"I came up to help you with your pack, but it looks like you don't need any help."
- John Roskelley to Deborah Waterman at 17,800 feet on Denali
In the meantime, Güero did an amazing job at repairing all the broken stuff at home. It’s time to test the new ADSL modem/router, so here we go, we’re online again! 
The day has come…FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well… so well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL.
Federico Biancuzzi interviewed two dozen developers to discuss all the cool details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more…
Oddly enough, today I assisted to the YUI 2nd Birthday Party here at the Y! Sunnyvale campus. What is YUI? A library similar to Meteora but made by Yahoo!
It was a decent time after being quite inactive for the last couple of weeks but, that wasn’t exactly the purpose of the run. What I really wanted was to re-energize myself after being so stressed lately. I think it worked… 
The celebration had to be in traditional Silicon Valley style: some food and beers at a local pub and then to Cris’ place to play Rock Band for most of the night. I know, we’re such a bunch of geeks… But at least we rocked a lot!
Today, the weather just got very bad; a lot of rain and wind everywhere. The forecast for tomorrow gets even worse, frustrating my attempt to go skiing to Lake Tahoe with Nilesh and Moad.
Seems like I’ll have to deal with being stuck at Daniel’s place working through the rest of the weekend, the ski trip will have to wait for another occasion… 
While you were still sleeping, Scott Jurek ran 30 miles, up a trail that climbs 3,600 feet. While you shuffled to the kitchen for Cheerios, Jurek spent two hours strength training, working his entire upper and lower body. He’s not done yet. A core routine follows, as Jurek works his abdominal muscles until they burn. That’s easily remedied by his preferred method of therapy — jumping into a tub full of ice water to soak away the day. In between, he’ll prepare, cook and munch on an array of vegan foods. The day after a peak training session, he’ll pound down an obscene amount of whole grains, raw veggies and wheat germ drinks: about 6,000 to 8,000 calories, give or take a lentil or two…
My run was not very long or strenuous and I was able to do it at a good pace and without any discomfort. Seems like my body and specially my feet are recovering well after so many days of rest. I miss my longer runs though…
A big fire took place on a big piece of land behind many houses in the neighborhood. The wind happened to be strong that day, which made the fire very intense and to move very quickly. Many people, including Firefighters and Police, arrived and were trying to control it. On that piece of land as well there are some high voltage electricity towers. Bad combination…
When the fire moved right under the towers, a huge voltaic arc formed and a lightning strike happened, it went to a metallic fence behind all the houses. This huge amount of electricity moved across the fence, and it went into street wires, fences, houses, etc. Two small constructions went into fire. A total chaos. The electrical shock passed very close to where many people were, including me. I had climbed my backyard wall and was tossing water over the burning land using a water hose.
Thank God nothing happened to anybody. Only some of us were thrown down to the ground and a few others got small injuries. It was a really scary moment, any of us could have easily been killed.
As to material damages… The neighborhood has no electricity, no telephones, water pipes got broken, wires burned, appliances burned, etc. From what I’ve seen (given there is no electricity) my house is leaking water from some walls, it has some wires burned, there is no telephone and several appliances got burned too.
The status right now is that each of us has to fix his/her houses/stuff for the moment. But everybody and authorities are figuring out responsibilities. I guess some kind of legal battle will very likely come in after this.
This morning I had to travel to Sunnyvale. Some very important meetings and work are scheduled for the next 2 weeks and I had to come, impossible to reschedule after 6 months of negotiations… Fortunately, Güero was able to go to Mexico City today to help me out with getting some things fixed while I am out of town.
So this is a brief version of how things were. And I thought it was going to be a relaxed weekend… *sigh*
Note: My ADSL modem/router died too. I’ll continue blogging and saving my posts off-line, hoping that my home server can be back on line in a couple of weeks.
Welcome to my Web Site!
I hope to keep this thing up to date...
Have a nice day! :)
Disclaimer: Don't do it. Look at the pictures between these covers, read the stories. Look in Leo's eyes. Don't be a fool. This shit kills people, takes friends, steals parents, seduces children. Maybe you won't die climbing, but you might. We suggest golf.
Taken from Alpinist #0
