Posted in cycling on October 22nd, 2008 by Georges – 2 Comments
Why do people climb mountains? Because it’s there. When it comes to mountain, Haleakala is not your average hill. It’s a dormant volcano and you can ride it from sea level to summit, 10,023 feet (3′055 m) of elevation gain in one uninterrupted climb. Some claim it’s the highest paved road on earth. Here’s my account of attempting such climb.
I rented a bike from South Maui Bike. They now feature Trek 5000, all carbon for $250/week. You can call in advance to reserve it and make sure you get the proper frame size. The bike was in decent condition, but don’t expect too much. I started from Paia as planned, and got rolling shortly after 6:30 am. Plenty of daylight at that time of the year. Baldwin Beach Park is the perfect location to take a picture and a toe dip in the water before starting the ascent.
Baldwin Beach Park, Paia HI
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Posted in agile on September 4th, 2008 by Georges – Comments Off
This is a repost of a series of article I originally published on Songbird’s blog
Previously, we’ve examined the new development practices that the Songbird team adopted to plan and track a release. Everyone on the team was very eager to put them to the test. Unfortunately, at the time, we were still in the middle of the 0.3 release cycle and new work could only be started once that release was completed. During the 0.3 release, everything was still treated as a bug, but in fact, many bugs were stories and tasks in disguise. We decided to apply some of the newly defined tracking principle to help us guide and finish the cycle, so we could start fresh with our next release as soon as possible.
Cuánto es?
The first step was to add cost to everything. We introduced a new cost field in Bugzilla and put a cost value on everything according to our new scale of 1, 2 and 3 points. With costing in place, we were in a position to compute how much points the team was able to complete in a typical work week. That total, normalized per work day became our team velocity.
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Posted in cycling on July 14th, 2008 by Georges – 3 Comments
It’s only been 48 hours since I finished the Tour of the California Alps, also known as the Death Ride and I’ve been feeling the pressure to share all the gory details. So here ya go.
Joe, Jay and I setup for an early start. We figured we wanted to leave plenty of time to make the check points and finish the ride. We had a great carbo load dinner at Passaratti’s the night before and set the alarm for 4 am. We arrived at the Turtle Rock park shortly after 5 am. There was already a lot of people there as everyone was trying to get a headstart. The temperature was warmer than expected and after much debate about what to wear, we were ready to roll at 5:30, heading south towards Monitor Pass.
The day was off to a good start. The sky cleared up from smoke the day before and we were all happy to finally see some blue sky and clouds. Lake Tahoe had seen some pretty bad air quality recently, so bad that several events got cancelled, including the Donner Lake Triathlon the day before.
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