Another First

I'm not one to be pushy when it comes to exposing my kids to motorcycling.  They all know it's a standing offer - if it is something they have interest in, I'm happy to give them a ride.  If not, no big deal.

Out of the blue, I was talking with my oldest son and he decided that he really wanted to go for a ride.  Then, as we were getting closer to going, he balked.  Too worried/nervous/scared about something.

I talked him through things, saying that my primary goal when giving anyone a ride is to make them feel safe.  I pointed out the trunk on the back of my bike, which is something he could lean against.  We did a "dry sitting" on the bike with the engine off so he could learn how to mount/dismount, where to put his feet, and what not to touch.

Pretty soon, his nerves were calmed and we got ready to set off.  In stark contrast to how I learned, I made sure he was all geared up - riding pants, riding jacket, gloves, and a helmet:

Pre-ride walkthrough

I always get on first

Be careful to not touch the pipes!

Settling in

Ready to roll

Pretty soon, we were off:

Nice and easy

Second gear is just fine

I immediately noticed that he was very uneasy in the turns.  As people sometimes do when they first ride pillion, I could feel him fighting against the lean.  Beyond that, I just focused on being smooth and steady, not too fast.

We stopped 5 minutes later at my Mom's house.  He was thrilled to surprise her since we arrived on the motorcycle.  We discussed relaxing back there and not fighting the lean, then took a slightly longer way home.  I could tell he was much more at ease.

When I was tucking him into bed that evening, he said, "Dad, I don't understand why you ever drive a car.  I'm only going to have a motorcycle when I grow up!"

That made me smile.

We went for a slightly longer ride about a week later.  It was getting on towards evening, and we went for a 20 minute loop.  We saw a pair of buck deer and a doe, the sun setting in a fiery red ball, and enjoyed the cool evening breezes.  It was another wonderful ride.

I'm looking forward to many, many more opportunities to go 2-wheeled exploring with him!

First Encounter with Dragons

Digging through email archives, I thought I would post up my original reflection on riding the Dragon.  I somehow got it in my head that it would be fun to put wheels of my ancient, faithful CB700SC into Georgia.  This was a trip I took back in 2008 - pre-GPS, minimal planning, just getting out onto the open road with a loose understanding of where I was going and no particular timeframe in mind.

Here it goes:

CB700SC

I have an old warhorse for a motorcycle -- a 1985 Honda Nighthawk S, CB700.  700 cc, small bikini fairing.  I have about 32,000 miles on it.  It just hums along, requiring about as much maintenance as a shovel.  Designed as a technology showcase back in the 80s, it has some features (hydraulic valves, shaft drive, twin front disc brakes, fuel gauge/gear indicator, 6-speed transmission) which were a bit ahead of its time.  I particularly like the power hit between 8,500 and 10,250 rpm - it makes clicking down to third gear for two-lane passing fun.

From the Stagecoach Trail

It is definitely not designed to be a touring motorcycle, primarily because the gearing is so short.  I spin between 6 and 7,000 rpm on the highway, which has a predictable effect on gas mileage.  Personally, I like being out there in the air - it makes me feel like I'm on a motorcycle.  Eventually I will probably add another bike to the stable, but I don't think I could ever get rid of this one.

The one thing I would change is the location of the oil filter.  To get it out, you have to reach between the four headers.  The engine is so tightly packaged that it only fits out between the number 4 exhaust pipe and the frame.  It is a very tight fit, very un-Honda.  I'm a little surprised it is engineered that way.

Another point of interest - it is oil cooled.  To assist cooling, oil is stored in the frame.  As a consequence, there's a center drain plug, plus two smaller plugs on the left and right frame rails.  Patience (or multiple drain pans) is required when doing an oil change.

Reflections

This trip had everything.  Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia.  1,457 miles.  A cool early morning ride from Lexington to Knoxville, seeing multiple sunrises from my helmet as the terrain got hillier.  Cruising through the early morning fog as I wound my way towards Knoxville.  The luscious, non-stop curves of the Dragon.  Meandering roads, following rivers and rapids.  Curving, climbing, cooling roads as I passed 5000 feet of elevation.  Long, straight roads.  Serenity of making time on the interstate.  Sun so hot I needed to fill my shirt with ice.  Rain so cool that it pitter-pattered on my faceshield and helped lower my core temperature.  The ecstasy of no traffic and beautiful roads.  The challenge of being surrounded by cars on arrow-straight highways.

It made me run the gamut of emotions, but the two that come through the strongest are harmony and thankfulness.

What I am thankful for – my lovely wife, who tolerates and encourages me to do what I must.  My beautiful children, and the thought of sharing adventures big and small.  The truckers who are out there, sharing the roads, making my convenience-filled life possible.  Trees, and how wonderfully cool they make a summer's day.  Entering a glade or forest when you are hot and sweaty, there's no better feeling.  Except possibly for filling your shirt with ice and rinsing off your head.  The police, fire fighters, paramedics, and doctors who take care of us when bad things happen, when we make mistakes.  The depth of experience that travel by motorcycle allows.  Balance.  Harmony.  Slow, quiet stretches and interstate-speed running.

In a single day, I experienced a half-moon and stars shining down on me, the sun come up, lovely, mountainous interstate passages, incredibly challenging non-stop curves, the cooling of elevation, the sweltering heat of mid-day Georgia sun, a rain shower just when I really needed to cool off, more delightful curves, another blissful interstate run in the cool evening hours as the sun set, hot and tasty barbeque with the sounds of live music in the background, and more rain.

I need to write more, but I am exhausted.  It was a blessed trip.  I have lived a lifetime in two days and an evening.  The pictures just don't do it justice – my mental movie cannot be shared.  I feel fulfilled, centered, happy, and so incredibly thankful.  I am at one with the universe.

The Facts:

	Moto Mileage	Trip Mileage	Gallons	Cost	Price	MPG
Starting Mileage	31430.8
Bakers Corner, IN	31559.9	129.1	2.923	$  11.86	4.057475197	44.16695176
1790 Airport Exch Erlanger, KY	31698.0	138.1	3.237	$  13.92	4.300278035	42.66295953
1970 Pleasant Ridg Lexington, KY	31777.9	79.9	2.179	$    8.98	4.121156494	36.66360716
1111 S Main St Jellico, TN	31888.5	110.6	2.994	$  12.18	4.068136273	36.94388778
??	31987.6	99.1	2.225	$    8.63	3.878651685	44.53932584
141 Bank St. Tellico Plains, TN	32098.5	110.9	2.183	$    8.71	3.989922126	50.80164911
4900 Appalachian Hwy Blue Ridge, GA	32162.1	63.6	1.292	$    5.22	4.040247678	49.22600619
2528 East 1st St Crossville, TN	32283.7	121.6	2.447	$    9.79	4.000817327	49.69350225
500 Main Nashville, TN	32401.0	117.3	3.054	$  12.21	3.998035363	38.4086444
553 Duntov Way Bowling Green, KY	32470.3	69.3	1.615	$    6.56	4.061919505	42.91021672
Scottsburg, IN	32611.7	141.4	3.25	$  13.16	4.049230769	43.50769231
4922 S Western Ave Marion IN	32768.6	156.9	3.355	$  13.75	4.098360656	46.76602086
Ironwood and 23 South Bend, IN	32885.3	116.7	2.811	$  11.55	4.108858058	41.51547492
Finishing Mileage	32888.5
Total	1457.7	1454.5	33.565	$136.52	4.059468397	43.33382988

And a few photos:

Approaching the Dragon

View from the Dragon Lookout

Goodbye Tennessee

Hello North Carolina

The old girl made it!

So did I...looking hot and fatigued

Somewhere in Tennessee

"Rollin' down a backwood, Tennessee byway..."

A rainy Sunday start in Nashville

Why not stop?

Love the Car and Driver Corvette

Somewhere in Indiana

A cool underpass/one lane road

A great trip all the way around - it was really enjoyable to head out with no real plan and explore.

Gluecon 2015

Gluecon

I had the good fortune of attending Gluecon this past week.  It is a short, intense conference held in Broomfield, Colorado, attended by some of the best and brightest folks in technology.  There was a lot of talk about microservices, APIs, DevOps, and containers - all the latest tech, with an eye towards 2018.

While the majority of slide decks are available here, this is a quick synopsis of what I took away.

Tweet early, tweet often

I'm a sporadic tweeter, but go into full-on microblogging mode when at a conference.  It's a great way to share information with the public, and a great way to make connections.  By adding a column in TweetDeck for #gluecon, the following image caught my eye:

Per @_nicolemargaret, "Doing some realtime analysis of hashtag co-occurrence among #gluecon tweets. #neo4j #rstats #d3 #nosql"

I love graphs, and the powerful way they communicate relationships.  Through that tweet, I had the opportunity to meet Nicole White.  Come to find out that she works for Neo Technology, the company behind neo4j.  While I have other friends at Neo, I had never heard of or met Nicole before (she is a relatively new hire).  I'm happy to have added her as a new node on my graph, as it were.  Very cool.

Tweeting is also a great way to reflect back on gems and tidbits - simply look at your own history to help organize your thoughts.  Like I'm doing now.

It's always the people

There were quite a few sessions talking about the importance of culture and talent in making for productive, healthy organizations.  Salesforce did a good keynote, illustrating the gap between available technology jobs and qualified candidates.

A challenge for us all

This theme continued through the very last keynote session:

Is this clear?

Almost every session I attended had a subtle undertone of "we need talent."  Most messages were not subtle.

Talking about microservices, Adrian Cockroft made a great cultural point.  When operating microservices, organizations need to fully embrace the DevOps model with a clear escalation chain.

Culture Win: the VP of Engineering volunteers to be on call while expecting never to get called.

Tools?  What tools?

Building on the importance of people, let's talk about tools.  Specifically, let's talk orchestration tools - Ansible, Puppet, and Chef.  I happen to think agentless Ansible is the way to go, but ultimately, it's what you and your organization are capable of doing with the tools, not the tools you pick.  Brian Coca illustrated many possible ways in which Ansible can be used...because he deeply understands how to use Ansible!

You can do this with Ansible...should you?

One of my favorite one-liners from the conference sums up the tools discussion: "Rather than teach everyone to code, let's teach them to think. The coding can come later; it's easier."

Right on - pick a tool that can be successfully adopted by you/your organization, and stick with it.  Stay focused, and don't get distracted.

APIs still rule...and enterprise software still lags behind

APIs have been a thing for years now.  I remember writing the customer profile master data store for a major airline in the late 90s.  As a master data source, many internal systems wanted to access/update said data.  Instead of giving each system direct access to our database, we surrounded it with a cloud of services.  At the time, these were written in C, using Tuxedo.

What has changed in the last 20 years?  The utter ubiquity of APIs in the form of web services.  The concept is the same - encapsulate business logic, publish a defined interface, and let the data flow quickly and easily.  And yes, it is much, much easier to get going with a RESTful API than a Tuxedo service.

Table stakes for software vendors

What else has changed?  Organizations simply expect data to be available via APIs.  If you are an enterprise software vendor and your data/business logic is locked up in a proprietary monolithic application, start opening up or face customer defection.

What a Wonderful World

In his presentation, Runscope CEO and co-founder John Sheehan put this slide up.

Can you imagine life without these tools?

Think for a moment about how remarkably powerful any one of the concepts listed in his slide is.  We live in a world where all of them are simply available for use.  With the remarkably rich tools which are out there, there is simply no excuse for a poorly performing web site or API.  If an organization is running into scale issues, the technology is not likely to be at fault - it's how that technology is implemented.

Talk with Adrian

If you get the chance, spend some time talking with Adrian Cockroft.  I was fortunate enough to spend 20 or 30 minutes talking with him over lunch.  First off, he is a genuinely friendly and kind person.  Second, he likes interesting cars (Tesla Roadster, Lotus Elise, among others).  Finally, he's flat brilliant with loads of experience.

I was able to glean useful tidbits about containers, tertiary data storage, and autocrossing.

Talking cars and tech with the incomparable Adrian Cockroft

One thing Adrian mentioned that stuck with me concerned the current state of containers.  They are mutating so fast that even companies who are working with them full time have difficulty keeping up.  That said, the speed at which this space moves makes for a high degree of agility.  However, every organization has finite limits on what new/emerging technologies can be pursued.  Containerize if you wish, but you should have a clearly defined objective in mind with palpable benefits.

Serious about automation? Take away SSH access.

One of my favorite tidbits was to remove SSH access from servers.  If no individual has SSH access, it forces them to automate everything.  At that point, servers truly become disposable.

Get beyond the tech

I was pretty fried by the afternoon of day two of the conference.  I took the opportunity to skip a couple of sessions and spend some time with Kin Lane.  His dedication to understanding and explaining APIs earned him a Presidential Innovation Fellowship in 2013.

Yes, we talked tech...and proceeded to go beyond.  Kin likes motorcycles.  He was a former VW mechanic.  He's gone through a material purge and enjoys the mobility his work affords him.  Yes, he strives to be all things API, but that's only one facet to his very interesting personality.

Opting to hang with Kin Lane instead of attending a session

Repeat attendance?

So, would I go to Gluecon again?  Most definitely.  It was a worthy spend of time, providing insight into the leading edge of technology in the context of microservices, devops, containers, and APIs.  Not too long, and not too big.

I came away from the conference with a better understanding of trends in technology.  With that knowledge, I am better prepared to work with, ask questions of, and assess potential vendors.

Where no Fiat has gone before

Through work, I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Gluecon 2015.  It is an amazing conference, attended by technology superstars like Adrian Cockroft.  The focus this year was on devops, APIs, microservices, and containers.  More thoughts on the tech in a later post.

My colleague Brandon and I got to Denver in the middle of the afternoon.  He had never been to this part of the country, while I worked for a Denver-based company for about 6 years.  We took this opportunity to go up into the mountains and do some hiking.

Arriving at the Enterprise desk, I was thrilled to be able to select a Fiat 500 - much more interesting than the Hyundai Elantra.   

It is an impossibly tiny car, reminding me of the Civic Si I was fortunate enough to drive in late high school.  As an aside, I loved that little car, it had such a great engine/transmission, and looked something like this:

This was a great little car

Classic Italian driving position, arms way out, steering wheel angled up.  Single instrument pod design.

Nothing says "I don't care about my job" more than the no smoking sticker in this picture

Remarkably thick B pillars.  Nice little engineering touches - rear wiper is on a delay by default, but goes active when you shift into reverse.  2 USB ports (1 is charge only) and a 12V plug.

Plenty of headroom!

We hopped in and headed west on I-70, winding our way up into the mountains.  An uncharacteristically thick cloud cover and rain came down as the powerless little car struggled up the mountains, feeling increasingly anemic with each foot of altitude gained.

Pounding along at 6,000 rpm, barely maintaining speed

That said, things got pretty, very quickly.

We popped off of I-70 and took 6 up over Loveland Pass, where it was snowing.  Nice, fresh, wet, beautiful snow.

The little Fiat that could!

We drove down the other side on 6, watching the skiers and snowboarders enjoying some late May slope time at Arapahoe Basin.

We were surprised to see some camouflaged prototypes running around, probably getting their high altitude testing done.  Not sure what the SUVs were, but we definitely saw some Ford Fusions prowling Route 9 near Breckenridge.

We saw some unbelievable scenery, as the rain cleared off and the sun smiled upon us:

A Colorado native friend of mine pointed us to some great hiking spots, so we proceeded to try and find them.  This should have been slightly foreboding:

Undeterred, we gunned the little Fiat up the mountain like a rally car.  The traction control was going crazy as we slipped our way up the hill...

...until it would go no further:

The problem was the traction control - we couldn't figure out how to turn it off.  Looked all over the place for the button, hunted through the manual.  Made multiple runs at the hill, and I just kept thinking, "wheelspin, I need wheelspin!"

Finally, Brandon found the button - it was right next to the gear selector!  From the driver's seat, it's obscured by the giant shift knob.  Hooray!  Let's charge ahead!

Lots of mud and snow spray ensued as we bounded our way up the track, until it became clear that our Fiat could no longer do a rally snowplow impersonation:

A beached Fiat 500 in the mountains of Colorado

So, after pelting the car with some snowballs...

...we reversed down the mountain, since there was no way for us to turn around.

We tried a few other spots, and got to a place of unbelievable beauty.

Boldly going where no Fiat has gone before

Yes, that is a snow cloud descending

Beautifully flocked trees

We thought we would go hiking past the gate in the background, but the snow was too deep for sneakers:

"foot deep" in snow

Brandon looks pretty happy

Scandinavian Flick?  Rally Turns?  No....

We headed off towards dinner, stopping in Breckenridge to get some Rocky Mountain Chocolate for our respective families.  Shopping done, we headed off towards a tasty dinner at the Mint in Silverthorne.

In no particular hurry, we enjoyed a couple more breathtaking vistas:

Clouds below the mountaintop

Sunny on the left, snowing on the right

After drinking in the scenery like the terrain-starved midwesterners we are, we arrived at the Mint.  One of my favorite places, simply old school:

I bet the decor hasn't changed in 50 years.

We order steaks and giant Fat Tires, and celebrated our amazing fortune at having lived what felt like a month inside of just a handful of hours.

All in all, a great little mountain jaunt before getting down to one of the most stimulating tech conferences in recent memory!