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This has been a very busy week. I’ve spent these days visiting Synacor‘s headquarters in Buffalo, NY and I can say that I’m very happy and pleased to have met the people I’m working with on a regular basis. We had some long meetings to review the VAM project’s architecture and to do an extensive walkthrough of all its current code. Then the rest of the week was about coding sessions to hack a lot of the pending components we want to add: lots of Perl, Catalyst, PostgreSQL, PLSQL, PLProxy, MogileFS, gearman, make & bash scripts, etc. Overall, we’re making a great progress and everyone is happy with the current results

Aside from being extremely busy at work, I also managed to enjoy one of Buffalo’s most traditional activities: eating chicken wings. Yeah, Buffalo is the hometown of the world-famous Buffalo wings, so being here and not tasting the local dish would be like some kind of capital sin. I happened to attend 2 of these eating-fests in 2 nights in a row. The first night, Dave took me to the Anchor’s Bar, where the original recipe was created. The second night, Tom and the rest of the engineering team took me to Duff’s, which is the strongest opponent of the Anchor. I had to vote for Duff’s wings tasting a lot better than Anchor’s, but that’s just my opinion…

With regards to touring the city, this afternoon I logged a 16 km run around downtown. I ran towards the Canadian border-crossing bridge then ran all the way down along the lakefront to the marina, then all the way up back to the hotel. The day was beautiful and the views were really nice. It was worth waiting for it after being running in the hotel’s treadmill.

I think that’s all for now. I’m flying back to Mexico City very early tomorrow but I hope I can be back here soon for more work-related stuff and to enjoy more beer & chicken wings with my new friends

Yesterday Mokka ran with me the Skyrace Mexiquense at Nevado de Toluca. As every other year, the good running gang (Sergio, Octavio, Luis, Cinthia, Rubén, etc.) got together for some mountain running. This year the highlight of the race was the snow in the middle section of the 26 km course, lots of fun for everyone.

This wasn’t Mokka’s first time running such distance but it was her 1st experience at an organized race. I’m sure she enjoyed it a lot, as everyone gave her warm welcomes all along the course. Despite taking a little longer than other years to finish the race, I also had a great time running with my 4-legged daughter

Rest of the pictures are here.

Yesterday morning Sergio, Mokka and I went to Nevado de Toluca for a long run at altitude. We did a variation of my 28K course around the mountain, going into the crater and around Laguna del Sol instead of circumnavigating the crater’s rim. The total distance was 26K and we logged a time of 4 hours 37 minutes from car to car, despite the cramps and heat at noon.

As you can see in the pictures, there’s still a lot of snow on the North sides of the volcano. Right now it’s a perfect place to train for some of the toughest mountain ultras, such as Hardrock 100 or the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc. You’ll see me there frequently as I’ll be running the latter this year

Rest of the pictures are here.

Yesterday I made a quick climb of Iztaccíhuatl via the Ayoloco glacier. I logged a good time of 3:56:38 from car to summit (and 6:42:17 for the roundtrip) but was bummed to witness that the tons of snow from Winter had almost fully gone. I didn’t even have to put my crampons on…

Spring is here again, but only to suck every drop of water available around. Global warming sucks

Pictures of the climb are here.