From left to right:

Ginkgo Biloba (just in case it actually works)

Calcium + D3 600mg.

Centrum multivitamin

Glucosamine HCI with MSM 1500mg x 2 (For cartilage and collagen development, no more pain in my knees, or ankles when running, stuff is awesome)

Whey Protein (24 grams of proteins, 1 gram of fat, 3 grams of carbs)

H20 300ml.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License by Gubatron http://gubatron.com

First of the year
Miami, FL
December 2011

Here’s my homage to Skrillex’s “First of the Year” music video, one I think will be remembered forever as a cult music video for Dubstep as it started crossing the mainstream frontier.

The model is my daughter who started joking with her fingers right after she saw the music video, which rang a bell in my head, and here we are.

In case you have not seen the music video yet, I’ll save you the Googling
First Of The Year (Equinox) – Skrillex [OFFICIAL]

This picture is Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I realized last night that the possibility our minds have to create mental models outside the physical world (abstractions) the internet works so well.

I think my mental model of the internet reality is several orders of magnitude larger to that which I’ve experienced in the physical world, and in a way sometimes it seems more tangible because we can interact with these abstract models like if we had super powers.

Now imagine connecting for the first time to the internet today, and having lived all your life without using its benefits to your advantages. Without guiding hands and coming to the realization that you are a “new born” dealing with the likes of some of us who have been here for well over 15 years, and who have had the time to create a more accurate mental model of what the internet really is, it must be quite scary and fascinating joining this world today, probably way more exciting than it was for you or for me because there’s already all of these possibilities many of us dreamed of having at first, to the newbie, the internet culture crash course must be quite intimidating.

Going back to the mental models we make out of internet websites, services, protocols, brands, any internet entrepreneur should know that to all these newbies you have the same chance of looking as big as coca cola on the internet, to the many new users if you provide a great experience and something unique you will be as big as you can in their minds.

If I were going by and had a $20 in my pocket I think I’d give it to this guy for making my day.

Recent conversations about completely unrelated technologies with my friend Alden had me coming back to the blog so I can share with you some of my visions of what I really expect the future to bring one day in terms of technology. Some of these ideas will seem far fetched, but hey, dreaming is free.

I’ll be writing about these visions in posts to come, some of them I think I could even be part of right now to start changing the lives of millions, others I know are completely out of my reach. VCs and Entrepreneurs start taking notes and steal the ideas.

The End of Computer and TV Screens

I want to live in a world where I don’t need a computer screen to use an operating system or watch tv or movies.
I want to live in a world where there’s no limit in screen resolution, where I’ll be only limited by the capacity of my brain to process images.

I think the solutions will be implemented somehow (we’re thinking very high level here) in the following stages:

The Visual Stream will be “projected” first onto my retina, it’ll be part of a pair of sun glasses, or glasses. In the same device there’s also a camera and microphone that exists to read my arms/hands gestures and to interpret voice commands.

Months later they’ll come up with smaller, better technology that can be embedded in contact lenses.

You could achieve this stages, at first using an external device for processing the data, namely your smartphone connects to the Retina Projector Wirelessly. As technology gets better (maybe truly powerful nano-computing happens) all the processing could be done in the the glasses or contact lenses themselves.

Years go by and then it happens the way it should. The user interface and video streams are projected directly into our Brain’s Visual Cortex, all input from you (arms, fingers, facial gestures and maybe even thoughts) is read directly from different sections of the brain.

The applications would be amazing, content could be delivered directly to us, no need for computers or even a workplace. This would kill huge part of the electronics industry and would create a replacing technological field (brain processing units -> BPUs) so we get a better experience year after year.

If you’re currently working with a computer in an office 24/7, you could be doing that laying by a pool with your eyes closed not moving an inch of your body, yet being extremely productive or entertained. How many times I’m extremely busy but I feel bad that I haven’t gone to the gym or for a walk to get a little workout, I wouldn’t have to hold my smartphone and read that tiny ass screen, I could be walking and reading news, a book, or watching tv in a translucent screen the size of the sky if I wanted to.

There is be no IMAX theater screen that can match the size of a screen that’s as big as your imagination.

Stay tuned for more tangible visions on Brain Computer Interaction, and ideas for Smartphone software that we could be building today (had I the resources to do so)

It had been ages since I didn’t play LEGO, after building a smaller project to see if we could get along as a team we decided to tackle a larger project.

Some life lessons you learn while playing with LEGOs:

1. Organization is key.
The more you can organize your blocks before doing any actual building, the better. The thinking is that you’ll have to find and use each and every piece on that box, you might as well do the indexing first and then spend no time looking for the pieces you need for your building.
Eventually we ended up separating every single kind of block and we put them in zip-lock bags or tupperware containers.

2. Attention to detail.

3. Focus.

4. Divide and conquer
But do so wisely, if you have to build the same module several times, that’s a perfect tasks to divide and do in parallel. If there’s a unique and very complex module to build, it’s better that you do it by yourself while your team builds other unique pieces. If they want to participate you could take turns, and spot each other to avoid mistakes. (sounds a lot like pair coding)

After watching Inception I think I have an easy way to explain what complex object oriented programming can be like.

Next time someone asks “What is Programming like?” I’ll say something along these lines:

“Did you watch that movie “Inception”? Programming is similar, you build your own worlds, with your own rules (and worlds that can only exist in the abstract, sometimes very hard to explain in words), but now imagine that instead of dreaming in 4 levels (dreams inside dreams) you could be dreaming in about 12 levels down, but not only that, you could be having several dreams at once (each with several levels down), and most of the times some of these dreams have to share things with one another in order to make sense or they break.

So Programming is like Inception, but Deeper, In Parallel and Synchronized.”

Photo by Smif

Way to go Apple, your iPhone App Store policies remind me of Latin American Dictatorships.

It will be easy to tell by developers that it’s a lot better to sell on Android, eventually the Android userbase will be way bigger than that of the iPhone (iPad). You missed your boat on the Apple TV (for not taking that project seriously), Android on the TV might make it to our living rooms thus creating a huge gaming market. You’re doomed if you don’t change your ways, milk the AppStore while you can.

So if you raise the price of YOUR app, you get banned? or was it because Tommy told you the truth of how much your AppStore sucks?

NOTE: I’m a Mac user, I love Apple most of Apple products but I just have a huge beef with the iPhone OS, the iPad and the AppStore. It is what it is, I’m not a blind fanboy.

At first we thought the helicopter was there to pick somebody that had an accident, it was really cool to see that it wasn’t a person it was carrying but what looks like Air Conditioning Equipment.

See more pictures after the break
(more…)

I often play around with keywords in Google Suggest to see what could be what most people type.

It’s very interesting and sad to see what are the top 10 “why” questions from about 148 million people that used Google as of last month.

Top 10 “Why” questions in English

Why Poems?
I guess some people are very jaded, or don’t get why do we have poems. I’d say this would be the same as “Why Music”, “Why Movies”. Sad… or maybe they’re looking for poems that ask the question “why”? I don’t get this one.

The top 3 US states asking “Why Poems” are Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

why live
A lot of suicidal people looking for answers in Google, crazy shit. Let’s hope Google’s first result page is very encouraging to keep living. The first result goes to suicide.com. Again, Sad, but interesting to see that there’s a lot of people who ask themselves that question. I must be one very happy person, never crossed my mind such a thing.

The top 3 states with suicidal tendencies on Google seem to be Kentucky, Iowa and Rhode Island. Things must be hard in those places these days.

why jokes
There seems to be a bunch of “why” jokes around. The first search result takes you to a long ass list of jokes that start with the word “why”. For example:

Why is “abbreviated” such a long word?

The top 3 states in need of why jokes are currently Michigan, Indiana and Iowa.

why jason aldean
No clue who’s this dude, but let’s see why they ask why him…
First search result takes you to a YouTube Music video of a country love song. Good choice of a word, I bet there’s been lots of “Why” songs, but this one is the one kicking ass now.

The top 3 states where this question comes from are, West Virginia, Kentucky and Maine.

why is the sky blue
This is a very popular one, and Google often uses it on it’s PSAs for Google Adsense.
The answer lies in light and the atmosphere.

The top 3 states wondering about the color of the sky are Michigan, Kentucky and Utah. They must have pretty blue skies over there.

why to men have nipples
Good one! This is a very tough to answer, there’s really no definite explanation, mine would be that we have still a few thousand or more years to go until we mutate and get rid of them, pretty much evolution in the process is my belief.

Top 3 states wondering about man nipples are Nevada, Tennessee and Indiana.

why did michael jackson turn white
This one truly cracked me up. Out of all why questions in the world, the majority of people using google are wondering about what happen to one man. Leave the poor guy alone. The first search result takes you to a cronological essay about Michael Jackson’s morphosis, I bet it does answer it. The second result is an answer in Wiki Answers which tells us 3 theories, but in the end none knows how he actually did it, it’s all rumors that eventually will come out unless all the parties involved die and no documentation is left behind about the procedures.

I guess if someone knew how to do this and it was an easy process there would already be one huge industry for self-racists to convert to white. I know a few myself that would be inline as soon as they’d have the money.

The top 3 states wondering about Michael Jackson’s pigmentation changes are Florida, New York and New Jersey.

why do dogs eat grass
So I guess a lot of Dog owners can’t figure out why their carnivore pets tend to be mowing the lawn or eating grass and then vomiting.

Top 3 dog owner states wondering about this behaviour are Oklahoma, Louisiana and Kentucky.

I’m starting to think that people in Kentucky need to have a lot of questions answered, where the hell did we ask for questions before Google, I guess we lived in a world ruled by rumors and miss-information since most people didn’t really go to the library to have mundane questions answered.

why did I get married
Again, some people think of Google as their psychologist or as a frustration release text box… or maybe they’re just looking to find out about a movie, which comes up as the first search result.

Top 3 states having second thoughts about their marriage are Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.
What’s with the people in the south of this country?

why is my poop green
This tendency seemed to have picked up towards the end of 2008 on Google trends. The first result takes us to a Yahoo! Answers page, and it seems to be related with vegetarians pooping green, with iron, with colorants in food, or deficiencies in the digestive process.

Top 3 states pooping green are Wisconsin, Missouri and Indiana.

Sources: Google and Google Trends.