Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Monday, October 7, 2019 8:02 PM

MotoGP in Thailand (or not)


On Tuesday I get up early and go walk for almost an hour before taking a shower, finishing the packing, and heading to the airport via Lyft, the Metro greenline, and a shuttle bus. There's a line for my flight, but not excessive. When it's my turn the agent doesn't like my passport because there are no completely empty pages in it (for visa stamps). I point him to the last three pages that are completely blank and he says if you read the fine print, you can see that these are "declaration" pages and cannot be used for visa stamps. Oh-oh - I'm in trouble. His supervisor comes over and I tell her that there are empty quarter pages which should be good enough for Thailand. (And I don't know about the Philippines.) The supervisor is going to send a picture of my quarter empty pages to Thailand immigration and see if they can accept them. As I'm waiting, there are a couple of other people who have the problem that they don't have entry visas for Indonesia where you need a visa ahead of time - not like Thailand or the Philippines where you can get a visa on arrival. These people awaiting their visas are mean to the supervisor and keep asking her to explain their options over and over again - though I could understand them perfectly. Finally the supervisor comes over to me and tells me that Thailand has denied using my quarter empty pages. I have no options. I go sit in the airport for a while and try to gether myself together and then get the shuttle bus, Metro greenline, and Lyft for home. At home I start trying to cancel all of my hotels and other flights to see if I can get some refunds. I'm glad I didn't have the last half of hotels or my return booked yet.

For the rest of Tuesday I go through some actions like watching a Moto3 race and unpacking, but I'm not all there. I don't know if I'm mad, sad, depressed, etc. I can't read my feelings. I do read up and find out that I need to buy a new passport and they now have double-sized passports at no extra cost. At some point I go to the library and get books to read and the grocery store since there was no food left in the house. And later at night I start reviewing the actions of the day and though I'm tremendously disappointed and out a fair amount of money, at least I haven't done anything irrational.

On Wednesday I don't feel like cycling so I mess around the house for an hour and then go ride. As I'm heading for home I run into my third cousin so I turn around and ride with him for a while. As we're riding six guys say something and my third cousin says, "Those guys are Czech". So we stop and it turns out that they are from the Czech Republic and saw my cycling jersey and are visiting the western area of the United States for their first visit to the USA. We give them a few pointers and then continue on the ride. At home I get cleaned up and to the post office to get the new passport application into the mail. And I go work at a coffeehouse trying to debug a project though I don't have much luck. (And I'm still probably "not all there" as I seem to have wiped my entire Tuesday experience out of my mind.)

I sleep late on Thursday until after 7 am. Between the stress and possible oral infection symptoms, I needed the extra sleep. Near 10am I get out on the mountain bicycle for a good ride. There are a few spots of mist during the ride and it feels good as the summer heat recides. I finally watch the Moto2 race from Aragon (Spain) and keep getting my buttons pushed as the announcers talk about the upcoming race in rwo weeks time at Buri Ram, THailand - which I won't be at because I have no blank pages in my passport. I'm still not entirely present in the moment from the Tuesday experience. Late in the afernoon I ride the motorcycle down to Irvine to have dinner with Person C_Ch.

I start Friday with a long walk and see the lady with the two golden retrievers again, so I stop and play with them a bit as we're discussing the breed. She says that golden retrievers have been seeing higher rates of cancers lately and shortening their lifespans. After getting cleaned up I read the news and check the markets and ride the motorcycle up to CSULA to meet with the team (though I shouldn't be here). We have a good meeting and then I ride home and have a great workout with the weights. It's almost time to increase the weights for each lift. Afterwards I make some preparations for the CSULB Climathon that is coming up at the end of the month and answer a few other texts/phonecalls for websites that I'm working on.

I stay in bed for an extra hour again on Saturday morning. Then I take off for a good ride on the mountain bicycle to the old yacht club and back home. After trimming the roses, I get cleaned up, watch the F1 qualifying from Sochi (Russia), and then I start dusting. The house is a bit dirty now, so I have a three day plan to get it clean again and today involves dusting and oiling the wood furniture. As I'm working away it starts to rain - very rare for us to have rain in September. And after the dusting and oiling of the furniture I touch up the bathrooms and quit cleaning for the day. The afternoon passes with two episodes of the final season of Breaking Bad and some reading. I get restless, so I pull out the mop and clean the bathroom and kitchen floors. I'm just not in a coding, algorithm development, web development, or geek mood today. Except that late in the evening I work on preparations for the Climathon and make huge progress for one last little item before I can start making PowerPoint "sales charts" for the start of the Climathon.

I stay in bed late on Sunday again - is it the cooler weather that makes me want to sleep a bit later now? I get up and watch a strategic, but disappointing, F1 race from Russia. Afterwards I get in a good session with the weights and ice the shoulders down. I spend a bit of time putting together more framework for the Climathon and reading. Person Ch_C comes over to visit and we hang out and then I watch some television before reading and bed.

I'm up at a more normal time and get in a good hour long run/walk. It's chilly this morning, but it feels good after the hot summer that we had. The run/walk goes well once I'm warmed up and I spend more time running than I thought that I would. After getting cleaned up I start laundry and re-kick-stat my Monday morning with my Red Bull cocktail (a Red Bull and Mountain Dew mix). There are a lot of loose ends to tie up today. Today the water company representatives come and install new smart meters on my street. Finally we might have near realtime usage data like the electric company has had for a quite a while. In the afternoon I wash the hardwood floors and have a fairly slow afternoon and evening.

I get up on Tuesday and have to wait a bit to go cycling to wait for some sunlight. I have a decent 40 mile ride. Near the end of the ride an SUV or minivan pulls up alongside me and the driver starts shouting (not in a mean manner) at me. I realize that he is speaking Cazech because I amwearing my Slovakia cycling jersey. I anser hello and ask him how he is in Czech and he's excited, but that's as far as I can go. He shotuing something that must mean "Go Slovakia!" and I finally point to my jersey and yell "Grandparents" at him. He's excited, but he's holding up traffic, so he speeds off. After a shower I run some errands including getting more books from the library. The first one, from an economist, has the authoer seemingly blaming all of the USA's eceonmic woes on when it left the gold standard in the early 1970s. I'm only finished with one chapter, but I hope this isn't a theme because its a whacko theme. I have a slow afternoon reading and later occassionally turn on the baseball widlcard playoff game and then turn it off after a few minutes. I get word that a couple of teammates from the 2018 Climathon want to join me for the upcoming 2019 CLimathon, so we make arrangements and I agree to send them some ideas in a week or so.

I stay in bed a bit late again on Wednesday and start out for a mountain bicycle ride. Near 44th and Long Beach I can't get across the street due to traffic so I wait as I ride around in tight circles. Finally I head over near the crosswalk. A guy driving a flatbed truck comes to a stop as he should for pedestrians near a crosswalk. I'm not sure of the rule for cyclists near a crosswalk - they theoretically have the same rights and responsibilities as a car and should probably wait. Regardless, I start crossing the crosswalk and I hear squealing tires and there's an impact - a small white car has run into the back of the flatbed trailer. Both of the vehicles pull to the side f the road and I stop also in case I am at all involved. The flatbed trailer has very little damage but the white car is significantly damaged as is partially went under the trailer but impacted on the hard trailer frame. I give contact information to the truck driver and take a couple of photos that hopefully captured both vehcle's license plate numbers. And then I continue on for a decent ride. At home I get cleaned up and have a good idea for controlling our harbor vessel via smartphones, so I work on that for a bit. Today I become obsessed with this smartphone idea, and besides a short trip to the library and grocery store, I spend almost eight hours working on the idea and share it with the CSULA team.

I walk to the grocery store firts thing on Thursday morning to buy muffins. And today they have the rarely-stocked oatmeal/cranberry/raisin cookies, so I buy some of them. At home I have the obsession again and I work on the CSULA vessel controller process and still keep debugging the robotic arm simulation. After noon I have a good workout with the weights where all of the lifts are easy. So maybe time to gradually increase the weights again. In the afternoon I relax a bit, get the scripting tool to run to send out a mass emailing fo Fair Trade Long Beach, and tidy up around the house. Into the evening I watch the Dodgers' baseball playoff game and some of the football game.

I sleep very porrly on Thursday night into Friday morning. But still I get up at 6 am and get out the door for an hour run/walk. Today's effor is much more running than last time and it feels easier. After getting cleaned up I read the news and check out the markets and then ride the motorcycle up to CSULA. We have a good team meeting where the team is making progress. When I get home in the early afternoon I trim the roses, read, and fall asleep on the couch for about 40 minutes. Early in the evening I head over to the First Fridays since I have been over there for a while. Again, I treat more as a walking workout as opposed to shopping or something like that. It's a bit boring, so I head for home and watch a part of the Dodgers' game but go read and sleep before the game is over.

I stay in bed about 40 minutes longer than usual on Saturday morning, but get out for a road bicycle ride. I don't have "it" today, but I still push forward for almost 40 miles and then call it quits. At one point there's a rider that tags on to the back of me and keeps trying to talki to me, but I'm concentrating on riding and try to keep very concise answers to discourage him. At one point he says, "I've got a good pace going on behind you", and I want to just laugh because, of course he has a good pace when I'm pulling him along. At hme I get cleand up, get supplies from the groery store, and watch qualifying from Buri Ram (where I should be right now) for both MotoGP and Moto2. Both qualifying sessions are exciting as riders set a fast pace and then, as they try to go faster, crash out. But the rain stayed away and Sunday's races should be fun. I take care of small things around the house and relax a lot because my legs are very tired from the running and cycling. Though I know that this is a "good tired" from pushing things as opposed to a "bad tired" from injury or illness.

I start Sunday with tired legs and a decent mountain bicycle ride. After the ride I trim the roses and watch an exciting MotoGP race from Thailand (which I should be at). In the afternoon I relax and do a bit of coding and watch football. It's a slow Sunday since I have nothing serious on the agenda for the coming week and I spend the day as a recovery day.

Monday is a planned day off from running or cycling. I walk early in the morning to the grocery store for supplies and then start working on building blocks for the Climathon. I also update the crime statistics for the city of Long Beach and post them online. Near noon I have a good workout with the weights where I've increased the weights. During the bench press the left shoulder hurts a bit during the extreme downward motion, but afterwards and with some icing it feels good. I take the day off cycling to clean up the road bicycle and de-crud the gears and chain and sprocket. During the afternoon I continue with some coding and watch some of the Dodgers' game. And late at night I pick up the three link robotics simulation again and find a couple of bugs and now it starts to behave as it should. I've been working on this problems for a few weeks now (off and on) and it just took periods of intense work/study followed by away periods where ideas could bounce around in my head in order for me to get it to work.