Life Status

Work has finally calmed down to the point where we only have one or two major bugs on my project outstanding; everything else seems stable, and even if we're not on the "finish everything a month before the release" schedule my first-line manager wanted we did get things done on time for my second-line manager's release schedule. It's probably time to have a Little Talk with my 1LM about how daily status meetings eat up a stupid amount of time and pull everyone who should be bug-fixing out of their bug-fixing groove. My 2LM is much saner this way.

Without the work stress or a day-long bike trip the weekend was actually pretty relaxing. We got the furniture arranged in our office room, I finished turning sheets of wood panelling into small pieces of wood panelling, I mowed the lawn and progressed on the hedge plot, we made it to Home Depot/Target/BJ's. And I still had time to read train porn, implement an "easy" loopy solver in Haskell (a couple hundred lines of horrific infrastructure followed by a couple dozen lines of solving logic), bootstrap a human mage in Angband to twelfth level (giving them Identify in a spellbook; secrets seem to be "restart if the shop doesn't have a lantern" and "don't drink the water"), and get started on Star Ocean. I guess that's a lot of stuff for a relaxing weekend.

At any rate, now work isn't eating my soul, I got home stuff done, and I still got to sit on my butt. This makes me feel neither useless nor overwhelmed, which somehow seems to be the trademark of a good weekend.

Potential Bike Trips

nuclearpolymer asked in response to last weekend's bike trip entry where I wanted to go next. I have a couple of things in mind, largely in the 50+-mile range...

• Fitchburg to Camberville. I wound up doing this two years ago but it was a nice ride then, except for the one hill just inbound of the 2/495 intersection. Non-trivially hilly but not difficult. 50 miles.


• Ayer, Nashua River Rail Trail, Carlisle, Camberville. After I did Fitchburg I rode the trail north from Ayer into Groton. Instead of orbiting through New Hampshire and ever-so-scenic Lowell, it looks like it should be possible to ride from the end of the trail southeast to Carlisle and then back to Boston by normal means. 40-50 miles; actively flat except for the Groton-to-Carlisle section.


• Worcester, Gardner, Fitchburg. We did a Worcester-to-Fitchburg run last summer which was scenic, except that we left Worcester totally the wrong way. We could go around Mt. Wachusett and go northwest through Rutland and Hubbardston to Gardner (approximately following the Providence and Worcester), then east to Fitchburg (approximately following the B&M). 50ish miles, probably pretty hilly.


• Newburyport, Plum Island, Boston. This was on narya's list post-PMC last summer but never happened. We had a good route from Ipswich to Woburn. Avoid mosquito week. 60ish miles with the Plum Island option, not very hilly at all.


• Attleboro to Worcester. Via Wooooonsocket!, RI; approximately follow MA-146 and the Blackstone River. Haven't really plotted this one out, looks like 45 miles or so.


• Maine? It's apparently only 23 miles from Newburyport, MA to Kittery, ME. And NH-1A is very scenic. We could bike to Maine for the sake of saying we've done so, possibly with an inland return route. At least 45-50 miles.


• 128 loop. The bike map shows an obvious route just outside MA-128 from approximately Waltham to Canton.


• Train-oriented things. I snuck in the P&W above; following the B&M from Ayer to either Worcester or Chelmsford, or CSX (CR, PC, NYNH&H, OC) from Framingham to Leominster would amuse me.

I'd also like to ramp up some on the distance, and difficulty, and speed. Some of these succeed on difficulty; since a lot of them are commuter-rail based, you can also get distance just by biking on one end or the other (if Newburyport or Haverhill to Kittery is 25 miles each way, then Newburyport-Kittery-Haverhill-Boston is a century). This is also not a lot of ocean and not a lot of exploration, it's more "go from point A to point B" sorts of trips.