Running - Walking - Computing

WALKING AND RUNNING

The jaunt around Research Park Saturday morning was sort of nice.
The weather was warm and humid - about 72 degrees at 6:00 AM.
Not my favorite mix, but better than cold and/or rainy.

I had tried to behave myself Friday and keep the physical effort under control.
I walked three miles around the neighborhood early Friday morning (5:23 - 6:10 or so) and mowed the grass later (10:30 - 11:10 or so).
That was pretty much it for moving around for the day.
Oh, and I did two loads of laundry.
The clothes I dried in the electric machine, the sheets and towels were hung on the clothesline.

Anyway, the run went okay for the first three miles.
I felt a bit tired going up Hill One, but I was ready to suck it up and do what had to be done.
Hill two felt a bit tougher and accelerated breathing kicked in halfway up the incline.
For some reason there was an unusual amount of traffic on the roads.
Then, in mile four, my accelerated breathing was required again and I knew that this was going to be with me for the rest of the ride.
I spent the rest of the trip arguing with myself about whether to stop and walk for a while or not.
Not won.

But I was not happy that we had to have this conversation in the first place.
The good news is there was no whining from hammies or joints.

(Interestingly, while padding around the house getting ready to run, my left knee was suffering from a sharp pain just to the inside of my kneecap.
I did not like the implications of that feeling.
But when I started running I felt no problems from that location the entire journey.) :)

I spent much of the rest of the day fiddling with my computer, trying to get my new version of openSUSE Linux to work perfectly.
I had three main issues
1) my mouse wheel did not work,
2) the new version of Firefox (3.0) did not want to play flash files (and they are everywhere, including YouTube), and
3) my numeric keypad stopped working.

I submitted a couple of posts on the Suse Forums and waited for an answer.
I also posted a couple of bug reports on Bugzilla.
I got a response from a guy named Stefan in Munich, Germany regarding my mouse wheel problem in just a few minutes.
He asked for a couple of internal configuration logs from my computer, which I sent to him.
A few minutes later he told me to do three steps, which I did, and **BING** my mouse wheel was working.
I thanked him and we listed the mouse wheel bug as FIXED.
Two to go.

THE SUNDAY WALK AND....

Sunday was spent occupied with getting ready and going to church and suchlike.
I walked my three-mile route through the neighborhood at 5:30 AM as usual.
I was doing a lot of daydreaming for some reason but I managed to keep my pace up.

Evidently, the people who own the boxer that likes to greet me each morning have gotten rid of their dogs. (there was a second dog in the yard that never made any sound.)
The dog houses are gone from their back yard and it was SILENT as I padded by this morning.
I felt kind of sorry for the doggies.

THE MONDAY SOLUTION

I was becoming very upset with my computer keypad problem and so I resolved to reload the operating system this morning.
I installed the DVD at 6:37 this morning and at 6:50 my new(er) open SUSE Linux booted up, ready to go.
That is thirteen minutes for the installation of 4.3 billion bytes of code.
I was impressed.

Rather than do an upgrade installation (like last time), I did a fresh install.
I had done a backup of all my personal files last night so I was ready to have to load them into the new upgrade, but that was not necessary.
Somehow, even with the clean install, my old files were saved and were ready to rock when I did my final boot.
Sweeeet!

The new install fixed my Firefox problem.
So now I have the new Firefox 3.0, (with Flashplayer 9.0)
the latest OpenOffice 2.4.0.14,
the Linux kernal 2.6.25.5-1.1, and
the latest KDE 3.5.9 release 49.1 desktop environment.

KDE has a newer 4.0.1 version released but it is not quite ready for general distribution just yet.
I will wait a while for it.

The new Firefox is noticably faster than 2 was.
And I was not unhappy with version 2.

So now I have a *new* computer.
And everything works.

Take THAT Micro$oft.
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