I went from thinking of Object Oriented programming as this awesome paradigm I should know about, I remember having all these mental models of what objects where and learning all this new vocabulary that I really didn’t fully grasp until years later when I was designing and implementing bigger more complex systems.

At first I remember looking at objects as a collection of functions that kept a common reference to keep internal states and missing out on all the great features of inheritance and abstract classes. Looking at “interfaces” and using them like a recipe without really knowing their true power, I look at the past and I was so limited, hopefully I’ll look at this post 15 years from now and think the same.

There’s lots of books out there on best programming practices you should follow, on this short post I’ll share with you 6 principles that I follow that I promise you will make your code behave really well, less bug prone, simple and elegant when it comes to Object Oriented design. This advice will probably apply better if you code in a language like Java or C#, I’m not sure if you can say these principles will apply 100% to other OO languages (for instance those that allow multiple inheritance)

1. DRY principle.
This is one of the most preached ones, and I will also preach it. DO NOT REPEAT YOURSELF. Really, don’t. It ALWAYS comes to bite you in the ass if you have repeated code. Only repeat yourself if it’s too hard to not do so or if you’re absolutely sure that you won’t repeat yourself a third time, but I promise you that third time will come if it’s not for you for the next guy maintaining that code.

The obvious benefit of not repeating yourself is that you get to maintain code only in one place, the added benefit will be that your code will almost start being written by itself like a perfect equation as it grows. DRY code will be reusable, maintainable and the other principles I’ll talk about are related to the DRY principle in one way or another.

2. Keep the scope at the minimum, be as private as possible.

Keep your variables as close to your local scope as possible. This will save you many headaches, will protect you from bugs in logic because you did something to a variable in place where it shouldn’t have been in the first place, and it will keep things simpler.

This also tells you that your classes should expose as little as possible. Keep your variables local, if they can’t be local, try to keep them as private members, if they have to be used by extending classes keep them private, only use public when you really know it’s ok to make something public and that nobody is going to break the behavior of your object if they play with things at any point in time.

Keeping scope at a minimum can also prevent issues on longer lived objects like singletons that might be accessed by different objects. If you abuse the use of object properties you could have one object changing the internal state of the object while another tries to do something and you’ll get unexpected behavior, this tends to happen a lot in multithreaded environments where programmers are not careful and forget objects might be accessed by different threads/clients at the same time, tight scopes will protect you.

3. Be functional
Sometimes you’ll be tempted to be lazy and not pass parameters on a method and think that you’re so clever by changing an internal property of an object so that another function in the object will then get it. Big mistake buddy. This can be equivalent to that advice from functional programming languages where you’re told that using global variables are a bad idea.
Yes, we have object properties for several reasons, but if the logic of a method depends on the state of a variable, you might as well be explicit and pass it in the method.

This is in a way related to keeping scope at the minimum, and to some extend related to the advice some give of keeping your objects as immutable as possible.

4. Only abstract classes are worth extending.
If you have control over the class you are about to extend (if it’s in your codebase) before you extend that class take a look and make sure that it’s an abstract class. Abstract classes are MEANT to be extended, so you can be safe that you’re doing the right thing here.

If you’re extending a non abstract class, you should probably be composing it instead. If you don’t have access to the code of the class you are extending, things could not behave as expected when you extend, not all programmers are as thoughtful as you are.

5. Keep Object lifetime as short as possible.
This goes back to keeping scopes tight and trying to avoid singletons as much as possible (as convenient as they might be), in the case of java the JRE has a better time collecting garbage and will save you from memory leak headaches. Put those factories to work.

Feel free to disent and share your favorite principles, If you’ve coded long enough I’m sure you tend to think about these things too and I’d love to learn from your experiences.

                          

I just watched a lot of film makers crying about how their movies are being “stolen” every day and seeing rogue websites monetizing on their movies.

They keep talking about how they made DVD deals that make no sense no more because people are watching their movies for free the day after the release online on pirate websites. Why on earth are you putting the financial fate of your indie film solely on a format that’s dying? hint, the people that are pirating your content aren’t doing so on DVD, they’re getting it through the internet remember?

Then you go on to say the solution to your problem without paying attention to your own words “the pirate websites are making money on advertising and we can’t do anything about it!”

Are you listening to yourselves?

The solution is doing exactly what the pirate websites are doing Make your content free and monetize it on ads YOURSELF, use your film to advertise itself and merchandise around it GLOBALLY.

Here you have the cheapest most effective content distribution tools available in history at virtually no cost and you’re not using them. Sharing your film with a Creative Commons license gives others a clear signal to share the content for you, you don’t even have to be there to give people permission when you do it in advance.

When your movie is done, give it for free on YOUR website, on BitTorrent, on youtube, put ads on it and around it, and place links for people to buy your DVD, Blu-ray, T-Shirt, Special Edition Sets, Action Figures. etc.

Make your content available through Creative Commons licenses, allow for it to be remixed, let your cultural impact reach others in ways you didn’t imagine, a Creative Commons license forces the sharer or remixer to give you attribution and incredible things can happen to your film when it reaches audiences you never intended in ways that you never intended.

Sharing your content is FREE MARKETING that can open so many business opportunities for you. And all this time you’re stuck on selling tickets and DVDs, the most expensive 2 ways to distribute your films, the worst distribution channels controlled by box office and retail mafias that will take a big cut of the sales, when all this time you could be saving so much on marketing and distribution worldwide. It’s almost unbelievable that you’re still missing out on these opportunities and saying the film industry will die when it now has a worldwide audience instantly.

Put your movie on YouTube as well and apply for monetization, you’ll get millions of viewers WORLDWIDE there too and get a great CPM rate on video advertising.

If you make it hard for people to see your movie while others are making it easy you are pushing business away, no matter what technology or law they pass, if someone really wants to see your movie and it’s not easy for them to access legally (not in theaters, not in DVD, or they just can’t afford to pay you) they are going to get it so it might as well be you spreading the content, tracking all the views, and monetizing all those free views yourself.

If it works out for the pirates, it will work 10 times better for you because you are the source of the content, you will be ranked first on search engines, and you will sell copies and merchandise, guaranteed.

You’re the only people complaining about having too many customers. Stop thinking of a scarcity based business model, you have a product that can be copied endlessly, why not make use of that amazing feature?

Update: I just want to say that I’m super happy that all this SOPA/PIPA happened, it has raised awareness not only on problems but it’s made people look at those of us who have been working for years on solutions for content creators around free based models. In this post I’ve talked about film, but all my talk doesn’t come out of thin air, it comes from the experience we’ve had working day and night with musicians, here’s more if you are interested on what we achieved in 2011 with Creative Commons, BitTorrent and open minded content creators (don’t miss the statements of singer Kellee Maize, who has come time after time back to the bittorrent community)

Update 2: I also want to clarify, that I’m not saying “drop selling and go free 100%”, I’m saying do both. Giving content for free on the internet will not affect your sales at all, if you remember it’s already being copied for free, it’s just not being done under your supervision. The people that pays to see your movie on DVD or on the movie theater are used to that experience of those form factors and they will keep doing it because they’re used to it.

Have your content easily accesible online, have both free and paid versions of it online, convenience and availability is the best antidote for piracy. Once the content is free there’s no motivation for the pirates to do anything, it’s already free and you can even use the opportunity to grow a much larger community of fans around your content, even if they don’t pay for it, they’ll love you and spread the word about it.

                          

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

                          

On this episode
Wish I was part of a secret society, a great unconditional support network.

Let’s form our own, only smart folks looking to change the world for the better should be in. Thoughts about free energy from the earth’s magnetic field (what would’ve Tesla done if he had wikipedia). Thanks to the 60 to 90 people who watch, I’m not talking to an empty room, yay.

Come to think about it, some religions are just that (powerful brotherhoods in the open), they just have a mythical pretext to come together.

                          

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.

                          

So you can do stuff like this:

console.log("this text should look nicer now".capitalize());
>> This Text Should Look Nicer Now

Here’s the magic code you’ll need to add somewhere on your javascript files and all strings will have a new capitalize() method.

String.prototype.capitalize = function(){
	   return this.replace( /(^|\s)([a-z])/g , function(m,p1,p2){ return p1+p2.toUpperCase(); } );
};

                          

Learning and living philosophy is REALLY important. Just as we evolve in every other knowledge field, we must evolve as philosophers. When some philosophers decided that reality had to be questioned (tested) we came up with the scientific method, which brought about more innovation in the last 200 years than in thousands before it. Just because we started questioning our reality differently than before (like shit was made by god and stuff, we learned stars where massive balls of hydrogen and helium collapsing into heavier elements which make up most of what you and I are made of.

What will the next breakthrough in philosophy bring to the aid of our creativity?

                          

Girl Reading

Miami Beach, FL
August 2011

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

                          

Temptation
Miami Beach FL, August 2011

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

                          

1. Menu
2. Picture: Mode [Enter]
3. Picture Options [Enter]
4. Auto Motion Plus, set it to “Clear”

Voila.

                          

I think the outlook of the future is not so good when we look at the eating habits of the average american person, which seems to be similar to other consumption habits in American society. We eat crap, we buy crap, we watch crap, we listen to crap, we waste time on stupid things, the top search trends on Google show that americans just care about gossip and vanal things.

If the future of this country depends on the majority of the people in it (and not in a brilliant few that drive innovation and cannibalize on the majority), I think american supremacy has its days numbered, not to mention that we’re going to keep spending a lot of money on healthcare thanks to our eating habits.

                          

Here’s the solution:

1. Select the path with the path selection tool.
2. Go to Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color. (Or use the Create new fill or adjustment layer button in the layers palette)
3. You have turned a path into a new shape layer.

                          

I suck at small talk, I like to think about other things, all my true friends aren’t here so I thought I might as well meet some other like minded people by recording a series of thought starters.

On this first episode I talk about realizing that the complexity of the world depends directly on the level of interactions that humans have with each other. The more of us that can do more specialized things, when working together bring technology forward. Therefore, think of all the things that will come out as the internet (and other technologies) empowers us to work together on all fields of human knowledge.

If I get enough traction the plan is to shoot outside, in HD, edit to minimize playback time and save you time, and basically produce a whole season (22 episodes each)

#iwasthinking

                          

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.

                          

Kurzweil basically has no counter argument against this, yet he tries to distract the reader with the Tibor Rado’s “Busy Beaver” problem. He says they managed to compute the Busy Beaver function for a number of N’s that would be impossible for any human to calculate, however, this is merely an example of how a computer can handle more numbers better than humans, yet, this is no example of how logic could be different in a turing machine than from the human brain.

Given enough time (probably till the end of it), human beings could in theory compute those results, given the computers that can do it were programmed with human logic. This also means, that if there are unsolvable problems (on which immortality could well be one of them), a turing machine (a computer) would not be able to solve given the limitations of logic and math.

                          

Ranking actualizado Wed Nov 30 20:50:26 EST 2011

1. @ninja_gayden Total Score: 2230 – Content: 610 – Social: 75 – Bonus: 1545

2. @gubatron Total Score: 1350 – Content: 150 – Social: 1155 – Bonus: 45
3. @HelyPuerto Total Score: 1015 – Content: 670 – Social: 15 – Bonus: 330
4. @Davidilusionist Total Score: 520 – Content: 100 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 420
5. @Arrastra0 Total Score: 475 – Content: 10 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 465
6. @KevinAlej Total Score: 470 – Content: 110 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 360
7. @pachecogeorge Total Score: 355 – Content: 220 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 135
8. @Erika_Pellman Total Score: 275 – Content: 140 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 135
9. @Jhuvens Total Score: 210 – Content: 180 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 30
10. @kthy93 Total Score: 195 – Content: 60 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 135

Lanzamiento Tentativo, 2da. semana de Diciembre

Ya tenemos una API, con la cual hemos estado capturando y estabilizando durante los ultimos meses para calcular todos estos rankings, y organizar las palabras y definiciones que han enviado.

Tenemos Logo, y diseño web listo. Tambien tenemos el home page listo.

Que falta?

- La pagina de Palabra, donde mostramos una palabra y todas las definiciones.
- La pagina de Usuario, donde se muestran todas las palabras y definiciones que ha creado un usuario. A futuro aqui tambien tendremos “achievements”
- Búsqueda.

- Otras paginas como Politica de privacidad, Terminos de Uso, Acerca de, etc, pero podemos lanzar sin estas.

No quiero mostrar nada aun para poder sorprenderles. Apenas respire mato todo eso.

Mientras tanto sigan jugando!, @ninja_gayden felicitaciones por ser la ganadora de este mes, aunque no prometimos ningun premio igual te vas a ganar algo :)

Trabajo

Una vez que lanzemos el sitio vamos a estar contratando personas en diferentes areas dependiendo de como se desarrolle todo. Estaremos buscando programadores, diseñadores gráficos, online-socialites, community managers, business developers y vendedores.

Interesados deben tener cuenta PayPal (para recibir sus pagos), pueden estar en cualquier parte del mundo, y pueden enviarme una carta a gubatron@gmail.com diciendome pq quieren y deben ser parte de diccionariochimbo.com. Si aplicas para la posición de business developer esperamos creatividad y algo de tu visión de negocios sobre que se puede hacer con diccionariochimbo.com (ten en cuenta que tenemos pensando en decenas de modelos de negocio desde hace mas de 10 meses)

Stay tuned, it is happening.

                          

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://otherSubdomain.server.com/lighttpd-status-url-you-have-configured. Origin http://requestingSubdomain.server.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

lighttpd allows you to add a custom header for all requests by adding this in a given context:

setenv.add-response-header = ( "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" => "*" )

For this to work, you must enable the mod_setenv.

But if you don’t enable this module, before you enable your mod_status module, you will never see the custom headers come out of your lighttpd HTTP response header output.

So make sure you enable mod_setenv like this:

server.modules              = (
            "mod_fastcgi",
            "mod_auth",
            "mod_access",
            "mod_alias",
            "mod_accesslog",
#           "mod_simple_vhost",
            "mod_rewrite",
            "mod_redirect",
            "mod_setenv", #before mod_status, very important!
            "mod_status",
#           "mod_evhost",
           "mod_compress",
...

The header output of your lighttpd status page should look like this now:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin:*
Content-Length:5952
Content-Type:text/html
Date:Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:27:04 GMT
Server:lighttpd/1.4.28

Hope this helps you.

                          

freddiew has some competition

                          

Eating is enhanced with the sense of taste, a taste that’s only used when we eat or when we shouldn’t eat. The happiness felt through the pleasure in your taste buds when you enjoy every bite of that delicious meal, and the relief of letting all the impurity and left overs out of your body, it can be pleasurable sometimes that you actually don’t mind taking a shit one more time.

                          

Adele- Rolling In The Deep (Cover)

With undeniable Talent, Good recording equipment, HD Camera, YouTube account and a vision for business the world is ready to meet a lot of content creators thanks to the enabling technology for creation and distribution of media that is leveling the playfield for more and more people. Discovering music and original has never been more exciting in history.

Forget piracy, this is what Labels are scared of, they’re slowly becoming more and more unnecessary.
No wonder they are behind legislation like #SOPA to have the power to scare everyone from doing covers like this one.

These covers are great to showcase your talents to people that wouldn’t otherwise even pay attention to you.

Do these kids deserve 5 years in jail?

Love her expression at the end of the video, she knows how good she is.

                          

These are just to illustrate the slight difference in implementation of these algorithms.

Basically, if you want to go deep, with DFS, you can use a queue on which you’ll be adding the next elements to explore as you traverse the graph.
If you want to scan around the current node, you can use a stack so that you keep looking at the closest elements before you move forward.

These functions use and return a list of visited nodes. If you want to make this a little more efficient, you can mark nodes as visited using a dictionary, or if the nodes themselves can have a property added to them, you can use that instead so you don’t have to do a linear search every time you want to know if a node was visited or not. I left it like that again, to just focus on the algorithm itself and not in the performance optimizations.

Source

GRAPH = {1 : [2,3], 2:[4,5], 3:[6], 4:None, 5:[7,8], 6:None, 7:None, 8:None}

def BFS(start, target, GRAPH):
  'Use a QUEUE to search.'
  print "Source:",source,"Target:",target
  queue = [start]
  visited = []

  while len(queue) > 0:
    x = queue.pop(0)

    if x == target:
      visited.append(x)
      return visited
    elif x not in visited:
      visited = visited+[x]
      if GRAPH[x] is not None:
         'add nodes at the END of the queue'
         queue = queue + GRAPH[x]

  return visited

def DFS(start, target, GRAPH):
  'Use a STACK to search.'
  print "Source:",source,"Target:",target
  stack = [start]
  visited = []

  while len(stack) > 0:
    x = stack.pop(0)

    if x == target:
      visited.append(x)
      return visited
    elif x not in visited:
      visited = visited+[x]
      if GRAPH[x] is not None:
         'add nodes at the top of the stack'
         stack = GRAPH[x] + stack

  return visited

print "BFS Path",BFS(1,7,GRAPH)
print "DFS Path",DFS(1,7,GRAPH)
print "="*80
print "BFS Path",BFS(1,3,GRAPH)
print "DFS Path",DFS(1,3,GRAPH)

Output

$ python graph.py
BFS Path Source: 1 Target: 7
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
DFS Path Source: 1 Target: 7
[1, 2, 4, 5, 7]
================================================================================
BFS Path Source: 1 Target: 3
[1, 2, 3]
DFS Path Source: 1 Target: 3
[1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 3]

                          

Exit 66
Fort Lauderdale, November 2011

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Every aspect of the world evolves with technology except political systems.

If government was an industry (which it is) it’d be the largest most inefficient one. If you saw countries as companies and citizens as customers it’d be one lousy industry, one on which some companies get to even kill their own customers.

How would the forefathers have designed our government system if they had the internet? (I can give you some ideas for that)

It’s an industry that doesn’t allow for new companies, therefore it’s stagnated and the world is in major dudu.

In this talk they propose to use the sea as the place to experiment new forms of politics, medical care, entrepreneurship.

My only concern is, how do you protect those from countries and from pirates?

Blueseed,

Also make sure to checkout Blueseed a project to create the first Incubator Vessel 12 nautical miles west of California, out of the jurisDICKtion of the US, so that entrepreneurs from all over the world can come without having to apply for a stupid work VISA. This is not a project to employ foreign worker, this is a project to empower entrepreneurs that want to have an impact in the US economy and create the jobs we need in the US. Pretty sick idea, specially what they reveal about their business model: rent + equity of every startup on board, the potential to make billions, so basically a technologically nurturing environment at sea, the sea startup incubator.

The world needs to move forward, and lawyers politicians seem to be in the way of it all. This is a very cool example how creative minds tackle problems.

Related Links
http://www.blueseed.co/
http://seasteading.org/about-seasteading/introduction

                          

Here’s my 18 month old, watching Polish cartoons on YouTube right after waking up. Think of all the technology* that had to come together to make this happen and how technology helps to preserve and spread culture.

Just 10 years ago this wasn’t possible. She would’ve had to be in Poland or we’d have to buy a special cable package with a polish channel (which would probably not be available in South Florida since there’s not that many polish people down here). If we had gotten a polish channel, we’d probably have to have her watch tv at a certain time and the cartoon she’s watching is probably too old to be aired.

She’s able to watch Polish cartoons and her mom is happy to know her daughter is having a similar cultural experience as the one she had during her childhood, to reinforce the language.

I’m able to teach her so many things with a few creative YouTube searches or with Google/Bing image search (for vocabulary and object recognition exercises), my baby’s cognitive development and language development eclipses mine probably by 3 fold when I was that age.

Her vocabulary is not only far larger than mine at that age, she knows most of it in spanish, polish and english (there’s just no other way for her to interact with the grand parents). She’s probably listened to more music since she was in the womb than all the music I heard up until age 4.

I think we should all be making our babies consume as much knowledge as possible, the rate of change they will have to go through during their lifetimes will be brutal, and they’ll need the tools to handle it and stay current. It will be amazing to see what these babies will be able to do for the world once they grow up.

High level Technologies worth mentioning for this to happen.
C, C++, Linux, Android, High Speed Inter networks and all of their stack which is too big to mention (the internet), WiFi, Dual Core cpus (and all the technology to make that happen starting from nanoscale transistors), Flash Memory, capacitive touchscreen, lithium batteries, Liquid Cristal Displays, Video Codec Technology, YouTube.

                          

Adjustments
Miami Beach, FL – August 2011

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Pretty Girl
Miami Beach, FL – April 2010

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

NYC Comic Con 2011 – Plastic Man

                          

GLaDOS – Generic Lifeform and Disk Operating System NYC Comic Con 2011

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Stan Lee joking around at the NYC Comic Con 2011

                          

Pink
Miami FL, April 2010

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Batman Poster – NYC Comic Con 2011

                          

No, it’s not a black and white picture.

Brooklyn Run Williamsburg North Side Piers, October 2011 Foggy run. Miami runners are way friendlier, only got 5/13 “Good morning”s back. In Miami it’s usually like 10/13, and people aren’t constantly looking down to avoid eye contact. Gave a lot of smiles to those who were feeling like the foggy weather and loaded myself up with positive energy while burning 660 calories. See you at Comic Con NY later.

                          

Candidly sexy posture
La Carreta, Calle ocho Miami FL, October 2011

Couldn’t resist the opportunity. Shot with the phone.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Hold down [Enter] and [Mode] while quickly pressing the [Power] button (DO NOT HOLD THE POWER BUTTON, just a quick press).

Continue to hold enter and mode for a few more seconds.

You should see the screen barely flicker on when you push power, and then nothing else should happen until you release the enter and mode buttons.

After you release the buttons, your unit should power up and go through the initialization screens.

Since this can be a difficult sequence to do, it is best to keep trying a few times if it doesn’t work at first.

This worked for me and I didn’t have to reset the unit. Looking at the Garmin forums a lot of people are having this issue after a first charge.

Unit not responding to Button Presses?
Say it’s on but it won’t respond to presses, press [Mode] and [Lap] simultaneously to reset the unit.

                          

I remember learning about the USA when I first watched the Summer Olympics in L.A. in 1984.

I remember asking my dad, why did that country get all the gold medals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Summer_Olympics#Medal_table
and then my dad explaining why the supremacy of this nation, and then me asking more and more questions.

Ever since then I admired this country like no other and I wanted to be part of it. I didn’t set foot in it for the first time until 1995 and when I did I loved this place even more.

The attached picture was what my room looked like (when clean) right after I graduated, you can see where/what my mind was set to (the flags I got on my 1995 trip and they were always on display in my room as a way to visualize my goal of coming here). At the time I was being outsourced to code for Pocket PCs, and that was my entry ticket to the US to become a special H1B worker.

Today the dream of becoming an American will come true.

I’ll be on my way to take my oath in a few minutes. Wish me luck.

UPDATE: As of 08:26:56 on 10/26/2011 you’re all stuck with me for good. Howdy fellow Americans, I’m finally a sworn (registered to vote) citizen of the United States of America.

                          

Liberty Island
From the air, October 2011

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Artist Celia Calle
NYC Comic Con 2011, October 2011

I’d say that 95% of her art features hot girls, Love it.

I wonder if the inspiration comes from her time as a fashion designer, some drawings look like scenes from behind the curtains at a fashion shows, skinny topless female models sucking on cigarrettes with a look of dispair are some of the examples.

Fell in love with her work, got a few posters and her illustrated book. Very talented artist.

Find out more about her
http://celiacalle.com/

                          

Super Heroin Mom
NYC Comic Con 2011, October 2011

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Sunrise of October 12th 2011
Miami Beach, FL

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

That little arc in between
Miami Beach, May 2011

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Dynamic Duo
This morning, Miami,FL

Every monday there’s this reset on my brain and before I start working I need to clean the office to start off the week with a good attitude.

Windex + Paper Towels = Dynamic Duo.

I thought these two are such a great cleaning tool together that they deserved a picture.

Do you also dust off and cleanup your desk and monitor with Windex and paper towels? or are you lucky to have somebody else do the cleaning for you?

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.