A fruit stand reminiscent of where I’d go buy fruit growing up in Argentina.
The view when you walk around.
A cool city-wide bike share program. These are every few other blocks.
Comments Off
Archive for the “Nico” CategoryA fruit stand reminiscent of where I’d go buy fruit growing up in Argentina. The view when you walk around. A cool city-wide bike share program. These are every few other blocks.
We are in France!!
Jul
22
2011
Minding the gapPosted by Nico in Nico, tags: Beatles, England, Liverpool, London, vacationThe first day of our vacation was pretty brutal as far as travel. Leaving Reno at 3AM wasn’t too bad, and we made it to the San Francisco airport in 4.5 hours. We only got stuck in a bit of traffic at the very end of the drive, and we had plenty of spare time to check in and wait for our plane to board. Our flight left on time, and it was rather uneventful. Sleep didn’t come easy; I probably slept a total of 2 hours and Kelly only got about 3 in… which out of a 10 hour flight isn’t much. We did get to watch “The Lincoln Lawyer“, and then we listened to music and read in between trying to get some more sleep. Part of the reason why we had a hard time sleeping was that we left at noon Pacific time. Regardless of our attempts at being tired for the flight by waking up super early that same morning, we just didn’t get to sleep much. When we landed in London, the local time was 7am, a cool 11pm back home… aka: bedtime for us. Since we got in so early in the morning, our hotel room wasn’t ready yet. We checked in our baggage, and went for a walk along the Thames river. Our hotel, the Novotel Waterloo, has a pretty good location, just south of the Parlament, the Big Ben and the London Eye. We killed a couple of hours by just walking around and getting a quick something to eat, and by the time we came back to the hotel, our room was ready. We decided we’d take a 1 to 2 hour nap to even out our schedule. When we woke up, it was a good 4 hours later. Whoops! Regardless, we felt better, and we carried on with some more exploring and walking around. We even got to experience the stereotype of London weather, when a very light rain shower made us thankful to have packed an umbrella. Yesterday we headed to Liverpool on a Magical Mystery Tour. We took a train to Liverpool, and once there we checked out the Beatles Story, a pretty rad little themed museum. After that, we went on a 2-hour long guided bus ride that stopped along a few Beatles landmarks, and appropiately ended at the Cavern. We had a couple of beers there, and then walked around Liverpool for a few hours until we caught the train back to London. This morning we woke up at around 7:30 without the help of any alarms, I think we’ve finally adjusted our internal clocks to this time zone! Not only that, but it was sunny and with clear blue skies. So, we hopped in the subway (called The Tube around here) and headed to Picadilly Circus. From there, we walked a whole lot, and enjoyed some of London’s attractions like St. Jame’s Park and the National Gallery (where we spent a good couple of hours). It is now high noon, and we’ve decided to take a good nap break to give our legs a rest. The computer in the hotel lobby finally let me log in, and here’s what ended up happening. Hopefully I’ll be able to update it again before we head to Paris in 2 days. Cheers! Tomorrow morning, we head out on a little trip to celebrate our 1st year of married life.
We’re so excited! Bags are packed, camera batteries are ready, and our passports and plane/train tickets are lined up. Au revoir,
Jun
08
2011
2011 Reno-Tahoe OdysseyPosted by Nico in Nico, tags: 2011, odyssey, relay, Reno, Reno-Tahoe Odyssey, RTO, running, tahoe, Tater Trots, teamLast weekend was the 7th Annual Reno-Tahoe Odyssey. This is a race I’d done back in 2008 and 2009 (didn’t do it in 2010 because that’s when I trained for a triathlon), so I knew what I was getting myself into… and that’s exactly why I was excited to do this race when I first signed up with my team a few months ago. When Jason, teammate from the 2008 RTO, reached out to me asking if I wanted to put together a team for this year, I said yes (of course!!), and our team ended up including some classic teammates from before and some new faces – who were also first time RTO runners.
The Tater Trots (that’s our team’s name!) started the race at 11:30am on Friday. Since I was on the second van, after cheering at the start line when Jason took off, we had some time to kill. We decided to invest into some quality carbo loading at my favorite pizza place in Reno, Eclipse. We then spent some time decorating the van, and baking some Tater Tots to have as a quick snack on the road. We absolutely needed to have those! At around 3:45pm, John took off with leg #7, his and our van’s first. John was a last-minute addition to our team, filling in for some last minute drop-outs, but he had just ran a half-marathon, so we knew his legs could stand the challenge. However, his first section of the run wasn’t easy, and when he finished climbing the hill I wondered if he was about to call a cab and tell us all off. I’m happy to report that this did not happen! John instead proceeded to kick ass and very gracefully finish his leg well before his projected time. Next runner up was Marlaina, who was also a last-minute addition. She is a co-worker, and when I needed to fill in another hole in our roster, I immediately asked her to join us. In fact, when I asked her, she had just run a 50-mile race the previous weekend, and he calves and ankles were all sorts of bruised and sore… after I described the RTO to her, she smiled and said yes! Anyway, she is obviously one tough cookie, and she made a breeze out of her leg. I knew what she was going through, because I was runner #8 when I did the RTO for the first time in 2008. I’ll just say that Marlaina did much better than I did. After Marlaina, it was Nicolle Morrison’s turn. This was something I was really looking forward to seeing, since Nicolle was a star runner in her youth, and she picked running back up when I invited her and her husband. She even kept a very fun to read blog about it all, here: http://theroguerunner.blogspot.com/ Mr. Steve James was runner #10, and he went for his run at 5:48pm. Steve is an avid cyclist, and told everyone that he wasn’t going to be a big asset to the team. Whatever, there’s one thing that is certain about Steve: he’s a big sandbagger! See, we had a spreadsheet with everyone’s distances and their estimated pace, and with some very basic math, you can project how long someone is going to take to cover a certain distance. Steve was supposed to run his leg in about 49 minutes. He brought it in after only 41:25! My turn was next. I was ready and eager. I used my iPhone with the Nike+ GPS App, so you can see some of my run info here: http://nikerunning.nike.com/nikeos/p/nikeplus/en_US/plus/#//runs/detail/408105819/972367474/all/allRuns/. However, the GPS or the watch must have been off by a bit, because my “official” time was 41 minutes, 54 seconds for 5.3 miles, which brought me in at an average of 7:54 minutes/mile, which was a good 20 seconds faster than my target pace. Yay! When I finished my leg came another moment I had been looking forward to a lot. My handoff was to Don Morrison, a good friend of mine of a few years now. Don tells me I’ve influenced him by inspiring him to run, and that it’s because of me that he has discovered something he enjoys. After Don’s leg was over, Van 2 took off towards South Lake Tahoe for some food and rest. We almost slept through all the phone calls from Van 1, but we made it to the van exchange point at almost midnight, and we did it all over again! I walked out of the dark and cold (but clean!) portable bathroom at around 2:27am. I figured that since I was about to go on my leg, I’d trot on over to the start line… where all of a sudden I saw all of my teammates waiting for me! I had apparently taken a little too long to go pee (but that’s because I did more than just pee) and I just switched it from warm-up trot to cruising speed. Once again, here’s the Nike+ info: http://nikerunning.nike.com/nikeos/p/nikeplus/en_US/plus/#//runs/detail/408105819/1039314567/all/allRuns/. This time, the fancy iPhone app clocked everything in right, and I did indeed run for 6.1 miles in the middle of the night, with an average of 8:47/mile. After Don ran his leg – which happened to be a 5k, and also happened to be his fastest 5k time ever – we were ready to get some rest. Lucky for us, old teammate Nate has a little farmhouse just 5 minutes away from where we finished, so we headed there to crash on his quiet lot. At 7am on Saturday, we were in good old Virginia City, ready to get started with the last 1/6th of the course. The weather was particularly unwelcoming then and there. The cold temperatures from the last 24 hours had now been joined by some pretty strong winds, which definitely made more than a few bones shiver as we waited for Joe Dito, who was running his and his van’s last leg. By the way, Joe has ran in every one of the 7 Reno-Tahoe Odysseys! He’s a super cool guy to know. Poor John had to run some more hills on his last stretch, but at least he did get to squeeze in some flats and downhills in this one! And once again, Marlaina and Nicolle had a feast with their downhills on Geiger Grade. By the time Steve’s turn came, we were at the very south-east end of town, on the valley floor, and bringing in it. Calculations were starting to happen, it was 8:45 when Steve took off, and if we finished before 11:30am, we’d be done in less than 24 hours, which is a pretty awesome little accomplishment. Steve, me and Don had to nail our runs, and we’d clock in at exactly 24 hours… but we each had some pretty long distances to cover, and we were tired. It was going to be difficult. Sandbag James once again ran it in well below the estimated time, and sporting a smile from start to finish. He handed off the baton to me, where I was to start my final leg of 6.2 miles (a 10K!). My run started off pretty well. There was a girl in front of me setting a pretty mean pace of about 7:45/mile. I figured I’d hang on and just try to keep up with her, and see if I could push it harder for the last stretch. But my strategy went to hell after about 10 minutes, when my stomach turned into a knot and I felt a combination of a sideache and a few shoryukens. I decided to let the girl go, and slowed down the pace a bit. Don took it from there, and he had exactly an hour to do his 5.4 mile leg. And that, he did. In fact, he ran it in less than 50 minutes, which brought us in with an official finish time of 23:48:52, which put our team in 23rd place out of 204 teams. When Don crossed the finish line, I gave him a big hug, and words failed me at the moment and all I said was “good job”. I have since then corrected this and told him how proud I was of him and his performance, and that it meant a lot to me to have him (and his wife!) on my team. But instead of having sweet emotional conversations, we did what everyone should do after finishing the RTO: We got our team picture taken, we received our medals, we exchanged high-fives, and eventually all went on our separate ways.
Feb
22
2011
Virtualizing an old and heavy server the smart wayPosted by Nico in Nico, tags: IT, LUN, SAN, server, vCenter, virtualization, VM, VMware, vMware vCenter Converter, vSphereI’m pretty proud of this solution that I came up with at work. We had a server that is over 5 years old, but it’s mission critical. Upgrading the hardware on it would be a nightmare, because support for the application is spotty, and it would also be highly time consuming. Instead of doing that, we chose to virtualize the server by using the vMware vCenter Converter. I’ve used the Converter before to quickly transform a physical server to a Virtual Machine, and get rid of the hardware. This thing is awesome, it even powers the physical machine down at the same time as it turns on the VM, which results in less than 5 seconds of downtime. This old server was a separate beast though. It has 2 hard drives, the OS drive being a regular thing, but the data drive weighing in at 1 Terabyte. If we were to use the Converter, it would take so long to convert to a VM that by the time it was done, it’d have to re-sync all the data that changed (because this is a live production server), and the chances of that going well were too small to risk it. First of all, we’d make a temporary VM server. Give the VM its own C: drive, but create the D: drive on the SAN as a big 2 Tb drive, so that there’s room to spare. This is easy to do through vCenter, and it took all of 2 minutes to create it and format it. Using our backup solution, we started a bit by bit duplication of the server’s D: drive to the temp-VM’s D: drive. This could take as long as it wanted, because it wasn’t affecting much. Sure, the production server slowed down a bit with all the reading activity going on, but that’s what scheduling is for. After the duplication of the D: drive was done, we effectively had an exact copy of it on the SAN. To make the abstraction easy to understand: It was the equivalent of having the physical drive cloned. Now the disk could be taken out of the temporary VM server and plugged into anywhere. So, after this is done, the next step was to run vCenter Converter. However, we ran it to only convert the source server using the C: drive, ignoring the D: drive. Much faster, and without worrying about live data being changed as the conversion happens. The VM came up with the same name and IP as the old server, which was now shut down. The magic happens after, where we disconnect the D: drive from the temporary VM, and connect it to the new VM server. Just like that, the server now had both its drives, and it only took a fraction of the time it would have taken to run the conversion using both drives.
Some extra notes:
2010 was a year of many things.
2010 was good to me. I’m looking forward to the next year!
|