RyanHarne.com

Saturday morning’s rain kept many people indoors and away from the group ride. So, our group was actually filtered to a highly concentrated, die-hard quintet. Today’s ride unfortunately followed the same route as yesterday with many more people given this 60º weather.

I’m taking this fact from other’s anecdotes or online articles on the subject, but, group rides tend to be unique to a locality. In regions where cycling is popular, the group rides are numerous and vary in intensity. In America’s cycling mecca (Colorado Springs, Boulder, or Denver), the group rides are pretty much professional training trips. In addition to the varying intensity of these group rides, every ride has specific rules, almost always unwritten and unsaid until you cross the line.

Blacksburg group ride rules: ride 2 abreast; if you’re pulling, go handlebar-to-handlebar as much as possible; if you can’t keep up with the pace that is set, it’s probably best for you to find a new route (but the pace is easily attainable for most); no half-wheeling (when one person is a wheel ahead of the person they are supposed to be riding beside); littering is bad; don’t complain to the women because they won’t hear it.

Anyways. Before we had fully left Christiansburg on our return route, many of these rules were being broken on a climb, as is sometimes the case. I’ll admit that it’s hard to ride 2 abreast in big climbs or to not half-wheel at those moments.

Something led to something led to me getting trapped with people on both sides and one of them cut me off in the last moment. I overcompensated in my instinctive turn and I went down. My right hip is a bit worn through, as were my bibs, but overall I’m fine; a quick inspection said that the bike was ok, too. Thankfully.

This is only the second time I’ve fallen. I really detest the healing process, in this case for bruises. I wish the bacta tanks used in Star Wars were somehow attainable in modern medical facilities. And I can’t believe that someone wrote an entire article on bacta in the Star Wars wikipedia page. I, however, am content in my nerdy, Star Wars trivia retention from my middle school years. end geeking out.

Even though I am well into my first draft of my research paper for this semester, the analysis is not complete. It took me practically all semester to acquire the data necessary and to foster an incredible patience to handle the monotony of experiments. Now, I have gigabytes of data ready to go… with a few hurdles remaining that I had never imagined. Without diving into the nuts & bolts of “natural hearing restoration” or “transparent hearing”, my code is selecting the best microphone locations for surface-mounting to a specific headset in order to recreate the ear’s natural hearing as best as possible. But, I have 48 locations. Luckily, I am only considering 24 of them. And, luckily, due to common processing limitations, 4 microphones is considered optimal. So, this means that the number of possible microphone combinations is (and you can’t have the same microphone present twice):

24 * 23 * 22 * 21 = 255,024.

Awesome. Unfortunately, my workstation in the lab takes about 20 seconds to process each iteration. That means 255,024 * 20 / 60 / 60 = 1,417 CPU-hours. My iMac here, at home, requires about 404 CPU-hours to finish the job (dual-core can do more, apparently). But, I have about one week, or 192 hours, to get this optimum microphone combination selected for my report. Hmmm.

I made a request for help and got a great reply. Something like “we have a bunch of new Xserves just sitting here… want to use one?” Once I recovered from the painful impact my jaw suffered from dropping so fast, I did some email tag and we are setting up the whole routine tomorrow. Some quick calculations say that the Xserve has four total cores and my process is multi-threaded (thankfully). My iMac has two cores, so take that number and divide by two… 202 CPU-hours. But, the Xserve has 2.66 GHz processors whereas my iMac has 2.16GHz processors. So, that means an increase in performance by about 20%, give-or-take, leading to … 155 CPU-hours.

155 is less than 192. Awesome. This could work.

In the spirit of Jack Frost, the Blacksburg weather forecasts now include a scheduled reference to “wind chill”. Today’s high temperature was around 32ºF but the wind chill kept it at 20º and below. This is exactly what my purchase of rollers was intended for and I feel somewhat vindicated that my fifth year in Blacksburg has taught me something about the sudden, harsh changes the winter weather takes. Now, if only I can discover a pent-up love for football…

The only chance I have to take a ride tomorrow is in the morning. Forecast: low 30s with heavy winds. If you see a Kevlar-clad alarmist riding his bike tomorrow morning, think of me… or just honk and I’ll get out of the way. The ear warmers really block out sound.

Students at Virginia Tech also have an unappreciated advantage when this weather comes through. Weather that makes you want to stay indoors at least provides you the opportunity of getting more work done. But, I’m not fool, and the first few seasons of Grey’s Anatomy are most assuredly getting continuous rotation on local DVD players. Frankly, I can really enjoy doing work inside with a warm cup of coffee and a warm laptop; what’s to hate about that? And who even likes Grey’s Anatomy? Certainly none of my friends.

Plus, staying inside and doing work means you have more time for play later or browsing the internet while you wait for your computations to finish.