DST is now in effect and even then it will make every last one of us hate it tomorrow morning when we’ll have to wake up an hour earlier, I’m already liking the artificial increase in the length of the day. Seeing the sun above the horizon after 6:30pm is just great.
This week, I’ve picked up rowing as a warm up exercise for my usual work out. And I’m already getting some results at 2000m rowing:
And that was after a 40 minutes ride between Menlo Park and Mountain View. w00t!
What are good albums to work out to?
On a completely unrelated topic, here are the pictures I took while in L.A. two weeks ago. Enjoy!
As you might have guessed from my yesterday post, I was in Socal last weekend. Maxime, Louis, Celine and I took the excuse of attending Scale to spend a couple of days there. We’d spend one day attending the conference and one day at Universal Studios. The alarm clock rang at 4am on Saturday and we were on our way around 5am. We arrived around 10:30 and checked into the cheapest and closest hotel to the conference: Motel 6 #1260, stuck between Hwy 405 and LAX. It wasn’t that bad, but they have a seriously messed up booking system, and they originally booked one of the room to be smoking (which we didn’t want) and the other one –although being non-smoking– was smelling cigarette like crazy.
Once we got the rooms, we headed for our first session of the day, which was about clusters. It was high level and pretty disapoiting in general. What I find in those conferences is that they tell mostly what should be done rather than how to do it. It’s always along the lines of “you need those machines to be very much in sync for the whole system to work”. Good, but how exactly are you supposed to do that when they’re 2000 miles apart? Some questions were very sucky as well and we didn’t get a good feel of that morning. Hence, we decided it’d be a good idea to go and have lunch on Venice beach. Venice beach is like the typical beach that you’d see in TV series like Pacific Blue and others. Bike paths, open air weight lifting zones, patches of green grass surrounded by palm trees.
We took a post-lunch walk on the sand and skipped a couple of sessions for the sake of just doing nothing. We were all starting to feel pretty tired and it was nice to just hang around with no purpose whatsoever. We took the car back and set to attend one last conference. We decided on going with what seemed the most hardcore technical one (runtime injection of spurious code in syscalls through /dev/mem) and that was really good. The presenter was barely out of his teenage years (though he actually looked like he was barely out of the 60’s) and was both an excellent presenter and technician. I really liked it, even though I was dosing off for the second half of it. We got back to the hotel and decided to give ourselves some time to sleep before heading out for dinner. A 50 minute power nap did it for me and we headed out to Hollywood for dinner.
Los Angeles is not a very nice city overall. There are interesting bits, but surprisingly few of them for a city of that size. Los Angeles feels more like a continuous, uniform, dull urban landscape. And Californians suck like hell at driving. It’s ironic because L.A. is a city built around the cult of the car, and yet no one can seem to drive their car with reason and without temper. You get cut off every other minute, people honk at the very millisecond after the light goes green, suckers with big fat muscle cars and oversized exhaust pipes play it strong but are unable to even take a turn or shift gears correctly. They drive as unsafely as teenagers, which is little surprise given the amount of training they receive for the driver’s license. I just don’t get why there isn’t a lot more than that, but to some extent, it a fastpath to the survival of the fittest.
We didn’t know it before we came close to it, but the whole boulevard was closed to cars, in preparation for the upcoming academy awards ceremony of the next day. The one thing we wanted to see was the Chinese theater, which was beautifully lighted. Apart from that, the stars were on the ground, the Kodak theatre was there too and we went for an Italian restaurant in the mall next to it. Hollywood Boulevard is only interesting on a fairly small portion, and we were really getting too tired to do anything, except listening to Uncle Fucker too loudly on our way back to the hotel. We went in deep sleep as soon as our heads touched the pillows, even though the noise of the freeway didn’t help.
After a quick breakfast at IHOP, we set the GPS to Universal Studios, North of Hollywood, behind the hill that bears the most famous sign. We did a couple of roller coasters like Jurassic Park, The Mummy and The Simpsons. They were all good, though the Mummy was probably a tad too violent for my taste. Jurassic Park was a lot better, especially we you’re on the non-wet section of the seat. The Simpsons was actually just a motion-simulator, and turned out to be quite the motion sickness inducer. We did the mandatory studio tour, in which we could see the sets for Desperate Housewives and the cars of Return to the future and Magnum P.I. Even when you know about it from DVD bonuses, it’s always different to see for real how it is behind the scenes. And also to realize that they’re shoothing all these movies right next to a bloody theme park. The afternoon was cooler and we only did a couple of 3D shows and the House of Horrors.
I drove for the first part of the way back, in the mountains North of the city and up to a few dozen miles North of Bakersfield. After a quick halt at a McDonalds, Louis relayed me at the wheel and The White Stripes, Ghinzu and Muse fought for the stereo (under my supervision as anyone can guess). Discussions were mostly revolving around the topic of movies, as we were following the announcements of who won the Oscar for what. I maintain that “Slumdog” has mostly won technical prizes and didn’t deserved the Best Movie. Sean Penn was a million times worth the Best Actor, but I was surprised Kate Winslet got it for the Reader rather than for Revolutionary Road. We arrived in the Bay Area around 10:30pm, and I finally hit home a half hour after that, which makes this trip a good 42 hours long. It’s little to say that I had a blast all that time, thanks to my great comrades in travel.
I took a lot of pictures on the Saturday, I’m hoping to be able to sort through them by the end of the week.
Return trip to Los Angeles in 42 hours. Great, but I’m exhausted. More news tomorrow.
One thing you just cannot escape when you live in the U.S. is TV ads. Huh, hold on, let me correct that: unless you TiVo stuff, you will see ads. Usually about 5 minutes every 10 minutes of programming, when you’re lucky. And in the all glorious practice of free market, it is permitted to advertise for medication, and even prescription medication. However, such ads also need to tell about all the possible side effects and counter indications, including rare and very negative ones. So, in the most extreme cases, you end up with stuff like:
Chixitrex is the most efficient medication to solve your chronic migraine.
And then:
Chixitrex should not be taken if you have asthma, take nitrates for your chest pain, or if you have low blood pressure. Chixitrex is not suited for patients under 18 or over 65. People with low-calcium shouldn’t take Chixitrex, as it may cause an unsafe heart rate increase and death. In rare cases, Chixitrex has shown to increase to frequency of migraines. The FDA reports that for some patients, the benefits of Chixitrex outweigh the risks. Do not take Chixitrex in combination with low-dose aspirin, as it may increase the chance of developing an ulcer. Possible side effect includes stomachaches, rash, loss of appetite, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, hyper-sensitivity to light and decrease in sperm count. Do not drive or operate machinery after taking Chixitrex.
That second part is usually said either by the ultra fast paced voice a guy who had cocaine for breakfast or by the soothing voice of a woman who could have sincerely applied for the job of the white snow at Disneyland. I find quite surprising that announcers are still feeling that the benefit of the ad outweigh the risk of people running away from their product screaming. They probably have the market research to back up their investment, but I sure won’t buy an asthma medication that “can increase the risk of asthma related death”. No Joke. To some extent, I find it honest and courageous to take the risk of sinking your own product. On the other hand, it just outlines how drug research is merely in its infancy. In the end, you could apply that logic to pretty much everything:
Common sense, I has it.
Remember back when I was saying that Microsoft should not invest into developing the next version of Windows, but rather repackage it into the Mojave version that they show in their ads? Well, guess what: Microsoft is rushing into the RC1 this quarter and announced there would be only one RC before the final release. This is very fast to bring major changes (read: they’re not bringing major changes) and people who installed the public beta say that the experience is almost Vista-like.
But more recently, I’ve also said that they should not charge anything for the upcoming update. That would be, in my opinion, the best way for Microsoft to preserve their crumbling monopoly. People would rush into it and Microsoft would not lose any of its monopoly because of its heavy user base in the Office market and their Internet Explorer standards implementation crap. Microsoft makes a bigger profit from their monopoly than from the sale of Windows, so why not pursue the reasoning till its natural end: free Windows everywhere! Imagine: you open you monthly issue of Wired and bam, Windows. Go to live.com and bam, free Windows download. Users would rave about it and the monopoly would be prolonged once again. Well, guess what? Free updates for Vista users! That’s a first step. They would do a killing by offering the free updates to all XP users who didn’t fall in the Vista trap. They would feel smart* (‘Man, Vista was so busted, I’m so glad I waited two years for getting the same thing’) and MS would profit from it.
I’m pretty sure Microsoft would not even lose money if they open-sourced everything in Windows 7. Even if they GPL’d it. That’s how much power they have over their user base.
*Of course, they’re only smart modulo the fact that they’re Windows users =/
This first time I felt old was in 2005, when a 17-year old asked me who were the Garbage. He was into music, he was into rock’n'roll, but honestly had no idea. But recently, I realized how the release date major work of art can make me feel even older.
Fight Club was released ten years ago, Showbiz was released ten years ago, Nirvana’s Unplugged was released fifteen years ago, OK Computer twelve years ago, The Matrix ten years ago, The Celebration eleven years ago, Frogstomp fourteen years, Grace fifteen years, Trainspotting thirteen years, RATM seventeen, Pulp Fiction fifteen, Foo Fighters fourteen. I read American Psycho eleven years ago. These titles –which are just the few ones I recall off the top of my head– have shaped my taste more than any other, and I just don’t feel like recent history has been as proficient in pieces as influential as these.
I suppose this is how you become one of those old farts that don’t like anything but things from their time. I am, however, still able to go back in time and find stuff from 20 or 30 years before my birth and that I can fall in love with. Well, I’m not really sure that makes much sense, but I can’t seem to find the same kind of excitement when opening a CD as I did fifteen years ago. It slowly became routine, which I guess is the real sign that one’s getting older.
I just went to see Coraline, which I have found pretty enjoyable. Though it reminds a lot about Jack’s nightmare before Christmas, the universe has its own properties and you dive into it very quickly. The plot is predictable but Coraline’s character is well enough written and played to spice up the movie.
I also went to see Slumdog Millionaire last week and I have to say I don’t really see what the fuss is all about. It is also a pleasant movie but in the end, it’s just a plain old fairy tale with the right extraordinary events happening at the right time in the life of the main character. In the end, it’s not far from what an old Disney movie could have looked like. From that standpoint, I fail to see how it is possible for this movie be a serious competitor for the Academy awards, especially when facing movies like Milk or The Wrestler.
But the one thing quite amazing about Coraline is the faux-3D in which you get to see the movie. You have to wear special glasses, but those aren’t your grandma’s green and red 3D glasses. As I was exiting the theater, my mind was wandering about how this effect was achieved. The only way to create the impression of depth is to project different images for the left and the right eye. The easiest way to achieve that is to polarize the glasses and project the half the frames at the angle of the left eye and the rest at the angle of the right eye. But to do that, you need to have two projectors, which is pretty expensive and not really workable if you think about the number of upcoming 3D movies in the pipe. Besides, the low framerate would be an issue. That’s about where I stopped thinking about it. Looking at the wikipedia page about Real-D, they solved both of the problems: simply multiply the framerate by 6 and have a custom projector that alternates the polarization every 144th of a second. As simple as that.
I’ve had my WWTDD? t-shirt for a couple of months, but it was the first time today that some girl asked me about it.
– So, what does that mean?
Gleefully, I replied
– The first rule is, ‘I’m not supposed to talk about it’.
Sadly, she didn’t get it. I can’t believe that movie was shot 10 years ago.
The views expressed on this blog are not connected with my employer in any way.