Rigger 2 Young Guns 0

Stepped in as Goalie again last night, and actually had a great game. While I may not be a great goalie, I'd like to think I did alright last night. Not sure of the final score, but I know I let in only 2-3 goals in the first half. The second half, there were some 1 on 1 moments that I'm not quite experienced enough as a goalie to win every time. Burnsie was absolutely Amazing on his end of the court though!! I have no idea how he can block some of those shots.

Anyway, the Young Guns stuck to their transition game, with only 1-2 settled goals, and we held to our pick/roll, and full field movement plan. We stayed ahead most of the game, though the youngsters came to within one goal of a tie in the dying minutes of the 4th. Experience won out though as we controlled the ball under very heavy pressure and brought the win home.

That win gives the Riggers the overall series win (best of three), but we'll still have a final game next week. I hear that Burns is going to be out of town then, so the Young Guns will need to dig deep and really lock down on their defense, as they won't be able to rely so heavily on Burns saving every shot.

Tempting...

Hmm..

So, was at the gym the other day on the C2 and the thought occurred again. Would I be able to complete a Triathlon? Personally, I believe that I could, but.. you never know for sure until you try, right? Brought it up with Chris today, to see if she'd be interested in maybe doing it together. :-)

So, looking around a bit on the 'net tonight I found the TriathlonIreland site (as well as TriFuel), which led me to the TriAthy site. The event itself looks like it would be a great intro to the sport, and being on June 2nd, should allow enough time to prepare. I'm seriously considering it...

I do have a lot going on at the moment though, so will be giving it some thought over the next week or so. Maybe after the Irish team tryouts in a couple of weeks.

MyShots Update

Got a note from D last night that the MyShots server has been taken offline (removed from the Co-Lo cage), so the old addresses and redirects won't be working anymore.

On the plus side, I do have a backup of all the myshots accounts, and D can bring the box back online from his home if necessary. I've also completed the move of Courtenay's Photos, and am nearly finished with Dave (Dickinson's) album upload. Your pics will be up tonight Dave! :-)

UPDATE:

All Done! Dave, your albums are online and upgraded. I haven't checked in on your Gallery in nearly a year. Some great pics in there! I'll be sending you the Admin login info when I get home tonight.

What ever happened to MyShots?

Yes, it's true, MyShots.net is no more. We closed up shop a year or so ago when the 'big' companies realized the potential, and we just didn't have the time or resources to compete. We never did shut down the user accounts though, as it wasn't costing us much to keep them around. Besides, most of our customers are also our friends. :-)

D will be holding onto the domain name, but we'll be moving the few remaining folks to other locations. At the moment, I've brought over the four remaining users that I setup initially. D's in contact with the remaining users, as he knows them personally.

So, Duc-Gasm & DTMSurf are live as of today, the rest should completed by Friday (some are pretty big). I've put a redirect on the old sub domains, but any direct links to the old Galleries will need to be updated, replacing myshots.net with fokust.com, ie user.fokust.com (sorry!).

As a little bonus, I've also upgraded all albums to the latest stable build of Gallery 1.5. This is very cool, because it allows the Gallery owners to go in and play with the site-wide settings, giving a custom feel to their sites. :-)

Photos are up!

Finally finished uploading the albums (3.5Gb), so the photo album is back online. :-)

I also upgraded to a clean install of Gallery, as I've been using a CVS version, updating via shell for years now. So, there's a few tweaks I need to make to get the format and coloring to match up with the site theme. I'll probably get it worked out this weekend some time.

Riggers vs. Young Guns Game 1

Tonight's the night. Round 1 of 3 between the Dublin Riggers and the UCD Young Guns. Looking forward to getting back on the court after a month hiatus. Hopefully I won't make a total fool of meself. ;-)

Update:

As I turned up late, I was nominated for Goalie duty, and actually had a real good game. We were ahead for the most part, with the Young 'uns catching up after the half. Once we pulled ourselves together, we took a 3-4 point lead and finished it strong. Two more games left in the series, and I'm sure they'll be looking for revenge.

Full Writeup, courtesy of Gibby

As Bender B. Rodriguez would say..

"I'm Back Baby"

So, after being thoroughly fed up with HostGator hosting, I've moved my account and sites over to LunarPages. Wow, what a difference. Great service, fast speeds, and lots of extras. Best part is that it's only $7.95 a month (or just under 6 euro!).

The old site went offline at about Midnight (PST) Saturday morning, which was before I finally got the new site up, so if you emailed me or Chris between then and yesterday evening you probably got a bounce-back. We're all good now though!

I'm in the process of uploading the photo galleries, which will take a bit of time. Plus I've actually got 'work' to do today, so won't be paying a whole lot of attention to website stuff. Expect things to be back to normal in the next day or two..

Lax Update

Been awhile since I updated anyone on how lacrosse is going over here, so...

Not much over the last few weeks. We finished up the inaugural season of the Dublin Box Lacrosse League (DBLL) back in early December. My team (the Thunder) ended the season with the worst record in the league. Yep, we really stunk it up. :-) We did manage to get everyone healthy and added a couple folks to the roster at the end of the season though. We did quite well in the post-season, stomping the league champs and making it to the finals. We lost a close fought final to end up 2nd overall in the league. Not bad at all considering the start we had.

So, 2007 is here and the start of a whole lot of new things for Dublin Lacrosse. The first being the a 'Lax Day' at UCD this Saturday, along with the annual meeting and evening social. At the moment I'm still undecided whether I will be attending the event or not.

The next big event is the DBLL All-Star cup, matching the 'old boys' of the Riggers against the up and coming Young Guns. This is a best of 3 match up, running weekly at St. Declan's school in Cabra, beginning this Tuesday at 7pm. The Young Guns have yet to beat the Riggers, although they've come close a time or two. I hope they're ready this time, but you know what they say: Age and treachery will always triumph over youth and vitality... ;-)

One really big deal coming up are the tryouts for the Irish National Box Lacrosse team. Due to my recent promotion to 'eligible' status, I'll be throwing my lot in and attending the tryouts on February 9th - 10th. Honestly though, there's going to be some major players coming out for this from the states, and I haven't exactly been hardcore on my training the last couple of months. So, we'll see how it goes.

What's left for 2007? Well, so far there's the St. Paddy's day tourney, DublinFest Tourney, the Riggers 'Kielbasa Tour' of Radotin (Czech Rep.), and a few other things. I'm not sure if I'll be as involved this year as I was in 2006 though. There's just too much else going on at the moment that requires my undivided attention.

Revolver

Happen to catch this film last night when I couldn't sleep. Excellent cast (Ray Liota really is an odd character) and some really crazy writing. Confused and intrigued, and couldn't change the channel.

Not released in the US though I highly suggest you sort out a copy. Recommended!

Movin House

Sat down to my desk this morning and found a message left by Dman. He's just been given notice that the guy we Co-Lo with (this site and a bunch of others) will be moving his service to another provider. When? This weekend! Wonderful...

So, I'm scrambling to get a clean backup of all albums downloaded ASAP, and hopefully get them online on another service shortly. There's a LOT of photos though, taking up a LOT of space. So, it could be a little while before I get everything back online. Dman's got a ton of work ahead of him as well. He's hosting a whole load of folks over there. Hopefully we'll get everything at least backed up before Friday...

This page will most likely go offline for a bit while I move everything over. Don't be alarmed though, 'ahhlll bee baaack'

Fizzer Update

Finally! The FZR is back on the road. I spent all day Saturday giving the house a thorough scrubbing, and on Sunday the sun finally came out and wind died.

So, I spent the afternoon finally getting the replacement header installed on the FZR and finishing up the brake upgrade. How's she run? Like a dream! She's a whole new bike now. Backfire and lean running are all gone, and the dead spot between 4500-6500 is gone (valve cleanup and cable replacement I'm sure helped a ton). Rode into work this morning and couldn't believe the difference. The brakes could use one last bleed though (I ran out of fluid before I was happy with the bleed), but they're still a huge improvement over stock.

Header Replacement
Brake Upgrade

The replacement turn signal is still back-ordered for Chris' car, so I didn't get that done this weekend. Also skipped on replacing the tyre as we just didn't have the time or extra cash at the moment. I did get it all nice and clean though, as the interior had a nice 'Christmas tree' theme to it thanks to last weekend's dumping of the tree. ;-)

Howling in Dublin

Have I mentioned that it get's windy here in Ireland? I mean WINDY! And down here in Dublin we just get the 'weakest' of the wind. Met Eireann records the records at over 120mph!

Why am I moaning on about the wind? Well, for the last week it's been blowing right proper, on average 30 knots, with 45+ knot gusts. Howling between houses, and making the daily commute quite 'interesting' on the bike. :-)

Anyhoot, not much going on here. Hopefully some decent weather coming this weekend. I've finally got all the little bits needed to get the FZR back on the road, so will be working on that. Also going to get Chris' tire replaced (finally!) and replace the headlight switch (finally too!) so that the lights actually stay on at night.

Oh yeah, Chris suggested using a paperclip to try and hold open the shutter on the camera, and I figured why not, as I had tried working on it already and couldn't get anything to happen. Well, while working to get a tiny pin in there the darn thing clicked open! Voila, we're all back to normal. w00t! :-) A bummer that we didn't get any Christmas day pics, so I'll try and get a few pics of the fam and post them up.

I've also been doing a bit of work for a friend here in town at Old Skool bikes, mostly rewiring old Harleys. He's planning on doing a full chopper rebuild here pretty soon, once the frame is completed over in the UK and shipped over. He's asked me to give him a hand with the build, which should be a blast. I'll keep y'all updated on how it goes...

Brand New Day

Well, 2007 is firmly upon us. I've been fortunate enough to have a couple of weeks off over the holidays to spend some much-needed time with the family and recharge the batteries. Back into work this week, and still catching up on a few things. I was working on a web site design for a friend and decided it was time to revamp the old fokust homepage. I've had a blogger account for longer than I can remember, so figured it's be as good a time as any to put it to use.

Note the gallery isn't quite finished yet. It'll take a bit of tweaking to get the header and theme to match, and time's not something I have at the moment. I'll get around to it in the next week or so.

Also, a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my Pops! We love ya big man!!