PhotoBooth

Adam came over today, and we were having fun with PhotoBooth. Above are some of the pictures we took. Click the image to see more. (Yes, I completely ripped this design off of Mike Matas' blog.) Also, yesterday was the last day of Christmas training, and the hardest practice I've had since Christmas training last year. We (the mid-distance people) did 30x200s. I'll analyze Kate's Book sometime soon, and see how far we swam (and if we made it to Mexico). Happy New Year!

An Excess of Water

It has been raining a lot lately, and now our neighborhood is flooded. Some of the neighbors have rivers running through their yards. I don't think the lake has ever been this high before, so I had to take some pictures. Click the images to enlarge.

Server

We're in Morton now, and we'll be here until Wednesday. A few days ago, a friend's dad gave me a spare Compaq Proliant 2500 server he had sitting around. I think it's from 1999, and he said it cost about $6,500 at the time. It has five 2.1GB hot-swappable hard drives, a 200MHz processor, and 512MB RAM. So it doesn't have all that much space, but my websites aren't very big anyway. But when I tried to boot it up, it would come up with "Non-system disk or disk error". So we took it to Morton hoping Grampa Dan could help me with it. After some tinkering, we found out that the only OS installed on it was DOS 6, which is... well, yeah. So we installed Windows XP (he just happened to have two Windows XP CDs sitting around, one from China, one from the Philippines), and now it works. I'm not familiar with Windows servers, so I don't know if I need the Windows server software to use it as a server or not, but the person who gave it to me said he'll be bringing the software later this week. I'll probably install Linux on it anyway, though. On another note, one of the things I got for Christmas is a book that tells how to make a hydrogen bomb! (Thanks Uncle Steve!) Bwahahahahaha...!

New iPod

My new iPod came today! I've loaded six movies onto it (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the 1984 Apple ad, and some swimming clips). The display is really crisp; it looks just like on a regular TV screen. Also, I don't know if my old earbuds were just getting old or not, but the new ones have a lot better sound quality. And the new software is also cool; it has the addition of a stopwatch and a screenlock (and other stuff). Here are some pictures:

It has begun.

Christmas training started last night. No morning yesterday, because of the Animal meet. We swam 7400 yards in two hours and fifteen minutes, and it was hard. We had morning practice today, and we swam even farther than last night. Afternoon practice in about four and a half hours...

Animal Meet

Today was the Canby Animal Meet, where the only events are the 400 IM, 200 fly and 1000 free, and everyone has to swim all three events. Then they add up your times for the three events, and whoever has the fastest time wins. In the 400 IM, I got 4:55, which is a five second improvement from what I got on November 4th, at the McSwimville Invite. I'm 1.8 seconds off a Sectional time. I got 2:19.84 in the 200 fly. I dropped two seconds from three weeks ago. I'm trying to get 2:11 sometime this season, beause that would be a Zone time. In the 1000 free, I got 11:09. The last time I swam this was the first meet of the season, on October 21st, so I improved 38 seconds. I don't know what my overall time or the final results are yet, but I'll post them when I find out.

Swimming, Software Company, Ice, iPod

A lot of things happened today. swimming First, we had Saturday morning practice, as usual, from 7:30 to 9:00. Then, at 10:00 was the intersquad meet -- a meet between just our team. It was really short and the events went really fast. I swam the 200 IM, 200 free, 100 free and 100 fly. The times I got were 2:18, 2:01.12, 55.52, and 1:04.43, respectively. I got a best time by three seconds in the 200 IM and about half a second in the 100 free. I wasn't expecting to get any best times, because it was just an hour after a practice. Also, I have the Animal meet tomorrow morning. Baba and Paka came yesterday, and Paka will be watching the meet. software company Daniel (BioChron) has decided to be be part of my future software company. And we decided on a name: The Byte Factory. We'll be developing for Mac OS X and probably Linux (if we can figure out how. :P). And you can join too, Joseph, if you read this. frozen lake For the first time in years, the lake froze over. Not the whole thing, but almost. And it's thick enough to walk on out to about ten feet from the shore. Proof: And... iPod Last, but definitely not least, I ordered a new iPod today! 30GB, black, with custom engraving.

Halo Around the Moon

There was a big halo of light around the moon tonight, which I've never seen before. We looked it up, and found out it's because of crystals in the air refracting the light from the moon 22 degrees and creating a "hole" with a bright border. You can read about it here. Click on the picture to see a bigger version.

Weather Update

So, here's the weather now: Now, if there was just a little moisture, it would snow...!

Christmas Party & Whip

Today we had a Bearcat Christmas party at the pool. There were gift exchanges 'n' stuff. There was also pizza. We, the senior group, gave Kate a whip for Christmas. (If you've seen the movie Miracle, you know where we got the idea from.) After a while, when everyone was playing water games, she came came into the room cracking the whip. What's going to happen to us when Christmas training starts...?

Horrific Changes

A few days ago, I noticed that the 2006 Sectional times are way faster than they were last year. The 14 year-old 50 free is now 24.99, the 100 free is 53.89, the 200 free is 1:57.99, etc. Everything is several seconds faster, and now I only have one Sectional time: the 200 fly. Nooooooooo! Not that there's anything wrong with the 200 fly. In fact I like the 200 fly. But I used to have four or five Sectional times. I asked Kate about it, and she said they take the average of everyone's times at the last Sectional meet and make those the new Sectional times. But the good news is that the Zone times didn't really get any faster. People must have swam really fast at Sectionals, and were still tired from it at Zones.

ECSC Winter Invitational, Day Three

My events today were the 200 medley relay, 200 fly, 200 back and 100 free. Our relay consisted of Eric (back), Adam (breast), me (fly) and Raymond (free), in that order. We weren't really expecting to do very well because Adam had to swim his worst stroke while Eric swam backstroke (instead of Adam swimming backstroke), but we did pretty well. We got 1st, and we were only two seconds off a Sectional time. I think our time was 2:04. My split for the 50 fly was 28.2. In the 200 fly I got 2:21.99, a seven second improvement (from my last short course time; my converted time from long course is 2:23). I think I also got a Sectional time by six or seven seconds. John was happy because my last two 50's were the same split: 36.8. I got 3rd place. In the 200 back, I got 2:18.52, and 2nd place. My old time was 2:21, so I improved three seconds. I also got a Sectional time by one second. I got 55.96 in the 100 free. I just missed a Sectional time by .17 second, but I dropped 33 hundredths of a second. I got 4th place. I've decided I'm more a mid-distance person than a sprinter.

ECSC Winter Invitational, Day Two

I swam the 50 free, 200 free, and 100 fly today. In the 50 free, I got 25.19. I dropped a little over a quarter of a second. I also won the event. John said I could have gotten a 24.9 if I hadn't breathed into the wall though... I got 2:00.90 in the 200 free, which is a two second improvement. I got 2nd place. The guy who won got 1:55. In the 100 fly, I got 1:03.1. I lowered my old time by one second, and I got 3rd place. Tomorrow I'll be swimming the 100 free, 200 back and 200 fly. -- I got to hold a video iPod in person yesterday! It belonged to one of the ECSC people. It's thinner than I thought, and really light. It also has a really nice screen.

ECSC Winter Invitational, Day One

Since Kate is at the Husky meet at UW (and I don't know where John is), we didn't have a coach for warmups today. Instead, Kristen Quirk, the ECSC coach, was supervising our warmup. Tim came when the meet started. I swam the 500 free today. I got 5:25, lowering my old time from four weeks ago by nine seconds. A Sectional time is 5:30. I think I also won the event. The guy next to me was Corey Williams, from RST. I was right with him (and everyone else) for the first 200 or so, then I got just a tiny bit ahead of him. I was about to pull back, thinking I was starting out too fast, then I remembered Kate yelling at me for pulling back and losing my race at the last meet, so I decided to try to stay with him. When I got a little farther ahead, it made me want to go faster, and then I beat him by about six seconds. I'm just happy I won a (somewhat) distance event.

42°

Aargh! When will it be winter here? It's getting warmer! If there are any Cocoa developers who read my blog, please take a look at the question I posted here, here and here. UPDATE: I asked Drew Hamlin about my problem, and helped me solve it! It turned out to be something really simple. Thanks Drew!