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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 30×200s. I’ll analyze Kate’s Book sometime soon, and see how far we swam (and if we made it to Mexico).

Happy New Year!

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.

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…!

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:

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…

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.

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. ).
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.

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.

So, here’s the weather now:

Now, if there was just a little moisture, it would snow…!

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…?