mcnixon on Xanga

Weblog

Sunday, 08 June 2008

Not that I'm sure I'll post on here, but I don't want to loose my place to someone else.

Tuesday, 21 March 2006

Running in 2006

In the last year and a half, I did a lot of running (and I'm still going). In 2005, I ran 4 Half Marathons (13.1 miles), Two 1-Mile races, two 5Ks, one 8K, one 25K trail race, and one Marathon (26.2 miles)

So far in 2006, I ran 1Mile (6:30), 1 Half Marathon (1:52:38 = 8:36 per mile), 1 8K (36:42=7:22). I'm planning to run 2 Marathons, and probably a 6-10 races from 1 mile to half marathon long. I'm training for the Fargo Marathon on May 20th, which I hope to finish between 3:50:00 and 4 hours.

Why do I run?
Well... I was thinking of making this a top ten list and just thinking of one item at a time, but any good top 10 or 5 list would actually be prepared and ranked before providing the list.

So I'll start with a different question... Why did I start running?
In 2002 my employer and my health care plan were testing out a new program with Lifetime Fitness Centers, to provide $20 off monthly membership, but only for those people who actually went to work out 8 times in a month. I signed up and started going to the club (or gym) 2-3 times per week. By the fall of 2002 I was usually going once a week the first 3 weeks of the month and then I'd make up my last 5 visits in the last 7 days of the month. I wanted some more motivation, so when I saw a flier for a 5K (=3.1 miles) fun race in December called the Reindeer Run, I decided to sign up. So for a few months I had a goal and I started running 2-3 miles on the treadmill a few times per week. I ended up running and walking through the 5K and enjoyed it enough to do another one 6 months later... and in October 2003, I found out that Lifetime Fitness had a running club, and it was much more interesting to run with other people. In 2004 I decided to take an intermediate class "The Next Level Challenge" to improve my running in races from 5K to 10K (3.1-6.2 miles). In 2005 I gradually moved up to Half Marathon and then Marathon distance.

Sunday, 29 August 2004

Currently Reading
The Battle of Corrin (Legends of Dune, Book 3)
By Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson
see related

Computers can be annoying...

...especially when your hard drive fails.

Hasn't happened to me recently, but besides my brother John's laptop troubles, the hard drive in my Pastor's laptop stopped working this week also.

Makes me wonder what about backups... (a) would a nice USB 2 external hard drive be the ticket?, or (b) should everyone be in the habit of daily/weekly CDR updates of the files that changed on their pc? Or maybe (c) better detection (and early warning) of a failure is the answer (I've considered for several years getting spinrite from www.grc.com )

Without a silver bullet at this point, I think i need to clean up my PC and do another round of CDR and hard drive backups. First I think I need to clean off a few TV Shows which I like to download via Bit Torrent (I'm not at home so I don't remember the TV Torrent site I'm using right now)

Gmail - Have you heard of this?

Google does email (at least in beta form), another 1 GIG "free" email account. Well I heard about this through www.tclug.org mailing list, and I thought it sounded cool enough to pay $1.50 or so for an invite into this beta of Google's new email solution. It offers so much space, but more than that a cool search feature, so I (hopefully) will be able to find any old information out of an email, and not have to delete anything ever. I think in my 13 years of having email, I like to save most of my email, but if I wanted to fill up 1GB I'd have to take my two or 3 largest archives combined (which go back about 5 years each). If I only had this 5 years ago!

Well I have some computers to fix, and another window waiting to read someone elses thoughts on backup up computer data.

Regards,

Mike

Monday, 23 February 2004

Currently Reading
Chapterhouse Dune (Dune Chronicles, Book 6)
By Frank Herbert
see related

Fire in the Neighborhood.

Last Night, I got home about 11:30 pm. It was kind of foggy and quite dark down the street, but everything was quiet. Then about 20 minutes later as I was brushing my teeth I heard Police Sirens, so I went upstairs to look out the window. The street perpendicular to our house (that I had just driven down) had 2 police cars and a Fire truck.

I wasn't sure what was happening, until I saw flames through the top of a tree. I put on a jacket and boots and went down the street to find that neighbors house across the street and 3 houses down was on fire.

At first most of the fire was furiously consuming the garage, but after the garage burnt out there were still flames coming from the roof/back of the house. This is the first time I've ever had a fire strike this close to where I live and it was quite a shock.

Saturday, 29 November 2003

Today is Thanksgiving Observed at the Nixon's.

We had a meatloaf dinner on Thursday, but today is the day of the tranditional Turkey feast. And we have plans to put up some Christmas Lights for my Mom. My Grandma has been staying with Mom and I for the last week and its been fun. Besides Myself, Mom, and Grandma; we are expecting our other dinner guests to be my Dad, and my two brothers Dave (& his gf Jodi), and John. And sometime this afternoon, my aunt Sandy from San Diego and a friend will be driving up for an overnight visit (they aren't driving all the way from San Diego, but from the Nebraska/South Dakota area).