Mexico city / Mexico DF

Mexico city! woo hoo! we're here until Jan 11th. Visiting family, friends, enjoying mexican food, a bit of smog and traffic. Good times. On our first day we´ve got our fix of Pozole and Tamales. Tacos are going to be next. Stay tuned.

Pues ahora estamos en el DF hasta el 11 de Enero. Disfrutando de la familia, comida mexicana, smog y trafico. Ya me hacia falta mi dosis de pozole. Todavia me faltan los tacos, pero ya me desquitare.

The beer belly / La panza de cervecero

This's got to be the greatest invention of all time! The beer belly! You get the look and you get the drinks all in one cool package! Oh my goodness, this is pure joy!

Este debe ser el mejor invento del mundo. La panza de cervecero! esto me recuerda aquello de los chalecos con panza... La panza de cervecero (MR) te da ese sex appeal tan codiciado y ademas cerveza barata para los partidos de fut. Salud!

Tiki Bar

As if they needed any more publicity!

But if you have not heard about them yet, check them out!
Tiki bar... aaah oooh aaah...
I need a drink :)

Good times

V

Teachers' strike and the media

This is why I do not buy any of the CANWEST daylies (The Vancouver Sun, The Province and the National Post) or any of their local newspapers (Richmond News, Vancouver courier Eastside/Downtown/Westside) nor I trust their free commuter papers (Dose and Metro).

You can find out what I am talking about if you read the recent article "How Big Media Covered the Teachers' Dispute" by Donald Gutstein in The Tyee.

Good analysis. But be warned, if you only read mainstream media, you might puke after you read this and find out that you have been living in a dream world.

V

David Weinber's rant

I just saw a talk from a guy called David Weinber. He talked about blogs, knowledge and the miscellaneous. Super intersting. The file is kinda big but worth your time. Which got me interested in his blog. Well actually he happens to have many blogs so he created a "table of contents" of blogs where he writes. This seems to be a topic worth my time. I will check some other sites about the subject.

V

Podcasts and Vlogs

Yeah Vlogs with a V! as in Video Logs. How about that? Well here are some examples:

http://villagegirl.typepad.com/
An interesting video log about a cambodian person that lived in the US, married and then made a trip back to her home. The last posts are about this trip to her cambodian village. Very interesting.

http://beccavlog.blogspot.com/
http://seeasilverlining.blogspot.com/
Some video logs from a Hawaiian girl and a Canadian guy. This is the opposite side of the coin (from my point of view) about everyday life in the developed world as opposed to the third world.

A very interesting contrast. I would say that for someone from, say US or Canada, who have never seen life in the third world. I am pretty sure they would be shocked from the "Village girl" Vlog. And someone from the third world looking at the other Vlogs would also be shocked about life in the first world.

Take a look at them and think about it.

V

Happy birthday

Today somebody is having a birthday for sure.

Some music for you:
http://www.bandbuilder.com/rhcp/player.php?ref_code=D31950

I also found another very interesting music link.
http://www.newmusiccanada.com/

Be sure to try it out.

Best wishes

V

Lookie lookie New toys / Quien pompo?

English:
With the pretext of starting a new work contract with a cellphone company "I had" to buy some new toys.

First and foremost a ginormous monitor, the Samsung SyncMaster 242MP. This is a 24 inch wide screen monitor, 1900x1200 resolution, HDTV ready, Component input, PC input (duh), FM radio, etc. Other thant the impresive resolution, the colour quality is fantastic.

The sad note is that I just found out that Dell has a similar screen (24 inch, 1900x1200) for "significantly" less price. Double darn! In any case the Samsung is so nice :)

The next "basic" toy is the laptop. With the pretext that I was going to be traveling "I had" to buy a laptop. I did a lot of research but time deadline crept on me and I had to buy what was on the shelf, although it ended up being a good purchase. Anyway I bought the Sony VAIO S460P at London Drugs. This is medium size laptop 4.3 pounds (approx. Im working of my memory here), Centrino processor (1.75GHz), 512 RAM, 80Gigs hard drive, blah blah. What I really like is the size. It's just right smack in the middle, just large enough to be useful on its own, the keyboad is confortable, 13.3 inches wide screen, light enough to be truly portable, but it has everything I need to make it useful. The other really nice thing is that it allows me to have two monitors at the same time, the laptop monitor and a external monitor. The video card has an NVidia chipset with 128MB of memory (Although I am not sure If the memory is shared from the main memory). Now if I could actually work faster and better...

Other little toys: Apple Airport Express (works as advertised). Microsoft wireless confort keyboard (works as advertised too). I like the keyboard specially because it has the zoom slider and since I am using Visio a lot, it comes in handly. ah, more memory for the laptop (kingston), that one was really plug and play... surprising.

I think the lesson of this story is "don't hold off on buying toys for too long or else you'll end up like me".

--------------------
Espa~nol:
Con el pretexto de que empece un contrato para una compa~nia de telefonos celulares "tuve" que hacer algunas compras de ultimo momento.

En primerisimo lugar el monitor. Un Samsung SyncMaster 242MP. Este es un hiper-monitor. 24 pulgadas con una resolucion de 1900x1200, sintonizador de television y listo para HDTV, entrada para componente, PC, sintonizador de FM (en eso si se pasaron de aztecas). Pero lo que mas me tiene impresionado, a parte de la resolucion, es la calidad de los colores. Muy padre.

El detallito es que me acabo de enterar es que Dell tiene un monitor parecido (mismo tama~no y resolucion) a precio mucho mas barato. Ni modo. Habria que ver a mas detalle como se comparan (dijo el dolido).

En segundo lugar: la laptop. Con el pretexto de que tenia que salir de viaje de vez en cuando pues "tuve" que comprar una laptop. Antes de decidirme, investigue bastante muchas opciones. Pero al final el tiempo se me vino encima y tuve que comprar lo que habia en la tienda, aunque al final de cuentas resulto siendo una muy buena compra. Termine comprando una VAIO S460P en una tienda que se llama London Drugs (si, es una farmacia, que entre otras cosas vende computadoras :). Esta es una laptop mediana de 4.3 libras de peso (aprox. no estoy muy seguro). Procesador Centrino a 1.75Ghz, 521MB de RAM, 80 Gigas de disco duro, etc, etc, etc. Lo que realmente me gusta de esta maquina es que tiene el tama~no perfecto, es suficientemente grande como para trabajar agusto (cuando no estoy en la casa), pantalla de 13.3 pulgadas y muy ligera. La otra cosa que esta a todas margaritas es que puedes conectarle un monitor externo y usarlo junto con el monitor de la laptop. La tarjeta de video es una NVidia con 128MB de memoria (no estoy seguro si esta memoria es compartida con la memoria de la computadora). Ahora si eso realmente me hiciera tener mejores resultados en el trabajo...

Otras "compras necesarias": Un "chunche" para tener red inalambrica (Apple Airport Express), ese funciono muy bien. Un teclado y mouse inalambricos (Microsoft), tambien jalaron a la primera. Y finalmente mas memoria para la computadora (Kingston), ninguna queja con esto.

La moraleja de esta historia es "el que las compras evita a la codicia invita".

Something I ate

Light blue, not a cloud in the sky. I am guessing it's Richmond or somewhere close to the airport because I see this very large airplane passing by, gliding from my right to the left. It's flying very low. It might be a military plane, its gray boring colour tells me that. - Hmmm, it's going too slow, almost stalling. Aaah.. it can't go that slow. - A plane that flaps its wings? holy crap, it is flapping its wings, it picks up some speed and a lot of altitude- By now it has my undivided attention. Then it slides back down, like a leaf, and starts to hover very close to the buildings.

It's a "Y" shaped street with 3 storey buildings. The one in front of me has a semi circular transparent plastic canopy all along the facade of the first floor. And I think there is another one on the top floor or something like that. They look a little bit tinted... Now I see the plane coming out from behind the far side of the Y shaped street on my right hand side, hovering very slowly. It begins to rotate its engines so now they point slightly up and starts to glide up and fordward to my left. I kinda guess that it's having some problems because it does not seem to me that it is going to make it. I get the feeling that the physics of its behavior do not add up. Now it comes slamming down and breaks the tinted canopy with its right wing.

I don't know what happened to the plane. My attention now it's focused on a human figure that apparently came out from the machine. Well, it can't be human, it's too big and its movements seem a little jerky. - It's definetively not human! it started climbing on the wall using only its feet- like a fly. Its body is leaning upward but its feet are flat on the wall. It starts running up and when it's close to the top it jumps and slams loudly on the sidewalk or the pavement, I don't know, who cares, the fact that it walked up the wall with only its feet and was able to jump from the top of the building and land safely as if it had just jumped from the second step of some stairs, that's what has my jaw on the floor. Now I am scared, a thing with that power poses a big threat, if it decided to be agressive, but apparently nobody is willing to find out, by now everybody is going into hiding, including me.

I came out from the back of a building with a patio with a roof made of long palm tree branches. I flying down the broad stairs and I noticed two or three soldiers in full gear with their weaponds pointing at something behind me, or at least I'm convinced that it's not me, I mean, It can't be me...

I guess I will not find out, I just opened my eyes to realize that I am safely lying on my bed with a groggy head. Man! what a dream. And so vivid. It most have been something I ate.

Phones and driving

Is it legal to drive and use a phone at the same time? should I be using a headset? Oh, how about those car kits? I know, a bluetooth headset, aren't they so cool?

Whatever... the thing is, no matter what gadget you use, it is very dangerous to use the phone while driving. You see, the problem is not that I am not using the right gadget, the problem is that my brain is not capable enough to handle both tasks at the same time. I know, I know lots of people do it all the time. But also lots of people cause accidents because of that.

The main argument here is that driving is a very demanding task for the average brain (person) and if on top of that you add the task of talking to somebody else then that pretty much overflows it, it's the needle that broke the camel's back, gone, kaput...

Something similar happens when the driver is talking to the passenger. But in this case the passenger can clue in the driver's body language, grunts, etc and is also exposed to the road situation to realize that the driver cannot continue talking while trying to make a left turn or passing a long truck. Compare that to having a phone conversation where there are no alternative clues, no body language, no road situation, maybe the grunts are still there but not very clear. On top of that the mobile phone has to filter the voice, code it into lots of 1's and 0's, etc to perform the magic of mobile communication, and by doing so the phone tosses out the window most of the little extra sounds that we make to say "I hear you", "I'm not paying attention", "Oh that's funny", "holy crap! that car is running the red light in front of me!".

A little real story to illustrate this. A couple of years ago during the summer I went to rent some movies from the local video store. It was a really nice day, bright, sunny and hot. I was wearing my yellow biking T-shirt and a yellow helmet, because yellow is supposed to be the colour that we can distinguish the easiest, thus being more conspicuos . So I am waiting on the corner to cross a two way street on my bike, the traffic light just turned red on the passing cars, everybody stopped, I began crossing with the rest of the pedestrians and I see this car coming on the empty middle lane, this lane was marked as left turn only. I kept checking on him, and it kept coming, it didn't look like it was going to stop, I am reaching the middle of road and I realized that it wasn't going to stop, so I stopped. My front wheel slightly onto the other half of the road. The car just kept comming, past the red light, going straight to the cars facing him (and me in the middle), the driver gracefully sways to the right to avoid me and the other car facing me, and as it is passing in front of me at about 10 Km/h, the driver gives me the look of "what the hell are you doing in the middle of the road?", and of course he was on the phone.

So he did not realize that he had just ran a red light, went straight on a left turn only lane and there were pedestrians crossing, even when I was wearing yellow on a sunny day!

Let me say in his defence that I think that was not stupidity, it is just too much for the regular brain. The conversation might have turned too demanding on a critical road situation.

I rest my case.