There's a radio at the School of Language where I take my Spanish class that recently had a competition for the students, to do a short 3-5minute radio program. A bunch of us in my class with the guidance of our teacher put together a nice little program which you can check out here:

http://raibabel.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/%C2%A1guiris-para-siempre/

I am the moderator, it could have been better, but that was partially due to the rush to get it done on time, and not knowing the studio setup at the school. Maybe next time, here's hoping we win some sort of prize!

Escuela Oficial de Idiomas de Pamplona site: http://centros.educacion.navarra.es/eoip/

Raibabel Radio blog: http://raibabel.wordpress.com/

Don't think I have much more to say other than... maximum speed my ass!

Well the title really does say it all... my nephew, Jenaro Vallejos Herreros Is now part of the CA Osasuna Junior B team.

He's the one on the far left of this picture:

Taken from:

http://www.osasuna.es/dev/equipos/futbolbase/equipos/juvenil-b-plantilla

Congrats to him!

It makes me laugh to think that this is what they consider maximum speed ADSL2+



To be fair, that server was 3x further than the local one... still results are crap, and the upstream is unstable.

Imagine my surprise when they launched this product, small bags of mini chips/munchies. Matutano are the subsidiaries of Frito-Lay part of Pepsico etc who make Doritos and Cheetos etc. They launched the "BITS" line with several different flavours, most of which were ok. I prefered two of the five I encountered at the beginning. the barbecue "twisties" and the "cheetos crunchits" I think they called it. While there are several types of Cheetos on the market here, I didn't care much for the flavour of any of them. Add that I don't really want to eat a large bag of them either... this product was great, it satisfied my craving, yet didn't force me to finish a huge bag (not that the chip bags are bigger than what I was used to in Canada at all) but in this case, just the right portion. There's a product page here: http://www.pepsico.es/index.php?s=productos/bits note that only the BBQ ones seem to have survived. Shame... another product I take a liking to, and they pull it from the market.

Well, this one also threw me a bit, for quite a few months I've been enjoying all the different varieties of these granola bars that are made by General Mills here in Spain (and all over the world apparently). They even have a website for the Spanish version of the product! http://www.naturevalley.es I used to find them in either Carrefour or El Corte Ingles supermarkets, both of which are rather large, and carry a wide variety of products from all over the place aside from typical local products. They used to come as a box of 6 packages, with 2 wafers in each package (they're thin like cookies). Then a while back, the ones in Corte Ingles changed to a box with 6 SINGLE wafers... so I bought them as per usual, grabbing a box of each flavour. Next time I went to Carrefour, they didn't have ANY... figured maybe they ran out of stock, or the best before date expired on what they had... but here we are a few months down the line, and what little was left in ElCorteIngles ran out, I managed to get one last box... and haven't seen one since... I've checked nearly every supermarket chain here, and most only stock the Kellogs brand bars with milk/chocolate on them (that chocolate/milk whatever makes me want to vomit!)... no plain granola bars/wafers anymore :(

When we first moved to Spain there wasn't a whole lot of products that made me feel a bit closer to home despite being on the other side of the atlantic ocean. So once we finished cleaning and painting the new flat, we discovered that one of the local grocery stores had Mountain Dew. They never stocked it in larger quantities like other soft drinks, but they maintained a somewhat normal level of about 18 cans... which for an uncommon beverage in a smaller supermarket is quite remarkable. I regularly bought about 6 cans every few weeks or so. One day they didn't have any. That situation never changed.

Well it's been a while, and I thought I'd give another speedtest to see how our "Maximum Velocidad" ADSL is doing...




And just to be fair, tests from a few different servers... What a crock... I'm really disappointed in that last result as that's where our streamer is located and we're having some intermittent issues since the "upgrade to provide more stable service"

Well I've been a busy bunny lately... too many projects all of the sudden!

In any case we met our Oct 1st launch date for the new auction website www.EDCSource.com which I had to integrate some addons and modifications to get it up to the level we wanted. Seems the out of the box features are never quite what you want. We're still working on streamlining it a bit, and sort of holding off on any further changes pending the new version of the core software to relaunch with a new theme, and even more features and improvements!

Be sure and check out http://www.edcsource.com

And bid on lots of cool stuff!

Neat! Google have released the new version of Picasa 3.5 with built in Facial recognition. It appears it's only for Windows/Mac users as they claim there's a poor response from Linux users... Perhaps due to the fact that there is no native Linux version? There is a v3 which is nothing more than the windows version bundled with wine. So, for the clever Linux users:

1. Download picasa35.exe (http://picasa.google.com) and install via wine
2. Replace old "picasa3" folder in /opt/google/picasa/3.0/wine/drive_c/Program Files/Google with the new one created by wine installer ($homedir$/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Google/Picasa3 or similar) I used "gksu nautilus" to get a GUI filebrowser
3. Enjoy!

Be sure to disable the update feature in options!

discovered here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=1549c0253f310634...

I'm on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) with Wine 1.1.29

Noticed a few resets lately and thought I'd check out our connection, turns out they cut our downstream quite a bit... That's what we get for being good customers and not telling them to piss off after all the issues we've had in the past... Maximum Speed my ass...

Well since I bought myself a bike this summer (first since I left Victoria BC in 2000?) I've been trying to get out and ride around town a bit. The biggest downside I've discovered is that we live on the elevated part of the valley, and no matter which direction I go in I end up having a hill to climb back up on the way home... Aside from the bike lane being an after thought/electoral promise here in town, you can get around without needing to be on the road with traffic or nearly running over pedestrians... There's a fantastic blog here: http://erroresyhorrores.blogspot.com/ with some fabulous photos and covers a lot of the issues that some people have discovered so far, unfortunately it's in spanish... (thats not an issue for me). I also have some of my own pics with comments (in english) here: http://picasaweb.google.com/sexto9/PamplonaBikeTrail#

Well since I couldn't get UT2003 to work, I opted for the original UT... used the lokigames installer and it went smooth as glass... and it runs frighteningly fast on my Quad Q9300 with Geforce 9600GT and 3gb ram... too fast even... even at 1680x1050 on my 22inch monitor... 360+ FPS... lmao

Decided I needed a decent FPS on my machine, and since I had a copy of UT2003 laying around, thought I'd try to install it in Ubuntu.

This is the process that seemed to work for me:

Insert disk3, copy "linux_installer.sh" to my home dir, open a terminal in the home dir, and run:
sudo _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 linux32 sh ./linux_installer.sh

follow the gui installer :)

If you run the installer off Disk3 directly you can't eject the disk when prompted... The install for me went in this order: Disk3, Disk1, Disk2 HOWEVER the installer starts from the last disk(disk3/3), then asks for the play disk(disk1/3), then disk1 (disk2/3), then disk2 (disk3/3) if that makes any sense...

Once all that was finished a window popped up asking for my cdkey twice, which errored no matter how I entered it. so I Ctrl-C closed it, and manually added a cdkey in my home dir ~/ut2003/system/cdkey in the exact cdkey format (xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx)

still no luck getting it to work... some reference materials:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-420743.html

http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=HOWTO+UT2003

Been a while, so I thought I'd give the speedtest a go to see how our "up to 20Mb" ADSL is doing... here's the results