I’ve settled down into a routine of worky worky and sleepy sleepy now, although I seem to be on 28 hour days at the moment – pushing back bedtime until I find myself eating lunch at 2am. Really looking forward to mid-March when we can think about sitting back for a bit!

Also, Justin’s flirting with the Everyman Sleep Schedule which I may adopt if he seems to be holding together.

We’ve been out and about for a couple of trips this week!

On Thursday or Friday I went for a bike ride round San Francisco with Pat. He used to be a hardcore Ironman triathlon type, but hasn’t ridden in a while so it wasn’t too painful for me. SF still is a hilly place however… it didn’t help that the initial rush of excitement of leaving the house led us to immediately tackle an offensively steep street. I was a gnat’s whisker away from blowing chunks at the top, and breathing tasted a bit like blood for a while.

I’ve got a map with our route below – we basically headed north to the bay, then across to the Golden Gate and back through a slightly seedy area where we saw the fuzz arresting a prostitute.

Plans have been laid to go across the Golden Gate next time, up into the conserved National Recreation Area.

This afternoon, I went for a run with Amir up to the top of Bernal Heights, which has amazing views across all of the bay. We took along Pat’s dog, who I tried to race to the top of the hill. The bitch won.

I’ve always taken fetishistic enjoyment from making pointless maps and graphs, so here’s a lo-tech list of the places in SF I’ve come to know and love so far:

Pat’s house — it’s the blue and white one. On the corner is the Jay’n'Bee, where we watched the superbowl.

Can’t be bother street-viewing the rest of them.

Trip to Tahoe

As the initial intensity of launching wore off, we took off last weekend to make a trip up to Tahoe for some R+R. Amir and Justin stayed in San Francisco to man the fort while Pat, Pat’s girlfriend and I made the 4-hour drive north-west up into the Sierra Nevada.

We arrived at 2am and went straight to bed, ready for some eXtreme wintersports action the next day. There were seven of us up there in total – friends of Pat’s.

I’m sorry to disappoint certain members of my family, but I chose to ski rather than snowboard because:

1. The generally accepted wisdom is that snowboarders are more likely to break wrists while skiers are more likely to break legs.
2. I’ve more experience skiing (half day on Rossendale dry ski slope versus none for snowboarding)
3. I was really looking forward to rocking the 80s neon shell suit look

After hiring some kit we headed up to Squaw Valley in the blazing sunshine. To ease myself in I went down the bunny slope a couple of times, while Pat went round in circles and laughed, then he headed off to do his own thing. My rule of thumb was that as soon as I managed to get down a certain slope without falling, I was ready for a more tricky one. So! After successfully wobbling down the easiest green slope, I took a bigger lift to try an intermediate “Easy Street” blue run instead.

Unfortunately, my uncanny sense of direction deserted me once again and I accidentally headed off down the double black diamond “Exhibition” instead, which was basically a light smattering of ice, on a cliff. Of course, once you’ve started, you can’t really go back, so I tried to ski down but basically spent most of my time either cartwheeling down or scraping snow out of my long johns.

It was only at the bottom that I realised I’d come the wrong way, and felt a bit less of a duffer.

The blue run I was actually looking for turned out to be not so bad, although on one of my last runs I happened to snag my ski pole in the ground and the end went KABLAM into my chops. I left an intermittent red trail down the mountain and had a really impressive looking big black bruise on my tongue for a few days.

The second day we went to Alpine Valley instead, which had some smaller, twisting runs. By the end of the day I was at a level where I spent sufficiently little time picking myself up and dusting myself off to make it loads of fun.

I drove us back down that Sunday evening, and we’ve been cracking on with work since. Scaling the service is still an issue – we’ve commissioned a new server to handle the load as a short term fix, although we’re going to have to get a lot cleverer about how we index all this information longer term… A month left till we have to demo what we’ve done and hopefully get some more funding!