Ole.. Ole.. Ole.. Gauchos!!!

Thats right we win! UCSB defeated UCLA today in men's soccer, 2-1 to win the NCAA Championchips!

Check out the celebration in IV


and some pictures have been posted here

Virtual Halloween Carver

Since this year I will be carving pineapples for Halloween, check out this site where you can make your very own virtual pumpkin design. Or maybe use it to perfect your real pumpkin design this year.

Check it out

Hands Down #1

Santa Barbara Sandcastle Festival

From Santa Barbara...

This weekend on Saturday, C and I joined up with some friends to compete in the 5th annual Santa Barbara Sandcastle festival. One member of our team joked that we should do a Hand Castle, well the idea stuck and we went for it. It turned it to a day full of Hand puns, and people smiling and liking our idea. The end results was even pretty cool looking, but the big surprise came when the winners were annoucned. That's right we WON! 1st place in the mixed division( sculpture + castle). I guess people thought our Hand castle was pretty handsome.

I guess next year we will have to out hand ourselves.

Tri it!

Team RAD was back in effect this past weekend, competing in the Carlsbad Triathelon team relay. Well at least AD was as R was out of town so we had to find a replacement swimmer. The frist person we had lined up stepped on a sting ray the weekend before the race and was now out. We posted again and found a new swimmer, lucky this guy broke the curse and was a great swimmer. We improved our overall time from 2:05:50 to 1:51:21.



Look its me passing  


Final push to the finish line 

iPod Healer

So last week my friend says to me, oh yeah my iPod died. What! Really! What happened? Story goes that she was just at the gym and all of a sudden the screen just faded off, and then the music kept playing for a few more minutes and then silence. It was dead. She tried charging it and nothing no response. So I mentioned that she should post something on a form and maybe someone could help her out. She wanted me to post, but I was waiting till I had it in my hands. That way if someone asks me to try something I can act right away and not play tech-support-tag.

Anyways it was given to me, to do as I will :-), in a nice bright pink case nonetheless! From what I found online it looked as my only option would be to disassembly Johnny Five. Since the G4 pod was out of warranty, her choices there were to send it in and if they found it was the battery (~$60), anything else (~$250, why? Just get a new one!) or it could make a nice paperweight. So after trying to reset, charge, smack around the iPod it was time to open up this sucker! I watched this video to get and idea on how to get the job done.

Realizing I didn't have the tools at work, I tried again when I got home. I ended up using some small eyeglass sized screwdrivers. Once I got the unit open I it was easy to disconnect the hard drive and battery. I let it sit disconnected for about 10 mins hoping that any memory/circuits would reset. And IT DID!!! After I hooked it all back up, VIOLA! iPod came back to life…and I only caused some minor scars, and had to reset the time and date. Even all her songs and data stayed intact. Needless to say my friend is very happy to have a ticking iPod again.

Oh Dell, you Devil!

For a the past week my friend has been IM'ing me about how to help out a mutual friends' Virus-Trojan-maybe even Herpes ridden computer. I told them to try all the Anti-spy programs and Anti-Virus I could think of, and non seemed to work, or they would just freeze up.

Anyways they had backed up all their important files, and was ready for the famous computer saying, "Format and Re-Install".  But we could not find the restore CD. After a long call to India, er Tech Support we learned that there is no CD unless you pay for one, "Software Warranty" but there is a hidden partition with a ghost image of the original configuration. Support told us they could not tell us anymore without charging us for the call, but let us know one thing "CTRL F11". 

It was my assumption that we were to push this combo when the computer starts up and we would be golden. But after 3 tries of hitting the keys and nothing happening, we had to go back to searching the support forums. Finally we found a post that said you should push the combo when you see the standard F2 for setup appear on the screen. Well that's what we did!

OK not we needed to focus on a different problem. We had also noticed that when the computer boots up it gets a "keyboard not detected" error. This was odd as they keyboard works once windows loads. We tried to use a different PS2 keyboard, but guess what, yep this computer doesn't have any of those old school ports on it, only about 6 usb ports are on the back. So once again searching on the forums I found a vague comment that said, Usually during boot up ONLY ONE USB port is active. OH really! So after 4 reboots trying different ports we found the magic one, you can tell because the led was lit up during the whole bios booting part. For us it was the usb port closest to the Ethernet jack, why or why don't they color label it Keyboard, is beyond me. Anyways once we got that figured out the CTRL F11 worked like a charm.

So anyways what should have taken like 30mins took about 2.5 hours, I figured I would right this in case someone is searching the net with the same problem maybe they would find some help because Dell sure didn't give much.

It's My Truck!

Yesterday I was cleaning up the house, and going through the endless piles of mail, OK mostly junk-mail, shredding the countless credit card applications and such, when I came across one that said Citibank on it. The plain white envelope looked like your standard credit card application and just as I was about to rip it in half, I thought ma ybe I should open it first. It was a dam good thing that I did! Inside there was a nice letter saying, Thanks for using us for you Auto loan, and attached to the letter was the Title to my truck! Woo hoo! I have finished paying off my Blazer, and no more car payments! So in the spirit of not having a car payment this month, I bought my truck a present. A new K&N Air Intake/Filter kit. It should help give me some more horsepower, and maybe some better gas mileage. Also the filters don't need to be changed for about 50,000 miles, and even then you just wash & oil them, so no more bugging me at jiffy-lube about my filter being dirty! I am excited to try to install my first truck mod, even if I know it's not that hardcore and look pretty east to do.

Speaking of hard core trucks, check out my pictures from last weekends Truck Jamboree