Still alive?

Yes, I am still alive even though I haven't had much time to write on my blogs.

Since I don't have much time to write much and I don't want that to be the just message of this post, I will write quickly about something I did and post a video (again).

Last weekend I went to see the Blue Man Group in Geneva with my wife. If you have no idea what the Blue Man Group is, you should get out of your cave more often :-) (or look at this website).

It was the "How to be a megastar 2.1" performance. I really enjoyed it and I recommend to everyone who likes theatrical acts that incorporate rock music (with an emphasis on percussion), odd props, audience participation, sophisticated lighting, and large amounts of paper (took it from Wikipedia :-)). Well, if you do not know whether you might like it or not, just check the video. It is the beginning of the performance I attended, with exactly the same artists.

????

I have no words...

Random Numbers

This week I was skimming over a JavaScript book and I found an interesting piece of code. In JS, Math.random() returns a random number between 0 (inclusive) and 1 (exclusive). Here is the algorithm the book suggests to get a random number between 0 and 4:

do{

iValue = Math.random() * 10 // random number between 0-10
iValue = Math.floor(iValue) // round to nearest integer

} while (iValue > 4)

Awesome!!

It is assuring to know that the algorithm will not only generate a random number between 0 and 4, but it will also take a random number of steps to finish. That's what I call taking random number generation to the next level.

The book is "Learning JavaScript" (O'Reilly) and the algorithm is shown on page 91.

Dilbert

I have recently discovered some Dilbert cartoons on YouTube. This is not the best one, but it is a nice one to start with:

Asimo

Last Saturday I went to the Balloon Festival of Château-d'Oex, here in Switzerland. My main intention there was to take nice pictures of the colorful balloons with mountains covered in snow as the background. Well, I can say that at least some of the 500 shots I took were nice.

However, what really took my attention was not the beauty of the event, but the presentation of the Honda humanoid robot called Asimo. If you had never heard of Asimo before, it is worth checking its web page here. You can find even some videos there.

If you are too lazy or too busy to visit the web page, here is a YouTube video with basically everything I saw during the presentation.



It is just amazing!

Eyes!

Today I will write about some of the nonsense that crosses my mind from time to time.

Sometime ago I was wondering why evolution did not make us with four eyes instead of just 2. I mean, how come Spiders managed to end up having eight eyes while us, supposedly superior human beings, have just 2. Wouldn't it be nice to have an extra eye on the back of our heads so that we could see what is going on all around us? I am convinced that an individual with four eyes would be more likely to survive on a hostile environment like a jungle or a company office. Maybe we are just an intermediate step of evolution towards a human being with more eyes.

Actually, some of my freckles seem to be sensitive to light. At least my dermatologist told me that they could turn into skin cancer if I overexposed them to the sun. The positive side of this is that my descendants might evolve to having more than just a couple of eyes and take over the world as a new superior species. All of a sudden, I started to feel like an X-man or one of those weird characters in the TV Series "Hereos."

Kite

This piece of news fascinated me:

Kite to pull ship across Atlantic

I hope this idea flies.

Automatically up-screwed

Sometimes I just hate Linux. I have OpenSuse 10.3 (x86_64) on my laptop and one week ago it notified me that I should download some updates. It turns out that these updates screwed up with my Eclipse application because of a very stupid mistake somebody made. Is it so difficult to come up with a tool for automatic updates that allows testing and rollbacks in a straightforward way?

???.com

There are so many web 2.0 companies around these days that I could not help thinking about a new one I could create myself. After five minutes of intense brainstorming I came up with the excellent idea of implementing a web site that keeps track of the people you have kissed (French kisses only). This idea is based on a careful study I performed 10 minutes before I started writing this post. According to my research, most successful web 2.0 applications satisfy two important conditions:

a) They look attractive to teenagers

b) They are viral (you are somehow forced or compelled to invite your friends to take part of it)

My proposal satisfies these two constraints. If I remember well (it's been so much time since I was a teenager), most teenagers love to brag about their conquests. Letting your friends know who you have kissed is just perfect for such teenagers (specially because you are not forced to
update your profile in case you kissed Ugly Betty). The way I think of this web site, you could create statistics about the countries/states/cities of people you have kissed, as well as a "to
kiss" list with people you intend to kiss in the future. It is just so perfect that I do not know why it does not exist yet.

I still have to think about a good name for the site, though.

Happy New Year!

And a new year comes...

I had a wonderful time this holidays. I do not recall eating so much and so well before in my entire life. Lobster, prawns, foie gras, steak, veal, pizza, spaghetti, quesadilla, and much more. I had such a great time that I do not regret the extra kilos it brought about. Now I have an extra reason to start running again.

I wonder if other people like eating as much as I like. What about you? Do you also enjoy eating good food?

I wonder if there is some Web 2.0 service dedicated to food lovers. I'll put it on my list of things to google about when killing time.

Happy New Year!