Recently in School Category

Well, I'm back from my day at the track, learning to flick monstrously overpowered motorcycles around hairpin turns courtesy of the fine instructors at the California Superbike School. The short review: I had a blast! Read on for the longer version.

The class starts with a 7AM checkin at Laguna Seca, so I opted to spend the night in Salinas at a hotel rather than slog down early Tuesday morning. The weather was cool and overcast. I quickly made friends with a couple of the other early birds, including Jose (who had flown in from Florida specifically for the joy of riding Laguna Seca) and Reed, who was doing the more advanced Level 2 class. Once we'd been checked in, we were shown to a classroom (pronounced 'unheated garage') for the first seminar with Keith Code, the director of the school. Keith is something of a legend, having trained several world class riders through this same school, but he's a really friendly and helpful guy, able to explain the complex mechanics of motorcycle riding in a very clear way.

The first seminar was largely dedicated to learning our way around the track and the rules of the riding sessions. Reed mentioned that the track was 'very slick' yesterday, resulting in no less that five (!) riders going off the track in the first lap! Not encouraging to us total newbs, but we stayed the course. So we put on our leathers and our helmets and went out to the bikes.

The school uses Kawasaki ZX-6R motorcycles, with 636cc motors that produce approximately 130 hp (that's 10 less than my 1990 Eagle Talon, if you're counting). These bikes weigh in at 363 lbs. without gasoline or rider. (Eagle Talon: 2549 lbs.) Yikes. That said, they're remarkably well-mannered if you're not grabby with the throttle or the brakes, and have enough torque that you can run an entire racetrack in 4th gear. Which is exactly what I did. In fact, except in exceptional situations, I didn't touch the brakes or the gear shift the entire time I was on the track! Amazing machines.

Needless to say, the orientation laps are crucial, as you need to know what to expect. The higher-level riders are already out on the track as we're lining up to start our orientation run, when first one, then two riders run off the track in turn 11, the last turn before the pit straightaway. Eek. No severe injuries, though, just some broken plastic and bruised egos. (Yes, Virginia, you really do have to warm up the tires before they turn into the sticky gumballs we all know and love!) They get sorted out, and then we're off.

A word about Laguna Seca - it's a monster of a track. It's 2.3 miles of twists, turns, ups and downs. Perhaps the most famous feature of the track is The Corkscrew, turns 8a and 8b. Imagine you're driving up your favorite steep San Francisco-style hill. It levels out a bit at the top, then drops into a steep, sharp left hand turn followed immediately (and I mean immediately) by a sharp right hand turn. As you exit the second turn, you realize you're now fifty feet lower than you were at the top of the hill. It's terrifying to behold, literally lurking beyond the innocent-seeming straightaway exiting turn 7. There are various other sharp turns as well - here's a map if you're curious.

Once we've pored over the tangle of asphalt twice, it's back into the classroom for our next seminar. We had five classroom segments in all, each covering a different aspect of basic riding technique. I learned more about riding today than I have in the last four years, and that includes an MSF course. Once you've covered a topic like throttle control in the corner or choosing an entry point, it's off to the track to drill on what you've learned. The instructors trail you from time to time, evaluating your form. Then they'll pull in front of you, and have you follow them while executing the drill. Hopefully, you get a thumbs up and it's back to practicing! Everything they taught felt extremely natural, like I'd just been waiting for someone to put words to it so I could agree with them.

Of course, not everyone was so into the lesson plan. On the first lap after the orientation session, no less than eight people ran off the track from our group of twenty-one, and another two crashed, one requiring an ambulance. (He later returned to the track with a sheepish grin and a broken collarbone. Warm up your tires, people!) At this point, I'm largely petrified, and resort to going very slowly and methodically through the turns as I practice my technique. This helps my confidence immensely, as properly performing each drill rewards the rider with increased control, a steadier bike, and a big ol' grin.

By the fourth session (the first after lunch), I'm feeling reasonably confident. At this point, however, several million years of human evolution decides to point out that maybe it has a few tricks up its sleeve, too. Consider the following truisms:

• In situations of duress (or in my case, bald-faced terror), your eyes will seek out and fixate on that most likely to do you harm.
• The oldest rule in the book with respect to piloting vehicles of any sort is 'You go where you look.'

Ah, yes. So there I am, entering the infamous Corkscrew for the thirteenth time that day. I've leaned the bike over, I've got my line, my entry speed is well within my comfort zone. But I get a good look at the huge rut in the dirt on the outside edge of turn 8a. Man, that's deep. I hated going over that sort of thing on a mountain bike. Hey, why am I running so wide?

RABBLE RABBLE BUMP BUMP

WHOA! I ran off the course! But thanks to the curve of turn 8b (and my level-headed refusal to secure a vise-like grip on the wildly oscillating handlebars, thus insuring I take a dive), I'm right back on the course! I'm a lucky SOB! I'm on top of the world! I'm... Hold on. I should've started turning immediately, shouldn't I? That's a lot more dirt in front of me.

RABBLE RABBLE BUMP BUMP CRASH

And there I am, lying on my back in a pile of dirt, cursing myself for having been so clever. I'm fine (a bruised calf), the bike was fine (I laid it down in the dirt, thankfully - they had it back in service for another rider within three minutes of starting to look at it), but my pride was irrevocably wounded. I could hear evolution sitting smugly somewhere licking its chops.

And so, I was asked to please lay off the equipment for the last riding session of the day. This turned out to be much less of a bummer than it had seemed at first, as someone wrecked in turn 5 as soon as they went out, resulting in the last session lasting a grand total of one (1) laps, and that under a caution flag.

So there you have it. A day full of wrecks, wrecks, and more wrecks (my greatest fear was being taken out by one of the hot rods) and some of the most fun I've had in years. I now feel like my everyday riding is well below my skill level, rather than hovering at 80% of it. And I've earned the right to say offhandedly, "You know, the time I ran off in the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca…"

Oh, and there are a couple of photos of me looking very intent that should arrive in a few weeks. I'll be sure to post them.

I'm about to leave for Syracuse to catch my last flight out of here for the school year. I'll be back on Sunday, at which point I'll be largely packing while waiting for the family to show up on Friday. I said my goodbyes to Aariel (my roommate) and Vivek (my project partner) today - it's definitely starting to feel real at this point. I actually blew off a party night with Deep and Vivi last night - couldn't muster the energy. Not sure why, but I'm feeling pretty tired these days.

In other news, we got an A+ on our final project submission for Distributed Systems. W00t! Still no final grades, but I think there's a good chance I'm rollin' on 4's this semester. We'll see.

That's it. Done. Over. Phew!

Well, not totally. I'll actually be continuing my Masters project over the summer - basically supporting the code I've written, extending it, running experiments on emulab, that sort of thing. Oh, and I still owe the department a writeup of my project. But other than that, I'm done. No, really!

I'm not quite sure what to do with myself. My new employer has asked me to start some work part time for the rest of the month, but I don't really anticipate that taking up much of my time. (Though in all fairness, I'll probably be doing quite a bit of work-related reading over the next few weeks in an attempt to determine where Web Services and XML processing have progressed over the last year.

It's been a while since I've posted a blog of the week, so without further ado I give you Overheard in New York, a community-style site where people submit snippets of conversation overheard in NYC. After our anniversary trip to the Windy Apple, I can actually put mental images to the locations described - seems we walked most of lower Manhattan that weekend. heh.

Speaking of walking, I seem to be bad at it these days. Okay, more running than walking, but it amounts to the same thing. After pulling up lame and gutting it out for a week or so, I finally wandered into the student clinic to learn I'd sprained a ligament. So I now have a license to take quite a bit of Advil and a sporting new knee brace with hinges and everything. The fun thing about knee braces is they're made of neoprene, the same thing that wet suits are made out of. So now I get to hike up Buffalo in 75 degree heat with 35% humidity wearing a tiny wetsuit. Whee. Nevertheless, I will fix this by Egypt, so I'm making an appointment for PT early next week.

Phew, what a couple of weeks! Let's see if I can sum everything up. First off, this is the last week of scheduled classes. My Entrepreneurship class project group gave its final presentation on Tuesday, to what we think was general acclaim. It took a massive amount of effort on the part of my teammates, as I was in Seattle last weekend! Mel and I wandered northward to visit Ryan and Sara and see the new house. I'm pretty sure I've discovered a new shade of envy not previously present in my psyche. (It didn't help that Washington had one of its rare beautiful weekends while we were there - Sunny and warm enough to forego any kind of jacket.) At any rate, while I was enjoying a production of Miss Saigon, my teammates were cranking out world class prose and powerpoint. I tip my hat to them.

Running concurrently to my Entrepreneurship class was my Distributed Systems class, my project group for which is at least as talented and dedicated. See, we had this demo Tuesday (yes, the same day as the previously mentioned presentation). Did I mention I chose a terrible weekend to be out of town? Nevertheless, the demo went flawlessly - perhaps we were bolstered by the fact that we scored better than perfect on the most recent phase of that project. Feelin' pretty good right now.

In the meantime, I've completely disregarded all common sense and installed OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") on my laptop. That's right, I upgraded the OS on my primary, nay, my only machine while relying on it to complete my Masters project (among other things). I'm an idiot. Fortunately, I'm a lucky idiot - everything went smoothly, and I encountered not a single problem in the process. It helped that I had a bootable copy of my old system on an external hard drive should anything go awry. Tiger, thus far, has been great - all of my apps work save Emacs (which required a build from the latest cvs - no big whoop). It's a nice upgrade - Spotlight, Dashboard etc. all work as advertised. Perhaps most importantly, Finder has finally been fixed such that the desktop and finder windows update whether they have focus or not - no more clicking on a Finder window to see if a download's complete, for example.

Anyway, I have a take-home final and a project writeup left to do (as well as a bunch of work on my Masters project), but it's definitely starting to feel like the end of the road. What a long, strange trip it's been. Still, I'm glad I came.

Seems CampusFood.com knows their target audience pretty well.

It's supposed to be sixty-seven degrees on Wednesday! Of course, it's currently thirty-six degrees and rainy, but this too shall pass! Apparently spring around here consists of wildly varying weather - reminds me of Texas, actually.

My academics are rapidly approaching their conclusion here at Cornell - the year went by as quickly as I'd hoped/feared. My distributed systems class has been a fantastic source of information - I wish it hadn't been taught by powerpoint, though. I seem to absorb more by being forced to take coherent notes, and knowing the powerpoint slides are available on the web somehow makes that task seem redundant. My entrepreneurship class is about the same - loads of information, but the actual class time (barring the guest speakers) is somewhat useless. I suppose the projects are the main purpose of both, at any rate.

My management class has been a real eye-opener. I've often had a sneaking suspicion I had no real clue what the task of 'management' entails; they sit on the 'other side' of the building and somehow the company keeps running (or not cough*Inktomi*cough). Reading and discussing how other organizations have coped with drastic change in their business environment is interesting stuff. No plans for the MBA yet (I can hear Mel's sigh of relief from here), but I'm no longer so opposed to a job that involves some of that non-techie stuff.

I'm having lunch with my management prof today, actually, though for a completely different reason - he's spent a fair amount of time in Egypt. I'm going to pick his brain for things to do and see, armed with an enormous map and the Lonely Planet Egypt guide. Should be a lot of fun.

Man, I'd forgotten what a wonderful thing Spring Break is. I spent the bulk of the day riding the motorcycle across the hills to the ocean and back again. Absolutely beautiful day - the clouds broke this morning and the air has the wonderful ethereal quality that appears after heavy rains, much like earthworms currently littering our sidewalk gutters by the dozens. On the bright side, Ithaca weather is looking up a bit - it's been over 40 degrees at least three times this week! I might have to take some shorts back with me.