The Chances

How a 250+ Pound Couch Potato Got Healthy

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Computer? Fixed! + Tempo Run

Desktop - FIXED!
I can't believe I'm actually sitting here, at my desk, on my deskTOP computer, typing this.

Back in October, I was tasked with putting a video from a website onto a DVD. I'd never done it before, but I figured it would be easy. Hah! It was anything but.

In looking for the right software, I made some serious errors, the gravest being running a program I knew better than to run. Yeah, that's the best way to put it. I'm a computer tech for gosh sakes, I know what programs I should be running and shouldn't, right?

The first thing that popped up was this program that said it was looking up flight information. Flight information? OK, this isn't right... before I could do anything else, *poof*, computer reboots. Immediately I knew what was wrong, and what had happened. My life flashed before my eyes.

I spent the next three days running all sorts of virus, malware, spyware, and trojan finders available. I tried just about every demo program I could, all the hardcore tools I normally use, with no success. So I brought my computer to work and tried a bit there. Nada. I won't name off all the software, but I think I tried 20 different programs.

Actually, nada's not true. I did clean all the crap that was on it. The only problem was, the networking got hosed in the process. I decided to put it away for a while.

It's been three months, and I've been working off a crap laptop I borrowed from work, just so I could support our users from home. The first of the year came and went, and yesterday, my W2 came waltzing into the door. I said to my father in law, this is motivation to fix the computer!

So I brought the computer to work today, spent a little time, and ended up on a path I hadn't looked at before. What led me down the path is the fact that I was able to get wired networking to work. Wired means that wireless must not be as broken as I thought! I started off completely removing the wireless drivers and reinstalling, but that didn't work. Then I stumbled on an option to troubleshoot the connection. Normally these sorts of things rarely work, but I figured what the heck.

Vista reported that the wireless service wasn't running, but couldn't start it. I tried to manually start it, but got yet another error. I searched for that error online and found that there were 5 other services that the wireless service was dependent upon, two of which weren't running.

Once I started these services, BAM! My desktop was back in working order. Yippee!

So I'm a happy guy. Maybe it makes up for today's run. ;)

Tempo Run
Today was a scheduled tempo run. 2 miles easy, 2 miles tempo, 2 miles easy. The tempo miles were supposed to be between 7:37/mi and 7:52/mi, but I didn't even come close. It was 8:25 and 8:37. Do I still get to count it as a tempo run?



Mile 1: 9:03.45
Mile 2: 9:15.25
Mile 3: 8:25.27 (tempo)
Mile 4: 8:39.22 (tempo)
Mile 5: 11:21.72
Mile 6: 9:56.17
.21 Mi: 4:22.29 (20:40/mi, walking)

As you can see, something happened around mile 2 and it continued right up until the end. I can't believe how tough those two tempo miles were! I wasn't gasping for air, but pretty darn close, and my heart rate was around 170. I did eat lunch about an hour before running, and it was a bit windy, but I didn't expect to run it that badly.

So how about it? Can I still call it a tempo run?

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