So last night, I sat down and wrote a quick little script to run via cron and pull some statistics and throw them into graphite.  Already with less than a day of data, I’m better able to tell that we end up with a few periods of about ten minutes where having more executors could help that are correlated with when someone does a commit to one of the projects at the base of our dependency tree.  So that gives us a lot better idea of whether or not the cost of an additional machine is worth the few minutes that we’d be able to save in those cases.

Since it didn’t look like anyone else had done anything along these lines yet, I put the code up on github.  There are a lot more stats that could be pulled out via the jenkins api, this is really just a starting point for what I needed today.

Go check it out over on the HubSpot dev blog

The conference was actually very good.  It has been a few years since I’ve been to a conference between grad school, my daughter being born, and being at a startup where conferences weren’t the priority.  But it was good to get back to it.  Had a lot of good hallway conversations with people about things that are relevant to us and saw a lot of good presentations.  And Velocity is especially relevant to me at this point as it was all about various web performance and operations stuff.  Where, unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on.

I mostly kept to the more operations-y tracks just because they map better to what I’m currently working on.  I’ve come away with a bunch of things to look into and posted a whole bunch of choice quotes over on Twitter, but a few takeaways boiled down for here would include

• If you’re using a public cloud provider, plan for things to fail.  Build your systems expecting it and you’ll have less pain.
• HubSpot is doing an awesome job with post-mortems.  DanM actually posted a great blog post over on our dev blog about things we’ve learned from doing a lot of them.
• Everyone complains and focuses on javascript performance but that’s misguided.  The bottleneck is the DOM.  Interestingly, none of the browser guys talked about that apparently
• DevOps has mostly been about putting developers into ops (hi!) but also needs to be about putting ops into dev
• Web performance has been very successful in tying itself to business metrics.  Weirdly, operations has overall been less successful at that
• There’s a lot of work going on to help with debugging and working on webapps for mobile platforms.  Very cool.

None of those are particularly earth shattering revelations, but still good to see/hear.

Also, on Tuesday night I did a talk for the Ignite track.  So 5 minutes, 20 slides, auto-advancing.  My topic was “Just Too Late” and was largely around some things I’ve discovered transitioning into a role where I’m doing more ops stuff and the fact that I feel like I get to things too late.  But then turning it around and showing that’s not really so.  Stay tuned for a longer blog post on the topic.  But the talk went really well.  It was fun, a lot of positive feedback and was good for me to get back to it.  Looking forward to submitting some (full-length) proposals for talks for some conferences later this year.

I also had a few thoughts on the way conferences have changed since I last went to one

• Twitter really is a pretty big game changer.  Lots of conversation on twitter during the conference about which sessions were good, useful tidbits from sessions, etc.  I actually felt that the experience was pretty strongly enhanced by it
• Conference wireless still sucks.  But you can get decent data now for devices and avoid the use of the conference wireless entirely.  This made it easier to stay on twitter during the conference
• An iPad (or other tablet) is a pretty perfect device for looking at stuff during a conference.  It sits on your lap so you can just check it sporadically, the battery lasts all day, you can get data from a cellular provider, and it’s reasonably fast.

Anyway, good time was had.  Thanks to all the people that I met and chatted up.  And hopefully it won’t be as long before I make it to another conference

Instead of working on the product which is front and center to all of our customers or even working on the free tools at grader.com that millions of people use, I’m now instead focused quite a bit on various infrastructure related things for us. Obviously, I’ve done some of that all along, but at this point, it’s my primary job.

It’s a lot of fun. We are heavy users of EC2 and some of the other Amazon services. We also are using Rackspace Cloud some. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we add another provider in the future. So there is a challenge in making all of these environments look the same for the rest of our dev team as well as our on call folks.  We’re also working to make it so that we can easily continue to scale out as our compute needs increase.  All the sorts of things that I’ve spent some time thinking about over the years, but there’s no theoretical here — we’re really deploying, managing and everything else a pretty large distributed system. We are using a fair bit of open source stuff in addition to building some stuff ourselves.  The first thing was obviously ami-creator but there’s more to come almost certainly. In addition, we’ll probably be doing some work and submitting some patches to improve some of the tools and things that we use as it makes sense to do so.

And as we we are growing like crazy, I’m looking to hire some people to join my team to help us get even more things done. If I were writing a job description it would probably include bits and pieces like Linux administration, python, puppet, probably devops (as it’s something that’s in mind), cloud automation (… even though I still hate the word cloud), release and build tooling, monitoring, and more. Sound interesting? Drop me a line and let’s talk.

1. Finished and submitted my thesis to complete the work necessary to finish up the SDM program and graduate in January.
2. My daughter was born in February.  There are plenty of pictures on Facebook if you know me and are on there (mostly taken by my wife)
3. I’ve continued working at HubSpot where there’s no shortage of work to be done and it seems like always something big going on or coming up
4. Picked up cyclocross racing in the fall.  Read all about it. Since apparently I managed to blog about that.

If you wanted more details, well, there was a lot more on twitter.  But hopefully going to get back into the habit of some blogging again for the new year.  Then again, I’ve said that before.

Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed with my options.

• Do some building by hand on an actual instance, then do the bundling and upload off of the running instance.
• Some of the ThinCrust stuff initially looked promising, but it seems like it’s largely unmaintained these days and the ec2 conversion bits didn’t really work at this point. I was able to get my initial images this way, but mostly by having a wrapper shell script of doom that made me sad.
• There’s always the rPath tools, but I wanted to stick to something more native and fully open source
• The new kid on the block is apparently BoxGrinder but I found it to be a lot over-complicated and not that robust. I’m sorry, but generating your own format that you then transform into a kickstart config and even run through appliance-creator via exec from your ruby tool just felt wrong. No offense, but just felt like a lot more than I wanted to deal with

So, I sat down and spent an evening hacking and have the beginnings of a working ami-creator.
It’s pretty straight-forward and uses all of the python-imgcreate stuff that’s used to build Fedora live images. Your input is a kickstart config and out the other side pops an image that you can bundle and upload to EC2.

Thus far, I’ve tested it to build CentOS 5 and Fedora 14 images. I’m sure there are some bugs but at this point, it’s worth getting it out for more people to play with. Hopefully it’s something that’s a lot simpler and more accessible for people to build images and I think it will also fit in a lot better with having Fedora release engineering building the EC2 images in Fedora 15 if they want.

One of the big outstanding pieces that I still want to add is the necessary bits to be able to (optionally) go ahead and upload and register as an AMI with your EC2 account.  But release early, release often.

Comments, etc appreciated in all the normal ways.

Minor update: switched the repo to live on github instead

There might be some other reorganization and moving around here as well in the future when I have a little bit of spare time. Which, since I’m racing cross, might not be for a few months

• If you’re using cloud to refer to EC2, use EC2 instead. It’s concrete and it means very real things about your deployment and scaling models as well as how you’re managing your infrastructure.
• If you’re using cloud to refer to some service which runs over the Internet, either refer to the service or just say the Internet. You don’t store your mail “in the cloud”, you host it with Google apps. You don’t backup “to the cloud”, you have your backups stored over the Internet with Mozy or Carbonite.
• If you’re using cloud to refer to the idea of some hosted application platform, just say the platform. You don’t run your python app “in the cloud”, you run it on AppEngine (or something else).
• If you’re using cloud to mean that you are using virtualization and have some management stack on top of it, then please just say you’re running in a virtualized environment.
• If you’re using cloud to refer to having your server infrastructure hosted in a virtualized environment by someone else, again, just say you’re running in a virtualized environment.
• If you’re using cloud to refer to a “visible mass of little drops of water or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere”, then congratulations, you can continue to use the word cloud. And thanks to Wikipedia for the definition

Following this simple idea will let you avoid the otherwise impossible to avoid discussion of the semantics of the word “cloud” and what you happen to mean about it and how you might be wrong and … This then means you’ll be that much closer to achieving whatever goal you hoped to achieve as you’ll spend less time talking and more time doing. And as an added benefit, you’ll avoid getting grumpy emails from me about the fact that you’ve used such a terribly over-used and under-meaninged term.

Looking back on the season, it was one that was both successful on some fronts and utterly not on others. I did a good job of keeping up a good base training routine through the winter but then ended up doing little in the way of racing over the course of the spring and summer. First it was waiting for the new bike, then it was being busy, then the weather sucked, then I got hit by a car, then travel, and then the season was over. Even though I didn’t race much, I felt like I was a lot better prepared for the races I did do and that my fitness was higher as a result of the base training through last winter.

So I think it’s now time to start easing myself back into a bit more of a routine in preparation for the winter of base training. I picked up a new trainer to replace the freebie I had been using that’s significantly quieter. Last winter, I was able to do trainer time in the evenings, but with my current schedule that seems unlikely so I’m going to start getting up a little earlier to get time in before the ride into work.

Set it up last night and had the first ride on it was this morning and it’s pretty nice — quieter than the old one and seems a bit smoother as well. I’ve got a pretty good set up to start with to be able to watch DVDs or online video. I’m then streaming the audio to my iPhone with AirPhones so that I don’t have to have a long headphone cable or worry about turning up the speakers really loud. Today was watching some TV via Hulu and then a Spinervals DVD. For the latter, though, I need some better music. What do other people listen to as a good upbeat playlist for time on the trainer or even general race warmup, etc?

Unfortunately, they’re still stuck in the dark ages with the newest AMIs available for Fedora being Fedora 8 based. With Fedora 12 around the corner, that’s two years old — something of an eternity in the pace of distribution development. I’d love to help out and build newer images, but while anyone can publish an AMI and make it public, you can’t publish newer kernel images, which really would be needed to use the newer system.

So, if you’re reading this at Amazon or know of someone I can talk with to try to move this forward, please let me know (katzj AT fedoraproject DOT org). I’d really strongly prefer to continue with Fedora and RHEL based images for our systems as opposed to starting to spin up Ubuntu images for the obvious reasons of familiarity.

Given that this seemed like a pretty typical problem, I figured I’d take a look and see what open source projects exist out there to see if any of them were suitable or could be at least close to a good fit for what we need and want. Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed…

• Capistrano seems to be the big player in this arena. It was originally written for Rails and still very very strongly shows that heritage. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it makes it a lot harder to get to work if you’re not doing something that’s rails-like. There are some people who have gotten some things working with Java app deployments for tomcat, but they all feel a bit hacky. The other downside for me/us is that Capistrano is very much Ruby-based, both in how its own deployment language looks as well as some of the “how it depends on things working” aspects. Also, the fact that it’s written in Ruby and thus a little bit more difficult for us to hack on if/when we run into problems is a point against. So it’s probably a non-starter for now, or at least a pretty difficult sell
• Fabric is written in python and seems to be following in the footsteps of Capistrano. Right now, it’s far far simpler. This is in some ways good but some of the pieces that we’d want (eg, scm integration) aren’t there and so I’d have to write them. And I’m not sure if the Fabric devs are really interested in expanding in that way; haven’t sent email yet, but planning to tomorrow to feel it out.
• Config Management + Binary deployment is the approach taken in Fedora Infrastructure for app deployment and it seems to be working pretty well there. It might be something to get to eventually, but that’s going to be a longer term thing and I’m not actually convinced that it’s really the best approach. For Fedora it grew out of only a couple of things which could be considered “webapps” and a lot of system config that has turned much later into more webapps. It also pre-supposes a bit more homogenous of an environment than we use at HubSpot from the work I did there
• Func is something that a few people have been working on that I keep wanting to find a use for but it seems a little less well suited to doing a lot of java app building/deployment given that it’s more https/xml-rpc based than shell based.
• Roll your own is what we’re doing now and what it seems like is pretty common. I don’t necessarily like this, but it’s certainly the path of least resistance

So, what am I missing? Is there some great tool out there that I haven’t come found that you’re using for Java (and more) webapp deployments? Bonus points if its python-based and pretty extensible.

Kara and I flew down on Friday morning and then met up with a friend for lunch. We then spent some time just kind of relaxing before meeting up with a group of my friends from high school for dinner. It’s a good group although we don’t get together anywere near as frequently as we used to… for the first few years after high school, we made it a point to get together around New Year’s or at some point over the holidays. This has fallen off as we’ve all moved increasingly far apart distance-wise and have increasingly busy lives. It was good to get together and catch up, though, and especially in a smaller group environment.

Later in the evening was the sort of opening party/reception type thing and my class had a surprisingly good turn-out. The event was held at a bar in Durham (Tyler’s) which was fine. It was a little weird seeing people smoking indoors as that’s something kind of foreign after living in Massachusetts for almost six years. This probably contributed to the scratchy throat feeling I had the rest of the weekend. As I walked around, I was able to see and catch up with a ton more people; both that I had been friends with through high school or people I barely talked with. It was really nice as pretty much everyone is doing something that is kind of interesting now and it was cool to talk with them. None of the usual crap that people complain about with high school.

Saturday was the main day of reunion stuff but my group of friends started earlier with breakfast at Elmo’s on 9th St. As usual, Elmo’s was good and we got there just in time to beat the majority of the rush. Then, it was down to campus and we watched a presentation about some plans to expand the school. I’m not really sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it looks like a fair bit of work is going into making sure that things are nice and really trying to turn what had been a hospital hastily converted to a residential high school into a very nice residential high school. On the other, more people in the same sized space could be a bad thing. A day later and I’m still not sure where my opinion falls on the expansion. The rest of the day was filled with catching up with more people, walking around campus to see what had changed (both a lot and very little at the same time), our slide show (always fun to watch again) and the like.

Kara and I then skipped the evening’s festivities so that we could grab dinner with my parents as we haven’t seen them in a while and it’s unclear exactly when we’re going to be down again. It was a low-key evening and then rather than attend the late night party, we just watched Valkyrie in the hotel room.

This morning we slept in a bit more and then headed to campus for what had been billed as the faculty brunch. The location stated for it had been a little bit odd, and when we got there, we learned why — it was actually in PFM (the cafeteria). Also, the number of faculty present overall was pretty low at least that we saw.

We skipped out a little, though, so that we could grab lunch at the NC Farmer’s Market Restaurant with another group of friends. This was, as always, tasty and it was good to get to catch up with another group of friends. Then we met up with my sister and her husband and now we’re sitting at the airport waiting on our flight back to Boston. (Well, we were… home now. But I’m a day later posting it)

It was a fun weekend and it was great to catch up with a whole bunch of people. There were some people who I would have liked to have seen who couldn’t make it, but I got to see a lot of people that I hadn’t seen since our 5 year reunion or even longer for some of them. And while most are on Facebook, some aren’t. The event was better organized and a better set up than we had for the five year reunion, but there were a few things which bothered me and can hopefully be better for the next one…

• The cost and especially the way the costs were organized was unclear. As it turns out, very few things were only for those who paid. This may be partially due to complaints over how much some things were, but it still wasn’t at all clear what you were paying for up-front.
• Having the full schedule sooner would be nice — I think the final version was published a week or less ago. That’s just kind of poor for people trying to decide if they want to come or not and especially how to schedule their travel
• Faculty presence was low. I vaguely remember complaining about this five years ago. I know it’s hard to get the faculty to come out, but some of it is communication with former faculty who have retired. They can’t come if they don’t know what’s going on.
• Little interaction with current students. This is one that seems easily fixable but it’d be really nice to get a chance to have more current students around and talk with them and the like. Get the real story about what’s going on at the school; I didn’t trust the administration ten years ago, I don’t trust them now Things like lunch yesterday or brunch today would have been perfect opportunities for them to be around, eating and join some alums. It would also be great for the current students to get to talk to people who have been there, done that, and are maybe doing something cool or interesting now. I would have liked it as a student and I would have liked it now as an alum.

Even with those suggested improvements, it was a fun weekend and I figure I’ll probably be back for the fifteen in five years and look forward to seeing everyone again then. Even if it does make me feel old to see current students wandering around.

Unfortunately, I’ve now had two weird pedal failures in the past week. Last Thursday, I was leaving the office and clipped in. As I got about a block away, I noticed my foot moving weirdly on the pedal. As I pulled over to check it out, it became clear that the cleat was stuck in the pedal. After some investigation later, I realized that I lost one of the two screws holding the cleat into the plate in the shoe. It looks like the plate where the screw went in is actually pretty stripped. And in getting the cleat and shoe disengaged from the pedal, I essentially had to take the pedal apart so I decided to switch the pedals out for the plain SPDs instead of the slightly fancier SPDs that were on there.

Today, I was riding home and realized about halfway home that one of the pedals was coming unscrewed from the crank. I made it home without incident and re-installed the pedal without any noticeable problem, but I’m going to be keeping an eye on it over the next few days. Hopefully the crank isn’t stripped — it looked okay, but at this point, I’m a little cautious of it.

Maybe I should look at building a new commuter bike sooner rather than later Although I really would like to get the Redline to last another year to year and a half.

Since I knew I’d end up reading a lot while I was on vacation, I figured I’d take advantage of Amazon’s good return policies and try it out. If I liked it, great. If I didn’t, I could certainly hit a bookstore to get “regular” books and return the Kindle when I got back home.

As lots of people have said, the packaging of the device is very good — Apple-like is really the best way I have to describe it. They really want you to buy into a full experience. I turned it on and had already set up a few “free sample” books to be on the device. And reading on it has turned out to be a great experience. The page turning was a little bit distracting at first with a little bit of a flicker, but after half an hour or so of reading on it, I don’t notice it any more than I notice turning the page of a regular book. One thing that I didn’t find at first (because I didn’t read the documentation) is that you can change the font size — this was pretty handy as I can definitely handle smaller than the default — I’m currently using the smallest and am pretty happy with it.

One of the obvious questions with the Kindle is battery life. With the wireless off, it was incredible (I didn’t apparently need to charge during most of my 10 day trip with it sporadically on). Leaving the wireless on I need to remember to charge it every three or four days. But the charge is pretty quick. Unfortunately, it uses microUSB instead of miniUSB, so it’s another cable to have to be carried bringing me to three (miniUSB, microUSB, iPhone).

The selection of books seems to be pretty good. Not everything that I’ve looked for, but the vast majority. Pricing is okay, usually a little cheaper than the price for the dead-tree version and the over-the-air delivery is wonderful. Especially when sitting in an airport between flights.

In terms of reading on it, the screen is incredibly nice. I had my doubts, but they’re entirely gone. Reading in bed? Check (just be sure there’s a light). Reading outside beside the pool? Check. On a plane? On the couch? … And so on. The screen is incredibly readable and I don’t end up with any of the eye strain problems that I sometimes get after staring at a laptop screen or a monitor for long periods of time. How well it worked in sunlight is one thing that really surprised me. Obviously it’s supposed to be one of the strengths of the screen, but I’m wary of marketing-speak But I really had no problem sitting and reading it even in direct sunlight.

Downsides? There are a couple. The biggest is the DRM stuff. It’d be nice to be able to share books (eg, if Kara decided she wanted to get a Kindle also so that we could both read the same books). It’d also be nice to have some sort of library functionality, although the samples are a big help in deciding whether it’s worth paying for a book.

The other real downside is the case that I got — the Patagonia neoprene case. It’s okay in that it protects it pretty well; it’s kind of crappy to use while reading, though and I’ve taken to taking the Kindle out of the case when I’m reading from it. Other case suggestions would be appreciated since I’m certainly going to keep the Kindle at this point.

It’s actually pretty simple — you hit the menu button, go to Settings, then “ANT+” and then Send on the device doing the sending and Receive on the one doing the receiving. And then, voila, you’ve sent the route between Garmins.

Very very cool, and something I’ll definitely have to keep in mind for future rides to new places as more and more of the team start getting the 605 and 705.

• Real hardware. I’m pretty happy with my current laptop so I just got a desktop machine to use at work. The box I got is a Dell quad core with 8 GB of RAM. Nice box overall and Fedora installed with no problems. The nVidia graphics work fine for 2d and even xrandr seems to be doing the right thing. One thing that is annoying is that Dell is still shipping machines with VT turned off in the BIOS. Once I turned that on, though, KVM is also working pretty well on the box
• Windows is both just as annoying as ever, less annoying and more annoying. You can run it in a virtual machine without real problems. But installing things, the terminals, etc are all still a pain. Stability is a bit improved. The whole “run as administrator” nonsense is a real pain when you’re trying to get a lot of stuff going.
• Coming in at the end of the scrum cycle seems to sort of be a good thing. Get to see the final push and then the demos from that cycle followed by getting to sit in on the planning for the next sprint. I won’t be on a scrum team until the next sprint and so hopefully I’ll have a better frame of reference¡
• Commuting to Kendall Square works really well for me. Okay, I knew this from riding into MIT but it’s still a takeaway. The bike ride in is a nice length; shorter would be fine, but longer really isn’t as practical.
• Complex build processes exist everywhere and are despised everywhere. But it always seems like a build and deployment process is the last thing cared about.
• I’m having a lot of fun being back in a startup environment.

So yeah, all in all, its been a good week. Now for a long weekend. Two four day weeks in a row for me I guess.

It’s a big change for me as I’ve been doing pretty much purely (fairly) low-level operating system work for a decade now. Going to a company that’s doing much more web development is making me shift how I think about everything from considering using Eclipse rather than a combination of Emacs/vim/terminals to the languages I’m writing in and the types of code I’ll be writing. And I think it’s a change that I need — I’ve been feeling a bit stagnant and so getting out of my comfort zone should help a lot.

Also, I think that HubSpot is doing some interesting stuff and I’m glad to be joining the team to help out in a variety of different ways.

During that time, I’ve also had the opportunity to play a big role in the development and growth of Fedora. While the start was somewhat rocky, I think we’ve now built up an incredibly strong community that successfully releases a whole distribution (arguably, several!) on a regular schedule. And within that community, we’ve grown a pretty awesome set of leaders to continue to drive Fedora forward.

While I’m planning to still keep at least in touch with the goings-on of Fedora as well as running Fedora in places, I certainly won’t have the time to spend on it that I do today. I hope to keep in touch and see people at conferences and events from time to time. But right now, I’m looking forward to what’s next for me. And for those wondering, it’s something pretty different really. More on it next week..

For the third year, I signed up for the Seacoast Safari ride to raise money for research and treatment of Cystic Fibrosis. As I’ve previously mentioned, this ride has a bit of a personal connection for Team Quad as one of the guys that rides with us, Chris Kvam, actually has CF. Not that you’d know it from watching how strongly he rides. This year, Quad had an even larger team than last year with 26 riders.

For me, the thing that made it even more fun is that I had convinced my dad to fly up and do the ride with me. Originally, the plan was to have him ride my Merlin and I would ride my Cannondale. The previous week’s accident made that not an option. But we found another team bike for my dad to ride and all was well.

Also, Kara served as the official photographer for this year’s event. You can see all of her pictures on flickr

Saturday started off a little bit drizzly, but it looked like the majority of the rain had passed us. The roads were still a little wet, though. I had decided to take it easy and to mostly ride along with my dad which worked out well for riding with a number of the other Quaddies. All was going well with about 10 of us riding together until Jon hit a rock and was thrown off-balance and went sliding across the pavement. Ugh. Not the way to start a charity ride. But we made sure that the paramedics were taking care of him and we continued on. The next mishap, just a mile or two later, was a flat that for some reason was quite difficult to successfully change. Finally it was fixed and the rest of the day went by pretty uneventfully and the sun finally came out. As we got to UNE in Biddeford, we saw Jon standing there after having been discharged by the ER and brought up by one of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation staff. We had the barbeque lunch and then watched some of the coverage of the Tour stage from the day.

Dinner was the typical pasta dinner that has characterized the Seacoast Safari along with an award ceremony and silent auction. A nice impromptu addition to this year’s event was a few people auctioning off their prizes to raise even more money. Very cool! And Team Quad was recognized for the fact that we both had the largest team and had the largest fundraising amount of any team. Overall, the amount raised this year was over $100,000 making it significantly more than previous years.

We headed back to the dorms where we mostly sat around and talked bike geekery and then headed to bed to wake up early the next morning again.

Sunday morning came along and was quite sunny and perhaps perfect from a weather standpoint. We had breakfast and were then on our way. Again, I was content to take it easy and ride with my dad for the majority of the time. A number of other people were content to keep the same pace and so we had a nice group of about 8 Quaddies riding along at a fairly relaxed pace. We took in the scenery, we sang and enjoyed a wonderful day on the bike. At one point, I went to the front of the group and basically sat there for about 12 miles setting a steady pace into the wind. It was a great time and a good way to get a good tempo workout without having to really push it.

We made it back to Newburyport and wrapped things up. Stood around talking with people for a little bit, but at that point, wanted little more than a good shower and so were on our way pretty quickly to do so.

And with that, another Seacoast Safari was wrapped up. A good time overall and the route was just as gorgeous as always. And I think that the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation saw it as a pretty effect fundraiser. Looking forward to next year so that I can ride it again!

Photo by Kara Katz / CC BY-NC 2.0

So Saturday we grabbed lunch with Kara’s parents and Kara’s other sister (Courtney) plus her husband and five month old again at the Cool Cat Cafe. This time I had a burger and it was a pretty good burger — I see why they are highly rated. We then headed to Waileia for the rehearsal. The rehearsal was quick and basically there was little information really to be shared.

Then, Saturday evening there was a rehearsal dinner / welcome dinner (some of Kara’s family that wasn’t in the wedding came out as well and they came to this dinner as well) at the Hard Rock Cafe in Lahaina. And the dinner really was what you expect at a Hard Rock Cafe. That’s not to say it was bad, but the food was predictable. We did have a nice outdoor table to sit at with a good view of the setting sun over the ocean.

After dinner, Kara really wanted some shave ice again so we went back to Ulalani’s Shave Ice. We shared a large this time and it was very sufficient for the two of us and again very good. Then, it was late so we headed back and went to sleep.

Sunday was the wedding and we were up fairly early. I drove Kara and Courtney to Waileia for their hair, etc appointments. Kara and I grabbed lunch at Longhi’s and I had a pretty good pasta dish — the Fettucini Lombardi. It was a fetticuini alfredo with the nice addition of proscutto and English peas. Very tasty and by going for lunch, the prices were a lot more reasonable than their dinner prices.

Then I dropped Kara off for her hair appointment and just read for a while. Then it was time for the wedding. This was actually kind of cool. Lindsey had decided to have various bits of native Hawaiian weddings in the ceremony including a precessional where she was carried in on a chair and accompanied by hula dancers. Very very cool to watch. The rest of the ceremony was nice as well, but it’s hard to beat being carried in on a chair

After the ceremony, there was a dinner/reception at the Bistro Molokini in the Grand Waileia. Dinner was good, but the service was very very very slow. While they started off getting things fast, they slowed down quite a bit and it was probably about two hours before our food came out. Oh well, we were in no rush. We eventually headed back (late) to the condo and crashed hard into bed. Of course, after I had driven the hour back, I was wide awake and so I read for a while longer and eventually fell asleep.

Monday came and it was raining a little so I decided against going for a ride. But after an hour or so, it cleared up and so we went out to hang out by the pool for a while. I read and swam a little bit. Then, the plan for the evening was to go to the Old Lahaina Luau with everyone.

Rain threatened, but held off for the entirety of the luau. It was pretty well done. They did a good job of not just having a mob scene at the buffet for food by sending up a table at a time. The performance afterwards was very very good. The food was a little underwhelming, although when you consider how many people it was feeding buffet style, it was pretty good. But certainly not the best meal that I had on the island by any stretch of the imagination. We had a good time overall, though.

Tuesday I awoke to more rain and so again didn’t ride. Plus, Tuesday was to be the day that the remains of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Felicia were to hit the hardest. So we got up and grabbed some breakfast and took it easy for a while. Then, we headed to Lahaina to do some souveneir, etc shopping. We had lunch at Cilantro which had the best reviews in terms of Mexican places and I was wanting a burrito. Sadly, I was disappointed in my burrito. It was just a bland blend of meat, rice and beans inside a kind of soggy tortilla. Kara had the flautas and liked them a bit better. We walked up and down the length of Front St while getting our stuff and then headed back to rest and relax and try to get in a swim since it wasn’t really raining hard. Unfortunately, as we headed towards Kapalua, the rain really picked up to the point that it was raining hard in Kapalua even though it was (at most) misting in Lahaina. So, we instead did the fun of some laundry so that we could go home and have clean rather than dirty laundry

Wednesday was our last day and we had to be out of the condo by 11. So we woke up and started packing up our suitcases and the car. We said our goodbyes to Kara’s family and then were on our way. We returned the rental bike to West Maui Cycles, grabbed lunch at Penne Cafe and then continued on to the airport. Leaving Hawaii is an interesting airport experience as in addition to the usual of checking in, a separate baggage check and the TSA security standpoints, there are also two separate times that you have to go through USDA checkpoints to ensure you aren’t bringing back anything you shouldn’t. The first of these is for checked bags, the second is for carry-on. And then as we sat at the gate, a USDA agent came around with a dog still looking for things. It was somewhat impressive.

And now, I write this while we’re 37000 feet in the air and somewhere between Maui and Dallas. My laptop’s clock says it’s 4:30 am but my body thinks it’s more like 10:30 pm. Thursday we’ll get in and probably sleep for a little while. Then I have some school work to take care of, actually posting this and a few other posts and starting the email catch up process. Then Friday, it’s back to work!

And of course, then a week to get around to posting it. But hey, it’s posted now!