Nico’s

A couple of months ago, I got myself a new computer. I ordered all the parts from NewEgg, and put it together myself. If you’re not interested on the size of my e-peen, move on down a couple of paragraphs. The parts of the new rig are as follows:

• Intel e8400 Core 2 Duo Processor.
• Gigabyte P35-DS3L motherboard.
• 2x G.Skill 1Gb PC2-6400 RAM.
• EVGA nVidia 9600GT Video card.
• All in a fancy and very slick Antec P182 case.

After a couple of months of not having used my old PC, and not having any use for it at all, I decided to hand it down to my AFS family. (These are the people that hosted me while I was an exchange student, for those of you who are just tuning in).
Well, here’s where the dilemma started. They already had a Windows PC, and it would have been a hassle to re-install every single program, and to re-create the accounts, permissions, and transfer all the logins, passwords and documents. What to do, what to do!
I couldn’t just slap their computer’s Hard Drive into my old PC, because Windows ties to the hardware in some black magic kind of way, and it would have thrown a fit if I’d done that. No, can’t do that… or can I?
Turns out, you can!
Once again, the benefits of ponying up $10 for SomethingAwful pay off, and I find this great article at one of the many goon projects: http://shsc.info/MovingWindowsToNewHardware.
Just what I needed! So I set off to sysprep the old system, and after that was done, I installed the HDD into the new one.
I booted it up, and… shit, wait. Wtf, blue screen? And then it reboots, without even letting me see what’s going on? Damn it, what do I do now!
I put the HDD back in to the old system, let it boot… At least it still works, and I haven’t entirely blown the Windows install.
I read the article again… and it says that if that happens, you can just do a windows install in repair mode, and you’ll be golden, so I take the HDD out again, and put it in the new one.
Great, I forgot to sysprep it. It goes back to the old hardware, I sysprep it, and once again it comes into the new hardware.
I run the repair install, and after the usual 20 or so minutes, it’s done.
Awesome, everything worked! The last thing that it needs now is to find the drivers for the new hardware, and it’s good to go.
It took me about one hour to find drivers for the motherboard, and I ended up just installing generic nVidia nforce3 drivers, which seem to work just fine.

I found it to be pretty cool that I could do this, and I didn’t have to re-install a whole lot of applications and re-do a lot of work that had already been done. I scored some major points with the fams, and now the kids can play some games from the 21st century (they were using a PIII at 700Mhz with 512MBs of RAM ). This is the feel-good post of the month.

I think the Grand Sierra should make this one of their new rides, shooting you over U.S. 395, so you can puke into traffic. That’s something I wouldn’t mind paying $50 to do once!

On a seemingly unrelated note, check out beambrosia.com.
Sounds like quite the scam (or maybe not! ), and the only reason why I’m posting about it is because their contact information is “502 East John Street, Carson City, Nevada, 89706″. If I end up being bored out of my mind, it is likely that I’ll drive down there to have a sample.
Josh aka Shazburg did a little of his e-detective work, and found that this is a set-up by a company that specializes in operations where they set up, scam and go before they get sued. Or something like that. Let’s just say that they have a colorful legal record.

I’ve had three cups of coffee.

After crawling out of bed at 6am, I rode to the Reno Bike Project, to eat some fresh pancakes while I waited for my eyes to stop watering:

There were a lot of people there, including Channel 2 news. (They were interviewing Wolfy as I rode in, so I expect a YouTube to be out at some point). I had me some pancakes, chatted with a few hipsters, hippies and random bike commuters, and then got back on my bike.
I was going to hit up Walden’s Coffee shop, but I didn’t feel like going to the other side of town and then come back, so I instead headed out to Bibo’s. I showed them my helmet, and then recognized the barista as one of the people I’d seen eating pancakes at the Bike Project, so he hooked me up with some coffee. I also bought a bagel, because I was hungry. (Important details in this post, I know). It was an “everything bagel”.
I chatted with another bike commuter also enjoying some free coffee. His commute was from Verdi to South Reno, and we chatted about bike things like the Procrastinating Pedalers and Critical Mass.
The last stop was Java Jungle, where I consumed my third cup of coffee. I was already wide awake by then, but I had to follow through with my plan, or what was left of it.
The temperature was rising, and not only internally. 61 degrees at 7:30am felt warm enough to ditch my windbreaker, and I rode on to work. It’s supposed to be in the 90s by the time I get out of here, so I’m prepared to change into my shorts for the ride back home.

I dedicate this post to George Pickard, who has labeled me as an activist for promoting Critical Mass in Reno.
At any rate, did you know we’re in the middle of Bike to Work Week? And did you know that May is the National Bike Month? I did!:
That’s why I’ve been putting miles on my bike. It’s been nice seeing more and more bike commuters out on the road, and it’s also more fun to race them.
This Friday is one of the most fun events of the whole bike shindigs. It’s the official Bike to Work Day, and some coffee shops around town are encouraging you to participate by giving you free bike-fuel. Check out the list of these cool places here: http://www.gethealthywashoe.com/bike_to_work.html. There’s also a list of related events, and you should check those out too!
I will most definitely be riding my bike on Friday morning, heading up to the Reno Bike Project for some pancakes, and then hitting up two or three coffee shops on the way to work. I think it’s important to mention that I rarely ever drink coffee, so I expect to have all sorts of jittery energy by the time I get to work. It might even be an uncomfortably energetic happening.

There have been a few temblors around these parts lately.
My friend Kelly had been whining about not being able to nap because of all the quakes in her neighrhood. It turns out, she was right! There have been a lot of small earthquakes.
But Friday night put us on the news. A 4.7 shook everything, and lasted for what seemed 10 seconds. I was sitting at the time, but it almost felt like I was inside a Zorb ball!
This morning, at around 4.30 am, a 4.2 woke me up in the middle of my dreaming session. The aftershocks put me to sleep afterwards, and I haven’t felt anything since…
Rumors are that Reno is “overdue for a 6+”, and that God Hates Reno, so we’re in for a special something. I hope that it’s nothing catastrophic.

I’m going to keep myself informed, since there are quite a few sources of information. I already got myself set up with an Earthquake preparedness kit, as recommended by Bike Carson.

I’m glad this week is almost over. Yesterday was likely one of the longest days at work, filled with frustration, stress and the urge to throw shit into the walls.
We recently got one of these fancy little Codonics Horizon film printers, and we’ve had a lot of issues with it. To make a story short, I spent about 6 hours yesterday with one of them, because it was not responding to pings from subnets different from where the printer is. The gateway and subnet were configured correctly, and it made no sense.
The best part came when I gave up, and Josh gave it some shots to see what was up. Apparently, a broadcast ping made the thing start responding, and that was the end of the 6 hours of troubleshooting.
CODONICS support never even came close to addressing the issue, either. Instead, they kept sending printers.

I could go on ranting, telling you all about how this printer is a bitch to configure, but I’ll spare you the details about AE titles, DICOM headers, modality priorities and other bullshit. Instead, I’ll just get to the moral of the story: CODONICS/Horizon Printers are not fun to manage, and you should be a fucking shaman to troubleshoot them.

Yesterday was Earth Day. Yes, it was yesterday, not Sunday! Sunday just happened to be more practical for a celebration/event, while also coinciding with 4-20
At any rate, I’m trying to go all week long without driving my car, in some sort of celebration of Earth Day. So far, I’ve been successful, but yesterday was really a trying day.
I begun by riding to work.
I wore tights, and some really short shorts. You see, work had this contest for Earth Day: win $100 by using an alternative method of transportation! And since I’ve been riding my bike to work for the last couple of weeks, I figured I’d spice it up by looking just a little bit more weird. I didn’t win, but oh well.

Like every Tuesday, I have a Cisco class at TMCC. I was determined to ride up to TMCC by the end of the semester, but the dates lined up well enough for me to have a good excuse to do it, so I did it!
The final stretch, on Dandini Boulevard, was a killer. To add to the long steep climb -without a bike lane- was the wind. The fucking wind, again!
It took me a whole 33 minutes to go from Work to School (590 Eureka to 7000 Dandini), which ended up being a whole 10 minutes faster than I expected. Of course, I got there sweaty, out of breath and thirsty… but above all, accomplished.
In class, I struggled to stay awake. My body wanted to shut off to recover, but somehow I managed to stay awake. Now, don’t ask me too much about VLANs, because I can’t remember anything from class.
I looked forward to the ride home from class. Like the famous saying goes, “what goes up, must come down”, I looked forward to gravity enforcing its 9.8m/s² acceleration on my unit of mass, as I gracefully handled the curves that the road provided, whether it be by its design or its many many fucking potholes.
But alas. None of that. The wind kept blowing face-on, and the acceleration was brought to a near zero, providing a very neutral coasting speed down the hill. Damn it, Earth, this is how you pay me back for celebrating you?

At any rate, I made it down the hill, rather uneventfully. I crashed at my girlfriend Dani’s place, and caught up on the Spurs-Suns #2 game of the playoffs. I knew we’d win, but it’s always fun to see Manu kicking some ass.
I was going to finish riding home after dinner, but I took a shower and hit the sack, so it was the end of the day.
My route ended up looking something like this:

You can just click here to view the larger map

Not too shabby. It usually takes me less than 15 minutes to get to work from home, and it took me 33 minutes to get to TMCC from work. Throw 15 minutes for the “descent” ( ), and it took me a whole hour to commute. I saved some money, I burned some calories. I strengthened the bond between my ass and my saddle.
I’ll be doing this again.

My cousin has been playing basketball professionally for a couple of years, at Boca Juniors. I found this video of him kicking some ass at some exhibition game:

He plays with the Argentine national team too, and he’s only… umm… I don’t remember, but he’s not even 20, I don’t think.

Have you ever reorganized your music files and then found your iTunes to have taken a shit all over your library, marking half of it as invalid, with exclamation marks? If not, please feel free to click here.
If you’ve suffered from this annoyance, and are looking to keep your sanity, pay attention!
After some researching, I came across this magic file (that can be downloaded with the whole SDK here). If you download this little piece of coding heaven, you just do this:

1. Fire up the mighty command prompt. (Start -> Run -> cmd)
2. Navigate to where you saved the file. Let’s pretend it’s on C:\
3. Type the following: cscript removedeadtracks.js and hit enter. *
4. 

* If this doesn’t do anything, you need the Windows Scripting Host. It should be in your computer though, so if you don’t have it, for the love of god, run Windows Update.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share a compilation of videos from one of TV’s greatest shows, Brainiac (Wikipedia article).
The premise is to capture somewhat normal things (like a slap to the face) in very slow motion, and seeing what happens in the blink of an eye. I must say that if I were to get slapped now, it’d hurt more Watch the video here, with my favorite part, the slap, at 3:30: