I’m on my way home from a vacation that was planned long before I entered the start-up world. It was only supposed to be two weeks long, but then things started to happen and “suddenly” I was going to be on the road for almost four weeks. This is week four. I’ve been traveling around British Columbia visiting family and friends. After a side trip to Kelowna, I spent two fantastic weeks on North Pender Island. I spent the last couple of days in Vancouver. I grew up there, but I left in 1986 to go to grad. school in the East, and never moved back. It’s a great city.
I did work while on the road. A few weeks before I left town, I opened up a SSH tunnel to my development server sitting in my basement. This gave me direct access to my git repository, Bugzilla, wiki, etc. I finished up an OpenID implementation while on the move and got that checked in before things mysteriously stopped working. There have been some intense storms that hit New York, and I suspect they caused more than one extended power outage at my house. I have everything (server, cable modem, router, etc.) on UPS, and the server is set to reboot when power is restored. It has been tested a few times with real outages and the backup worked like a charm every time. But, I never tested the scenario where the power is out for hours and the UPS drains itself. I can’t tell until I get home, but I suspect that the UPS doesn’t power itself on after it runs out of battery charge during an extended outage.
I can’t say that I recommend taking such a long break when just starting up, but having done it, it has it’s benefits. You can never underestimate the value of “recharging your batteries” (personal ones, not UPS). I’m really looking forward to jumping back into things. The break also gave me time to do a lot of reading and thinking, I’m bringing home a bunch of ideas and things to try out.
Meanwhile, life is getting even more interesting. Last night, I flew into Richmond, Virgina, from Vancouver and drove along Route 64, right past Mineral, VA, the epicenter of the recent East Coast earthquake. I didn’t see any damage, but wasn’t really expecting to. According to Chip, back home in New York, they felt the quake, but there was no damage there either. Having lived in California, and through a number of similar sized jolts, I’d much prefer to be in a quake there then here on the East Coast; there, the buildings get “tested” frequently and the bad ones get replaced, in the East, there is virtually no preparedness, a really big quake would wipe things out all along the coast. Speaking of wiping things out, as I write this, Hurricane Irene is making its way up the East Coast, and is expected to pass over my house this Sunday as a Category 2 Hurricane.
Wish us luck.
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