July 21st, 2008 Scott
Gina and I started our road trip to Montana today. We left Wenatchee around 7:30 AM and arrived here in Billings at 7:30 PM (11 hours after we started). It was a beautiful drive, but doing the same thing for 11 straight hours can get to you. We are happy to be settled into our hotel room and will go out to Fairview (near the North Dakota border) tomorrow to visit my dad and step sisters for a couple of days. We will take our time going back through the state visiting more family and friends as we go west.
We hit the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar outside of St. Regis today. It used to be the 10,000 Silver Dollar Bar, but I guess inflation has hit. Click on any picture to see a larger view.
50,000 Silver Dollar Bar...used to be only 10,000
It is Interesting to note that when I was visiting my dad in Montana in the early 80′s, that this was the 10,000 Silver Dollar Bar and there were road side sign advertising it’s existance for at least 200 miles in all directions. I guess they haven’t had time to replace them yet now that the bar has 5 x the number of silver dollars. The silver dollars are on the walls, in the bar, everywhere…
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July 19th, 2008 Scott
I did my first Olympic distance tri today (ChelanMan) and even though it didn’t go quite as planned, I finished very well overall. My goal was to do a 2:25 or better. Even though I cramped up on the run and did lots of walking (at the aid stations), I still came in fifth out of 23 in my age group (35 – 39) and 24th overall for the men (out of 144). My total time was 2:22:17.9
I’ll take it. Here are the vitals (the bike leg is still by far my best, but the swim & run are improving):
Continue below the stats to read the detailed breakdown of the day…
Participant Detail Information
|
Racer Number
|
62 |
Race Start
|
07:00:00.000 |
Overall Place
|
28 |
|
Name
|
Scott MCGLYNN |
Assigned Start
|
07:30:22.000 |
Overall Back
|
+00:26:03.9 |
|
Home Town
|
APO AP USA |
Actual Start
|
00:00:00.000 |
Gender Place
|
24 |
|
Age
|
39 |
Stop Time
|
09:52:39.900 |
Gender Back
|
+00:26:03.9 |
|
BrGender
|
M |
Total Time
|
02:22:17.9 |
Class Place
|
5 |
|
Class/Division Name
|
Olympic 35-39 M |
Net Time
|
02:22:17.9 |
Class Back
|
+00:10:59.0 |
| |
|
Pace
|
|
Total Adjustments
|
+00:00:00.000 |
Intervals
| Name |
Time
|
Cumulative
|
Overall Place
|
Overall Back
|
Gender Place
|
Gender Back
|
Class Place
|
Class Back
|
Pace
|
| Swim |
00:28:25.100
|
00:28:25.100
|
79
|
+00:15:07.9
|
52
|
+00:07:52.4
|
10
|
+00:05:32.5
|
00:01:44.0
|
| T1 |
00:01:11.300
|
00:29:36.400
|
29
|
+00:00:41.7
|
16
|
+00:00:41.7
|
3
|
+00:00:06.6
|
|
| Bike |
01:04:17.600
|
01:33:54.000
|
8
|
+00:06:43.9
|
7
|
+00:06:43.9
|
2
|
+00:03:08.0
|
22.4
|
| T2 |
00:01:06.000
|
01:35:00.000
|
67
|
+00:00:43.7
|
36
|
+00:00:40.1
|
6
|
+00:00:27.8
|
|
| Run |
00:47:17.900
|
02:22:17.900
|
56
|
+00:12:21.6
|
41
|
+00:12:21.6
|
8
|
+00:09:25.2
|
00:07:37.7
|
| Final Lap |
00:00:00.000
|
02:22:17.900
|
23
|
+00:26:03.9
|
23
|
+00:26:03.9
|
7
|
+00:26:03
|
|
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Posted in Triathlon | 3 Comments »
July 17th, 2008 Scott
I just occurred to me today that you might find this interesting: the businesses on base here don’t use pennies. Anything that ends with a 2 or less is rounded down to the nearest dime and 3 or more is rounded up to the nearest nickel. I’ve heard that it costs them more in shipping to deal with the pennies than it’s worth to use them. Register totals will still come out at penny level amounts ($4.23), but we pay the rounded amount ($4.25). It seems like balancing your til could be tricky at the end of the day.
So why does our bank even supply us with pennies when there is nowhere on the island to spend them?
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July 17th, 2008 Scott
I can tell Gina and I were out spreading the word about the blog today as the stats indicate 61 visits throughout the day. I know we didn’t visit 61 people, so there must’ve been a lot of return lookers. Shoot me an email if you have questions on how to find things. All the pictures are within the blog entries themselves, so go through the archives to find pictures.
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July 12th, 2008 Scott
I’ve had it for about a week now and I can’t believe how productive I can be on this computer. I’ve installed Windows XP in a virtual machine so I could still do the things I need to do in Windows. The funny thing is that I really haven’t had to use it at all because I can do everything I need to do in OS X, and I can generally do it more efficiently as well.
I bought an Apple mouse with the laptop because I don’t like trackpads, but I find that the OS X trackpad with gestures is much more efficient than using the mouse. I can do all of the following all from the trackpad (without even using the single button):
Click
Right Click
Scroll Vertically
Scroll Horizontally
Drag
That doesn’t seem like much of a big deal, but think about it: those actions all without moving your hand away from the trackpad. It saves a massive amount of time when you don’t need to touch the keyboard at all for 99.9% of Internet browsing and for most file functions. When I go back to my old XP computer, it feels clunky at slow now, but not because of the speed of the machine. It’s the interface. That’s something Apple always has managed to get right on the first try.
I’ll still need to use XP for my .Net programming using Visual Studio, but I’m finding that I’m more and more interested in learning PHP & MySQL because of the HUGE amount of support out there for web applications developed using that infrastructure. I’ve been toying with Joomla, Moodle, & WordPress this summer and am astounded how effective and complete these web apps are…and they are all open source. Why would I want to continue to rebuild the wheel from scratch in .Net (granted, there are resources out there…but not complete open source packages) when I could start with one of these packages and modify it or create new plugins to fit my needs? If I go full tilt into the LAMPP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) mode of development, that will end my need for Windows XP entirely.
Goodbye uncle Bill, welcome uncle Steve.
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July 12th, 2008 Scott
I’ve been back in the states for about a month now, or halfway through my summer “vacation”. It’s not much of a vacation really as we have tons of work to do to get the house ready for the rental agency so they can rent it out after we leave next month and return to Okinawa. I had some misgivings about what it would be like to return to Wenatchee after being in Okinawa for 10 months, but it it turned out that I didn’t really notice anything odd. It felt like I never left.
It’s as if time stood still, or I had only been gone a day. I slipped right back into driving on the right side of the road running errands around town, mowing my lawn and repairing broken sprinkler heads. In short, it felt like a normal summer. So normal in fact, that it seems down right boring. That’s the best way I can describe. In Okinawa, everything is such a unique new challenge that make my home in Wenatchee seem dull because I know how to do everything I need to do.
We’ve certainly missed our favorite restaurants and have made it a point to go visit several of them, but other than that, I think I prefer the challenge of Okinawa. I’m anxious to be done with the house prep and get back to the island, although I have a ton of work to get done before I get back. So, I’ll get cracking on it asap.
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July 10th, 2008 Scott
We’ve been back in the states (CONUS) for about three weeks now and it has mostly been the drudgery of getting rid of all our possesions that we still have in the house to prepare it for renting out this fall after we leave.
It hasn’t been fun.
We make four piles: trash, mail to Okinawa, permanent storage, or temporary storage for the estate sale. Everything must go into a pile and we have far too much stuff to sort through. Did I mention it isn’t pleasant?
As part of the process, I’ve been posting stuff on craigslist that I thought would sell better there now than in October when the bulk of our possessions will go on sale in the estate sale that the YWCA is doing for us. Occasionally the mind wanders and I end up off task on the Internet. Today, I ended up looking up information about Misawa. It is a city in Northern Japan that has an American Air Force Base, but also happens to be the city sister to Wenatchee (and East Wenatchee…hence my title). I found a great website there in English that makes me think that teaching at Edgren HS on that air base would be an entirely different vibe that where I teach in Okinawa. The website makes it seem like the Japanese people there really appreciate American culture and want to learn more about it. They appear to be very inviting about integrating the Americans stationed there into their own culture.
It isn’t like that in Okinawa. There, they put up with us. There are business that support us and the people are nice enough, but they really don’t want us to be there in general. Specifically, I’ve found that the teachers and principals of Okinawan high schools that I’ve spoken too seem very suspicious of my intentions when I ask to participate in their local events (joint concert, large group festivals, solo & ensemble festival, etc). I can’t say that I blame them much for it does seem to me that we are a large imposition on their small island. We are 50,000 Americans amongst 1,000,000 people in Okinawa. At Misawa, 50,000 is the sum total population of the area. I don’t know how many Americans are there, but with only one air base it must be much, much fewer than in Okinawa.
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July 9th, 2008 Scott
Today, my domain space has becoming my blogging space as I’ve installed wordpress. I’ll figure out how to incorporate my photography stuff later and also how to move my blog entries from live.com into this site. I’ll also need to move from this default theme as well. But for now, here it is.
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