XKCD and Projects

Following the recommendation of the guy from Zero Punctuation, I have been reading this comic strip called XKCD. The strip is not incredibly awesome, and some may claim I do not understand the jokes, hence my veredict. That may well be. But I have to admit it, it has its moments of brilliance. This week's strip, however, is about a common mishap faced by computer geeks all around, in particular the example of BSD installations. When I was younger and with a lot more time in my hands (due to my still living in my parent's place), I used to like to play around with Linux and BSD installations, doing it like it was done when men were men and wrote their own drivers. It is all fun if you like to tweak with things and know all the lines necessary in the files at /etc that make your system work. It is a lot less fun when you just want your Internet connection to work or your personal SVN server be up and available. Hence, over time, I may have gotten weak, and now I rely on graphical Linux installations and automatic updates. What the hell, sometimes I just want things to work, not to prove my geek manhood.

New Camera

Yesterday I picked up my new camera, a birthday gift from my brother, after a perilous trek to the confines of south London, as seen below. Adventures apart, I am now discovering the awesome new features of my Panasonic DMC-TZ3, though most of the non-obvious ones are probably going to be used just for the first month in which I play around with the camera. In any case, this one has a much larger resolution than my previous Canon Powershot A80 (with which most of my previous pictures were taken), and significantly better optics, with more than three times the optical zoom capacity. It also takes wide angled pictures, like the one shown in this post. Later I took some time to go out to Ruskin Park to take more pictures, the weather at least was nice (for London, that is).


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NASSA

An interesting video about a parallel organization trying to reach space in the 50s and 60s. The best part of this video, without a doubt is the description by Blackstronaut Wallace "Suitcase" Jefferson of how he got laid the very night he started up NASSA.

Versailles

I am blogging this with a week of delay, since it took me some time to figure out interesting (or not thoroughly idiotic) captions for my Picasa Web Album. Nevertheless, on the week of one of the most important days for the history of mankind, I decided to celebrate the event by visiting Paris with my girl. Unlike my previous visits, this one allowed me to visit the Palace of Versailles. Up until this point I never thought it would be such a great experience, after all, how big can a palace be? But I must tell that this one gives an interesting meaning to the term majestic. This picture, though in very poor lighting, is just a part of the Hall of Mirrors, which is a huge room with an awesome view to the huge gardens (a fraction of the original gardens) outside.



All in all, a very pleasant experience, and I have seen but a fraction of the entire palace grounds.

Massive Black Rooster

While reading the latest review from Yahtzee in the Escapist Magazine, or more exactly, the forums linked to his reviews, I came across a link to a company that was just awesome in the innuendo included in their name. Of course one can never be sure if this subtle interpretation is accidental or not (or if I have a sick mind and see things where they are not), but the company name is, nominally, Massive Black, while a black (actually gray) Rooster sits at the back. Regardless, I leave to the reader to know which synonym of Rooster is implied to be big and black on the company logo.

Eye of the beholder

You never know when things in weird languages pop up into your mail box, and today a Kazakh friend sent me links to some interesting videos in YouTube which not only show some interesting drawing tricks, but also have songs in some weird language. Now I know that I have been posting videos from YouTube all too often, but I have not seen many interesting things outside of the video realm. Anyway, you could count the previous post as a music one, regardless of the YouTube trailer.



If you happen to understand Portuguese (more precisely Carioquese), you will notice that the lyrics sort of (loosely) match the innuendos of the drawing.

Atomic Soundtrack

My girlfriend has just given me the soundtrack of the documentary Trinity and Beyond, after what seemed to be a remarkably hard time trying to find this in stores this side of the Atlantic. My girlfriend's quest to satisfy my eclectic musical taste, however, is not the point of this post, the music itself is. If anyone has watched this documentary, or any other of the atomic series made by Visual Concept Entertainment, it is hard not to be impressed with the choice of music that accompanies the detonation of nuclear explosives.



I initially thought that the music was cleverly selected from some classical composer, and the synchronization of the musical apexes with the blasts carefully made. However, after looking at their website, it turns out that the music was especially composed for these films, and performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, in what turns out to be an entirely fitting combination, given the history of nuclear armaments being strongly tied to both the US and Russia. Historical digressions aside, this music is quite powerful on its own, and even more so if you read track titles such as Thor Missiles and Operation Crossroads. Besides, this music is excellent to work to, so I should experience some productivity gains (offset by this blog posting). You can also check out trailer for this movie below.

It's a trick, get an axe.

One of the best movie lines ever, can be repeated in almost any real-world situation, either metaphorically, or literally, if you are in one of those situations that absolutely require an axe-based solution!