The course map for the 2006 PF Chang’s Rock ‘N’ Roll marathon and half-marathon race has been released to the public. The race website also has a video of last year’s route, sort of like a virtual tour of the race, in case you want to check it out.

Today’s long run was 15 miles, one more than last week, and also Bob came back to join the group. I had the usual muffin and juice at home but more important we stayed home last night so I felt good about today’s run. Five of use went out together but at about the 4.5 mile I had to make a pit stop — the body works in mysterious ways and I am glad they are doing some construction work in that part of the canal.

I ran on my own until the turn around point, my task was to try to catch up with the group I went out with but I knew it was going to be a hard task. I didn’t quite catch them but at the turn around point there was about a 400 yard difference between us. I was close enough since I knew they were going to pick up their pace, something I had done already while trying to catch up to them.

So I ran the 7.5 miles back to SRC mostly by myself although the canal was busy with walkers and other runners. Even a race was getting setup (not sure what race it was) but we managed to get through before they got started. I ran a time of 1:57:31 (7:50 avg. mile) which is an improvement over last week’s performance. Next week we scale back to 12 miles before bumping it up once again to 17 miles on Nov. 9th.

The Suns started the 05-06 season with the wrong foot after losing to Dallas 111-108 in double overtime. Steve Nash had a great game, just like during last year’s playoff series, but it was not enough. I watched the majority of the 3rd and the first half of the 4th quarter before going to bed and the team looks good. I assumed they would’ve won since they had a double digit lead when I switched it off, I guess they let the Mavs back into the game.

They are not the fast-pace, 3-point shooting team they were last year but I think they have just as much talent and they might even better balanced? might is the key word.

I have spent the last few hours trying to clean up a friend’s computer from a lot of spyware, adware, a couple of trojans and a couple of dialers. It is an absolute mess to say the least. We started early this evening and an AV scan is still going. I am trying to see how much can be cleaned up with the antivirus before moving onto removing the EliteToolbar (using this tool from SimplyTech).

The antivirus that was installed expired a long time so the AV definitions were too old to provide any significant protection. The machine was also running XP without Service Pack 2, which tells you more about the state of the PC itself. I wonder how many average family windows machines are in this state, letting spyware take over? I guess it is some what appropriate that we are doing this during Halloween, I should’ve asked for treats and not this trick :o)

update: A few hours since we got started, I was able to remote the EliteToolbar, remove a few trojans and one dialer that were installed on the machine. I have installed Firefox and AVG free edition as the web browser and antivirus solutions. I am also installing Service Pack 2, the rest of the windows patches and I will configure the machine to download and install any new MS patches released in the future. I hope this is enough to avoid re-imaging the machine and start all over from scratch.

Daylight saving time ends tonight/tomorrow morning, depending on you look at it, so don’t forget to set your clocks back. A benefit of living in Arizona is that we don’t observe daylight saving time so we don’t have to deal with synchronizing our clocks. However, we have to make the adjustment when we get in touch with friends and family since we are now on the mountain time zone. Anyways, just a little reminder.