Improving my swim

My shoulder muscle needs to improve. These days, my swim speed got better and my endurance level got better. It takes 70 seconds for 50 meter swim, 155 seconds for 100 meter swim. Better but, way worse than excellent swimmers. Olympic swimmers are less than 50 seconds for 100 meter.

I saw one of master swim person making 45 seconds for 50 meters consistently forever. At this time, my goal is 120 seconds for 100 meter. Long way to go.

Oldies but Goodies

David Coverdale was one of the biggest influence of rock music history. His old songs are still touching. Here are two of my recent favorites. Sailing ships are originally played by Steve Vai. The guitarist on this video is Adrian Vandenberg.



Very famous "Soldier of Fortune". I don't need to comment/explanation, do I?
...
all the song that I have sung, echo in the distance,
like the sound of the windmill going round
...

keep watching this video.

Megadeth, Tornado of souls.
This song reminds my wild young life. I loved this song. I was just a stupid young rocker-wanna-be.
Anyway, very well performed live. Planning to buy this DVD.

Still using Emacs

I am still intimidated by Emacs internals. I can barely customise my emacs as I wish with lots of research. Sometimes, it looks counter-economic. To to a little thing, I have to pay the time price. I know modern technology of "Eclipse" or "Net Beans" to replace Emacs.
But, I still use Emacs because it is fun. No need to fall into debates of 'Eclipse is in the position where early Emacs was.' I just do this especially for fun of functional programming with Lisp.

Elisp isn't the same as Common Lisp. Functional programming sometimes was bothered by Object Oriented Programming knowledge. It is a different world. Just trust the 30 years of evolution of Emacs. It is Rock Solid.

I am taking an approach far from the perfect way. I just implement/tweak .emacs/.emacs.d as I need. I don't worry about Emacs API. Later when I find a piece that makes a better way to replace my stupid code, then I fix it. Sure I still need to design the code before a keystroke, but, I don't take serious design as I do in real life work.

Eclipse plugin can be also written using Java and Eclipse SDK. True... But not as enjoying and easy like Emacs. Eclipse SDK learning curve is far bigger than Elisp learning curve. No fun. And Eclipse plugin development seems more serious than Elisp customization.

"Hey, come back to modern world." I know, and I have to. If I work with Java, I will. But in Python perspective, I still love python-mode, rather than PyDev in Eclipse. Oh, yeah.. Way better. How does Eclipse handle Python natural "undeterministic code indentation"? Not better than Emacs "tab". How does Eclipse handle calendar library to ad-hoc insert "Today's date"? not better than Emacs "calendar" library. And in anything can happen on any place as Emacs does? Can Eclipse give a reference of individual open document (or buffer in emacs term)?

Most simply can Eclipse give a current position as a handle? Eclipse can be an IDE, but not an editor. It is not customizable.

CVS checking out behind webproxy

CVS is not a minor version control, yet. Especially for old projects like emacs still use CVS. One of my co-worker had hard time checking out emacs since our firewall blocks most of outgoing traffic. Luckily we have a web-proxy. Use this command.

cvs -z3 "-d:pserver;proxy=PROXY_SERVER;proxyport=PROXY_PORT:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs" co emacs

Swimming, one recovery strategy

Today, I made another 12 lap swimming at one shot and didn't get tired. Total of around 40 some laps. At this point, doing many laps without improving swim skill is meaningless. So, I thought what will be the first one to fix?
I made several laps just checking as many I can see myself, and found I made inconsistent recovery especially on my left arm. Sometimes I make a splash during recovery. So, let's fix this during March.

Recovery is a procedure of an arm going back to front for the next swing. Each arm takes turn to propel. The best strategy to recover is to relax or spend the least energy to its original position. Splashing obviously isn't good. Splash by itself isn't bad. Drag after splash is bad. So, I took this approach. During recovery, focus on the elbow. Forearm just hang below elbow. While driving the elbow above the water, stay 'stream-lined'. That is important not to waste energy. At the final stage of recovery, Imagine that a hand opens a hole at the surface of the water, and put the entire arm through the hole. While doing this, the next swing starts and the body rotates. Obviously, this is the best time to initiate the propel.

So, again, at the final step of recovery,
1) push the arm through the imaginary hole,
2) kick the other foot to initiate hip rotation,
3) start the other arm swing. ( Remember the best efficient path of arm )
4) stretch for the stream line.

Swim is so much fun!

Swimming is just fun.

From beginning of this year, I began to swim. The whole first month was just struggling in the water, but after two months later, I can do 8 laps (200m) without taking a break. For me, the process to improve my swim was like tuning a sloppy software. But, in the end, nothing is more important than the fact that "Swimming is just so much fun."