Not Even My Wife Reads This

They plowed the W&OD Trail! Woo-hoo! It's now rideable with a road bike, without studded tires, at least until the next time it snows. Great job by the park maintenance crews, and thanks to whoever made the decision to finally do this.

And all the fallen trees I saw on Wednesday were gone by Thursday. (Well, not quite gone — you can see what's left of them on the sides of the trail — but they're not blocking the trail.)

Be careful out there, though — there will be black ice in the mornings as the melted snow from the sides of the trail refreezes, and there are still some large low-hanging branches.

If you somehow haven't heard, the Washington DC area got about 30 inches of snow in early February.  Too much to bike through.  They plowed the big roads, and then the small roads, and then most of the very small roads.  But not the bike paths.

My commute is from Ashburn to Herndon, Virginia.  Exurb to outer suburb.  It' s about a mile of nice calm local roads and nine miles of W&OD Trail, each way.  Usually takes me about 35 minutes when there's no snow.  Less with a tailwind or if I'm really trying hard, more with a headwind or if I'm sick or on the mountain bike.

Today, I tried it for the first time since the big snow.  I didn't know what the trail would be like.  I have alternate safe road routes for about 90% of my commute, so if it was really bad I could take roads for most of the way and just walk the bike down the W&OD for the mile between Loudoun County Parkway and Route 28, where there are no bike-safe roads.  (There are two stream crossings there, and no bike-friendly roads bridge them.  Only the W&OD and big high-speed highways like 7, 267, 606, and Waxpool.  267 is a limited access toll road and actually illegal to bike on; the others are unsafe to bike on in my opinion, at least during rush hour with their shoulders unrideable due to piled snow.  So if anyone from VDOT or NVRPA reads this, if you can only afford to plow one mile of the W&OD, it should be that mile.)

Anyway, I took local roads to Wild Meadow, which has a small paved side trail leading to the W&OD.  That side trail was covered with several inches of uneven refreeze, so I walked the bike over it.  But the W&OD in Ashburn was actually plowed!  Awesome.  It was only about 5′ wide, but that was more than enough.

Around the Ashburn Village Road underpass, the trail went from perfectly plowed to doubletrack.  There were two slushy pickup-truck tire tracks, and then a bunch of footprints.  And a mix of snow, slush, ice, crust, black ice, and occasional bare pavement.  This is rideable with skill and studded tires.  I don't have much icebiking skill (it's like mountain biking, with fewer trees to hit but much worse traction), so I had to put a foot down in places, but it wasn't bad.

After crossing Smith's Switch Road, the tree-lined section of trail was plowed, with evidence of much recent tree work.  Looks like some trees fell and blocked the trail there, but the work crews already got out there and cleared them away, and also got rid of some snow while they were at it.  So I stayed on the trail rather than detouring through the adjacent commercial area's parking lots and roads.

The stretch between Loudoun County Parkway and Route 28 was double-track with lots of melted snow, slush, etc. again.  Rideable with studded tires, but not easy.  I was getting hot at this point (it was about 40 degrees, and the mix of low-speed cycling and scootering and pushing the bike that I was doing is hot work and does not provide the cooling headwind of normal cycling) and removed my balaclava.

Once I crossed 28 I could have taken my road detour (Ruritan, Church, W Holly, E Holly, S Lincoln, Crestview, Herndon, Ferndale, Vine, Spring), but I wanted to see how the trail was.  Bad idea.  Just west of Sterling Road, the trail was blocked by several stopped work crew vehicles.  I pushed the bike around and saw that the crew was removing 3 or 4 large fallen trees.  I should have turned around at this point, but pressed on, walking the bike.  Once I got past where they were working, the double-track went away, showing that no vehicles had gone through.  So the snow in this part of the trail was mostly 4-6″ deep refreeze, with footprints and a few refrozen mountain bike tracks but no vehicle tracks.  So I had to mostly walk rather than ride.

I should have turned onto Sterling Road, but I didn't.  Just on the east side of Sterling Road was another large fallen tree that the work crews hadn't reached yet.  I pushed my bike around it.  The next chance to get off the trail (without turning around, which would have been admitting defeat) was at the Oak Grove Baptist Church.  I didn't know where the road there went, but I took it anyway, hoping it hooked up to Crestview.  Nope, it connected to 606, which was crawling with bumper-to-bumper traffic.  I could have ridden in that mess (it's no fun, but the cars are moving slowly enough that it's not that dangerous), but instead I turned around and rode back to the trail.  Then I pushed the bike up to the trail until I reached the largest fallen tree yet, which was big enough that it completely blocked the trail.  I had to climb the snowy embankment on one side to get around it, which would have been slightly annoying even without a bike to push.

That was the last fallen tree until I reached Crestview.  By that point I was hot, tired, and late for work, so I took roads the rest of the way in.  The roads were fine.

Temperatures have been in the 40s lately, so it's all melting.  The parts that are kind of slushy and icy should be clear by the end of the week, if it doesn't snow again.  And the work crews are working on the fallen trees, though I'm not sure how long it'll take them to remove them all.  I recommend taking roads instead of the W&OD through Sterling, at least for a few more days.

PyCon was in Atlanta this year, which got me away from the record snow in the DC area.  Yay for winter conferences being in warm places.  (Nothing against Chicago, but Chicago conferences should be in the summer.)

Attendance was about 1100, a little more than last year, but nothing like the crazy growth PyCon saw when the economy was strong. I think that Python is still growing but travel and recruiting budgets are down.

The best talk I attended was Raymond Hettinger's.  It was about using the right container classes to solve computationally expensive problems.  He pointed out that every ordered dict implementation except the one he just added to Python 3.1 had O(n) deletes due to using a list for storing the order, while his had O(1) deletes because he used a linked list with a dict index.  I hung my head in shame because I've written odict twice (once at a former employer, again from scratch for Slugathon) and done it "wrong" both times.

The most useful thing I attended was the Twisted Open Space.   Because my employer really wants IPv6 in Twisted, and I've submitted a patch but not had it accepted because of reverse compatibility concerns.  Actually talking to most of the core Twisted team at once in person really helped clarify what we need to do to break the logjam and get the patch moving forward again.  That ten minutes probably justified the cost of sending me to PyCon this year.  (And I wish I could go to the sprints and maybe actually get this change into Twisted this week, but I can't.  Next year I really want to go to at least a couple of sprint days.)

Rackspace Cloud was there as a sponsor with a booth, which reminded me that I should have blogged about my experience using Rackspace Cloud.  Basically, they stood up a virtual small Ubuntu (they have other choices too) server for me in about 5 minutes, for about $12 per month (plus bandwidth, more money for more memory), and it just stinking worked.  I've since turned it off because Slugathon isn't done yet so I don't really need a dedicated game server yet, but I'll definitely be back when it is.  The only negative is that there's no way to setup a cap at which the server turns itself off, so if you get Slashdotted or DOS attacked you may get a high bandwidth bill.

Negatives:

Airline travel sucks.  You already know this.

Guido's keynote was just taking questions via Twitter, and the signal-to-noise ratio was awful.  (Yes, I'm an old Angry Unix Guy.  Get off my lawn and take your Twitter and your Facebook and your iPhone with you.)  If Guido doesn't want to do a real keynote, that's fine; why not let someone else have the slot?

I'm no longer in favor of invited talks, because one of them was just content-free pattern metababble that never would have been accepted if the speaker had had to do a proposal.  (But, in fairness, all the other invited talks I attended were excellent.)

There were several talks that I really enjoyed and thought were great fun, but where I didn't really learn anything.  So they validated my existing opinions but didn't stretch my brain at all.  (Larry Hastings actually pointed out before his talk about micro-optimizations that it was just nerd porn and that it would be entertaining but nobody would learn much.  I applaud him for his honesty.)  I guess that's natural when you've been doing something for a long time and have attended the same conference a bunch of times.  I need to attend fewer talks and spend more time just talking to people.

The board game social wasn't as awesome as last year because there wasn't a huge pile of games to pick from.  (I think last year a game store donated some games, and you can't expect that to happen every year.)  So I will bring at least one game next year.

My 7-year-old laptop lost its WiFi connection whenever things got crowded.  The networking people do their best, but 1000 laptops crammed into a small area means the newer stronger ruder WiFi cards will crowd out the older weaker more-polite ones, no matter how many access points there are.  I plugged into a switch when I could, and lived without WiFi when I couldn't.  My laptop is heavy and has poor battery life anyway, so I think it's time to retire it in favor of a netbook.