Tulane Day Hack

Yesterday was Tulane Day at the state legislature, which meant a long day and no training ride for me. I spent most of the day in what they call the "rotunda" of the State Capitol Building. This is a very non-rotunda rectangular room separating the chambers of the House and Senate. Why they call it the rotunda I haven't a clue. Anyway, it's an odd sort of event where we set up a bunch of displays and have people stand around them all day just in case someone important happens to stop by. In the midst of all this were at least a dozen groups of school children taking end-of- semester field trips, a big rally by the AARP, and various tourists. Concurrently we have our president and some of the senior staff and faculty running around to scheduled meetings with various elected officials. Finally around 4:30 we folded our tents and headed off for a glass of wine, or whatever, before the 6:00 pm start of the reception, which was held at the Old Capitol Building. There we had our traditional Tulane-Tini's (green martinis) and handed out cute little stuffed monkeys wearing Tulane T-shirts as part of our effort to get some additional funding for the Primate Research Center construction project that got about $10M more expensive after Katrina. I'd have liked to have stayed longer, but I had to split around 7:30 so I could lend some assistance to my father. That worked out OK because The Wife's flight was delayed and so I was able to pick her up from the airport. Finally made it home around 10:30. I get to drive back up there tomorrow for a meeting.

It's still plenty windy around here! I knew the levee ride was going to be a little bit hard when I saw that a bunch of guys were on their TT bikes. As it turned out, it was almost as disorganized as it was hard, though. A few of us rolled ahead of the group at the start, and apparently just as our pace picked up someone back in the group flatted. We didn't know until Howard came up to us, also on his TT bike, to tell us. That didn't stop him from going to the front and surging up to 29 mph or so. Seeing as how I was severly out-numbered by the TT freaks, I decided not to play the "my bike is faster than your bike" game today and so a few of us let the others go. I'm glad we did, too, because the ride back felt just hard, hard, hard to me. We were fighting a steady headwind and struggling to hold 24 mph, often dropping down to 21-23. Right after the turnaround we got mixed in with a little group of triathletes. It eventually got kind of scary. One of them kind of started a little battle with Rob, which pushed the pace up pretty high a few times. By the time I got home I felt totally wasted. Apparently a dinner of cocktail shrimp and wine isn't good preparation for a hard training ride. Who knew?

So this morning I discovered that one of the little websites that I built on the Tulane webserver had been hacked! It's a fairly inactive site nowadays, so I hadn't noticed until I went looking for a link that I knew was there. Luckily, all my files were there, they had just added a bogus index.html file. I called our Tech Services folks and they're "looking into it." Whether I hear from them or not, I guess I'll wait to fix it until tomorrow, but you'd think that they would have at least reset my FTP password by now, wouldn't you??