Explicit Exposure

Nines

2009-09-09T09:09:00.000-04:00

Things that happen once in a lifetime... posted on 09/09/09 at 09:09:09

Miserable Failure's back

2009-06-01T14:00:00.000-04:00

LOL, Google shut it down, but Bing brought it back:

I Still Don't Have A MySpace, but....

2008-11-11T12:59:00.003-05:00

...now I do have a Facebook.

I finally succumbed and, despite I fierily refused to open a Facebook account for a while, now I decided to give it a shot.

I've been too lazy to keep up posting to my 5+ blogs in the way I would have liked, as I sometimes lack of time (best excuse), a good theme to write about o simply interest of doing it. I hope this "Gossipbook" thing doesn't become another bad excuse to neglect my other chores.

Anyway, my plans with my fragrantly new Facebook profile go farther than just blabbing with old (and new) friends. I plan to use it to do real networking, trying to get my message to where it wouldn't be possible without its capabilities.

I'm still old school and I still believe email and IM are the best ways to get connected, but heck it's 2008 already and I have to move on.

Cerberus

2008-10-07T13:45:00.001-04:00

I saw this cloud formation and immediately found a resemblance with a dog, now I don't know if it may be a hellish or a celestial dog... or maybe Cerberus with two missing heads?.

Class of 2008

2008-04-22T12:57:00.001-04:00

My little Grad

Travelers of the South

2008-04-16T13:42:00.002-04:00

A couple of friends started the adventure of going from Bogota, Colombia to Miami, FL riding their motorcycles. Some friends joined them in California and rode altogether from the west coast to the east coast, arriving finally to Miami.

They kept a blog documenting all the trip, with detailed stories, photos and videos. Although it is written in Spanish, it's something worth to read.

Dos motociclistas salen de Bogota, Mauricio y Gonzalo, para el norte, en
Feb/28/2008. El primer trayecto, Bogotá- Panamá con sus motos en avión.
Recorreran Centroamerica por la via Panamericana,; en Mexico despues de
escudriñar la Peninsula de Yucatán y el centro del país (DF) entran por Baja
California a USA; Otro compañero, Jorge, sale de Miami, Fl hacia Los Angeles.
Simultaneamente, Laura, la hija de Gonzalo, se dirige desde NY a LA para
acompañarlos unos dias. Juntos van a escudriñar el oeste estadounidense, Valle
de la Muerte y Cañon del Colorado y finalmente hacer un "costa a costa" buscando
en Miami un vuelo de vuelta a sus origenes.

Link to Viajeros del Sur

She Played Like A Pro

2008-03-26T08:00:00.001-04:00

My daughter played Viola in a concert her Doral Middle School's orchestra performed together with the Miami Youth Symphony Project's orchestra.

Both directors, Mr. Custis Edwards and Mr. Alex Berti, marvelously conducted their kids to produce one of the best live performance I've ever heard.

Maybe it was just parent's pride, but for me these kids played like long time professionals.

Invention #4, directed by Mr. Curtis Edwards

Idylls of Pegasus, directed by Mr. Alex Berti

My most sincere congratulations to these two exceptional Directors and their magnificent orchestras.

More videos available at my YouTube Channel or after the jump:

Fables (part 1), directed by Mr. Curtis Edwards

Fables (part 2), directed by Mr. Curtis Edwards

Hungarian Dance, , directed by Mr. Curtis Edwards

I (almost) don't believe in ghosts..!!!

2007-02-12T14:09:00.000-05:00

This article appeared today in El Nuevo Herald from Miami. As the old saying says: Yo no creo en brujas, pero de que vuelan vuelan:

Las historias de terror solo eran parte de los mitos de las guardias nocturnas hasta que recientemente fueron renovadas las cámaras internas de vigilancia y entonces los monitores comenzaron a captar y a grabar, con nitidez y a todo color, el ingreso del gato negro y las extrañas danzas y cambios de formas del supuesto fantasma.

Todo, en efecto, comienza pasadas las 10 de la noche con la entrada del gato negro.

Here is the article in Spanish and google-translated into English.

Me Too

2008-01-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

You're invited, but we know you're guilty

2007-06-28T12:00:00.000-04:00

I got an invitation for attending the screening of Michael Bay's Transformers movie. What pisses me off is what is written in the ticket, a disclaimer that implies that they, the MPAA, Paramount Pictures and/or Cobb Theatres, just assumed I am already a criminal and I need to be scanned and profiled as one.

I know treating people like criminals is a common practice by the MPAA, and sometimes people attending the screenings are subject to all kind of degrading and abusive procedures, but anyway I will take the risk to go and "try" to enjoy this movie, despite my cell phone is a Treo 700wx and hence that instantly makes me a culprit.

The disclaimer (imputation?) textually says:

No recording of this motion picture, by electronic or any other means, is permitted. Your will be subject to search and inspection. Individuals entering the theater will be subject to physical search and inspection of their person and personal effects for recording devices and may be required to pass through a metal detector and/or subject to scanning via a handheld metal detection device. No one possessing any camera, recorder or any other device capable of recording sound or images, including without limitation camera-equipped PDA's and cellular phones, will be permitted to attend this screening.
This screening will be monitored for unauthorized recording. Anyone who uses a recording device or attempts to use a recording device during this screening will be subject to immediate removal, detention and civil and criminal prosecution. Any recording device (including its contents) discovered in the theater shall be subject to immediate forfeiture and/or destruction. Unauthorized recording will be reported to law enforcement, and nothing contained in this notice shall be construed to limit our available remedies and/or legal recourse, including without limitation a legal action for copyright infringement statutory damages of up to $150,000.00 per violation.

Soda Stereo... una eternidad esperé este instante.

2007-12-05T23:45:00.000-05:00

A decade ago, the best exponent of the Latin Rock movement, the band that inspired every other band in Latin America, decided to separate. Gustavo Cerati, Charly Alberti and Zeta Bosio couldn't withstand a single day together, they couldn't coexist any longer, they needed a break from each other and so they split, leaving behind 15 years of magical music, sold-out tours, platinum discs and millions of crying fans. Soda Stereo muted its voice.

De aquel amor de música ligera
nada nos libra, nada más queda.

Now, after a long decade, they revived our memories, they transported us to our recent past and made us evocate those wonderful moments in our lives, when we where younger, when we spent incredible nights just being ourselves, drinking beers and listening to Soda.

Golpean la puerta
Por décima vez
Es que falta alguien por venir
Cuando me suba esa cara de gaste
Y me baje el alcohol
Entre el alud podré asomar mi nariz
Y salir a la calle

The American Airlines Arena filled up with the best music any band in Latin America could only dream to produce, to play, to sing. Soda Stereo is back, and it doesn't matter if its voice mute again for another long decade, what we lived tonight was worth the wait.

Tarda en llegar
Y al final, al final
Hay recompensa
En la zona de promesas

Photos and videos after the jump...

Some Photos

Hombre Al Agua

Cuando Pase El Temblor

Persiana Americana

Y sin embargo esperas
Un laberinto sin sorpresas
Y sin embargo
Aun puedes abrir tu caja negra

Bugatti Veyron spotted in Miami

2007-08-16T15:32:00.000-04:00

Last week I was coming to my home when I saw something that caught my attention, a truck with the back door open and two rare cars in sight.

The car in the lower deck reminded me The King, the race car featured in Disney-Pixar's Cars, but it was only after I passed by that I recognized the particular B logo in the back of the car being transported in the upper deck of the trailer. It was a Bugatti Veyron!!!.

I circled the block and came back to snap a picture with my Treo's lousy camera. Don't blame me for the ugly picture, I tried my best.

But Dad... it's not an iPod!

2007-06-22T08:00:00.000-04:00

Daughter: Look daddy, that's the iPod I want.
Me: uhm ...
Daughter: It's the iPod video 30 gigs. I think I'll ask Santa for it, again!.
Me: Ok, but look sweetie, there are another brands. For example look at this one, pointing a Zune, it has a bigger screen, FM radio, wireless connectivity, and....
Daughter: But Dad.... it's not an iPod!.
Me: You've got your point.

SIDE NOTE: I have never bought an iPod or any other Apple product, because I'm an soft-core anti-Apple advocate (long story). I have dodged my daughter's requests for an iPod for the last 2 years, and I even bought her a couple of cheap MP3 players that she gladly accepted but later "conveniently" lost.
I think she'll finally get what she wants, despite all my futile efforts to dissuade her from having it.... Apple: 1, Me: 0

Fake Linux books, brought to you by Amazon.com

2007-06-04T11:44:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine just received a book he bought from Amazon:

It was supposed to be a book about TrixBox, a telephone system for Linux based on the open source Asterisk PBX, but what he got was the legit covers with a weird printing inside:

They were the same two pages from another book about emotional techniques for kids, repeating over and over again along the whole book:

Forbidden to Forget

2007-05-27T19:07:00.000-04:00

A free country died today, a dictatorship has risen.

Why FedEx is not knocking at your door

2007-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

It has happened three times this year. I ordered something online, they shipped it by FedEx and the driver just dropped it off at my porch without even bother knocking my door, even when it was evident there were people in the house.

This is unconfirmed, but I overheard two FedEx drivers talking between them, one telling the other a third driver had the record of effective deliveries at his route, with a hundred-forty-something deliveries in one day. After I thought of it, it made sense of the way FedEx delivers to my address. The only way they can achieve such high goals is by avoiding wasting time having the customers sign for accepting deliveries.

Let's do some math. Let's say an average park-drop off-continue routine takes the driver only one minute, that is, without knocking, talking with the customer and getting the signature. If you sum these, they will add up an average 4 minutes to their routine.

Let's suppose an 8 hours working schedule. If we take off the time driving around, of let's say 5 hours, it would leave 3 effective hours for deliveries. Now, if the whole delivery process takes only one minute, it would allow them, in theory, make 180 deliveries per day. Now, if the process took 5 minutes, that would reduce their effectivity to only 36 deliveries a day. Of course, this calculation is very simple and many other influencing parameters should be considered for getting a more real estimate, but anyway it somewhat illustrates my point.

I suspect FedEx's management is fully aware of it, and they maybe encourage (or a least suggest) their drivers to simply drop off the packages at the door and run away to the next. Even if the package is lost or stolen, their calculated costs of dealing with the angry customer and/or the careless shipper is much lower than not reaching their daily delivery levels. It's simple benefit-cost math, the lower the effectiveness in deliveries the higher the number of trucks and drivers they need to fulfill their goals; and that's much more expensive than paying the cost of replacing that $100 crap you purchased online or even the cost of being the second largest parking violator in San Francisco.

What Wii Need (or at least just Mii)

2007-02-19T22:23:00.000-05:00

Since I got my Wii, two weeks after its launch, I realized some minor features it lacked of, specifically related with saved games and memory management.

The Wii has a SD slot where you can back up saved games, but those games can't be saved or read directly to or from the SD card, only from main memory. This is annoying because you always have to copy your saved games to the main memory from the SD card, play from the main memory, save there your progress and then copy everything back to the SD card, not before having to first manually delete old files from the card, given no overwriting is allowed. All this procedure is really a pain in the back.

The reason why I'm raging about actual memory management procedures is because, in the Wii, is utterly easy for a 3 years old kid to delete all items from memory.

My toddler plays Wii, he has his own Mii and amazingly plays all Wii Sports and Monkey Ball very well. At his short age he alone turns on the Wii, chooses the channel he wants and plays the game disc currently inserted (the Wii resides high out from his reach to avoid him to change discs and damage the hardware). He plays at the Mii channel, the news channel, the weather channel and every other channel, including VC games.

The problems arise when he hits the configuration option and gets to the memory management channel. He usually deletes all saved games just for fun (remember, he's just 3) when nobody's watching him. Every time I'm around and realize what he's trying to do, I usually avoid it by telling him not to do so, just before he deletes anything. But if I'm not watching, he deletes everything.

The Wii only asks you once to confirm if you want to delete something, and then everything is gone. The only way I found to keep my info safe is by painfully backing it up to an SD card, but sometimes I forget to back it up and you can imagine what happens next. The worst occurs when I leave the card forgotten inside, he doubles the slaughtering.

Thus, this is my very personal petition to Nintendo, please, please... pleeeease, make the deletion of memory contents a bit more difficult.

In the way parental control can be applied for making the system ask for a Pin for accessing to some channels and options, please make us able to apply the same parental control to the deletion of memory items. I beg you to implement this feature as soon as possible, after I had to start playing Zelda from the beginning for the fourth time. Not to mention the pain I have suffered after I lost all my records and points in Wii Sports.

By the way, you should also implement harder ways to reset games in the Nintendo DS, just like in Nintendogs... because you know, my son assaults them too.

Thank you for listening...

Wii Crashed 3 times in 24 hours

2007-02-25T21:00:00.000-05:00

My Wii crashed and/or misbehaved 3 times in the last 24 hours. Can this possibly be a sign of something worst to happen?

Last night, while playing Wario Smooth Moves, the main wiimote stopped working and with every button I clicked all I got was all LEDs blinking. I resolved it by taking out batteries and then resyncing the remote with the console (by pressing the red buttons in every of them).

Today, it crashed again. I was playing Wii Play and changed the disc to Wii Sport. While I was waiting the game to load I clicked Everybody Votes at the same moment my son started clicking simultaneously the 1,2 buttons on the two secondary remotes. The screen blacked out and remained black without responding to any remote. I had to unplug/plug the console, and everything seemed okey after that.

Later, trying to load Wii Sport again, all three remotes suddenly stopped working and I had to resync the main one to make it work again.

I don't know why this happened, but I hope it's just a bug in current WiiOS version and the big N is aware of it and will correct it soon. I started getting sporadic unresponsive remotes after the very first WiiOS update back in December, when I had only one wiimote. Now that I have three, this behavior seems to be more frequent. Could it be the console is broken?

All three remotes had brand new fresh batteries at the moment of crashes, so it discards battery problems.

Are you having the same issues? Let me know in the comments.

Wii Play with Letters

2007-02-25T22:50:00.000-05:00

I was reading the descriptions in the back of Wii Play's case and couldn't understand the Spanish description at first attempt. Then I realized there was a typo, or better said, a misplaced letter in the first paragraph.
Instead of:

na vez que empieces a jugar los nueve juegos rápidos y adictivos de Wii Play, U se te hará muy difícil dejarlos de jugar.

It should read:

Una vez que empieces a jugar los nueve juegos rápidos y adictivos de Wii Play, se te hará muy difícil dejarlos de jugar.

Is it possible the big N can't afford hiring someone fluent in Spanish for its QA department?

The rip off behind DisneyPixar's Cars DVD

2006-11-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

My rage isn't against the movie, because it's excellent. Just read all the other reviews posted everywere and see what is other people saying.

My anger is against the rip off behind Cars' DVD marketing strategy. Why in this world this thieves at Disney didn't include an English and Spanish audio tracks in the same DVD, or at least included Spanish subtitles along with the English track. They didn't do it because they wanted to squeeze more money out from their loyal customers' pockets, and force them to buy two copies of the same movie, one in English and one in Spanish.

I never go to the movies at the theater because mi wife doesn't understand English. I usually wait for the DVD release and buy it for the enjoyment of the movie at home, playing it in my already expensive home theater system. Thus, if a movie doesn't have Spanish (audio or subtitles) I simply don't buy it. However, this time I had to buy this one because my kids.

My kids and I do speak English and we watch the DVD with English audio, given my kids prefer it that way. But when I watch the movie together with my wife, we do it with Spanish audio or at least with Spanish subtitles (yes, I commonly watch movies twice).

This time my wife felt very disappointed she couldn't enjoy this movie and had to conform to the very bad live translation I was doing to her.

I've bought every DVD Disney has produced and sold in the past 5 years, but a rip off like this makes me think in piracy as an option.... Did you hear that Disney?

Beach days in Autumn

2006-09-26T18:00:00.000-04:00

The north started to feel the first colds of another tough winter....
..... look how worried we're about:

Las Olas

Sep 24, 2006 at Fort Lauderdale, FL

Wii want one, wii are going to (hopefully) get one

2006-09-14T13:03:00.000-04:00

My next console is to arrive on November 19th, 2006.
Just can't wait for having it. :-)

Link

I Do Refuse to be Terrorized

2006-08-24T11:00:00.000-04:00

Finally somebody has the "cojones" to openly disagree against this overhyped new chapter in the war against terror, and explains why it all has just been a complete waste of time, money and an absolute lack of common sense. Bruce Schneier, you are my new hero:

"The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer."

Stop watching news, stop listening to politicians, just live your life without fears. Enough said...

Link

Firehose

2006-07-17T22:34:00.000-04:00

Update: This is my entry for this week's Photo Friday Challenge: Common

Location: Downtown Atlanta, GA
Taken on: July 7, 2006 at 2.47pm EDT
Camera: Panasonic DMC-FZ20
Exposure: 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture: f/4
Focal Length: 10.9 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Exposure Bias: 0/1677721600 EV
Cropped: Yes
Flash: Flash did not fire

Automotive

2006-06-16T19:30:00.000-04:00

My entry for this week's Photo Friday Challenge: Automotive (link# 370)