As friends have noted, my son is a serious competitive swimmer. As in, ten to fifteen hours of practice a week. He just turned 11 years old.

It's fun to watch him progress. Today he swam an intense 400 meter freestyle race which he 'negative split', which means he swam the last 200 meters faster than the first. His last 100 meters was only 1 second slower than his best 100 meters, ever.

Which is the way our Olympic distant swimmers tend to swim (look at the splits for Kalyn Keller, who was second in the women's 800 M freestyle at the Olympic trials) (my son proudly noted)).

Since we're on the topic, bet you didn't know that the world best butterfly swimmers are almost as fast as the world's best freestyle swimmers, now.

And also bet you didn't know that America's swimmers won 30% of all the medals Americans won at the last summer games. The seventh-most awarded nation at those Olympics....

It's a wonderful sport -- physically, of course, but also mentally. It teaches extremely durable commitment...

Just a warning for Movable Type users -- versions 2.64 and earlier (at least, don't know about later) are susceptible to database corruption problems.

We've been grappling with this on the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network site on and off for the last ten days. The system would freeze up and ultimately disallow publishing posts. Forum posts suggests the problem is widespread, and typically shows up once a site gets to relatively large numbers of posts (we're at about 3,000 posts on RMPN now).

We exported all the data (having saved it in HTML format, too), reinstalled MT, and are reimporting all the data. The reimport didn't work the first time (only about 15% of the archival data reappeared), though, so we're having to parse the data to recover.

Time consuming, and we're not sure that will work.

I presume (but don't know) that Six Apart has worked this problem out with at least the Professional version they're now selling, but freeware users beware...

We're looking at a proprietary 'blog' system made by our web partners, Creation Chamber, as an alternative. We'll keep everyone apprised...