On to the Engineering Building...and the Princeton Library

Next up was a trip to the Engineering building. There is a lot of seating everywhere on the campus and the E-building was no exception. It is a bit more inviting than CUs E-Center. Once again, free wireless and no complaints.

The cloudy skies have cleared making for a gorgeous evening. I wandered over to the Princeton library which is getting a great deal of use. It is pretty modern with nice dark red brick coupled with ample windows, light and computers. Slightly puzzling is the teeny-weeny computer section. It's the smallest collection of computer books I've ever seen in a library. I guess they figure anyone really interested in that stuff gets their books from the campus library or just goes online. I found some basic HTML books to help with the sad little website I'm attempting to put together.

My, Where Has the Time Gone?

It's time to blog...and explain a few things. Thanks to Bill for the kick-in-the-pants. Interesting, because I think I would have blogged today w/o the encouragement to do so.

I'm on vacation. This is a real vacation. Some sociology building on the Princeton campus is keeping me comfortable and providing free wireless internet at the moment.

I don't consider myself a workaholic, but I do know that I can't stop doing things. With my 2008 racing season in doubt (thanks to having to pull all-nighters the week before training camp), it occurred to me that if I spent as much time and energy doing something else besides training, I might actually get somewhere in life. I say this with the utmost respect and appreciation for cycling, but the women's race scene leaves too much to be desired. This fall, I was out on a ride with top women cyclists and Alison (one of the fastest women in the world) mentioned what she's being compensated. It struck a cord with me. Yeah, I know that we all race for the love of it, but I race for the love of competition and because I like to travel. A good paycheck could ensure the traveling bit and I hope to return to the local race scene in 2009.

Towards the end of February, I started a company, March saw the company doing a fair amount of business (read: I was working my tail off) and, completely unassociated, but well-timed, I ended up with a job offer that I couldn't refuse. The month of March was a very significant time in my life. I also had to bid farewell to the company I've been working for and have loved. It's hard to leave a small company because it was like leaving a family. It's too bad that it has to be like that.

Here I am, in-between jobs and spending the time back East. I like the idea of working from anywhere and am testing out that concept. So far, I haven't done too much. Yesterday (Monday) my body was completely freaking out from all of the stress I'd been under since December. I expected something like this to happen. My body told me I'd better relax for the first time in forever or I'd be sorry. So, I stayed in (I'm staying with my uncle and he has a very comfy couch) and it was rainy/foggy all day so it was a good day to be in. My diet consisted of these magic wellness pills (vitamins) and a few raw food bars. Looks like that cold was averted as I have a lot more energy today.

Sunday my uncle and I rode bikes from Liberty Park (across from the Statue of Liberty) to the George Washington bridge, tooled around the neighborhood north of Harlem for a bit and rode back. Pictures are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/patrialanfranchi/NJRiding?authkey=2_CPy4_UaG0

It was a perfectly beautiful day and as warm as one could expect. Funny, today it's raining a bit (more of a drizzle now), but it's at least 65 degress...basically it feels like a rain forest with all of the humidity. And that fits for how my day started--I spent a lot of time at the gym in the steam bath. Ah, refreshing and a good way to start after such a rough day yesterday.

There will be more posts & I'm going to work on keeping them shorter. Like the Twitter concept. I still want to host my blog from my own server, but seeing as though there was too much other stuff going on to worry about, it's blogspot for the foreseeable future. (Urgh.)

Today the goal will be to make my business website. Will post its address if it gets launched.

The Wonders of Sleep

To update quickly, the week prior to training camp was insane...deployment ended up taking 50 hours, almost straight. I only took 3 3/4 hours out of that time for quick naps at work and 2 1/2 hours for eating food. The rest was solid deployment-related work. It was the most I've ever done and this was my first deployment experience ever. The support my co-workers provided was awesome and it really helped at 2 am Monday morning (the day everyone was coming into work and expected the system to work) when one of my co-workers was on IM with me, keeping me awake and helping me think through solutions to our last problem. It's hard to think after working intensely so hard and with so little sleep.

No need to bore blog readers with this info, but I was very pleased with how that went off. It is something I feel very good about and was a very large part of my life (well, still is, and I'm happy about it). The rest of the week prior to training camp (after deployment) was still very hectic due to bug fixes now that the system was being used in production and some remaining deployment activities that hadn't been necessary prior to that. Didn't get more than 3 hours of sleep any night that week.

Training camp-- We all took LT tests the first day and got to know some top-notch coaches and Kimberly Baldwin, one of the fastest women racers (while she was racing) in the US and world. The ColoBikeLaw girls are strong and fast, and we all seemed to gel very well. The roads in Scottsdale were smooth and flat/rolling for the most part. There were a couple of significant climbs, thrown in there for variety. I don't think I saw a cloud in the sky once the entire weekend. I was trying desperately to do base miles (hr < 143) as that's what I do in January. It was hard to go as slow as I wanted to with the group-ride mentality kicking in, especially every time the road tipped up. After training like this for so long, it's no problem for me to wave good-bye to the group and not care about going my own pace. It's what makes me fast in the spring. And, being overly fatigued, it didn't make sense to try to go any faster, even when my teammates were trying to get me to go faster. I don't give in easily to peer pressure...never have, it's just not worth it, not in January, anyway. I realized later that I was running ~80 psi in my tires all weekend. It's just so easy to be in "trainer" mode. Good thing I remembered to wear a jersey & helmet!

This week, I finally got to completely make up for all of the lost rest (> 9-12 hrs sleep a night all week) and yesterday on my ride, it was pretty amazing to see what the sleep did. My power was up very significantly and the effort necessary to push the pedals so much harder seemed so much less than it did in AZ (interesting since there's even waaay more oxygen down there than there is up here). So, I think that's the nitty gritty. The plan for this blog is to move it to a different site where I can host it myself. So, I've been procrastinating on posting here b/c I just want to get the new site going...but that's contingent upon getting a new internet provider so I can run my own server w/o necessary ports being locked down. All of that should happen in the 2nd week of February so that's what I'm looking forward to now.

One more thing before I sign-off...wasn't this weekend fabulous?!?!!?!!! Nothing like perfect spring weather in January! :)

AZ Training Camp

Check out the ColoBikeLaw.com 1/2/3 women's team (not everyone in attendance)...stories soon...back to work today, weekend riding & hanging with teammates was awesome.

Work, but is it, Really?

The past quite a few weeks have been full of few other things besides work. Finally, today, I am deploying a huge project that I have been working on for the past 8 months. All of the real work is done now, the bugs have been found and tossed out. Much of deployment involves running scripts and waiting - and - hoping that everything goes as planned.

The adrenaline rush of having something like this come together and go out is very similar to the one I feel when finishing a race. This project hasn't been a solo effort, it's a team working together. Even though we're paid to do this, it wouldn't be successful if it didn't somehow excite us to do this work. It's in our blood. Just like racing...but not quite.

Never a dull moment

Let me introduce my esteemed co-worker, James.

Christmas Tree

This is my first real Christmas tree--ever! This tree was born and raised in Coal Creek Canyon. It's such a nice tree, I wish I could keep it all year. And, it really beats the little fake one that I had last year. Between this and getting to play in the snow this weekend, I'm really in the Christmas spirit now.

*Sneeze*

I'm dusting off the ol' blog...it's going to be all shiny and new in a few days. Too much has been going on, sleep has been minimal and I value sleep pretty much more than everything else in life.

There's a ton to blog, too. :) Hope everyone in blog-land is enjoying the July-like Christmas season!

I just signed up a new...

I just signed up a new Jott.com account this is really cool. I am talking through my phone and Jott will translate that text into a blog entry so lets see if this works. Bye.

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jott.com

Tonight I learned about this cool new service called jott.com. I'm not being paid to write about it, it's really cool, though, so I thought you'd want to know all about it. Basically, you call this number from your phone, leave a message to yourself or someone else, jott.com then transcribes the message and emails you with the text.

Something else jott.com does is allow you to speak your blog entries. So, I just tried it. Hopefully it'll show up here in the next few minutes. Speech recognition on drugs, man!

Happy Birthday, Doug! (For those of you who don't know, but you should if you've been to my place, Doug is the coolest painter in the world.)