Switch

I've officially switched registration to the Aramco Houston Half Marathon. I had been dreading having to do this for a while because it feels like admitting failure, but realistically, I won't be marathon ready in January.

I don't feel that it's right to charge an extra ten dollars to switch races, especially if it's a switch to the race that is less expensive. Isn't the nonrefundable nature of the full marathon registration fee enough punishment to our wallets?

I also wonder if the December 10 cutoff date to switch is really necessary as well. Rock 'N' Roll San Antonio, for example, handles switches all the way through the expo.

The exploding popularity of the event is partly to blame for this frustration I suppose. With the rapid sellouts we have now, participants are basically being asked to commit to one race or the other six months in advance.

So, I will miss out on the race route through West University, the Galleria, and Memorial Park. But there's seven weeks until Marathon Sunday, and I hope that will be enough time to be ready to run 13.1 miles from the GRB to UST and back again.

Katy YMCA Turkey Dash

In both the figurative and literal senses, this morning's Turkey Dash was an acid test. I thought I had found the right strategy to ward off the race-day nausea that has dogged me for too long. But would it work?

Well, just like true gold drenched in nitric acid, the results turned out to be shining:

Mile 1: 9:44
Mile 2: 10:02
Mile 3: 10:33
5K elapsed time: 31:26 (per Garmin Forerunner 205)

And so, I find myself thankful for my best race in six months. I thought I had an outside chance at 30 minutes, but that was definitely lost in the final mile. Mysteriously, several people in the crowd running around me began to wheeze, hack and cough. This put my mind in a not-so-pleasant place, so I just slowed up and let them pass ahead before I caught whatever they were tossing up. Otherwise, the battery of ranitidine and old-fashioned calcium carbonate enabled me to open up my breathing and push my pace into the tens again. It was a good run, and I was entertained for much of it by eavesdropping on a group of women swapping stories about what their kids were learning in sex-ed class.

The weather was stunning -- sunny with temperatures in the high 40s and no wind. The public address announcer crowed that the event set a new registration record (2900). Families with children and dogs were as abundant as the parking at the new Villagio shopping center across the street from the Y. In all, I can easily see this event growing just as popular as the TXU Energy Turkey Trot in the Uptown District.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This Old PC: Setting Sail for New OS Shores

My copy of Windows 7 arrived from Amazon right before the weekend. After adding memory and a new video card to my Shuttle box previously, I was ready to take the plunge.

When making a major change like this, it's always a good idea to leave a fail-safe option if something should go wrong. My first step, therefore, was to create a system image file of my existing Windows XP installation to an external hard drive using Norton Ghost 2003. Then I yanked the internal drive out and placed a new (and larger) drive in its place. After cloning the old drive's image to it, I was free to make a mess, knowing that I could bring the old drive back at will if things got hopeless.

As long as I was in an experimental mood, I was not only installing the new version of Windows, but also wanted to see how my system would react to a Linux installation. So the second part of this project was supposed to be installing OpenSUSE 11.2. From past experience, I remembered that Windows installations tended to wipe out Linux bootloaders, while a Linux installation is more amenable to accomdate a Windows boot option. So the Windows 7 Setup would be up to bat first.

I booted from the Win7 upgrade DVD and was presented with very few prompts before the installer got to work. The only real detour I made was needing to indicate that I wanted the new OS to install itself to unallocated space on the hard drive, creating a new partition in the process. The install appears to have completed flawlessly. I started a load of laundry in the washer at the same time I started the Win7 install, and I was back on the web in less time than it took my Kenmore frontloader to get reach the spin cycle. All hardware was detected perfectly, including my WLAN adapter, my wireless network printer, and even the native 1440x900 resolution of the Westinghouse TV that I use as a monitor. Since there is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to 7, I'm still left with migrating or replacing my applications, but Microsoft gets an A+ grade from me for handling this old PC configuration.

The OpenSUSE install, on the other hand, could be described as "rough." I had downloaded the ISO file from the OpenSUSE site and burned it to a DVD-R using Active@ISO Burner. I used GParted to shrink the Windows partitions and leave some room for the Linux filesystem. Booting from this disc also kicked off a pretty friendly installer program. After a few basic questions, the YAST2 Setup tool got to work. In just a few minutes, I was poking around the KDE desktop environment. Hardware support was incomplete, though, as drivers for many devices were just absent. Most prominently missing was support for the WLAN adapter, which was surprising since the Broadcom chipsets are common, and a functioning network adapter would have been useful for possibly downloading drivers for the memory card reader, printer, and monitor (resolution was stuck at a distorted 1280x1024). In the end, I removed the ext4 Linux partitions and just left Windows, the new and the old, in a dual-boot setup on the hard disk. I still want to investigate today's Linux possibilities, but I may stick to experimenting with it purely on a test PC.

With support for Microsoft Money fading away, one of the new apps that will be added to this Windows 7 system will be Quicken Deluxe 2010. Let's hope that installation goes as smoothly as the Windows setup program itself.

This Old PC: Freshening up hardware for 2010

One of the remarkable things about my experience in personal computing is the current period of relative stability in which I've found myself. In the 1990s I'd build another box every other year or so to keep up with advances in speed needed to keep up with the demanding programs I was running, i.e. games. But my computing habits have changed. I game less, and most of those titles are now on consoles. The most demanding PC game I run now is SimCity 4, and that was released back in 2003.

What this means is that I've been able to get by with the same desktop chassis at home since 2002. It's what I consider a classic, the brilliant SS51G from Shuttle's XPC series. When many enthusiasts were still obsessed with big tower configurations, I chose this toaster-sized box as the foundation of the system I still use today. The oddly translucent blue faceplate is a reminder of the influence that Apple was exerting in product design at the time with its original Bondi Blue iMac.

Within the SS51G's compact dimensions, Shuttle left enough breathing room for what has turned out to be a long life of expansion options. For the past eight years I've been back inside the case to swap or upgrade components several times. (For example, there used to be a floppy drive where the flash memory card reader is now.) This past weekend, I gave this old PC what will probably be its last internal hardware upgrades -- a second gigabyte of RAM and a new videocard.

As long as I had the system unplugged and the case open, it was a convenient time to exorcise all of the dust bunnies that have been collecting for many months. A few minutes with the ever-popular can of compressed air stripped away the fluff clinging to the inner crevices. A couple of tips I thought I'd pass on to readers looking to perform this chore themselves:

• Turn the computer on its side, or even upside-down if necessary, but always keep the can of compressed air upright. Or else be prepared to see liquid propellant squirted into your machine.
• Use a stick-like object to stop fans from spinning from the blasts of compressed air. Not only is it more difficult to blow dust off of moving blades, but remember that DC electric motors double as generators. Who knows what might happen if you start pushing random current upstream from the fan?

Once things were dust-free inside and out to my satisfaction, the new components were swapped in and I was booting back into Windows XP soon enough. The videocard, based on the GeForce 6200 from nVidia, was a bargain-basement purchase, but it should be enough to enable the Aero interface of Windows 7 -- which we'll leave for a future installment of "This Old PC."