Vacation Day 1: False Start, Try Again Tomorrow
Friday, July 22nd, 2005$1.25 of Hard Drive Space Costs Me Hours
The logistics for a trip like this are, pretty obviously, non-trivial. Lining up the vacation time from work was taken care of months in advance, just to be sure. Today was to be Vacation Day 1 for planning, prep, packing, double-checking everything. That didn’t quite work out: a last minute request from Sales for a presentation to a BIG customer, hurry-up roadmap planning meetings for next-year’s products, strategic partner tap-dance planning. But to top it off, a firedrill to reduce the amount of space we use on the email server. The deadline was two weeks from the notice. Well, with this long trip planned I had about 48 hours [with lots of other things on my mind], to shave about 2.5GB of email off the server. Let’s see: a 200GB hard drive costs $100 today - $0.50/GB. My “overage” that is so troubling to our IT is 2.5GB. So I’m using, quite literally today, $1.25 of disk too much and if I don’t repent for my sins and remove the offending email [which I frequently need to search from potentially anywhere in the country at any time], my email service will be shut off. I dutifully spent hours on Vacation Day 1 dealing with this crap. The solution cost the company far more than the problem. Doesn’t anyone do the math anymore?
Moving Through the Logistics
I did, however, manage to get the plane washed and presentable, charts ordered for delivery tomorrow, and received the folding pedals for the Montague folding mountain bikes that Ellen and I recently got. The ones I chose are actually OEM’d to Hummer and have the Hummer logo, but they are Montague bikes. I really enjoy the irony of owning a Honda Insight hybrid and two “Hummers”. The pedals save about 4 inches and I think that may be just enough to permit loading both bikes into the baggage compartment - we’ll see tomorrow.
Cars, Hotels, Places to Visit, Music to Hear…
As of right now, we have rooms booked in some but not nearly all of our destinations. The tough one, Oshkosh, has been reserved since March. With a little luck most of this will be nailed by end of day tomorrow. A couple places, though, like Sandia, may be tough. Still have to call the SPLC and make sure they will be accepting visitors when we are there. And I haven’t started to try and find out what music we might be able to catch at some of our destinations: Nashville, Memphis, Lafayette, Austin. This will really be the fun part.