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Remember the Bearcat auction in July? Adam, Andrew and I did yard work at the Siminec’s after morning practice today. We had to lay sod in their backyard. It was mud when we came and grass when we left. It took us four hours. When we were done, my face was completely covered with mud, there was mud down my neck, and my arms and legs were caked. And Andrew’s shoes were so (there’s no other word for it) destroyed that he just left them there to be thrown out.

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Kate assigned me a project: find out how far we can swim in two weeks, averaging 7000 yards a day and combining the distance of all our swimmers in Seniors (about twenty people). It comes out to 1185 miles. The second part of the project is to find out where we can swim to in that distance. At first we thought Hawaii, but then we’d end up about 1000 miles out to sea. We could swim from Reykjavik to London, but that’s a little but out of the way. Or we could just swim East, but it’s hard not to end up somewhere like South Dakota or Kansas…

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I am having a lot of trouble contacting Palm.
When we were in France, I accidently plugged my Tungsten C’s charger into the wall without a power transformer, and blew it out. So my PDA had to go without power for the rest of the trip, and draining the battery is bad for it. So now I need to get its battery replaced, because I can’t charge when it discharges so quickly, but I wanted to wait until I get a new charger in case there are *delays*. Well, there have been delays. Palm took the wall chargers Tungsten C off their site. There are car chargers and solar chargers, but no wall chargers. So I tried contacting customer support by email, but no response. Several weeks later, I posted a topic on their forums. No replies. I checked back again at the forums, and noticed that three topics have any replies. So I tried calling them by phone, and after a recording told me I would be hooked up with the right department, it hung up on me.
Maybe I’ll wait try again on Monday.

I said I’d post some pictures when I get them, so here are a few:

There are actually about fifty-eight more, but I will try to have them all on the Bearcat site within a few days.

My dad and I went on a group bike ride with about twelve people, and it went from Maclay Inn to Silver Falls and back. It was 54 miles for us.
We eventually abandoned to group, because they had to stop and wait for the tandems and slower people every few minutes. Four of them started to follow us, but they fell behind when the Hill started.
When we got to Silver Falls, we stopped at the lodge and had a sandwhich. Then we rode to Silverton and had some soup. The hill on the way back down was the biggest I’ve ever been on; we were going faster than the speed limit.
It ended up taking about five and half hours from start to finish, but some of that was waiting time.

This was the last day of the meet for me. My events for today were 400 IM, 200 free relay, 100 fly, 100 free, and a 400 medley relay.
In the 400 IM, I got 5:06, beating my old time by ten seconds. Adam and Andrew were also in the same heat as me.
In the 200 free relay, we had the ultimate relay team, the one we’ve been waiting for for years: Adam, Andrew, Kyle and me. Our time was 1:44. I forgot what the order was, but I know I went first, and my split was 25:53.
I got 1:04.89 in the 100 fly. Not my best time, but the last time I swam it was at the end of the season. Andrew (who was swimming right next to me) beat me by one second.
My time for the 100 free was 56:66. I think I got 2nd in this event. I got a best time for short course, but my converted time is 55.47. I beat Andrew by half a second.
The 400 medley relay was another Ultimate: Adam was swimming back, Kyle was swimming breast, Andrew was swimming fly, and I was swimming free. We got 4:17. This would have been a Sectional time by a lot, but Andrew just turned 15 so it doesn’t count. We still got a State time though.

This is my first swim meet since long course State.

I swam the 200 yard IM and the 1000 free today. In the 200 IM, I got 2:23, which is a six second improvement from my old time. I was racing in the lane right next to Adam, and he got 2:20.
In the 1000, I got 11:48, and my seed time was 12:17 (but I hadn’t swam it in ten months). The only two people in my heat were Adam and me, but they combined it with the previous event, which was also all Bearcats. So it was me, Adam, Crystal, Sammi and Tori in one heat.

Tomorrow I’m swimming the 400 IM, 100 fly and 100 free.

On Wednesday we had our team pictures. It lasted about an hour and twenty minutes, and we ended up not having to swim. Everyone wore their Bearcat sweats and Bearcat t-shirts (except James - !). And Brent Kibby was the photographer.
Some of the things we had to do were a little painful — such as the Pyramid, where Adam, Andrew, James, Natascha and I were on the bottom. Somehow, the people on the top had the worst balance…
I’ll post some of the pictures here when I get them, and I’ll try to put all of them on the Bearcat website.

Miscellaneous Topic of the Day: I’ve pretty much finished cleaning up my dad’s website, and I actually got it to work in Windows IE, but now everything shows up Really Badly in Mac IE! I’m wondering if I should just drop support for Mac IE… Who uses such an insidious browser anyway? Do you - ?

Some of you might have already known this, but I just figured it out: You can access all the nib files, HTML files, images, and other resources of any application, through Terminal. Type in:

open /Applications/SomeApplication.app/Contents

with the complete pathname of the application. Remember to add the .app extention.
I knew you could do this with directories, but I didn’t know you could do it with application bundles. I guess they count as directories too. This is a useful thing to know, because then you can do things like replacing the icons, etc.

Another way to do it is to download CatScan ($10), written by Mike Matas.

If you have not seen this, you have got to see it.

…Oh, and this too.

Sorry I haven’t posted anything in a while, but I’ve finally started learning GUI in Cocoa with Objective-C, so I’ve been really busy.

I posted more sourcecode on my software page. This one is for an improved version of Portfolio, (which I added several motnhs ago), but written in C++ instead of C. It’s also a lot less buggy, and with more features. I started and finished it while we were in France, to keep my brain busy.
If you download it, you’ll get a zipped Xcode project, but if you don’t have Xcode, you can just use the actual source files.

On Monday, I had my first day of swimming in two months. It was good to see everyone again, and they were happy to see me. My stroke felt really awkward, as it always does after a long period of not swimming, but I got used to it.
I think my legs are in better shape than before, because of all the running in France, but my upper body is weaker.

The reason I’m posting this at four in the morning is because I’m going to morning practice today and I have a little extra time before we have to leave.