Our hard drive looks to be failing (nearing the completely failed state).  We have had this computer for a while; and both DVD drives have been spotty at best (they work when I can get them open, but that is the trick).  Recently, nearly every time the computer boots it runs CHKDSK, but still boots.  This past week, however, I got a pop up from Vista that it is detecting the hard drive is failing and that I should backup immediately and stop using the computer until I fix or replace the drive… Yikes; that’s almost worse than the old blue screen of death, because this was specific.

To try to extend life of it a bit, I ran through a full disk check last night, it appears to have taken about 6 hours or so to complete and all seemed ok when I started up this morning.  To be safe, I checked on my backups (whew, 100%) and moved a few folders over to the USB drive just in case… and this morning, I got the call… “Honey, the computer says it can’t read from the boot…” yep, that will nearly seal the fate of this computer, or at least hard drive.  So, now I have to either buy a replacement drive and rebuild Windows (which means getting Windows 7, something I’ve wanted to do for a while) or buy a new computer… which brings up lots of possibilities, build one from scratch, go with a Mac, etc.  Regardless, it’s a lot of $$$$ I wasn’t planning on spending.  Hopefully I can squeeze just a bit more life out of it, or we may be going using the iPad a bit more for a while.

My plan was to build up to a mile (1650 yards straight, not a true mile, but what is considered a swimmer’s mile) and I found a plan that helps get you there in six weeks starting with 700 yards three times a week. I figured that would be easy as I did 3000+ yards in practice in high school. Boy was I wrong. My first workout was a Friday a few weeks back, and I couldn’t even do 300 yard and made myself sick… I had to pull over on the way in to work because of it.

So, I took a step back and have been working up my yards gradually… I was able to do 600 yards this past Friday (4 x 100 then 4 x 50). I am hoping to start the six week trek officially on Monday with the 700 yard workouts.

My start has ended up a little slower than I wanted but I really like the rec center pool and am enjoying swimming as a workout again. Hopefully six weeks from now, I can do the mile and go from there with my swims.

• Change color scheme
• Make it so players see and can print their bracket upon submitting it
• Create a new area where a user can look up their bracket(s) prior to the games starting

I get requests nearly every year for people to see their brackets and in the past, I wasn’t able to provide that and really wanted to this year. Players will still need to contact me if they want to make changes to a bracket, but now they have the tools to see what they need to.

While just doing the above was a major undertaking, as I started working, I ended up doing those things as well as a complete reworking of all of the pages and nearly all of the code. Most of these are behind the scenes but here are some new additions that really advance the site into newer techniques.

• All PHP. In the past, I have used a Perl script generated by my pool software to insert entries into the database staging area. This year, I completely wrote that functionality into my own PHP.
• Complete CSS. I replaced nearly all inline style declarations and created solid CSS in two files (one for the pages, and one to specifically define the bracket and location of teams and results).
• 100% Validation. HTML has changed a lot since I was first introduced to it back in 1995. Now pages have important DOCTYPES that follow particular formatting to ensure that all browsers interpret the pages properly. I updated every page to ensure and check for XHTML validation. I can even have the seal of approval on the site to prove validation.

I am very pleased with how the site is turning out and should only have to make very minor changes when the 2012 version of my pool software comes out. I don’t plan on any more changes/enhancements for this year, but am already trying to think of possible changes for next year (perhaps looking into using AJAX instead of iframes to serve up the pages).

I hope you are all planning on joining this year as well. Details will be sent as the time draws near!

In this year (and really the last month of 2011) I am in a new house, in a new state, starting a new job. We picked up the family and moved from Las Vegas to just south of Charlotte in South Carolina. I have taken a new position with one of the largest health systems in the region supporting the oncology service line that is going major growth. It is a position with a lot of potential and I feel like I am making a more direct impact on the care of cancer patients, especially given that I don’t have a clinical background.

Resolutions have been up and down over the last few years. 2 years ago I feel I did pretty well since I used this blog to help keep me on track. Last year, I wasn’t as focused and didn’t hold myself accountable by having specific goals or a plan to implement them. With all the changes going into this year, I want to be specific and dedicated to my resolutions as much as possible. So without any further delay, here are my resolutions for 2012:

• Daily Devotional: In 2010 I set out and successfully read through the Bible in one year. Last year I wanted to keep up with a devotional but was never consistent about it. This year I want to try again.
• Physical Fitness: I have been able to maintain my weight for a couple of years but I still have a long way to go to get in shape. I don’t believe that I will be able to bowl regularly as there are no centers within a decent range of the house. There is, however, an aquatic center very near my office. I will check it out sometime this week, but my thought may be to swim each morning before work. If that doesn’t work to be a good option, I will have to figure out something else.
• Self Improvement: For the most part I believe I am a good person but there are certainly times that I react to situations in a less than ideal manner. The only way to truly change to become better is to acknowledge those times and figure a lesson to learn from that to hopefully not make the same mistake twice. While I may not detail out every aspect, I want to use this space as a personal journal to identify those situations and what I can do to better handle them. This will by far be the hardest resolution I have ever taken on and also the hardest to truly measure.

I believe those three are plenty for this year and hope to be more active on the blog this year as I track these and post about life in general. Take care all and I wish the best 2012 for each of you.

I will miss my team here as well as the league bowlers and wish them all the best going forward.

As a team, we were all but one below average and the last was just around average.  Despite that, we won the first game by 80 pins, the second by 3, and lost the last game by 82.  That means we took total by 1 pin… 1 pin difference across 8 bowlers for 3 games; as they say, it just doesn’t get any closer than that.  We took 5 points, and should be in the top 5 going into position round next week I would guess.

Individually, things were even stranger.  I missed a couple of easy spares in the first and second games to wind up with a 170 and 184, respectively.  The last game the wheels came off.  I’m not sure what it was other than maybe being a little tired, but I wasn’t able to get anything to go down and wound up with 3 splits (2 in the first three frames).  I couldn’t ever find a line or speed that would work, and the final score was 138.  That gave me a season low series of 492.  I’d prefer not to see me go below 500 ever again!

As noted, next week is a position round.  I don’t think we’ll be realistically in the hunt to win the quarter, but to finish top 5 would be pretty sweet.

This week we were back on the right side of the house which plays much differently (not really sure why, but both sides always have played quite differently) and our team bowled quite well; all of us were at or above our average throughout, but the other team bowled lights out so we only one the first game, and that only by 5 pins. They killed us in the team score the other two games, so we were lucky to take the one game, but I don’t expect us to be in 2nd next week.

My League Summary

Take care all and have a great week.

Like I said a short one to test the new app. Take care all.

• First 200 game (games 2 and 3 actually)
• First 600 series (632 to be exact)
• First clean game (game 3)

My scores overall were 186, 200, 246.

Now for a little on my goals for this year and the biggest one is actually not score related, but a little more on that in a bit.  Score wise, I have two goals; the first is to have and maintain the elusive 200 average.  My last full season I ended up with a 192 average.  Just one more completed spare each game and I’m right there at 200 so it is achievable.  My second goal, also score related, is to not have any series lower than 550.  A 550 series is still a 183 average so in order to achieve that I have to remain fairly consistent.

That of course leads right into my third goal which isn’t directly score related, but more of a mental goal and mindset: bowl within myself.  I have found that it is fairly easy to do that during practice because there usually isn’t a lot of people around or even when bowling with friends and family as there isn’t any pressure on scoring.  But at league, I see people with much higher velocity and rev rates than myself, and quite frankly, I get a little jealous that I don’t have that tool set.  My ball speed is about average (maybe a touch below) and my rev rate is nothing to shout home about.  So while some others can hook the entire lane and make the pins fly everywhere, I start around center lane and bowl up 2nd arrow.  I still create a reasonable angle into the pocket, but nothing spectacular.  My goal then, for this season, is to just not care about the flash and style.  My game still produces good scores as long as I make my spares, so if I bowl within myself and my abilities instead of trying to ramp it up and impress (not that anyone really cares anyway, the score is all that matters) I believe I will be much happier and will bowl better.