A friend of mine at work recently purchased on of the new MacBook Air laptops. I was amazed at how fast the darn thing booted up and how applications opened almost instantly. I decided to order and SSD and install it as the main drive in my mid-2010 MacBook Pro.

I chose this drive from OWC. It arrived yesterday and I installed it last night.

Unfortunately, the Mac does not “recognize” the drive at all. Nothing shows up in Disk Utility so I am unable to format the drive and install anything onto it. I tried it in both the main drive bay and also in the optical drive bay. No difference.

Have emailed OWC tech support for further instructions.

14:00 – Update on this. I was pleasantly surprised to get a very quick response from OWC tech support (on Sunday even). A very nice fellow, Andy Loy, recommended that I try booting from the recovery partition on my old drive or, failing that, an OS X 10.6 installer and see if the SSD drive would be recognized. As it turns out that worked fine and I am now running of said SSD drive. Very fast!

Twitter Hacked

I got an email from the good folks at Twitter the other day saying that my account may have been compromised and that I should change my password. No worries – I did that.

I hadn’t checked my Twitter feed lately and when I did this morning I found some goofy post about not wanting to go to work tomorrow with a link to some SPAM site taking about making money working from home.

Fortunately Twitter allows you to delete tweets.

So consider this a Public Service Announcement – look at your Twitter feed every now and then and make sure everything this is something that you recognize.

Folks today is the start of the 2010 Badwater ultra-marathon. For those not familiar with this event – It is a 135 mile run from Death Valley to Mount Whitney. Damn.

CrossFit

Made the 06:00 workout at UniversalCrossfit this morning. Today we did 5 circuits of:

clean & jerk x 5 (95)
deadlift x 5 (225)
pull-ups x 5
run 300 m

My time was 24:17 and I was a sweaty dog at the end of it.

Swimming

Took a short lunch break and swam for 30 minutes over at LA Fitness (which is about 2 blocks from the office). Total distance = 1600m (just under a mile).

The last two days have been very frustrating with regards to being able to get in a CrossFit workout. I had been planning on making the class at 18:30 on Friday, but got stuck late at the office helping a co-worker solve an issue with one of our end-user applications. Then, this morning, I had planned on getting to the 09:30 class. Left the house in what I thought was plenty of time. But found that the entire south-bound side of HWY 59 was closed for road construction. Finally got around that and thought that I could still make it to class in time, but then found out that the I-10 westbound exit was closed as well for road construction and by the time I managed to find away around all of that it was already time for class to start and I was still 10 minutes away. So I ended up driving back home, doing a few chores, and then going for a run.

This morning’s CrossFit WOD was Pukey Brewster. It was deceptively simple: 150 Burpee’s (the last 15 with dumb-bells). My time was an appalling 27:23 (probably not too bad for a CF newbie).

Had my very first CrossFit workout. It was really intense. I went to Universal CrossFit, which is a cool place located at the intersection of Roy and Maxie Streets in what I think would be considered the Heights area of Houston. Our instructor was Jimmy. He went out of his way to make sure I understood all of the exercises and also the basic science and philosophy of CrossFit. I met Daniel, Victoria, and Jonathan. Our Workout Of the Day (WOD) was 5 sets of:

5 back squats
5 box jumps
5 wall ball
100m sprint
200m jog
jump rope x 2 min

Here is a (blurry) shot of the gym (box?): Right around the corner of the gym was a couple of very cool lots that had some metal art / art car action going on:

Swimming

Went for a quick swim at lunch time. Just did 22 minutes for a total distance of 1050m.

Time: 01:01
Distance: 5.2 mi
Energy: 525 kcal
HR (avg) 132 bpm
HR (max) 144 bpm
SP (avg) 6.2 mi/h
Warm-up: 00:10
Cool-down: 00:06

Evening – Strength Training, New Rules of Lifting, Hypertrophy 1/B (#1)

Alternating Sets:
    Squat: 135x10,10,10,10
    Deadlift shrug: 135x8,10,10,10
Alternating Sets:
    Bulgarian split squat: 22.5x10ES, 10, 10, 10
    Step-up: 40x10ES,10,10,10
Reverse Crunch: BWx10,10,10,10

Program: Hill @ level 6
Time: 00:45
Distance: 4.46 mi
Energy: 540 kcal
HR (avg): 142
HR (max): 164
Speed: 7.0 mi/hr x 00:20 + 6.0 mi/Hr X 00:15
Warm-up: 00:05 @ 4 mi/hr
Cool-down: 00:05 @ 3.5 mi/hr
Stretch: 00:05

Cardio (evening) – Cycling or rollers

Equipment: Fuji Aloha on Rollers
Time: 00:49
Energy: 524 kcal
HR (avg) 127

Time: 00:27
Distance: 6.79 mi
Energy: 299 kcal
HR (avg): 124 bpm
HR (max): 145
Speed (avg): 15.3 mi/h

Swimming – Laps

Time: 01:00
Distance: 52 laps = 2600 m = 1.62 mi

Cycling – Gym to Home

Time: 00:25
Distance: 6.87 mi
Energy: 312 kcal
HR (avg): 132 bpm
HR (max): 141 bpm
SP (avg): 16.7 mi/h