Uncompahgre Peak
Posted on 04 October 2020
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.
How to game on Azure while minimizing cost
Posted on 28 April 2020
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
Dry Canyon Hike
Posted on 26 April 2020
Trail conditions as of 4/26/20: Towards the end of the dry canyon trail, there’s a bit of snow, but nothing I couldn’t handle with my pair of trailrunners. As you can see from the Strava recording, I went past that and to the trail to the top of big baldy, where there’s quite a bit of snow. I ultimately didn’t attempt the final summit of big baldy because I was alone due to social distancing so wanted to err on the super safe side, but it looked doable. It’s about half a mile out from where my recording ends.
read moreSocial Distancing
Posted on 04 April 2020
I have done this trail so many times in my life, still never gets old.
