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.
We increased the milage once again after our 10 mile run from last week, this time we were going for 14 miles. This is the longest distance I have ran at one time so I am learning how my body reacts to it. The same will apply for the next few weeks as we move onto 15, 17, 18 and 20 miles over the next few weeks. These runs are become critical as I try to decide on a pace for the actual race.
Today a group of 3 of us (Glenn and another one of the regular guys) went out to the halfway point in 57 minutes flat. My final time was 1:54:07 with a final mile of 7:39. The average pace was 8:09 minute miles which is still within my range. Next week expect the 15 mile update where I would like to improve my average to 8 minute miles.
What a better way to prepare for next year’s world cup that to relive history. The official website for Germany 2006 has released a great video archive, which includes 51 of the greatest goals scored during the history of the World Cup. They also have available video highlights for the last 10 tournaments (1966 England – 2002 South Korea / Japan) and highlights of several classic games, players, coaches and stadiums. Thanks to Clinton for letting me know this was available, we could’ve easily had spend the whole day watching the videos and chatting about childhood memories.
Explore the worlds greatest sporting event through video of its most memorable moments, matches and people. Watch Brazils majesty, Diegos defiance, Frances chic, fantastic goals, dramatic matches and stunning saves. Why ever you love the beautiful game, it is here.
The BCS computers decided that UT was going to be the #1 ranked team in college football for this week. I only say this week because it was the strength of schedule that put UT over USC in the mathematically-calculated BCS poll. However, since USC has a stronger
schedule from now on, they will spring back to the top spot as long as they continue to win.
Don’t get me wrong, I like to see UT win because of my ties back to the state of Texas but I would also like to see USC do well. What I don’t like is to see USC be #2 because of some computer said so, despite the game winning streak they have accumulated and the opinion of the coaches and the media. UT has played some great teams but they have yet to prove they are truly better than USC — funny how soon we forget that UT almost lost to Ohio State, just like USC almost lost to Notre Dame.
In any case, the BCS controversy starts much earlier this year and I can only imagine what it will be like in January when bowl invitations are handed over.
Despite the fact that we mostly use our laptops at home, I still have a couple of desktop machines which provide some extra storage space and a test environment. One of the machines runs Windows 2k while the other one is running an older version of Fedora, this is the playing machine since I usually test new server software on this machine. The windows machine was the first machine that I ever put together and although it is a slow relic, it still does its job (photos backup and iTunes music storage) and it has some emotional value behind it.
Since I was not using the desk machines as much as I had before, I decided to sell my 21″ monitors a while back. One was sitting in the closet and the other one took too much desk space. We wanted to get a LCD to make better use of the desk space but I also didn’t want to spend too much money since we hardly ever use it. After a few weeks watching craigslist I finally found a 15″ Dell LCD. I picked it up last weekend but decided not to install it quite yet. I tested it with my PowerBook when I picked it up so I knew it worked just fine.
I installed the monitor this evening and the Fedora machine did not like the change of hardware though. This happen at the office a while back so I wasn’t too surprised. I switched it off and I’ll deal with it later. I turned on the Windows machine and nothing happen. I checked the plug to make sure it was properly connected since I hadn’t turned it on in a looooong time. I replaced the cable and tried again, this time the power supply sort of started going but stopped before turning on. I moved the cable a little bit thinking there might be a loose connection and pushed the power button once again.
I was surprised to hear my machine turn on but I was even more surprised when I heard a pop come from inside the machine. I am feeling a little sorry for the bug that I just electrocuted but didn’t think too much of it. However, a second pop and the smell of burn electronics made me pull the power cable right away and now I am thinking the worst.
It turned out to be just the power supply which is a great thing since these are cheap and easy to replace. I took the power supply from the linux machine and installed it on the windows machine and everything worked just as planned. I have a few MS patches to apply before I put it back on the network but I am glad I didn’t fry my motherboard or my processor. I really got lucky this time and it reminds me I need to integrate a backup solution for this machine.
