burnout [12/01/2006 02:12:17]
It's late, and a new month, and I have two weeks worth of stuff to talk about, so I'll keep these short.
- I went to Tucson. In the last week or two before the race, I didn't want to go. I knew I wasn't ready, despite those 86-mile rides. I considered just doing the 100 miles on my own, since, as the slowest guy in our group, I knew I'd be riding alone anyway. But in the end, since I told everyone I was going to do this in Tucson, I had to do it in Tucson. So I made the decision to stop dreading the trip and just not think about it. If you can't think anything nice...
- I won the roommate lottery. I hate sharing a room. I shared a room in college with a guy for a whole year. He was a born again Christian that never washed his sheets and put printed-out pictures of Alicia Silverstone all over the walls. I barely spoke to him the whole year. I don't even remember his name. With the exception of girlfriends, having someone else in my space like that just drives me up the wall. I think I was more stressed out about having a roommate on this trip than I was about the ride. They're all good guys, but I just need my space. Luckily, there were an odd number of guys on the team, and I just happened to be the odd one out. Once I found that out, I was a lot happier about the trip.
- Tucson was nice. A big flat area surrounded by mountains. The streets are old and full of scary cracks but otherwise very bike friendly. The hotel was near the university and the street by the hotel was packed with places to hang out. I spent one morning just walking around downtown.
- I refused to wear fruit on my head. There were some 8000 people there for the ride, and all the team in training folks had to wear little plastic things on their helmets: little capitol buildings for the people from DC, peaches for out team, and so on. It's supposed to help us find each other in the sea of bikes and also build team spirit and be fun but I couldn't bring myself to attach that stupid thing to my helmet. Call me anti-social.
- I didn't finish the race. Well, I knew it would be hard. I didn't think it would be that hard. I lost half an hour early on because I had a flat and then, while pumping up my spare, broke the valve off the spare. I had to wait for the race workers to come rescue me. By the time that was fixed, I was officially the last person in the race - there was a motorcycle cop following along behind the last person, and for a while that was me. I wasn't the absolute slowest person though, so I started passing people again. But by the time I reached the 50 mile mark, it was 81 degrees out and we'd all carried our bikes half a mile across a dry riverbed and then half a mile back, and rode up several huge hills. I was exhausted, and I just stopped off to the side of the road to rest. Eventually a cop pulled up and she offered to call the truck to pick me up and I just gave in. So I made it halfway.
- Which means I'm going back next year. I can't say I really want to go through this again. But I said I was going to do this, and I didn't, so... It's sort of a matter of honor. I'm committed to raising another $4000 by August anyway, so instead of donating $500 a month I'll just save it up and donate it all at once for the next ride. And next time, I'm not sitting in an airport all day. I'll just drive. Then I can stop off with my parents anyway.
- Speaking of airports, I survived homeland security. I was paranoid about going through the security checks at the airport. I left one of my laptops at home because it has a sticker of a cartoon skull on it. I didn't take sunscreen because I couldn't find a small enough bottle. I nearly had a nervous breakdown the day before the trip, when a teller at the bank pointed out that my driver's license has expired. I wound up getting wanded and frisked twice, and had to show an old lady in Atlanta a second ID. She wouldn't accept a credit card because it wasn't issued by the government but accepted a library card, even though it doesn't have a date on it and the only bit of identifying information on it is my signature. Anyway, I wasn't locked up in a secret prison and tortured. Maybe next time.
- Thanksgiving was fun. My brother brought his xbox 360 and we hooked it up to the internet and downloaded a bunch of demos off xbox live. The Fight Night Round 3 boxing demo was the crowd favorite. I also got into Just Cause, which is sort of an easier Grand Theft Auto with a guerrilla war in the tropics flavor. Besides playing video games, we ate various birds and rode four wheelers in the woods. Turns out riding a four wheeler up a steep, rocky hill is scary as hell. Aside from that bit, it was a good trip.
- DCD had a meltdown. All hell broke loose while I was driving for the java clients at the new hosting company I bought. Apparently, Resin and Postgres had some kind of problem and both needed to be restarted but I didn't get the message, and I hadn't gotten around to giving Liz superuser access. So that was a small disaster.
- The backlog is back. I've got about a hundred and fifty issues left to deal with. I'm working my way through it, but I can't keep doing this. Even when I'm caught up, answering email just wears me out. I'm getting burnt out on tech support, and something needs to change.
- I need a knowledge base. I spent a good deal of the drive back thinking about how I could restructure things so that I could have other people do this without massive training costs. Basically, I need to start tracking what I do to fix problems and storing that in some kind of knowledge base. I did a PHP3 site for someone seven years ago that works a bit like what I need, so I plan to dig that up and retrofit it for support. I'll probably merge that in with the stuff from the cornerhost wiki and just make one system for customers and support team alike. Eventually, I can hook that problem list to cerberus or some other ticketing system and start identifying the most common recurring issues. But first I gotta deal with that backlog.