Thursday we went to lunch at Betos.  It had been a few weeks since we had gone there.  We also got flu shots in our shoulders, so I wasn’t feeling much like working out.  Then Alex finally made it down here for lunch on Friday, so we all went to The Italian Place.

It’s Saturday today and I’m working.  I messed up my machine on Friday by trying to uninstall all the various sound/audio drivers and components.  I have been having trouble getting ALSA to treat my PCI soundcard as the default.  It always finds my USB camera first and treats that as the default.  There’s no audio output to a camera, so I have been without sound for a while.  In uninstalling the various sound packages, I inadvertently removed everything (those package dependencies will get you every time).  So I started my day by reinstalling my machine.

I got it mostly back up and running again when Joe chatted me up to say that he had crashed the whole datacenter.  I didn’t think that was possible, but sure enough, it was down.  I kicked off a mail to Lin telling him about it and decided to go swimming.  Of course, Lin had solved the problem in the 5 minutes between sending the mail and leaving for swimming, but I went anyway.

500 Free warm-up
500 Free @ 7:00
100 Free easy
500 Kick
100 Free easy
500 Pull
300 Free warm-down
———-
2500 yards

Swimming is amazing for your health.  I was starting to get a bit stuff last night and was worried that I might be coming down with something.  This morning I wasn’t feeling 100%, but I came to work anyway.  When lunchtime rolled around, Joey was nowhere to be seen, so I headed to the gym by myself for some swimming.  When I got out of the pool, I felt so much better.  I really think the combination of the exercise, the pressure on your body from being underwater, and the chlorine help work out the crap from my lymph system and keep me healthy.  Maybe I’m crazy, but it seems to be working.

300 Free warm-up
6 x 100 Free @ 2:05 (coming in under 1:15)
100 Free warm-down
———-
1000 yards

Right after I wrote that last post about not being able to swim because the Gold’s Gym in Orem had drained their pool, I decided that was just another convenient excuse and that I should figure out how to swim anyway.  So I looked up another location of the popular Gym and found one quite close to home.

Joe and Kyle used to work and go to the gym in American Fork prior to joining Bungee Labs.  They still tell stories about how nice the AF gym is compared to the crappy Orem gym.  From the outside, they are right.  It is definitely newer than the Orem gym, but it must get a lot more traffic.  The locker room was trashed when I got there.  Toilet paper was stuck to the floor in several locations.  It was quite disgusting.

The pool is roughly the same size as the pool in Orem.  Three lanes wide, twenty-five yards long.  The lanes in Orem are fairly skinny, compared to the nice lanes I grew up with at Cottonwood Heights.  The lanes in American Fork seem even skinnier.  I don’t think two guys with arms as long as mine could swim past each other in the same lane without having to modify their strokes.

The patio area around the pool in American Fork is much smaller than in Orem and it makes it feel very tight.  I also realized that the size of the overall gym is larger, which means there are more people at the gym for the same size pool, hottub, steam room, and sauna.  That means the pool areas are probably more crowded in general.  It wasn’t crowded tonight, though.  It was a ghost town.  I guess there are usually better things to do on a Friday night.

The pool in American Fork is also setup a bit strangely.  The slow lane is the lane furthest from the locker rooms, and has no entrances.  It has no ladders and no staircases.  How are the slow people (typically extremely large handicapped old people) supposed to get all the way to that lane?  They don’t.  And to make it worse, the fast lane is the lane closest to the locker rooms, and it has both a ladder and a wide staircase entrance.  The ladder and staircase cause extremely strange wave patterns as you swim, making it a horrible place for a fast lane.  Luckily, everyone seems to ignore the signs.  The old fat people that can barely walk use the fast lane, and the swimmers use the slow lane.  At least that’s what happened tonight.  The only other people in the entire gym were these two old people that had 4 or 5 sets of floatation devices and were mostly just resting in the pool while I swam.

500 Free warm-up
5 x 100 Free @ 2:05 (coming in at 1:15)
200 Free warm-down
———-
1200 yards

Although it is highly unusual for me to sleep well when my wife is out of town, I must have.  I woke up this morning at 6:30 and felt like swimming.  I blame the combination of extreme cold (I let it get down to 62 degrees during the night) and the ultimate quiet of the awesome new house for my rested state.

The pool was empty when I arrived, but by the time I had changed into my suit, some of the usual suspects were getting into the pool.  These two, a fat old man and his fat old wife, are there almost every day.  They don’t swim.  They do their own version of the aqua-cow dance.  Luckily they were both in the slow lane, which gave me my choice of the remaining two lanes.

The lane line between the slow lane and the medium lane is always very loose.  The aqua-cows remove it 6 times a week (2 x M,W,F) so they can fit their whole herd in the pool for the aqua-cow dance.  They obviously don’t have access to a wrench, so when I swim in the middle lane I tighten the line two or three clicks by hand, but it’s still not as tight as it should be.

Knowing that these two old fatties would be making a lot of strange wave patterns that would probably cross the loose lane line, I chose to swim in the fast lane.  As soon as I started swimming the old women moved into the middle lane for no apparent reason.  It’s usually bad enough just to have to see her tennis shoes and fat legs as I swim by, but today was a special treat.  Today, like several other days, she almost killed me with the extreme amount of horrible perfume/hairspray she was wearing.  Why do you need perfume and hairspray to go swimming?  As if that wasn’t enough, she started doing a new spin move that crash huge waves of stink from her lane into mine.

It was pretty horrible, but I still managed to get in a decent swim.

500 Free warm-up
5 x 100 Free @ 1:30 (coming in under 1:30)
100 Free easy
6 x 50 Kicking @ 1:30 (coming in under 1:00, 0:55, 0:50)
2 x 100 Kicking
150 Free warm-down
———-
1750 yards (1 mile)

Who steals a towel from someone while they are in the pool?

Charmaine left around 6:30 this morning to drive to Hood River, OR to visit her brother. I wasn’t going to go back to sleep at 6:30, so I decided I’d get my lazy butt to the pool, even if it was only for a short workout.

I got to the pool about 7:10. The aqua-cows had already vacated the premesis. There were two younger guys swimming in the fast lane, two fat people wading into the slow lane, some people in the hot tub, but nobody in the middle lane. As I walked out from the locker room, and old man stepped into the one and only shower out by the pool. Sure, I could have gone back into the locker room and showered, but I was worried that he was going to ace me out and take the middle lane away. I decided to forego the mandatory shower and get right in. I hung my blue towel next to the only other towel on the rack, which was an old gray towel that had seen better days (more than one hole torn in it, despite being fairly thick material).

I was in the pool for about 45 minutes. During that time, all the people that had been there when I arrived left. Some other people came and left, and still others had arrived and were still there. The old beater towel was still there, but my blue towel was gone.

Who steals a towel from someone while they are still in the pool?

The kicker is that this is the second time this has happened to me. I know people are tired when they get up in the morning, but are they really so tired that they can’t remember that they brought a really crappy towel with them? One that looks like it was abandoned and then stolen from the lost and found? Maybe I’ve stumbled upon something with that statement.

At any rate, I’m fairly upset about it. At least it wasn’t one of our really good towels that I bring from time to time.

500 Free warm-up
3 x 100 Free @ 2:05 (coming in under 1:10)
1 x 100 Kicking
———-
900 yards (pathetic, yes, but at least I got my butt out of bed)

Charmaine and I traded cars this morning so she could take Julie and Jess around Highland, Alpine, Cedar Hills, and Pleasant Grove.  The plan was to find something great at a local garage sale.

I went to help Kyle and Megan move into their new house across the street.  As I arrived, one of the guys helping said, “You have impeccable timing.  We’re done.”  That wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough.  I helped them carry their big TV downstairs into the theater room under their garage and then they really were done.  BG, my next door neighbor, had seen their moving truck early this morning and made a few calls to get some guys over to help.  It didn’t take long to unload their truck with 7 guys helping out.

I was now quite a bit ahead of schedule, but that was good.  I figured I could get some things done at work and maybe have time for swimming, so I made sure to bring my swim bag along for the trip to Orem.

As I stood outside my locked office door, it dawned on me that the key to said door was on the keychain to the car Charmaine was driving.  They probably wouldn’t be done hitting garage sales until close to noon, so there was no reason to head back for the keys (it was only 10:30).  And that is how I found myself swimming on a Saturday morning.

500 Free warm-up
5 x 100 Free @ 2:30 (coming in between 1:05 and 1:15)
200 Free easy
200 swimming under water (as few breaths as possible)

I’m starting to think I need to define my workouts before I get to the pool so I don’t wind up messing around or talking myself into a shorter workout, etc.

When I got back home, Charmaine and Julie were talking about keeping workout logs.  I wound up getting roped into setting up some blogs for them on Perrykids.com.  I guess I better get on that.

Despite the lack of blog entries, I have actually been swimming.  I swam Wednesday and Thursday.  I even mixed it up a bit and did some over-unders and some sprints.  My fastest 50 was 0:30, which is pretty sad, and my 100 wasn’t any better at 1:05.

I’ve had a serious lack of computer connectivity as of late.  We just moved into our new house and I have only setup the phone and wireless.  My old Power Mac doesn’t have wireless, so I won’t be blogging from there until I wire up the ethernet jacks and buy a new switch for the basement.  Even my work machine has been down a lot lately.

I’ve finally given up on getting XEN to work with my NVIDIA card.  I can hardly wait until AMD releases the ATI driver stack as open source and forces NVIDIA to do the same.  What a bunch of morons.

Josh finally moved from Windows to Linux at work as well. Corey was helping him get all setup on his Dell Precision 380 (the same machine I have).  Josh was complaining about how hard it is to setup Linux on these boxes (because they can’t include the proprietary NVIDIA driver in the distribution).

After giving up on getting XEN working with NVIDIA, I decided I might run Windows as the base and then do something like colinux or parallels on top of that.  I decided to be a bit bold and dropped in my Windows Vista RC1 DVD.  It booted up and said it couldn’t install because I don’t have a hard drive.  I wasn’t extremely surprised that Vista doesn’t have a good set of drivers yet, but I sort of thought they would be in the “Release Candidate.”

After failing with Vista, I decided to put Windows XP back on the machine.  I figured that should be easy, since XP was pre-installed on the box when we bought it.  Booting with the Windows XP CD yielded the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death).  It became extremely clear that it is easier to install Linux than Windows, at least on relatively new Dell hardware.

So I thought there must be some drivers I have to install at the beginning of the XP setup so that it can succeed.  I quickly installed Kubuntu and went to Dell’s website to find the drivers.  There are no less than 6 drivers that I have to supply during XP setup to get this thing to install.  What a joke.  And to make this process easier, Dell has packaged all their drivers in self-exracting archives that only work on Windows.  So without a Windows machine I will not be able to get the drivers that will enable me to install Windows.  Brilliant.

I decided to stick with Kubuntu.  It does almost everything Windows does, plus a whole lot of things that Windows can’t even hope to do.  If only it had a better groupware (email, calendar) client.  I can’t stand Evolution.  It crashes about 35 times a day (not exaggerated).  For now I’m using rdesktop to connect via RDP to a virtual windows machine running on a headless box in another office.  Then I have Outlook on that machine.  It’s not ideal, but it sure beats Evolution.

Wow, almost nothing about swimming in this post.  Oh well.