Easily the coolest and also most technical hike I’ve done. It’s the one on the Coors light can! Plus, the more near death experiences you can squeeze into one hike, the more rewarding it is at the end (disclaimer: please don’t see this as inspiration and get yourself killed). We wanted to send one final 14er on our last weekend in Colorado and this seemed like the one to do it. Winds and temperature weren’t ideal compared to the weeks before, but there was a storm arriving the next day so it was pretty much the only possible day to do it. We also got the whole hike to ourselves, didn’t see a single other person for almost 24 hours. Now that’s social distancing :)

Trying to figure out how to split rent with roommates when the rooms are different? Use this spreadsheet I made. The way it works, each roommates bids on how much of a premium they are willing to pay for each of the nicer rooms, and then those premiums are applied to the worst room to make it cheaper. The market solves all.

So lucky to live in this awesome state.

Was my first 14er. That was a rough dirt road up to the trailhead. Jack’s car paid the price for that one. Also camping at 12k ft is cold! Kville trained me so I lived.

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I left my desktop at school when I left when the campus got shut down, but I still wanted a way to ‘play warzone with the boys’. I experimented a bit and have found what as far as I can tell, is the cheapest way to set up a cloud machine game on Azure.

Costs/Savings for a cloud gaming machine breaks down like this:

• VM per hour pricing
  • Switch to spot pricing
  • Deallocate (stop from portal) when not in use
• Storage: monthly cost + disk operations cost
  • Avoid managed disks: by default, VMs are provisioned with a 127 GB OS disk. If you make this an HDD, this runs up to ~5/month in fixed costs. And then expanding this or making a data disk for game data runs up your costs a lot more, and charges you even when you’re not using the machine. What’s more, you get charged for disk operations when it’s in use
  • Store game data as a block blob and extract to the temp disk to avoid page blob charges and the associated disk operations costs. The temp disk also has almost 5x the performance of a premium SSD managed disk in my experience. Downloading/uploading is incredibly fast with 40 gigabit network interfaces installed on the VMs (although storage performance will bottleneck)
• Network costs: only outbound data is charged
  • Make sure all storage and VM resources are in the same region

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