THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

So a few months ago I gave a Book of Mormon to a guy at work. Actually I gave out two, to different people but anyways…

One of these guys works on my team as a developer / tester / content enterer, and so a few days later, we’re looking at the site up on the projector and what do I see?

I had forgotten about this till today when I was working on the Archives section of our site and saw it again.

Good times…

I’ve been a bit under the weather lately so I haven’t been out to the Y this week but I went this morning. I continued my swimming improvement – up to 1.3 mph.

I wore my old watch (probably 15 years old). It said 100 meters water resistant but I was worried because it was so old. But it worked fine and solved my seconds problem. I did 28 laps (700 yards) in 18:25. I also tracked my time for my first 400 meters (17.5 laps), which was 11:27

Also wanted to post an update on my time goal. I have not been doing as well with that – I’ve had some problems with motivation and sickness and such. I have also been doing things like swimming or running where it is harder for me to go for 30 minutes or more (as opposed to biking which I can do for hours plus)

My goal for the year was 4 days (96 hours). I am currently on 9 hours, 26 minutes, and 25 seconds. Today is day 66. That puts me on a pace of 52.35 hours for the year.

So as I have mentioned before, we are doing our recycle challenge today. So I was down there today because I like to get free lunch help the world see.

Speaking of those free lunches, I won a T-shirt as part of the challenge. I asked for a size large but they were out so they gave me an XL. But I figured hey, I keep getting all these free lunches so I should be filling out an XL in no time flat!!!

Anyways, they have a big TV in there but also XM music with a big sound system. So when I first got in there, what was showing on the TV but one of those movies I refuse to watch. For the record, the other movies on my “no watch list” are It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th street. Oh and the Olympics.

So I of course took up a job that didn’t face the TV and (for the most part successfully) tried not to watch it. In interesting news, I was commenting to the guy who will soon be my boss about how I don’t watch it, and the reasoning. Which is basically because it was all the rage in the Mormon community, especially among the Utah folk that are living out here and going to school and they all thought it was so the bomb (dot com) and so Carolyn and I decided we’d be anti. Anyways it turns out that his brother is also LDS – converted 20 years or so ago and is a bishop out in California. So we talked about that for awhile.

And now we get to the subject of this post. After the movie which shall not be named was off, someone flipped on the music and it made its way to some 90s channel. It felt just like I was back in high school. I could picture the crazy high school dances, playing stuff like “Whoomp (there it is)” (not to be confused with “Whoot, There it is”. Everytime I thought it couldn’t be any more like high school, they’d bust out with some Mr. Big or Ace of Base.

And occasionally songs would come on that I wouldn’t recognize. One of them was the Friends song. And by wouldn’t recognize, I mean of course I recognized that particular one (and Breakfast at Tiffany’s) but I didn’t remember it from when it originailly debuted. It seems I have this “cultural gap” between say, July 1995 and August 1997. Hmm….. I was talking with a class of ’96er when the Friends song came on and I was talking about this cultural gap of mine and he was saying he thought it came out in 92 or 93. I was like “nooooooo way” and sure enough #1-1995 baby!

As an aside, I would like to request the world’s pre-eminent authority on such matters to give me the track position and year of all songs mentioned in this post.

I have another rant coming, but maybe I’ll save that to post in a few days so the masses stop a-complainin

#1. I’ll post when I’m good and ready.
#2. The goals bar only gets updated when I remember
#3. Exercising isn’t even one of the goals on the goals bar anyways.
#4. I can’t believe that my “stalker” wasn’t Ray.

Or is that swimming splits? Or shin splints? Don’t worry, gentle reader, for we shall talk about all of that AND MORE!!!

So to start off, I think I have acquired shin splints. Seems to be caused by some combination of crappy quality of shoes, old (worn down) shoes, and poor running technique. All of which I have to a high degree. I plan to go down to FleetFeet to get some good shoes. I was actually planning on going down today but was stopped by the White Death (up to 15 inches possible by tomorrow afternoon!!)

Anyway so as not to run, I have been swimming lately. Which is probably good since my swimming skills are… not so much. But I’ve been getting better.

As you can see from my exercise log (available as a link over to the right), my recent swims:

1/7/2008 – 200 yards in 7 minutes (0.97 mph)
1/11/2008 – 250 yards in 10 minutes (0.85 mph)
2/28/2008 – 750 yards in 22 minutes (1.16 mph)
3/3/2008 – 425 yards in 12 minutes (1.21 mph)
3/7/2008 – 800 yards in 22 minutes (1.24 mph)

You’ll notice that there are only minute times. There is a clock at the Y, but it’s hard for me to see the seconds as I’m swimming. It is our time to do our recycle challenge at work again. So I was down there this morning with some various coworkers and we were talking about that. And it was commented that when you’re swimming so slowly, the seconds don’t really matter. (Zing!) There was general merriment and revelry concerning my swimming prowess (or lack thereof). One lady who is apparently a swimmer was mentioning that her 400 meter swim time was like 4:21 (compared to my 13:50 last time).

I of course then challenged her to a fight. Or rather a triathlon. She nancied up so I must be the winner.

So it’s been a week or so since I posted here. And the people… they MUST have their Dan Miller. So here I am.

I know… I know… you’ve been missing me. I’m sure it won’t help when I tell you that I’ve been posting over at my secret new blog. Yup, that’s right. My secret new blog.

But I will give a little something to the masses.

My goals have been going… okay I guess. The wake up in the morning goal has been doing well. We changed the alarm from music to annoyo-alarm and it was decided that I have to go turn it off. And what do you know, ME having to turn it off versus getting to lay in bed while someone else turns it off actually increases the odds that I will get out of bed. I mean, I know, it’s revolutionary. But hey I’m telling you – it’s true!!!

I have not been doing so well on the “do 1 productive thing at night” goal. We did go down I think Friday or Saturday night and clean out all the old expired food from the General Store. It’s actually looking kind of bare, relatively speaking. We felt pretty bad about throwing away all that food, but there is a limit to how much you can eat Hamburger Helper that expired in 2005.

We threw away some of it, and I brought some of the not TOO expired stuff into work to give away and then I am selling 18 Glade Wisps with 22 refill packages on eBay. I am estimating that between the auctions (I split them up into 3 separate auctions) I will clear $40 off of them. I’ll keep you posted.

Exercising is going well. Oddly enough this morning as I was entering the Y, I saw PJ there who was just leaving. We talked for awhile and then I went in and did what they call a “brick” (2 different activities back to back). This is part of triathlon training though you’re supposed to actually do 2 of the sections that are back to back in a triathlon (like swim and then bike, or the most common one is bike and then run). I ran and then swam. I changed it up on the run – I wanted to see how fast I could sprint a mile. So I set the treadmill to 9 mph and then periodically upped it, ending up at 10.2. I got the mile done in 6:35 which was cool. Of course that’s only a 20:27 5k pace, and frankly the thought of running that fast (and actually a bit faster) for another 2 miles and change (to get a sub 20 minute 5K) is mind-boggling.

Then I went and swam. I went for 17 laps, which is approximately how far I’ll have to swim in my upcoming triathlon. With the annoying yards to meters action, 17 laps is 425 yards which is 388.62 meters – so a little shorter. But I got it in about 12 minutes (compared to last year’s time of 13:50). And that even was with some significant breakage time. I managed to go 3 laps and then break, all the way till the end when I was feeling okay after lap 15, so I kept going till the end. And of course 17 laps put me on the wrong end of the pool so I did another lap for fun and then 2 more laps to cool down.