Archive - Feb 2006

3 miles in 22:30!

Of course Steve kept up that pace for double the distance (he's actually hoping to run that pace for the entire marathon) but he's been running for longer than me. :)

Well, week five of training has come and gone and what a fantastic week! I felt great after all my runs this past week.

It started out last Tuesday with a short 3 mile run which I did in record time (for me). I decided that I'd throw some 'speed' work into the mix (which is supposed to help in the long run) so I finished the 3 miles in 23:30 - significantly faster than the 25:30 that I normally take.

On Wednesday I opted to do my 5 mile run at my marathon pace, which I'm hoping will be 8:30 per mile. That had me finishing the 5 miles in 42:30.

I only had to do a short 3 miles today, but I felt really good about it. Completed the 3 miles in just under 23:30. Started out at 7.5 mph for the first mile, increased to 7.6 mph for the second mile and then to 7.8 mph for the last mile. I felt REALLY good after the run too. Perhaps I'm actually getting somewhere with this training stuff...

I'd like to get down to somewhere around 20-21 minutes for a 3 mile run by the end of this training.

Well after having been in the new place for only three days, I had the boys over for a night of poker this past Saturday. We used pretty much the same rules we have been using at other poker nights, and it was pretty much the same crowd. Thanks to Steve who was TD for the tournament. In the end JK walked away with the big money, followed by Adam and finally Rob. I believe a good time was had by all and I'm looking forward to the next outing.

Well as Dave pointed out a short while back, my server was down again - this time for quite a time. Turns out it looks like it got hacked by some spammer, or at least that is my guess based on the what data was left behind after they pooched it.

Since I've been running on e-smith, I've been hit twice now. Luckily neither time I lost any data that mattered to me but it got me thinking. I decided to ditch e-smith and with the help of d-smith (hehe) I managed to install a different linux distribution and install all the necessary packages to get haggaret.com back in business. My thinking was that e-smith was preconfigured with well known default settings which may or may not have made it easier to hack. Perhaps I'm way off in my assumption but oh well. As a bonus, I've been able to get new themes to work on this linux distro that didn't seem to work with e-smith. Next step - avatars! :)

Big thanks go out to "Wolff" who is providing me with internet access as I type. I was hoping to find an open wireless network here at Bonnie's mom's place but I didn't think it would be that easy. I fired up my new mac, clicked on the wireless icon and BAM! there was "Wolff"...all I had to do was select him/her from the list of available networks (it was the only one). So once again - thanks Wolff!

P.S. Got the wireless keyboard and mouse going too.

So much for my training so far, it was pretty much non existent in week 2. The only running I managed last week was the long run on Saturday and I didn't even get the whole 7 miles in.

Week one started ok but when I got around to Thursday I skipped that run for some reason. Can't remember why now. The weekend of week one happened to coincide with that last weekend before we moved out of our old place and therefore there was no running for me. If I had been *really* devoted to the training program I likely would have squeezed in a run but I was already starting to feel run down and with all the packing still to do, it fell by the wayside.

So after what I considered to be a long wait (although not longer than was projected when I ordered the thing) I finally received my new intel iMac. Talk about a thing of beauty! Check out all my phots here.

I must admit, the photo pictured here is sort of staged...that's not my wireless keyboard and mouse in the picture - they're Dave's. I opted to continue using my wired keyboard and mouse (from my eMac) for a couple of reasons - speed of setup and fear of interference with Dave's mac mini. I've since realized that interference shouldn't be a problem considering how bluetooth works. The fact that I didn't set up the new keyboard and mouse has ended up causing me a bit of grief, but more on that later.