New Best Time of 45:26

Yes, another new record. Reminds me of that Russian weight lifter that used to beat his record by 1/2 kilo every big match. He set the world heavyweight record about 50 times in his career (hehe). Well, I don't think I'll ever get that prolific but I did ride the short (14.2 mile) course today and hit 45:26, beating my old best time by 22 seconds. With an average speed of 18.75 mph, it's also interesting that the speed for the 2nd half (7.1 miles) of the ride was 20.06 mph. Still, all in all, I don't think I'll get 20 mph for the entire ride anytime soon (that would result in a time of 42:36, although that would be pretty good.

Now I'm just a little tired of Microsoft producing (yet another huge piece of) bloatware ... this time they're calling it Vista. The main "benefit" that I can see, besides eye candy, is a little bit of extra security functionality and some enhancements to the graphics interface, called DX10. Meanwhile, to "support the Operating System" (notice, this is not supporting running your own applications faster) virtually all users need to go out and buy either a beefier PC (again, remember Windows XP?) or add a gigabyte or two of additional memory. Sheesh! Anyway, with the advent of the new Intel processor Macs, I'm seriously thinking about switching, perhaps I'll get a Mac next winter. A bit nearer on the horizon would be the easy (and cheap) route of going to Linux (which is open source ... free) and a dual boot system (WinXP & Linux). By the way, Windows XP will not be available installed on new PC's starting this fall and Microsoft plans to end production and sales of XP by January, 2008. So I ordered a "closeout" version of WinXP Pro in order to make sure I have a copy for perhaps dual booting a Mac. I found it for $106 online (don't go to Best Buy, they still want $299 for the non-upgrade version of XP Pro).

Well, better get a shower here and decide what to do this evening. Tough to sing with this hoarseness in my throat ... it still hasn't gone away since RAGBRAI. Probably because I've been singing a little more, meaning more time in a bar (smoky) environment. But it still makes me smile ...

Later ...

Thought for Today

Regarding religion and its reliance on dogma (definition: noun. a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof), there is this to say: "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence". This quote is attributed to Christopher Hitchens.

Hard Drive Woes/Magic ... Success!

Well, the title of this post says quite a bit ... herein a few details, although it will be pretty boring for anyone without some level of PC "geekness" . I've grown quite fond of my little Gateway Laptop. It's about 5 years old and it sometimes shows its age (1 GHz Pentium III w/512MB memory). But it works well and has been a consistent performer. However, one big drawback is the small (and slow) hard drive. It's only 30 GB at 4200 RPM. That's been an annoyance from time to time, but especially when working with large audio files (such as when I'm converting LP's to .mp3 or .ogg format files, first saving them as .wav). Anyway, I've long been pretty sure that I was going to have to update the drive soon and, lately, I started running out of space in the Windows partition again. Therefore, I ordered a new 100 GB PATA laptop drive and a device from Apricorn that converts the ATA interface to USB. The idea is to clone the existing hard drive to the USB (new) drive and then install the new one and carry one.

Well, so far so good ... as I started this process on Friday, August 24. And note that I both defragged (the c: partition) and ran chkdsk on the old drive before starting the cloning process (no errors detected). The trouble started when I used PartitionMagic to increase the size of the Windows partition on the newly installed (and working) drive. It came up with "Error 983" and the drive then failed to boot into Windows. Nor would it boot in SAFE mode. All I could glean from the boot error message screen (present for less than 1 second) was "UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME". Well, I spent a significant amount of time online and downloaded some utilities to diagnose the drive with but couldn't get a clear answer as to what I should do about it. Furthermore, this PC will not boot from the CD ... which is what I really needed to do so I could run Acronis and do a roundabout save/restore of the (still good and working) original drive. Finally, today, I found a place online that discussed this CD fail booting issue and there were some details to allow creation of a "BootManager" floppy. This was just what I needed. So I actually created a Windows 98 boot floppy and added the boot manager code to it. At that point I could boot up the floppy and then tell the system to boot from the CD ... problem solved! So, finally, I saved an image of the entire drive to an external drive and then restored it to the failed (non-bootable) new hard drive. In this case, I also restored the Master Boot Record/Track 0 onto c: ... lo and behold, the drive booted up! This was heady stuff for me because I'd been doing a lot of research on it all day yesterday as well (gets to be tiring).

OK, so now the new drive boots (again), but what to do about resizing the Windows partition? During the Acronis image restore process, several errors were documented by the restore utility ... even though the restore worked. But I checked another forum regarding the PartitionMagic 983 errors and finally found a clue where, surprisingly enough, one guy recommended running chkdsk via MS-DOS (command line). I had originally run it through the windows interface ... and I'm now convinced that the DOS commandline version is a more thorough test of the hard drive. At any rate, it *did* discover a Bitmap error and corrected it. After that I was able to successfully run PartitionMagic, increase the size of the windows partition and now all is well. This much speedier (7200 RPM) hard drive is a good investment as I can see many applications loading up much more quickly. It's a real pleasure ... and, yes, it brings a smile to my face.

The Bridges of Madison County

Today was a good day ... golf with Larry this afternoon. Not the greatest golf game, but very much better, as they say, than being at work. We played at Ellis and it was *very* humid. I still think I did pretty well running up the hills vs. Larry's cart!

Then this evening I decided to pick up a few groceries but I stopped over at Pei's for a Rum & Coke before going to Target. Becoming, almost instantly, very relaxed, I absent mindedly diddled with the TV controller (since no one else was in the bar at the time) and happened upon the movie "The Bridges of Madison County". This reminded me of a recent journey out to western Iowa to see (and photograph) all the remaining covered bridges. Also visited the birthplace of John Wayne. At the time I was with someone that I believed was in love with me. That turned out to not be true but today's movie brought all of those feelings back to me again. In fact, I actually recognized one of the bridges in the movie (although I think the main bridge actually burned down sometime after the movie was shot). Sometimes, no matter how sure you are you've let go, your heart thinks otherwise ... how can that be? Anyway, I'm here to testify that, given enough pain, it really doesn't matter what the heart thinks ... best not to listen to falsehoods, of any type. But it does manage to remove the smiles from this day ...

Speaking of which, there is a good dance friend of mine that won't date me because she's "trying something" with another guy. Now this guy really doesn't seem happy when he's out there dancing with her. What's with that? She's pretty special, in her own way, and I hope he truly sees and appreciates that. Hopefully he'll be smiling more as time goes by.

Tonight I think I'll practice a few songs and then maybe go out for one more drink ... and an evening smile. As life goes, being alone is actually a pretty easy situation ... I really am getting used to it.

Oh, by the way! My eldest son is flying in to Chicago in September and bought me a ticket for the Cubs last homestand on Saturday, September 22. Well, it *could be* that they'll be competing for the pennant, right ? It will be a good time ... and I'm confident there won't be any rain that Saturday. G'day mates!

Century Completed ... Again

Finished another century ride yesterday. I must say that I could feel the humidity though. I didn't get started as early as I wanted to and so that cost perhaps an extra hour in the hot, humid afternoon. At any rate, the ride covered 102.4 miles and it took me 7h 48min. It was different in that I don't think I ate as much of the right stuff for carbs. I say that because this time there is a little stiffness in the legs and that doesn't happen if you are eating properly on the ride. I'll have to look that up in my nutrition book again and reproduce my original food list for next time. I lost 5 pounds of liquid weight on this ride even though I drank almost a gallon ... so I'm sure I was sweating much more this time around. Well, it was a good time to do it and I've accomplished my goal of three of these rides for the summer (RAGBRAI in July and one each century ride in June and August).

Of course, all this means that I have to do laundry today as well as mow the lawn, things that I put off yesterday. But that works for me. Unfortunately, I think I had some "real" grass die and now there's quite a good deal of water or "quack" grass growing in the front yard. There's no selective herbicide way to get ride of that and so I'm resigned to using Roundup on it, raking it out and then re-seeding that area. I've decided that it will be therapeutic, even though I don't normally spend much time on the yard. This is a good lesson and, in the future, I'll not let the grass go more than a few weeks without watering it when it's dry like it was earlier this summer. And, since it's therapeutic, it will put a smile on my face ...

New 15 Mile Route

Well, today I turned left instead of (my usual) right at the end of Toddville Road and found an interesting road that crosses I-380 somewhat north of the Toddville exit (where I usually cross on my standard training run). Then it hits Center Point Road and I can ride back home on the final third just like the old route. The difference is that the new riding route adds about .8 miles so now it's almost exactly 15 miles in length. This is a very nice number (although it's not prime ). And I tried out my new wireless Mavic Cyclocomputer today ... it worked fine. However, when I installed it (yesterday), I found that it was not communicating with the wireless cadence counter. So I sent that back and they're sending me a new one via UPS. Hopefully it will be here tomorrow. I thought about removing the front (lowboy) rack today but I think I'll leave it on for awhile yet as I haven't given up on the idea of doing another century this weekend and I'd want to put bags on the front for that. I'd like to do the 100-mile ride just because I have more experience now and I'm in much better shape after RAGBRAI, so it would be interesting to compare it to the first one I did earlier this spring. One good check mark in the experience column is that I've learned how to relax my neck and shoulder muscles while riding. On short (1-2 hours) rides it doesn't matter much but when going more than 50 miles I start to notice a "pain in the neck" ... and I figured out how to keep that from happening while on RAGBRAI.

NewsFlash! Ryan sent me a note that BestBuy has the last two Matrix DVD's on sale so I went over there after work and, sure enough, they were there and for only $3.99 each. I guess they're trying to get rid of DVD's as they want to make shelf room for HD disks. By the way, in the long run I think that Blu-Ray will win the format wars but it'll probably get to be a pretty cheap option to have players that handle HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. However, I expect that people will likely be stuck with renting, for example, only Blu-Ray from some rental places and only HD-DVD from others (and maybe both from yet others). Well, we'll see. But Blu-Ray has more storage space and allows for more encryption/content control capability, so that's why it'll probably win. From a TV perspective, 1080P is going to be tops and the latest LCD TV's are coming out with 120Hz refresh rates, which is great for action movies, etc. I think Samsung is one of the manufacturer's there and those latest feature TV's will probably cost more (maybe close to $3000 for 40-inch) for awhile.

Well, quiet night as I've worked out and then went out to Pei's to eat dinner. No golf today as Larry is sick and Scott (the other guy in our league 3-some) is on vacation ... so I'll probably see if Larry and I can play on Thursday or Friday afternoon. And I'll have my new driver by Thursday (look out Tiger!)

Maybe I'll take a look at the Matrix Reloaded movie.

Good night ...

Days In The Sun ... 45:29!

Today, I went to the new movie, The Bourne Ultimatum. It's a good action movie. And it's consistent with the preceding movies. I also have now purchased the books (by Robert Ludlum) as I'm confident they will be good reading.

Interestingly enough, my weight today was down to 155 ... fully 4 pounds less than on my return from RAGBRAI one week ago today. I'm eating 2500-3000 calories a day and I've played golf twice, danced for a few hours and only ridden 43 miles since that return. Not a great amount of exercise ... so it's a mystery to me. Well, I guess all I can do is eat more and enjoy it, eh?

Today I did my laundry, mowed the lawn and then changed the chain on the bicycle. I have almost 2100 miles of riding in this year with 1800 of that on the TriCross. The chain stretch was right at 1% so it was time. The new chain is a Shimano HG73 (same as the original equipment on the bike) but I'm going to look in to availability of, perhaps, an SRAM chain for the future. I think that there are other chains out there that last longer than the HG73 ... and I also like SRAM's standard "SuperLink" for easily breaking the chain. This facilitates removing it for more thorough cleaning and I'm using a Shimano compatible SuperLink with the new chain. I haven't ridden hard on it yet, but it was quiet and smooth shifting in my quick test ride. Hopefully, the new chain will extend the life of the cogs and chainrings. I also washed the bike ... and it has been raining today ... kind of a fitful spitting of the clouds, for the most part. Perhaps reflecting the melancholy I'm feeling this weekend. And, yes, I still want more days in the sun .

At this point, my throat is still hoarse, but for unknown reason(s). This started in the middle of RAGBRAI last week. I don't seem to have a cold of any sort, nor strep, as far as I can tell. But it keeps me from singing and, of course, that's not good.

At this point (about 6:15pm), I'm watching my DVD of "300". It's pretty good ... but, of course, definitely *not* a chick flick. And I'm thinking about my new driver, which I'll be trying out "in combat" during golf league on Tuesday.

This week, my son sent me a 3 DVD set of "Underdog" shows . I've always liked that cartoon ... it'll be fun to watch. Of course, the other great show (from college, primarily) is "Rocky and Bullwinkle" ... not sure if they have any DVD's out of that.

Well, at this point, I have several books to read ... the Bourne trilogy, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". And, of course, I have several more DVD's to watch as time permits. I find that I enjoy the reading most ... but tend to spend more time singing than anything else. However, with my voice out of commission, I will certainly read more ... h-mmm, that's worth a smile.

PostScript: At about 7 tonight, I just got tired of not riding and so I went for a test run with the new chain. And I broke my old best time by more than a minute, from 46:48 to 45:29 (about 18.7 mph average). There was a fairly brisk east wind, which negatively affects the second half of the ride but helps the first half. In fact, I reached the 5 mile point in about 14 minutes and halfway (7.1 miles) in about 23.5 minutes. So you just never know when all systems are going to be "go" for a record ... eh?

Weight Control ... UP!

Well, surprisingly enough (to me), my weight has dropped 2 lbs. since completing RAGBRAI last Saturday. I'm eating good and no issue with the number of calories. So I'm wondering if a solid week of very heavy exercise like that actually revs up a person's basal metabolic rate. Maybe I'm really consuming calories at a much higher rate because my body has adapted to what it saw as a consistent and permanent change. I don't know, but my weight was 157 this morning and I'm definitely not trying to drop below 159. So I ate more this evening and I'll do the same for the next few days.

I also ordered a new driver from the golf shop. Should be ready by Tuesday and, if not, it's identical to one they have there and I've been told I can use that for league next Tuesday as a temporary alternate. It's a bit shorter than the one I've been using and it feels good. I just need something I can hit 240-260 yards very consistently with ... and then, I promise, I'll be happy and stop offending the golf gods regarding the quality of my driving .

I got a new bicycle cyclometer today that got wireless speed sensor and wireless cadence. It's a Mavic WinTech unit but the main computer was DOA so I had to figure that out and the screw around for awhile before contacting the merchant to see what to do. They're sending out a replacement unit but I had to go out to UPS and send this one in to them (meanwhile, they've charged me for the replacement and will credit it when they get the failed unit back). So that put my riding time way behind today but it also means that I won't have that all set up to use for the weekend. Well, I guess I'll just do my planned chain replacement (this chain has almost 2000 miles on it and it has stretched about 1%, so it's time) this weekend and we'll see how the weather is regarding a potential ride to Waterloo. Looks to me like that might have to be Sunday instead of Saturday ... if I go ahead with it. Otherwise, I'll reset for next weekend.

Guess I better chomp a few more calories and get myself some extra rest tonight. I plan on going dancing tomorrow night ... bet it's been three weeks since I've done that and it's high time! Always makes me smile, of course ...