September 2008

There were 11 posts published in September 2008 (this is page 1 of 2).

Parque Central – Base Jumping from the Twin Towers in Caracas

During the summer of 2008, a couple of Venezuelan Parachute Base Jumpers (Carlos and Pedro) got together with Propela Productions to make a short film about an extreme dream of the jumpers, Jump from the Base of one of the Twin Towers of Parque Central in Caracas, Venezuela.

They format published in YouTube was divided in 2 parts, this is part 2. You can see Part One here.

Very nicely planned, produced, executed and edited (to my taste).

Let’s keep an eye on these guys, anybody knows if they have a site? I just got this from Nosgoth

Mac Bangs Dennis’ Mom – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Best damn funny/controversial show I’ve seen. Seinfeld on steroids for what’s left of the decade.

From wikipedia:

The series deals with a variety of controversial topics, including abortion, gun control, physical disabilities, racism, sexism, religion, the Israeli/Palestinian situation, terrorism, transsexuality, slavery, incest, sexual harassment in education, the homeless, statutory rape, drug addiction, pedophilia, nuclear proliferation in North Korea, child abuse, mental illness, gay rights, bulimia, prostitution, nazism, necrophilia and cannibalism.

Stream provided by Hulu.

Fight for empty TV channels to connect New Yorkers to the Internet

I just received this from the Free Press organization, warning me about how New Yorkers won’t be able to use the whitespace signals next year for Internet Connectivity, given the Wireless communication mafia is trying to get a hold of the spectrum, and if we don’t do something about it, we’ll loose the spectrum. We’ll ALL benefit by having this spectrum, it would enable ubiquitous wireless internet access, benefiting every business on the internet with more users. That would surely make cellphone companies scared, imagine a phone that would use that spectrum and communicate via the internet instead (with skype, for free for example, international calls free, access to MyBloop files anywhere, etc.)

With your help, we can deliver high-speed Internet access to more New Yorkers.

What if I told you we could use empty TV channels to connect tens of thousands of New Yorkers to the Internet?

The technology exists today. But some members of the New York City Council are trying to stop us from using it.

The Council has bought into a corporate misinformation campaign, and is now holding a public hearing next Monday to consider a resolution that would keep this technology from the New Yorkers who need it most.

You can help the Council make the right decision by speaking out at the hearing:

WHAT: NYC City Council Hearing on White Spaces
WHEN: Monday, Sept. 29, 10 a.m.
WHERE: City Hall Committee Room, enter at the Intersection of Centre and Worth Streets

The latest front in the battle over universal Internet access is “white spaces” — empty frequencies between TV channels on the public airwaves. In New York City, 20 percent of these television airwaves sit idle. New technology can open this unused spectrum to powerful high-speed Internet services, bringing ubiquitous and affordable broadband to tens of thousands of New Yorkers now left off the grid.

Here’s the problem: Councilmember Gale Brewer and Speaker Christine Quinn have sponsored a draft resolution claiming white space devices could harm the Broadway industry in New York City. They, along with the Broadway League, maintain that white space devices will disrupt the wireless microphones used for Broadway shows. Numerous tests conducted by the FCC show, however, that this is not true.

Meanwhile, lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters and cell phone companies have been blitzing federal, state and local governments with misinformation to prevent white spaces from bringing the benefits of broadband to millions of people. They want to hoard this spectrum to stifle innovation and competition. If they win, we all lose.

Too many in this city have been left on the wrong side of the digital divide. The answer to getting New Yorkers connected is right in front of us:

Attend Monday’s Hearing

The hearing will be open to public testimony. Please come and urge the City Council to reject the resolution and speak out for opening up white spaces for a better Internet.

With your help on Monday, we can help deliver the Internet for everyone in New York City.

Thank you,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
http://www.freepress.net/
http://www.savetheinternet.com/

1. Learn more about white spaces at www.freepress.net/whitespaces

Watch all “Death Note” episodes for Free on Joost

This week finally Joost launched their new web based version of the P2P Free TV platform. Since their last launch they’ve added loads and loads of new content. I happened to stumble across one of my favorite anime mini series Death Note yesterday. I had to pay for this content around february when I bought the DVDs on ebay (shipped from Japan), now everyone is lucky enough to view all the episodes for free on Joost.

Hats off to the Joost team for a re-launch that went way better than I expected. Thanks for listening to all the suggestions, I know I’ve been a pest.

About Death Note

From Wikipedia

Death Note is a Japanese manga series created by writer Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata. The series centers on Light Yagami, a high school student who discovers a supernatural notebook dropped on Earth by Ryuk, a shinigami (“death god”), that allows Light to kill anyone by writing the victim’s name in the notebook. The story follows Light’s attempt to create and rule a world cleansed of evil using the notebook, and the complex conflict between him and his opponents.

My Calculus II Cheat Sheet (1997)

This piece of paper is about 11 years old, I created it as (non-permitted during exam) reference to all those formulas I couldn’t remember a 100% or to which I could doubt in a moment of stress so I could double check.

It’s been kept on the pouch of my HP 48G calculator for all this time, today I thought it’d be probably a good idea to scan it and upload it.

Click on the images to see in high resolution, maybe one they they’ll be worth something and they’ll lay on a museum, or at least, a family vault.



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What grinds my gears – Tennis

I recently had the privilege to attend the US Open for the first time in my life, and as with everything I started questioning things:

Scoring

What’s with the ilogical scoring? Who came up with 15,30,40,Deuce, Advantage…
Why such an almost random sequence… why not, 1,2,3 ? or if anything 15,30,45!!!

Why when a set is tied 5-5 do they have to do it till 7 (tie-break)?, just let the first to go to 6 win that set, as if the matches weren’t long enough.

Callings

So 0, is not called zero, it’s called Love? wtf
Update: Simon expained it’s “L’oeuf“, which means “Egg” in french, probably a relationship between the shape of a “0” and an Egg.

When a serve hits the NET, they call it LET? wtf

And when they go into “deuce” it always sounds as if they’re calling the players Douchebags…”Douche!!”

Other than that, it’s one hell of a game, one of endurance, precision, technique, focus, strategy, excitement, I loved it.

Thank you wifey for taking me there for my birthday, it was awesome.

Birthday Trackback (29yrs old – 2008)

So today is my birthday and I want to thank everyone who sent out a shout for me in chronological order.
I also want to mention that it was interesting to see a few things:

  • As my friend Daniel Chang pointed out, it seems that regular people are finally catching up to the internet, I didn’t receive a phone call the whole day, expect from my closest family members. I personally think it’s a pain in the ass getting so many phone calls for the same reason the same day, everybody has finally seen the beauty of digital messaging, and its awesome that everybody seems to have a facebook account nowadays, they just post to the wall and done deal.
  • There’s some clever Facebook app developers, maybe a little to evil, but I received several “birthday cards”, which in fact were Facebook apps, I didn’t bother to open them as soon as the first one said it was an application which needed access to all my contact info and friend info… bastards. But this makes me think that birthday related functionality is a must, specially if there’s friendship functionality already available to your site. You’ll always have clusters of users interacting with each other thanks to many birthdays a day

    • So, here it goes, thanks a lot for taking the time to send a shout, pretty cool to know there’s so many people that did so:

    – My wife
    – My wife’s parents, who came before midnight and gave me a drill for my tool-set as a birthday gift.
    – My mom
    – My dad
    – My sisters
    – The Swaman
    – La Tati (via SMS)
    – Raul Hernandez, now in UK
    – Fitim Blaku
    – Hugo Londono
    – Guillermo Amador
    – Rhona Bucarito and Luis Ramirez
    – Laura Borman, now in UK aswell
    – Felix Rios
    – Eduardo Torres
    – Javier Chauran
    – Marcelina Knitter, my sister in law
    – Nacarid Lopez
    – Honack Villanueva, the most responsible team mate when I was in school
    – Gabriela Noriega, it seems now all over the place (CCS/CDG/MAD/LUX/CDG)
    – Adelaida Moubayyed, now in Spain
    – Felix Berger
    – Jose Lopez Brett, aka Nosgoth
    – Gabriela
    – Adriana Fulchini
    – Daibory Trujillo
    – Sue Geissenberger
    – Maria Cione
    – Roger Kapsi
    – Ale Penichet
    – Cristian Radu
    – Angel Eloy, who wrote me a very nice email
    – Antonio Jordana
    – Gabe Perez
    – Stephanie Alvarez
    – Katay Santos (before in China, now in CCS)

    Google’s Chrome, no extensions? then no go

    Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t read any mention of Browser extensions on the chrome document, I read about plugins (these are more like Flash plugin and what not), but nothing about extensions.

    This probably means:
    – No StumbleUpon toolbar 🙁 (I’m a stumbleupon.com addict, I feel crippled with chrome because of this)
    – No Cool Iris
    – No Twitter extensions
    – No weather extensions
    – No firebug-like extensions
    – No toolbars of any kind
    – No Synced bookmarks

    This means a lot of businesses would die if people were to embrace an extension-less browser. I think it’s a little scary when you allow one of the most important websites of the world to run the browser industry. Let’s hope people will stay distributed around IE, Mozilla, Safari and chrome, and that they don’t become the defacto browser, cause then they would really run the show.

    Remember Google, don’t be evil, right?

    Update:
    Confirmed, no extensions as of this writing are available.

    Taken from the Chromium developer FAQ:

    Q. How can I develop extensions for Chromium like in Firefox?
    A. Chromium doesn’t have an extension system yet. This is something we’re interested in adding in a future version.

    To Mac Geeks
    If you want to build it for mac, you can (supposedly, I’m in the process off, I’ll post screenshots or video if I manage to do it sucessfully)

    Here are instructions

    The first multi-process web browser

    One of the funniest parts of the explanation of chrome, they brilliantly used a comic format to explain the world

    Google today releases a beta of a new multi-process web browser, which makes it look like a mini operating system in itself.

    Instead of the old model where you’d have web pages, scripts and plugins running on the same process memory space (with threads for certain things, like images and plugins), now they’ve built a browser called Chrome which puts every tab on a different process.

    This is in a way a scary move in terms of how big google is getting (they already pwn Firefox), and how they’re starting to push to us a web operating system, I bet this thing will come with lots of google pre-installed (Google Gears, and what not)… but damn it, this is one of those ideas where you can’t help to say… “Why didn’t I think of that, it’s such an obvious thing to do, put each tab on a different process, and make javascript run in its own damn thread”, so this is why it looks like this will be a trend setter for all of the browsers, in the end competition is good and we can only hope the Firefox team already knew about this and we’ll see similar updates in the future for Firefox. The other thing that doesn’t make this all evil, is that chrome is also open source.

    The multi process approach takes an initial toll on your memory, due to the overhead of allocating new processes for every tab you open, but it guarantees more stability, no single page will crash your entire browser since each one will run independently, and once you destroy a page, the OS will truly claim back the memory space.

    In any case, you’re better off reading the explanation from Google, brilliantly done in a comic format (which at the beginning sort of scared me, sort of looks a bit like commie propaganda, but it has its fun parts). Leave comments if you want to discuss the subject.

    It will only be available for Windows for now, so I’m gonna have to turn on my Windows box to try it, grrrrr.