At 6:30 am on Sunday (ug) I'll be hauling my ass from the start of the Newport Beach Triathlon. Here's the race information: SWIM: 1/2 mile (Back Bay of Newport Beach). Flat water swim. CYCLE: 13 miles (through various parts of Newport Beach, around Fashion Island) RUN: 3 miles
The race starts with a 1/2 mile swim in the Back Bay of Newport Beach in the Newport Dunes recreation area at Jamboree and Back Bay Drive (shown in this picture). Parking is located here. The Newport Dunes is located at Jamboree and Back Bay Drive.From the 405 or 73, take Jamboree towards the beach. Right before you get to PCH, you will turn right on Back Bay Drive.
So if for some reason you want to spend an hour and half cheerleading or seeing me make funny faces and breathing hard, now you know where to go. But I should warn you, dating me has the same effect, and you don't have to wake up as early. [ 5/21/2004 08:44:47 PM ] [ ]
Office 2004
I've been noticing my disk is almost constantly being accessed. After doing some poking around, I noticed via top -u that a Microsoft processs was constantly running in the background. [khyron:~] quellish% ps ax | grep Microsoft 381 ?? S 0:00.35 /Applications/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS 382 ?? S 0:16.04 /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Microsoft
Turns out it was two of them. I had installed Office 2004 the other day, and that seems to be the culprit. Killing those two processes ended the disk access immediately. Annoying.
If you go to your account in System Preferences, you can turn off those Microsoft processes in Startup Items. The autoupdate agent is a no brainer, but if you use Entourage I don't think you should disable the Microsoft Database Daemon. [ 5/21/2004 06:38:40 PM ] [ ]
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Bike To Work day
Today is Bike To Work day, and sadly, I didn't bike to work. But I did find some very useful resources for anyone who wants to try it. [BikeMetro] has some very cool route planning stuff, though when you turn on the "use public transportation" feature it starts to fall apart. If I biked to work (which I've been considering for a few weeks) I'd currently save about $9,000 a year. That's a lot of money. The problem for me is the route I'd have to take is 100% streets, and about 25% the worst streets in Los Angeles. I might have to get some lighter body armor, and a bike that can take more abuse than the racing bike to make it practical. At 30 miles, it's a bit long to use the Stumpjumper until I would get a commuting road bike.
Ug. And I hate driving every day. The sick thing is, it would take me less time on a bike. As a side note, according to the GPS my Sunday ride hit over 50mph.... not bad! [ 5/20/2004 05:44:50 PM ] [ ]
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Tuesday funday
If you feel the needle moving in, it's going to work. That's my rule with lydacaine: if you're not feeling it, it's not near enough the nerve to work. So today after the first two shots we waited for it to take effect. My previous visit with the oral surgeon was to get my wisdom teeth out, and I had been completely out for that. This time around I was very much awake. As soon as he got started, he really got started. Anybody could tell I was feeling everything we was doing, and I could tell that he was hurrying to keep the time I was uncomfortable as short as possible. As soon as he had to start cutting he realized that I needed a tad more lydacaine before he could go in with the scalpel. A quick shot, no waiting, and he was back in there working the tooth out. The whole time I was keeping myself as in control as I could, but it wasn't easy. I probably breathed all of 3 times during the whole procedure, the doctor had to remind me two of those times to breathe again.
Once he was done the assistant started going over the post op guidelines: no drinking from straws, no hard foods.... at the hard foods I was having real trouble keeping my eyes open and my head up. I had skipped breakfast to keep my teeth free of Crackin Oat Bran for the doctor, so going in my blood sugar was very low. Between that and the stress I was on the verge of blacking out once I was breathing again after the operation. I tried to talk with my hands to the assistant but couldn't bring my hands above my heart to gesture, which was frustrating as hell. At that point I apparently turned several different colors and broke out into a mad, cold sweat. Soaked within seconds, they ran to cover me in paper towels.
Oddly enough, last night I woke up in almost the same sweat and had a hard time getting back to sleep. Strange.
At any rate, I scared the hell out of the doctor's staff. For a while they were keeping an eye on my blood pressure, and wouldn't let me think about moving until it was back to normal.
The City of Santa Monica brightened my morning back at my car with a parking ticket, bless their hearts.
When I got home I ate as much of a cheese tortellini MRE as I could on one side of my mouth, took my medicine, and ended up falling asleep while checking some stuff out of CVS. And now I'm hungry all the time, but can't eat much of anything yet. Ug. [ 5/18/2004 07:35:46 PM ] [ ]
Monday, May 17, 2004
Working the weekend
Saturday I went to a swimming clinic put on by [Acme Coaching] for the LA Tri Club. The focus was on improving form using the [Total Immersion] technique for distance swimming. The clinic started out with each of us swimming a lap "normally" using freestyle, which usually meant the crawl. After that it was about an hour or so of Total Immersion drills, learning how to balance in the water and use weight and buoyancy to move efficiently. The last lap was applying what we had learned in front of an underwater camera, then we watched ourselves and had the coaches critique our form. For the first lap, I did very well at 15 strokes (for comparison, most of the swimmers did the 25 yard lap in about 20 strokes). My last lap cut that down to 11. I did pretty well overall and definitely learned a lot.
Sunday I took out the new bike for the first time, getting up to speed on it. I rode along the bike path for 30 miles and learned the ins and outs of my first tri bike. Balancing on the aero bars proved to be a challenge, and relearning the gear ratio after a lifetime of using mountain bikes took some work. I managed to get home in one piece, and I really do like the [Speedplay Zero] pedals I got. [ 5/17/2004 08:11:23 PM ] [ ]
