It has come to my attention that my travel schedule is insane. In the next 50 days...

  • Raleigh from October 11th to 15th. (Community Architecture team retreat)
  • Boston from October 16th to 18th. (Visiting home for a few days to swap out things I have in Washington DC, etc.)
  • Toronto from October 23rd to 24th (Ontario Linux Festival)
  • Rochester from October 25th to 26th. (RIT!)
  • Toronto from October 27th to 30th (Teaching Open Source Summit, FSOSS)
  • Singapore from (approximately, tickets not booked yet) November 6th to 14th (POSSE APAC)

...I will be home for less than half of them. And this is not counting...

  • Thanksgiving
  • A trip to CMU sometime in November (no dates yet)
  • Another trip that's planned but not yet public (though I don't think the person in question reads this blog)

It's probably the best "HOWTO be an effective road warrior" curriculum ever designed, especially since for a bunch of these (Raleigh, Toronto, Rochester, Toronto) I'll be with folks who know how to do the Travel Thing (Karsten, Greg) and thereby able to watch the balance that they strike, after having spent a couple months coming up with my own version of things (which usually involves maniacal amounts of work and then random "...well, that seems interesting, let's do that!" jaunts to various locations - typically bookstores - in strange cities). Practice, reflection, recalibration, repeat. Eventually I'll learn where and how to draw my own boundaries, create my own space, keep my own head together in the middle of everything else changing. It's a valuable skill to have.

I'm also starting to consider the purchase of actual travel gear. Like a travel vibrating alarm clock. I've got a non-travel version of one of these, and it's the only alarm that's consistently able to rouse me. (It had better. It beeps like crazy, flashes a lamp in my face, and shakes my pillow like thunder.) I can't hear beeping alarms even when I'm awake, and phone alarms are usually faint enough that I don't hear them when I'm sleeping half the time (or when I'm awake, for that matter). I've given up on ringtones and have been experimenting with various ways of amplifying the vibration of my phone, but no consistent hits yet other than the uncomfortable "wear pants with pockets to bed and stick phone in pocket so it's jammed into your leg," which is also a really freaky wake-up experience. There are still variables to tweak, though; putting the phone on something hollow that will clatter (I had great success with a cereal box at pika, but I don't usually pack a cereal box in my backpack when I travel) seems promising, and timing my sleep cycles so that I only set my alarm to ring when I'm at the light phase of my sleep cycle seems like it would work based on past observations of when I have woken up via phone, but hasn't been particularly rigorously tested yet.

...or I could just drop <$30 and just Have A Clock That Works. I hate getting more stuff, though. (Except for books and music.) If I can do something with what I have, I will. Eh, maybe when I move back to Boston for the spring semester (and thus have the ability to set up a little electronics workbench) I'll whip out an AVR and make my dream alarm clock. That'd be fun.

Yup, all packed up now. Bedtime!