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We went yesterday on a school field trip to the Yankee stadium for a tour. The stadium is being torn down
they will open a New One next year (right across the street).

If you’re in New York and have the time, be sure to visit the stadium before its gone, its a great piece of history of this city and of this country’s culture, it’s awesome being there, a truly magical place where unbelievable things always happen, go soon if you haven’t done it before.

Tonight, July 31st of 2007 I had the privilege of attending a talk by the man himself, the creator of the C++ language, Bjarne Stroustrup.

He was sharing with us how things are going for the next version of C++0x – The 0x stands for a possible year of this decade where it will be released.

One of the interesting things that happened to me at this meeting was to finally have the honor of meeting Sebastian Delmont, and oh, those 3 geeky Red Hat guys, wonder if they were actually part of Red Hat or just hardcore fans, good thing I was wearing my Ubuntu shirt to represent for the Ubunteros.

As for C++0x, I guess my thoughts aren’t that deep, I honestly don’t care much about C++ at this point in my life, and it seems it’s an old language striving hard to keep the pace with newer features found in new languages. It seems its very hard to reach consensus on the C++ board, and its very hard to accept new features given the language is already too big, its also funny to see that everything that gets hughe (millions of people use it), will always have problems in terms of adapting to new conditions or injecting innovation to itself. Bjarne created the language around 25 years ago, and there are features that only now he’s finally been able to get accepted for this version. C++ however, we must admit is a language that’s heavily used, (but I think by end users, not the software engineering community), on software like Photoshop, Google search engine, and the Mars rovers (these were the examples Bjarnes kept bringing again and again, I would also be proud of course).

For me, I’ll stick to Python, Nasa’s been using it too for quite a while, the same with Google and many other applications, hey, YouTube’s backend runs in python.

Acaba de llegar mi nueva franela con el logo de Ubuntu. Puedes hacer franelas como estas en spreadshirt.com

When we moved out of our ghetto latin neighborhood, my wife told me “You’re going to miss the food”, but today, I discovered one supermarket in Manhattan Ave. here in Greenpoint which has the best of both worlds.

Not only they have all the polish stuff that you can get in this neighborhood (which makes my wife’s life a lot better), but they also have latin food and best of all they have Harina Pan, to make the best arepas a Venezuelan guy could eat.

If you’re a Venezuelan and you’re planning to marry a polish person, get your ass to Greenpoint in Brooklyn, NY.

Today my precious wife gave me this cool Joost T-Shirt. Neat.

I often have stupid ideas that could actually be applied to make real world every-day-people-related systems better, but I never write them down. I had this idea a few months ago, but forgot to write about it, hopefully someone on the New York MTA will read it one day and will have the power to propose it to their executive board.

If you travel on the subway like me, you can travel forward in time if you use the correct doors from train to train, I think you actually travel forward in time, instead of wasting time, if you for example need to Switch to L on 14st and you’re at Canal St, all you need to do, is take the express Yellow Line (I think it’s the R), but to make the best of your time, you need to walk to the very last cart of that platform, you make use of your “waiting time” to travel forward in time (or save time) once you get to 14st, since you get off, and the stairs to the L transfer will be right on the end of the track, then you go down stairs, and if you’re lucky enough, you can make it to the L without waiting.

I say you travel forward in time, cause if you get on the first car of the R, you will loose all your “waiting time” sitting at the beginnnig, and then you will have to do the walk you didn’t do in Canal St, when you get to Union Square…

so… in short, after this absurd, but “clear” example (yeah right), what’s the solution?

Make everybody travel like this…

If you do, and you have a well designed system, based on mining patterns on how your metro users travel every day, you could design the metro system to have people ride in certain cars.

You could either… mark cars of the train to say:

“This car will give you an optimum get off time if you get off at:
- station blah, blah, blah
or if you need to transfer to: L, 1,2,3″

So, you don’t stand in the way for people that actually need to get off and run for their next transfer…
anyway… just the thought of a maniac of traveling optimally on the subway.

Not sure if this made any sense gramatically, and I don’t think its even worth revising it… just ventilating my frustration with slow people…

Oh, and another thing, there should be “Staircases for People in a Hurry”, or “Fast Lanes in Staircases”, not just Up and Down directions, but actual, fast stair cases, so we don’t have to smell people’s asses going up the stairs like they’re doing a walk on the zoo on a sunday, please move your ass on the stairs people, you can make people loose transfers.