Entries from October 2007 ↓

I’m trying to get back working on some Smart code. I hope to get some interesting job done in a few weeks.

I don’t have a proper answer for my own question: ‘why americans don’t like soccer?’. Well, one thing I can tell you for sure: narration of soccer games on American TV is BORING, I noticed that pretty right when I was in the US. Yesterday I received a copy of FIFA 08 for my XBox 360, direct from USA. In the past I used to play the FIFA series on the PC, with Brazilian narration, and the feeling of the game is waaaaay better. You can feel the emotion and the passion through the announcer on the Brazilian version, while on the American copy it’s booooring. I guess that’s the reason why they don’t like it.

Aqui vai um bom exemplo de falta de humildade e muito ego inflado:

“Acabei por concluir que meu conhecimento estava muito acima daquele disponível pelas pessoas que normalmente ocupam espaço na mídia, e resolvi apresentar alguns pontos de vista que, acredito, sejam inéditos nessa discussão.“

Não vou citar a fonte pra não queimar o cara. Basta dizer que é professor de universidade.

I’ve gotta say that when I saw “Jim Carey” on the movie credits, I got a little skeptical about the results, but curiosity is stronger, and the movie must be seen. It was a nice surprise when I finished watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A very nice and intelligent movie, with a very complex story line. Kate Winslet plays a very strong and spontaneous character, which creates curious situations, and develops very nicely during the film. Quality time that made me thing that we need to keep every single memory we have, even the bad ones. Experiences make us what we are, and they would be useless if we don’t keep any memories.

I’ve never been a fan of Gmail for two reasons: a) I hate any kind of web mail; and b) it had no IMAP support. Well, things are slowly change, and now Gmail supports IMAP. That doesn’t mean I will re-activate my account and start using it, but it sure makes me look at the service with different eyes. Gmail users, enjoy.

Unicamp, a very prestigious university in Brazil, is using a cluster composed of 12 PlayStation 3 to run scientific research for biologists (atom behavior dynamics). They claim that the game console is much more stable than a cluster of PCs, and they had only one crash since June/2007 (no power, and the building generator failed). They also say that with the same amount of money they spent on a 72 CPU cluster using the PS3, they would by only 32 PC CPUs. Another interesting fact, is that in the original article you can see a photo where the researcher uses a computer running Fedora, which is probably what they have running on the cluster. Original article here (pt-BR only, sorry).

I forgot to write about this fun story.

Last week, when I was connecting flights in Atlanta to come back to Sao Paulo, there was a guy, American by the looks, that was checking in to get the same flight. The girl in the Delta desk look at his passport and shoot the fatal question: “do you have a visa, sir?” The guy look astonished, and replied “do I need a visa?” “Yes sir, all Americans are required to have a visa to travel to Brazil.”

Reaction: “what? I need a visa? why nobody told me that before? why do I get to know it right before boarding?“. The girl returned his passport and said “sorry sir, it’s not our job to advise about visa issues“. He took his cell phone, dialed and started yelling: “dam, why didn’t you tell me I need a visa?“.

Awesome!

BTW, more information here.