This week

Life

Between work and bike riding (see below), there was not a lot of time for anything interesting on the home front this week, with the notable exception of 16 yo starting at his new school. They have an “early start” programme which gets everyone in for two weeks at the end of the year to start their 2017 classes, which I presume helps with getting administrivia, meeting teachers, finding your way around, etc. out of the way so they can hit the ground running in the new year. He acted grumpy about having to get out of bed at 7 am, but I think he’s actually secretly quite excited about starting this new journey.

Training

There’s this strange phenomenon I’ve observed when I have a big ride coming up: I feel less and less ready for the ride as it gets closer. On the morning of Giro della Donna I felt absolutely terrible, almost to the point of considering pulling out. Riding in from Launching Place to the start in Warbie I could barely turn the pedals over. I was looking forward to a miserable day of barely surviving.

But then the ride starts and I find a rhythm and off I go. I ended up recording times up the major climbs (Reefton Spur, Acheron Way, and the top half of Donna Buang) that were not that far off my PBs from when I was far fitter.

Bike riding really is a mental game.

Work

My document mining for Hack Day didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped. I made a little progress on a couple of things (mostly what to do when an open source project maintainer leaves the company) but there’s still plenty more to do.

I did manage to clear a bit of an email backlog though, and rearranged a bunch of 1:1s that were scheduled for while I’m at conferences and traveling over the next couple of weeks.

Speaking of which… I’m off to YOW CTO Summit today, and then two days of the main YOW conference, for which I scored a last minute ticket – on the condition that I make it back to the REA booth before everyone else comes out of talks. Maybe I’ll see you there? We’re hiring. ;-)

Theatre

A new heading!

A few years ago I formulated a “15 year plan” to reinvigorate my lighting design career. It started off pretty well, but then… real life intervened. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans” etc. etc. But I’ve kept in touch with the community, and after designing one or two shows for HTC over the last couple of years, they have asked me to do two next year (Feb and Nov). So that’s pretty exciting. If I was some sort of hippy flake I’d mumble now about “setting intentions and the universe will deliver”. But I’m not so I won’t. Suffice to say I shall grab these opportunities as they present themselves.

You can follow my progress (and the outcomes) at http://michael.rowe.lighting.