Ride home for Friday, March 11

Hectic day as a competitor for one of our biggest web host clients went bankrupt, meaning all the airline customers were flooding sites like our client's to try and book an alternative ticket. Our server held up fine, but the remote booking server was up and down, so initially we were blamed ("the web site's having problems!"). The web site was running a little slow as I like to keep some bandwidth in reserve (TCP starts having problems over about 75% pipe utilisation), I opened the floodgates to full and got some extra bandwidth from our upstream provider. This meant that the booking website was unable to keep pace, so I ended up throttling back traffic anyway. I ended up sitting there babysitting the connection whilst the client kept trying different strategies and getting me to run more bandwidth through. All this fun and games meant I didn't get out till late, and seeing as I was supposed to be at home having a meal to celebrate the mother in law's birthday meant I was under a bit of pressure! Leaving later meant I hit a lot more traffic than usual (I usually arrive at work early and leave early), so I was slowed down even more. I finally got home around 6:45, about an hour late.

The rear derailleur behaved after being picked up, at least. It's a Shimano Altus, which has extremely mixed reviews out there; it seems like you either love it or hate it. I have a suspicion that most of the people that hate it bodged the install, as the usual complaint is they couldn't get it to shift cleanly. I don't think that'll be too much of a problem for me anyway, as I have all friction shifters.

Distance logged: 11.357km
Time: 39:03
Average speed: 17.5km/hr
Max speed: 49.3km/hr
Temperature: -4, cloudy
Cumulative distance: 697.958km