After the night

This is a picture of Gaza students back to school after the bombings. The cards mention the names [and ages] of the students who are not there anymore.
It is not hard to imagine the desperation and desolation of these kids and what actions ca lead from them.

Useful trick!!

Just enter 'pwn' in front of any youtube video before the word 'youtube' and it'll send you to a download file.
For more details, see here.
Very nice :-)

Job Hunting Syndrome

The last couple of weeks, while hunting for suitable employment, I have become kind of antisocial. I don't want to talk to my friends and I don't want to see them (esp the ones with jobs!). I don't want to answer any questions about how my job hunting is going.
The problem is more myself, because when i see friends I can't help but talk about what's on my mind but I also don't want to talk about it, so you see, my solution is not to see them or talk to them.
Which is probably not a very good thing! :-(

Informative Video

Watch the following 60 Minutes piece. Very informative. The situation in the middle east is extremely sad.

Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution?, 60 Minutes: Growing Number Of Israelis, Palestinians Say Two-State Solution Is No Longer Possible

Fathering babies at 111... say what!

This is a very cool story about Henry finally becoming a father at 111 (possibly for the first time). Seems he used to be very crabby but then a tumor was removed from his butt and he suddenly became all sweet natured and lovin, thereby leading to a pack of kids.

On a related note, this is interesting:
"Tuatara, which are found only in New Zealand, are sometimes referred to as "living fossils". They are the only surviving members of a family of species which walked the Earth with the dinosaurs more than 200 million years ago."

A tip of my hat to La Gillen

La Gillen gave the following link as a comment, but it is so hilarious it deserves its own front page announcement. The following is a most hilarious song about a boy and a girl ... and what happens at night. It is such a deja vu it is not funny. I lie, it is actually hilarious!

Australian Comedy act Tripod performing "Gonna Make You Happy":


ps I already know some people (you know who you are) are going to complain about the xbox mention. Suck it up!
pps La Gillen is seriously the best for continually introducing me to new music and hilarious shows and... the world! :-D

Colorful Benediction

I love the wording of the benediction by Rev. Joseph Lowery during President Barack Obama's inauguration:

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

Then Jon Stewart added a couple of more lines:
When Blue will be allowed in two, when Puce will be set loose, when we rise above the minutiae of Fuchsia, and Orange …. screw Orange!

Are you there God? It's me... Fly!

The above graph shows the relationship between how much (and when) an atheist believes in God and the activity the atheist is involved in. I can imagine a couple of more scenarios that could have been added! :-)

Dawn of a new era

This is the car I rented. Pretty isn't it? :-) but so hard to drive!
The interview went okay, I met with 10 people from 9am-5:30pm and I was so tired in the end! I can't believe I didn't think about drinking some coffee in the middle of the day. On the way home I got stuck in traffic and I could hardly keep my eyes open!
I loved the job description and let me not say more because I might jinx myself.
No more talk of this. My mouth is zipped.

The only bad thing was that I missed all of the inauguration ceremonies!! I missed it all!!! Did everyone else watch it? Which part was your favourite? Mine was probably the part that it was Obama being the president. Ha! but seriously, I would love to hear what you guys particularly liked about the ceremonies.

my trip - 1

I am having an interview in San Diego tomorrow which I am really looking forward to. The job seems so ideal for me. The last couple of days I have been preparing for thi interview, going over stuff, my papers, my resume, having a gaming party.. :-P That was saturday and it was really fun but we are not talking about that.
I flew down in the early afternoon and the excitement began on the plane when a combination of coffee and spicy tomato juice totally made me sick. Trust me, being in a plane is not the best place to be in when you get sick. By the time we landed I ok again and I went to get a car. The company had hired an intermediate car and i asked for a compact since I am so short i have trouble driving a big car. After some computer searching they gave me a convertible! :-p yes imagine me in a white pontiac solstice, with the top down (only after asking someone how to do it!). It would have been a magical experience except for the fact that it was so hard driving it! it is a tiny car, very very low to the ground with deep seats that yes I still couldn't see over the steering wheel!! but who returns a convertible for a say, corolla? not me!
Seriously i had a lot of trouble driving and the poor GPS got the brunt of my inability to drive. I took so many wrong turn and the poor girl had to keep recalculating!
finally i got myself to the hotel when i found out i had put in an incorrect hotel address!! I drove again and finally after a very long day i got to my hotel. Interview day tomorrow!

Your morning laugh

Enjoy!

DRM-free?

These Apple people are such sneaky people... makes me not want to buy anything from them!!
Although they are making their music in iTunes store DRM-free, they insert your email info into each song/video you purchase so that they can trace songs. Seriously Apple people???
Some thoughts:
- can't you just take out the email via a text-editor?
- wouldn't there be privacy concerns here for the consumer?
- seems Amazon puts inserts a watermark as well, but not related to the purchaser - only that it was purchased from Amazon.

Update:
Amazon doesn't watermark the songs itself. The labels that provide the songs do themselves so the good news is that the songs are not individually marked; i.e., the same song bought from two different accounts is bit-wise identical.

Great Jumping Spiders Batman!

This is the newest plush toy that is a big hit in Japan. They were going to add her to the Monsters Inc movie but he had powerful enemies.
ok I was lying. That's a real spider, one of those instances were you wonder at the craziness of nature.
It is a Jumping Spider. It is furry, female, has 8 eyes and can jump 30 times its length. Don't you just want to hug it? :-P It is amazing!!
More pictures. More info.

T-minus 10

I have been running simulations on my trusty machine in the past couple of days and I know my computer is doing some serious number crunching when its fans become alive and it starts humming real loud to get my attention. I think it's complaining. Anyway, sitting next to it and hearing that fan go faster and faster, I get this image of a rocket revving up for blast off. Other times I think I am going to gradually see smoke coming out of my computer and the whole thing just self-combusting... go up in glory!

Who said programming is not imaginative???? :-P

How to get music savvy

It might surprise many people, but I am not what is considered "cool"... NO WAY!! no, really? I know, I was quite shocked myself when I discovered it. But then I asked my mum and she said, well, surprisingly, she confirmed it.
Hark!
The who issue gets re-confirmed whenever we play trivia and I find myself so clueless about current music. Now give me a bit of opera and I might not do AS badly, but .. who am I kidding. Anyway, Atlanta is similarly clueless about cool music. As an aside, this might be why we are so good for each other -- both of us are clueless and yet we think the other one is cool. :-P
How did I get here? I am quite the meander-er tonight! the whole reason why I started writing this blog was because Atlanta, in his quest to become up to date with current music, is listening to the radio station of his car in Grand Theft Auto -- yes, not a real radio station, rather the radio station of his simulated car in the simulated NY of GTA. He has come up with quite a few new songs that we assume are cool because they are in video games. I think that is hilarious =D

Ape like

Recently Atlanta and I were listening on NPR to an interview with Josh Brolin who plays Bush in the movie W. While he was talking about learning the gestures of Bush, he mentioned a particular habit of Bush: when he stands, Bush has an ape-like tendency to angle his arms with the back of his hands pointing to the front. I finally got what he meant when i saw the above picture! it is so true!!! :-P

Meanwhile seems Bush is handing out Medals of Freedom to his good buddies little Johnnie Howard (the old PM of Australia), Tony Blair and Alvaro Uribe (president of Colombia) for their support of anti-terrorism and promotion of democracy in the world... meaning for blindly following in the footsteps of Dubya. What an honor to be in such an elite group...

Favourite Past Time

A new favourite activity of mine these days is watching Alvaro play Metal Gear Solid online... He is Ellen Petrovich and there is something so incredibly addictive in watching her try to rise above her sloth status :-P hehe I kid I kid. He is definitely a hawk (wannabe). He belongs to this colombian clan and you know they are the elite of the elite. He leaves around playboy magazines and while the innocent are distracted by these trashy mags, he executes them, Ellen style. That's just the way s/he rolls you see. But he really is getting better, making more head shots, and cries and curses the gods only once in a while.
Trust me... it's more entertaining than any TV show. 24 has nothing on this. :-P

Fair?

There is something wrong when a military offensive leaves a death ratio of 1:100 on the two sides. 5 to 500.... Can anything this unbalanced be fair? it makes me wonder.

Back to schooling

These days I am preparing for job interviews by going over my C++ progamming books. It's a lot of fun actually re-reading these and learning how the language has changed and what is new. I wonder if it is because I know the basics and so I understand everything much deeper and better now.
A couple of more days of this and then I begin the algorithms re-training.
Learning is Phun!

Spiderman

Seems I am on a music roll. I actually have lots of things to write, except I don't seem to have time. However, I do have just enough time to mention how much I love the big band music of Michael Buble. If you haven't heard him, try him on It had Better be tonight and Irresponsible and Feeling Good. Very nice! Here he is with Spiderman: (not my fav but pretty fun)

In terms of music, i think I was born after my time :-)

Argument to Music

and not just any music - Beethoven's 5th :-)