Why, this:

Booger, Kitty and Mousey, along with their friend Gregory. Just amazing. Some nations should learn from them.

Now it all adds up! This explains everything!

Check this site. I couldn’t help but chuckle at some of the stuff there. For those lazy enough not to click, here’s an excerpt:

1. Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.
2. Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly.
3. Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter.
4. The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken.
5. All principles of gravity are negated by fear.
6. As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once.
7. Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot.
8. Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent.
9. Everything falls faster than an anvil.
10. For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite vengeance.

And my personal favorite, which shows what can be accomplished when you decide to make something that doesn’t follow the common sets of rules, but instead invents rules of it’s own: “Rules we obeyed in the Coyote/Road Runner Series”, from an autobiography of Chuck Young, creator of the Road Runner cartoons:

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going “Beep Beep!”
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote-only his own ineptitude or the failure of the ACME products.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime — IF he were not a fanatic. “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim” -George Santayana.
4. No dialogue ever, except “Beep Beep!”
5. The road Runner must stay on the road — otherwise, logically, he would not be called Road Runner.
6. All Action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the Southwest American desert.
7. All material, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the ACME Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.

Be sure to check the link for more stuff, as well as examples for each of the laws.

Today I found out the actual, real life meaning of the internet expression “LOL”, as I was watching this video. It’s a screen-cast of some guy playing an extremely difficult Super Mario Bros hack, complete with voice over from the player.

While the video itself is good for the crazy gameplay alone, what truly makes it fun are the remarks made by the player, as well as the constant cursing after any given frustrating death (which there are plenty of). My favorite quote is “This is worse than reading the YouTube comments”. To all my gamer friends, you HAVE to watch this.

Here’s the link again for those who did not catch it before.

I found this amazing virtual barbershop. It’s an example of something called binaural recording, which is basically sound recorded using two microphones were the ears would be. The brain fills in the rest of the information, and the result is incredible surround sound, that actually makes you feel you are there.  You can actually hear the scissors and hair trimmer just like you would if you were getting a haircut.

Click the link, hit play, and close your eyes. You won’t be disappointed.

As my spam folder contents constantly reminds me, size has always been a problem for humanity, and many great efforts have been made to study both the big and the small. The results, however, have never been very clear or ultimately interesting for the average person.

However, today I stumbled upon the best study/comparison of sizes, from a single proton, to some of the huge stars as Antares. Click here to see it. A word of caution, though, you will lose lot of time clicking away, if you’re even a bit curious. Very interesting facts and commentaries are also provided. Check it out.

Man, every day I wish more and more that I had the opportunity to attend MIT. It’s just like the greatest place on earth for a geek to go. They recently made open and free their course catalog via the web, which showed me how a real and well put class should be (not that my college was bad at all, but there’s just no comparison). Now the same group that came up with Lego Mindstorms (next to ninjas and transformers for greatest invention ever) came up with one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, one that I’ll add to my list of “why didn’t I have this when I was a kid?“.

Scratch is a simple and intuitive programing environment designed for kids 8 and up. It’s based on an entirely graphical model, with programming instructions, variables, sounds, images, actions, et all, modeled after Lego-like figures that you can drag and paste to each other. Depending on what you put together, you may get anything from a silly cat walking side to side and making sounds (which I did), to a full-fledged Donkey Kong game. The whole thing is really intuitive and easy to use, with colors differentiating the types of constructs, and shapes letting you know what construct you can paste to another. And that’s not all. From Ars-Technica:

Scratch saves its finished files in its own .SB format, but users can upload their finished products to the Scratch home page with the click of a button, a very Web 2.0 addition. Other users can then download and comment on these projects. Some of the projects are simple, but others are more involved. An addictive puzzle game called Slider by Steve LoBasso consumed much of the time I was meant to be writing this review.

There is also an option to save the finished project without uploading it to the Scratch web site, which involves downloading a Java applet from the Scratch web site. The Java applet, which calls the .SB file directly, can then be embedded in any web site.

The program is currently available for Windows and Mac OS X, with a Linux version supposedly on the way (though I doubt there’s a lot of kids out there that use Linux). I downloaded it and tried it on my Macbook, and it’s really fast, stable and intuitive. For more information on the project, click here. As we say in my country, whoever invented this, has never seen a platano, not even in pictures.

This is kind of a continuation of a previous discussion, based on new evidence. The other day I was talking to a friend at work, who was telling me about some issues he’s having with his new Vista laptop. Since he bought it in Argentina, the OS language was in spanish, which tends to be a pain to use if you’re accustomed to using the english version. From Excel formulas changing names, different keyboard shortcuts, to badly-programmed applications that install to “Program Files” instead of “Archivos de Programas” (hard-coded paths instead of using the system variables), a lot of things go wrong.

So he was telling me how he wanted to set it to be English. I know from past Windows experience that doing so it’s a bit short of impossible, but bear with me for a second. After contacting Microsoft support, they told him that he needed to purchase a language pack. It was only about US$25, so he got it. Now comes the interesting part. When he was going to install it, some error occurred that prevented him from doing it. He contacted Microsoft support again, and now they told him, “oh, you need to have Vista Ultimate to be able to apply language packs”. WTF?? Now he has to upgrade to a really expensive version that has a lot of stuff he will never need, just so he can apply a legally obtained language pack? And there’s the aggravating that at the time of purchase he already had to upgrade to the Business edition, cause something as simple as the networking and mail in the Home Premium (I wonder what that premium accounts for) don’t work properly in a business environment.

So, again, why do people bend over time and again for Microsoft, when there are many different options available out there, that are at the very, very least just as good as Windows, minus the hassles, bugs and frustrations? Not only are Windows users the only users in the world that have to spend time dealing with viruses, spyware, BSOD’s and whatnot, now they are getting crap from the actual support, asking them for their first born just to switch languages. A feature, by the way, that it’s a default in every other desktop OS. Mac OS X has every language I can think of, and Linux has many that I don’t even know how to pronounce the name, so it’s not like something that it’s a big deal, neither commercially nor free.

But, when thoughts like this enter my mind, I’m suddenly reminded of two conversations I’ve had not that long ago, with people I regard(ed) as smart, that immediately made me understood the common view of the average internet/email/office Joe:

• Linux?? That’s for hackers!!”
• Mac?? That’s for publicists!!”

Geeks like me will say that the users are just stupid, and that they use it cause it’s all they’ve seen and it’s “safe” (a very geeky thing to say, I know), but the non-geek in me better asks himself, at what point do people become so brainwashed as to embrace those ideas and completely ignore the other options? It may have been acceptable to think that way in past years, when the other OS’s popularity perhaps wasn’t as widespread, but now it’s just inexplicable. Even long time Windows apologists are at least acknowledging the competition. Every time someone does that, a penguin gets it wings, and a tree sprouts an apple.

No offense intended to those who liked it, but WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP!! I’m sorry, I can’t help it. It just felt like my childhood memories were raped by Michael Bay. I don’t understand how Steven Spielberg put his money on the project. Sure, lots of people will see it, and it will certainly be a box office hit based on hype alone, but man, how do people sponsor such disasters? NOTE: If you haven’t watched it yet, don’t read ahead, there may be spoilers.

The whole movie was a joke, LITERALLY, and a bad one too. The first joke made me laugh, the second, made me chuckle, but by the third all the way to N > 20, I had enough. Was it supposed to be a comedy? If it was, then hats off, it equaled Dumb and Dumber. But that’s not what Transformers fans want, we want want big-ass robots kicking the shit out of each other, and this was just not it.

I only liked the about 20-30 minutes that the robots were on scene and no one was talking. As soon as anybody opened their mouth, the whole thing falls apart. Don’t get me wrong, the robots looked awesome, prime beheading a Decepticon, and Megatron breaking Jazz in half specially comes to mind. Even the story wasn’t really that bad at it’s core, but the way it was handled, that’s my problem with it. It’s like every single character, robots included, were told to make a fool of themselves (president: “Get me a ding-dong!” WTF?). Don’t agree? Then name me one character that didn’t. Just one (maybe the hot chick, but that’s because all she was supposed to do was look hot, which I’ll say, she excelled at). Even Prime, who almost saved the movie, if it weren’t for the worst scene in the history of 80’s remakes, i.e., the whole hide-and-seek at Sam’s house.

Another thing, what’s up with the ads? I know that GMC sponsored the movie, but they pushed it too far. Even Panasonic seems to have put some money down. Or the all-spark, how it reduced itself was just stupid. Granted, this is a movie about transforming cars, but even simple physics are insulted here. Even if somehow the giant sized cube, using alien tech, was able to fold itself to the size of a box, wouldn’t it be the same amount of mass, and weigh the same? Yet we see Sam running around with it. And there were soooo many scenes that added nothing to the story. I counted it, and you can check it again, for the first 90 minutes, there is only like 15 minutes of good robot action/development. The rest is just lame attempts at comedy. The masturbation thing, again, WTF!!

I could go on, but you get my point. I know most people were thrilled to see how lifelike the robots looked like, and how there were some awesome (short) sequences, but think more throughly about the movie you saw, and tell me if it’s not stupid. If not, then please correct me, and help me change my mind about what a rape that movie was. I will certainly NOT be watching it again, unless someone cuts out just the robot battles, and send it to me.