Well, Erica is out of town on a collecting trip, which means it’s time for Jackson to clean out the ol’ Netflix queue. This week is Bollywood week! I’ve got some big names lined up: Hrithik Roshan, Shah Rukh Khan, A.R. Rhaman, and Aishwarya Rai.
Discovered via co-worker Leah, the band OK Go:
So now that we’ve finished Farscape does anyone have any ideas for what we should watch next? I know Sports Night has been mentioned, so I’ve added it to our queue. I also want to re-watch Battlestar Galactica season one, but we’ll wait till it hits DVD.
The dull roaring sound I’ve been hearing all morning is apparently the rain pouring down outside the office. I’m glad Erica decided not to ride to school today.
I’ve just imported about a hundred posts from December 2000 through May 2003. The posts are kind of a mess, since during this time I used four different blogging systems (hand coding, Blogger, Movable Type, Blosxom). As a result, my RSS feeds may be a bit messy as I update and reformat these older posts. As I go, I’ll add the interesting things (I doubt there are many) I find.
In recent days I’ve found myself feeling stupid with alarming frequency. I’ve been asking questions I should have known the answers to, gotten frustrated by problems with simple solutions, and generally felt foolish on too many occasions. On one occasion I discovered that downloading a directory with about 5000 small text files (most around 4k in size) via FTP is a bad idea. After 45 minutes only about half the directory had been downloaded (and yes, I had plenty of bandwidth to play with), so I killed the connection and gave up. That’s when I realized I could have compressed the folder and downloaded the whole thing in about a minute.
Thinking about the loss of TV Torrents made me realize that for somone who “doesn’t like to watch TV” and doesn’t have cable (and gets pretty lousy reception) I sure watch a lot of TV.
The results from the triathlon have been posted.
I finished 61st out of 70. I had a pretty good swim (#20, 15:04), a slow bike (#61, 58:48), and a slower run (#65, 36:32). I thought I could do better on the swim, but the placing is really good. I know I could do better on the bike, but my time is 12 minutes faster than my practice ride, so I’m still happy with it. The run still bothers me. I know I’m not a very good runner, but I basically walked to whole course. Seriously, it only takes my friend Jeff 10 more minutes to run a 10k.
Still, I finished the race. We actually completed one of our New Year’s resolutions, got in shape, and finished a triathlon. Not bad.
We both finished the race! We finished in under two hours! We both hurt like hell!
I didn’t feel as good about the swim as I did during the practice. I finished in about 14:00, which still puts me about two minutes faster than my pool time, but I was hoping for something closer to 13:00. My biggest problem was wandering off course after the half-way point. The course is an out and back swim in an inverted V, and the leg back into the beach goes right by a sandbar. I managed to swim right into the sandbar, which forced me to spend some time getting back on track.
I was pretty tired after the swim so I took the transition pretty slowly. The bike course is basically an X, where each arm of the X is about two miles long. Three of the legs have pretty decent hills on them. The first two felt good, but I had a lot of trouble on the last one. I kept getting stuck behind other racers — I didn’t have the energy to pass, but I was forced to slow down so as not to get too close. At the end of the bike I was really starting to feel lousy. I realized that I hadn’t had enough to eat/drink before the race, and my energy was really fading. I forgot to hit my watch to time my swim/bike split but I think I finished in about 58:00.
Miserable. I walked most of the way. Dehydration was a big factor, since running for more than a minute left me feeling parched and nauseous. My legs felt good, but I just didn’t have the will to push on. I really think I could have done better if I had been better about my pre-race prep. My time was about 36:00.
Still, I finished, which makes me feel really good. I managed to beat the two-hour mark, even walking as much as I did. I haven’t decided if I want to do another race (I’m leaving that decision for another day, when I’m not so sore), but I’m really glad I did this one.
The Triangle Triathlon is this weekend.