We did our final brick before the race, it was ok, not as good as last week’s, but I am still thinking I can finish the race in 6 hours. I believe that Kojo’s advantage is about 3-4 minutes in the swim, 8 minutes on the bike, and about 3 minutes on the run. But I probably have a 1-2 minute advantage in transition, so my estimate is that Kojo’s time will be a little bit more than 10-12 minutes faster than me. Which really isn’t that much, about %2 over a 6 hour race.

Ugh. I’ve just spent an insane amount of time trying to figure out what’s wrong with my machine. My game machine has been crashing while playing war3x and sometimes raven shield too. I think I finally fixed it.

First I upgraded from Win98 to XP, which was sorely needed anyways. Then I got that all up to date but it still didn’t fix the crashes I was seeing. So then I reformatted my disks with NTFS and that didn’t fix it either. So then I split up the onboard RAID controller on my Abit KT7A-RAID motherboard, so now I have two regular disks instead of one striped disk. That didn’t fix it either. So finally I upgraded the BIOS on my motherboard and that seems to have fixed it. Jesus what a pain. I’ll be really sad if that doesn’t really fix it, because the next step is to buy either a new graphics card to replace my Asus GeForce3, or more likely to buy a new motherboard. I’m keeping my fingers crossed though.

On the bright side, I now have the much nicer Windows XP installed and NTFS, but I did blow away my RAID, and of course I have to reinstall all my applications. Which really isn’t that bad, the only things I do are play poker, play war3/war3x and sometimes I’ll play either Counter-Strike or Raven Shield. Of course I surf porn too.

The job search isn’t going that great currently. I have a few contacts at a couple of places, but it is a pretty tough market.

We’ve got 1 week before the race, and I’m feeling decent. I’m still thinking I can finish in 6 hours, but that’s if I’m feeling good on race day.

This economy and war are really sucking the life out America right now. That and now there’s a new virus out there that spreads rapidly and has given hundreds pneumonia and has killed dozens called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome(SARS). It’s spread rapidly in asia, mostly Singapore, Hong Kong, and China.

So the war has started and I’ve been glued to the TV watching coverage from all the various new agencies. That’s why I haven’t written anything lately. It’s clear that the US will win, but my greatest concern is about the long term repurcussions of the war. It’s not like Arabs don’t have enough reasons to hate America anyways.

I’ve also been playing the War3 expansion beta. They did a major patch last week and now everything has changed, it’s a much better game. It’s the best war3 has ever been.

We finished a super tough workout on Saturday. Me and Kojo did a 1:10 swim, a 2:10 ride, and a 1:15 run. Kojo didn’t make that much time on me. We finished with a great run, 9miles in 1:16. If I can keep that pace during the race, I’ll be stoked.

So this weekend we went down to LA to visit a couple of Tracy’s friends from law school. That was cool, we ate some good food and hung out. Didn’t really do anything while we were down there.

Oh but we did see a celebrity. We’re about %90 sure we saw Alexis Bledel aka Rory from Gilmore Girls while we were walking down on Manhattan Beach. That was our exciting story for the weekend.

My workouts sucked ass. The way my latest workouts have been, I’m worried that I might not even finish come race day. Oh well. The job search hasn’t been going that great, but I do have a couple of leads at least. I got my first unemployment check in the mail the other day. That truly made me feel like a leech on society.

President Bush has given Saddam Hussein a 48 hour ultimatum to leave his country, which no one believes he will do. So it appears that the US will be taking the initiative in the next 2 days and starting a war against Iraq. What a sad world we live in.

So a friend lent me his Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne beta cd key. I played a couple of times, but the damn thing keeps crashing on me. I hope it gets patched enough so that I can get a bunch of real games in. I did get to play the new Warden hero. She seemed pretty cool.

We must all do our part to spread the word and prevent elephantitis of the scrotum.

Also my friend Rick Roe is getting married in June it seems. I should be getting an invite to his wedding. Unfortunately, that means I’ll probably have to bail on the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon.

And in very exciting news, it looks like I’ll be able to play the Warcraft 3 expansion beta, because a friend of mine will get the beta.

Sigh. every day spammers get more and more clever. The following spam evaded my usually effective bogofilter Bayesian spam filter.

To: hubert@chen.net
Subject: hubert,hey there...:)

First thing I hope this is the right email address  hubert@chen.net  ...:) You
probably don't remember me, but we talked online a while ago.
I don't really know what happened, but I guess we both just got really busy or
something.
I feel really bad because I don't want you to think I was ignoring you or
anything.

Anyway, I know we haven't talked in a while but I thought we had the beginnings
of a
pretty good thing going so I was just wondering if you'd be interested in
getting back in touch.
Maybe with a few emails first so we can feel each other out again?
You probably don't remember what I look like, there are some pics of me at:
...

Also I got email from the Charles Wright Academy Alumni Association asking for any email addresses of classmates. So any classmates of mine, I’d love to hear from you if you read this.

So I’ve been telling people this year, that 24 is the best show on TV, even though Tracy likes Alias. I finally put my finger on why I like 24 so much better. Because it was written as a whole season of 24 1 hour episodes. The story works nicely and all the episodes tie together nicely. With Alias, you never really know what the hell is going on and they could literally be doing anything in any city in any episode. Also The West Wing is well worth watching this year.

Signed up for the Pacific Grove Triathlon in September.

We are now in the toughest week of our training program. Thank god it gets easier from here. I’m tired all the time even though I don’t have a job.

Still no real job prospects. I need to go do some real networking and see what’s around.

Tracy is thinking about adding a sunroom over our deck to give us a little bit of extra living space. I think it’s a pretty good idea. It’ll be expensive, but it’ll add a lot of value to the house I hope.