Month: March 2010

Bad Weather Days

Nothing puts the dampener on the mood than bad weather. Or maybe more when the weather changes from winter to wonderful spring, and then cold harsh winter again. I guess most would call that living in new england. I just call it the weather gods playing with our emotions. They give us a couple of good days, and then a thunderstorm. They give us a clear sunny day, and then a tornado. I am sure my college roommate would have something more educated/informed to say about the weather all I can say is “I want good biking weather”.

Saturday was horrible went out for 60 mi bike ride in cold miserable windy 32F weather. Cut it down to 20 mi and returned bushy tailed from west haven beaches.

Sunday didn’t even bother with the run.

29 weeks, 1 day

So I wish I could find something funny about 29 weeks, but it doesn’t match any lunar, solar, celestial, biological cycle I know of. But hell all I know is after 29 weeks of training, I have to do an IM . So I planned this out way back in sept, tweaked it in nov/dec, jan and finally I am settling on this plan in march. Being the obsessive compulsive I am I might need to tweak it again.

But Lets just say that between now and jul 26th everyday counts

1/4/2010 1
1/11/2010 2
1/18/2010 3
1/25/2010 4
2/1/2010 5
2/8/2010 6
2/15/2010 7
2/22/2010 8
3/1/2010 9
3/8/2010 10
3/15/2010 11
3/22/2010 12
3/29/2010 13
4/5/2010 14
4/12/2010 15 Transition Week
4/19/2010 16 Transition Week
4/26/2010 17 IM Training
5/3/2010 18
5/10/2010 19
5/17/2010 20 Big Day
5/24/2010 21 1/2 HIM
5/31/2010 22
6/7/2010 23 Lake Placid Camp
6/14/2010 24
6/21/2010 25 Olympic race
6/28/2010 26 Race Sim
7/5/2010 27
7/12/2010 28
7/19/2010 29 IMUSA

Physics will get you

So working in technology I am always surprised when people forget basic physics and how it applies to our everyday lives. Being a physics student in college there are certain things I will probably never forget; newtons laws, speed of light, theory of relativity, power calculation, electricity calculations, and my personal favorite the wave equation.

So a couple of things that I think we need to remember from everyday physics:

1. Theory of relativity: simplified only light can really travel at “speed of light”. electrons and electricity , and correspondingly network packets over ethernet travels no where close to the speed of light.

electricity on a typical high shielded coax cable is roughly 2/3 speed of light.more relaistic is that it travels at 1/3 speed of light . not to get into the intricacy of physics but rest-assured an electron will never travel at the speed of light. unless ofcourse you in star-trek land .

2. Optics: Even though fiber optic is dependent on light transmission , the actual speed of the signal on fiber optic is not the speed of light. first of all speed of light is absolute in a vaccum. fiber optic is not a vacum.second the speed of the signal is effected on defraction, reflection , dispersion so in actuality it is never travelling over a given distance at the speed of light.

But thats ok. Don’t go selling stock of alcatel, lucent engineers are smarter they send several signals over the same fiber. so in that way the total throughput is a lot more. but at the same time 1 signal still has physics governing it.

3. The speed of light even if transmitted across the US is still going to have a ping time of 1.3ms. So basically you can take a beam of light and send it across the US, it takes 1.3ms for another person to see it. Again this is my back of the paper of calculation.

4. Ping-Pong: The avg time taken for signal to be sent and to get a reply back, can be calculated by ping-pong test. You simply send a signal and wait for the reply. The time take divided by 2 is the time taken for your signal to be sent.

5. Electrical power: Let do some simple calculations first

Power=Voltage x Current

So if your server takes 200 watts of power at 110 volts , it is 200/110 amps as draw.

Sleepless nights and days off

So it figures in the cosmic karma that the 1 day I have off from training. I get woken up by 3 blazing phone calls in the middle of the night . I wonder if mr. murphy took into account that a dev server can go down the same day , that a bomb blast in lahore, same day as a major deployment with issues. So basically with little sleep , I decided to go drown my self in the pool with a morning 1500 yd swim.

Now I just have to live through the rest of the day/night, deploy some code and then crawl into bed. You I never thought for a moment doing this race would be easy, but it is almost a wonder what I will have to go through to do it.

Tri tests and days at work

So for the last week I have been doing different triathlon tests. Just so I can get some metrics to measure my progress over time. I did my last vdot test and was suprised my vdot number has not moved much from 43. I was able to run 3mi in 22min.

After that it was a harrowing amount of work. I had to work 12hr days to get some projects ready. And on top of that 2 major snowstorms destroyed any structured training.

So now in the beginning of this week which is the build phase of the training, I have to get real focus on this race.