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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. :wtc:
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. :rant:

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 :420
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! :argh:
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? :arghfist::saddowns:

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” ( :effort: ), 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. :banjo:

* 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. :froggonk:

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 :gonk: Watch the video here, with my favorite part, the slap, at 3:30:

I made a pun on the title! :haw:

Anyway, I’ve bought a road bike. It’s blue, see?

I’ve had it for less than a week, and I’ve already ridden it quite a bit. The primary reason of this purchase, was to make my 6 mile work commute a bit more pleasant, and it sure has become so now! Cruising on a road bike is so much faster than when on a mountain bike, which means that I can go faster with less effort.
Actually, I don’t know if it’s less effort. When I commuted using my mountain bike, I’d get out of breath before my legs got tired. But on the road bike, I feel my legs working but I’m breathing.
At any rate, I’m very happy that I found this bike up on CraigsList, and that I went for it. I wish I’d gotten a road bike sooner to cruise around town!

It’s been a week since I’ve been living at a new place. I have decided to move to the Old Southwest of Reno, with my friends Cory Jones and Jason Wickum.

It should be a fun experience, sharing a house with people who are a bit closer to my age and I already know. There’s also a lot of common room that I can share, instead of just being able to access. For example, the living room, kitchen and living room: it’s quite bare, so we’ll all have to build up to furnish it, and I think a shared feeling of ownership will come from that, which will make each one of us feel at home.
One of the things I’ve “pitched in” is my basketball hoop. Stef had kept it at the house after the divorce, but I called her and pleasantly found out that she was more than willing to let me have it! :neckbeard: So, I recruited Dani and her trusty truck, and we moved the damn thing.
It was quite an effort, to get it to not fall, and after a long and slow drive, we got it home:

And now it sits on the driveway. I’m sure videos and pictures of the many upcoming tournaments will pop-up here, so stay tuned for that!

Today is April 1st, and as you all know, it’s also known as April Fools’ Day.
I won’t bore you with a personal back-history on April Fools’ Day, or a recollection of all the pranks on the internet, because that’s been done. :colbert:

I will instead tell you a personal story, about today, at work.
Basically, I changed everyone’s wallpaper at work. I changed it to something obnoxious, mildly annoying and confusing. It’s something I figured would be noticeable, but would not affect anyone’s work, so it’d go by as a little joke, and that’d be all.
See for yourself, and then read on (click to see the image in full size):

So this morning, people logged into their computers to find this. The first email came at 4am, asking what had happened to the desktop. The next one was at 7am.
By 9am, a few people had figured out what was going on, and everything was alright… except for one person, who shall remain nameless.
This person said, and I quote, ” I consider it a vicious act of aggression.” :argh:
Give me a break. :rolleyes: Vicious? Aggressive? Ok!

At any rate, I’m cutting the story short here: I am packing my stuff and clearing my desk right now, so like they say in the streets, fuck them if they can’t take a joke. I will go get me a job at Taco Bell or something, while I look for a more serious one. Wish me luck!