As race day is beginning to loom large, I set out to do another full prep day.  My goal was to average 15mph on the full bike length and see how well my run would stack up after that.  I happily exceeded my bike speed goal and started off the run well.  I was staying just ahead of my virtual partner which I had set at a 12 min mile pace up until mile 4.  At that point I experienced some bad leg cramping that slowed me to a not to fast walk.  After a mile at that pace the last loop of the trail was abandoned.  This cramping incident has me worried about race day as I will also be swimming for 30+ minutes in addition to the bike before the run.  Some walking mixed with the run is fine, but painfully slow walking (ha ha) will really hurt my overall time.

• Bike 26.77 miles - 1:42:36 (15.7mph, 1225cals)
• Run 5.37 miles - 1:15:07 (14min mile pace due to cramping, 536cals)

I’ve had several people comment on my lack of preparation for my upcoming triathlon event.  Truth is the lack has actually been in the posting not the training so here’s a recap from my garmin training buddy:

June 11th

• Bike 16 miles - 1:12:25 (16.0mph, 671cals)
• Swim 34 minutes continuous* (396cals)

June 14th
Read more

That’s right the actual KITT used in the series came out of the vault and onto eBay….

Grabbing a cool 53 large.

But at least you can drive with the knowledge that you can take on any ramp shaped bush you happen upon… Read more

Seriously, this is for real:

Park department staff is recommending reducing bonfires at the two beaches this summer and possibly banning them altogether next year.

The park board will hear the recommendation Thursday, and the city plans to run public-service announcements and hand out brochures later this month about the effects of bonfires on global warming.

According to a memo to the park board from the staff released Thursday, “The overall policy question for the Board is whether it is good policy for Seattle Parks to continue public beach fires when the carbon … emissions produced by thousands of beach fires per year contributes to global warming.”

Under the proposal, the department in July would reduce the number of fire rings at Alki from six currently to three and at Golden Gardens from 12 to seven.

Read more

I know that the ability to articulate is not a true indicator of intelligence but communication mastery -or lack there of- can certainly create an image of intelligence (or lack there of).  For instance, is this really the leader of the free world speaking?

What they’ll say is, “Well it costs too much money,” but you know what? It would cost, about… It — it — it would cost about the same as what we would spend… It… Over the course of 10 years it would cost what it would costs us… (nervous laugh) All right. Okay. We’re going to… It… It would cost us about the same as it would cost for about — hold on one second. I can’t hear myself. But I’m glad you’re fired up, though. I’m glad.

Yup, it is. Or will be. That was our savior of change, presumptive Presidential candidate, Obama - off teleprompter.  Which begs the question: Can we elect his speech writer instead?  He goes on in the same meeting to talk about breathalyzers & “InHALators” for asthma patients.

Here’s the YouTube link in case you doubt the transcript: Read more

If you like me and already saving your pennies for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to space - the piggy bank just got a lot smaller.  That’s right Virgin prince Richard Branson may soon lower the cost of a space flight from $20 million to just $200k.

• Virgin Galactic will roll out mega-mothership

IBM has just built the ultimate supercomputer for the military.  Using 13k PS3 cpus along with 100k server processors, Skynet Roadrunner can perform 1,026,000,000,000,000 calculations per second.  Twice the power of the last supercomputer record.

• Military Supercomputer Sets Record

In my quest to slowly remove Billy from my life (as much as possible in this MS Windows dominated world), I have grown tired of moving my giant email archives every time I have to reinstall windows to make it happy again. I had moved over my main acct to Gmail last year but my Windows Mobile phone syncs up with Outlook (only).  So I set out to find a way to replace this function with google (the next world dominator).

There are serveral programs that will sync your WM calendar with your google one from your device (google has something that can connect from your computers outlook and sync), but only one that claims to sync your contacts as well. That is OggSync 4.07.  Here’s how it went….

The calendar syncs are a tad slow even on my EV connection and for some reason it had to put my mom’s birthday on a totally seperate google calendar (shrug).  Other than that oddity it seem fine.  However the contact syncing was much worse.  The fastest way to sum it up is from my emails to support [notes added]:

ME:

Read more