Day 11 – On The Home Stretch
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been down in the Caribbean for 11 days now, but that’s how the math works out. I woke up this morning and spent a few moments trying to figure out what day of the week it was, since it’s pretty easy to lose track.
Sara made it home ok, and Dale and I have been working on some BraveNewCode stuff since she left. Yesterday we spent most of the day in the room, Dale designing away and me coding away. We’re keeping the lid on most of the things we’re working on, but lots of cool things should be coming down the pipe.
The wireless here has proven to be a pretty large disaster. We managed to hack into the administration page for the WRT router they have supplying the wireless, and we tweaked a few settings which has helped a bit, but in general all the connections appear to be proxied to a simple cellular data interface, which limits the max speed to about 200 kb/s. When you have 20 people on that, it doesn’t go very far.
Wednesday is pretty much my last day here, which means that I only have three days left really. Thursday is pretty much an entire day of travel for me, and I’m not looking forward to it. I leave the resort at about 10am and head to the airport, which is about 40 minutes away. Once at the airport, I’ll have to kill about 3 hours of time (thankfully Rebecca and John will be there too, and hopefully we can grab some food or something). My flight from Calgary to Punta Cana was 6 hours and 11 minutes, so I imagine the reverse will be about 7.5 hours with the jetstream flow. That puts me into Calgary sometime around 7pm PST, with probably about an hour delay there as we unload some of the cattle from the plane. Then, another 1 hour, 15 minute flight to Vancouver, following by another hour drive home. With any luck I’ll be home sometime around 11:30 or midnight PST time.
Unlike last year, where I worked pretty much through the Christmas holidays, this year I’m taking another break around Christmas, and will most likely be relaxing around home from Dec 22nd until the new year. So, while there are a few weeks of solid work ahead, I’m going to have another small bit of a break before hitting things hard again in the New Year.
So far I’ve had a really great time down here, and am looking forward to another few more days here and a bit more pool time. But I’m already getting a bit tired of the buffet, and imagine I’ll be ready to head home when the time comes. I’ve been watching the weather widget from down here, and it looks like it’s been raining the majority of the time I’ve been gone, and I’m not looking forward to that (although, it’s been pretty much over 30C here the whole time, even in the evenings, so going back to 10C will be a nice change, at least for a few days). I’ve sporting probably the best tan I’ve had since I was probably a kid (not that I really care about tans for the most part, but I’ve apparently gotten a lot of sun), so I imagine I’ll look a bit out of place in Chilliwack until it fades a bit.
And on that note, I’m probably going to head to the pool and take a quick dip. Afterwards, Dale and I will be doing a bit more BraveNewCode’ing.