Cada dia se descubre algo nuevo. No tenia ni idea de que habia salido a la venta un album doble de exitos de Fito Paez, grabados en vivo a lo largo de los ultimos diez años. Se llama "Mi Vida Con Ellas" y se consigue en un volumen 1 y volumen 2 en Amazon, o si no les importa tener el arte, la forma mas economica de comprarlo es por medio de iTunes.
I never imagined I'd be as excited, but I am. Truth is I have seen the launch of the Discovery from school (I will post a couple of pictures shortly) and it was VERY exciting. I totally relived my childhood memories, when I played with my friend Fernan, around the time of the first launch of the Columbia shuttle. I realized how much this meant to me when I saw the news this morning that everything (including the weather, which is very HOT) seemed to be a GO for launch at 10:39 today. And it was...
Hope the rest of the mission goes well.
Tags: current events
A photo from Full Sail, where I work, showing the Discovery Shuttle and a small plane and a tree in two closer planes (as a reference of what we were able to see this morning). 
(Photo by: Ben Jurand, a colleague from the office)
Tags: current events, personal
A friend sent me this recently. Three stories with some great lessons in them. This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005, at Stanford.
"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much."
This week, the new album of music by BJork goes out on sale. She's making music for a movie again: Matthew Barney's "Drawing Restraint 9". Here's the comment about the album on Bleep.com:
"Soundtrack to Matthew Barney's new film that was written for the sho, one of the oldest instruments in Japanese culture. As well as the ancient, Björk’s collaborations with her close circle of electronic producers continues – Mark Bell, Leila and more."
From what I heard in the samples on Bleep.com, it sounds very interesting. Classic Bjork!
Well. As expected, Lance Armstrong did it again. He won the Tour de France for the seventh straight time. Now he's going to leave the sport... we'll see that. ;)
Hoy supe de la muerte de mi Tio Antonio, el hermano mayor de Papa. Murio ayer. Me dio mucha tristeza. Era muy querido para mi, una tremenda persona... Lo extrañaremos mucho.
So, my friend Mechie is back in Georgia since last month. I am glad I heard back from her. She is a great soul, a very caring and loving person. She's going through a rough time, but I am sure she will be just fine... I just know it.
You take care, girl! We love you here.
Tags: personal, spirit, blogs
Pues si. Ayer cumpli 33 annos. Confieso que la noche anterior llore recordando a mi papa, que debe estarnso viendo desde alla arriba, pero el dia en general fue muy especial y lleno de llamadas, e-mails y detalles de los panas y la familia. A continuacion, comparto un e-mail que me mando el pana Chucho desde Toronto. Me parecio demasiado comico, porque describe perfectamente las "fiestecitas de cumpleannos" venezolanas:
Hoy como que estas de cumpleaños. Bueno, espero que la pases muy bien, te eches unos cuantos palos, te piquen tu torta y/o/u gelatina, te tomes tu Frescolita, te hagan tu quesillo, te tumben tu piñata, le repartan cotillon a tus amiguitos, no tegas que salir corriendo a comprar hielo porque se acabo, no te den dos regalos repetidos, te den los regalos con pilas incluidas, no te regalen ropa sino juguetes, repartan tequeños (cocidos), perrocalenticos (con salchichas cocktail), el payaso no llegue curdo, no llueva y tengan que tapar la piñata con una bolsa de basura hasta que escampe, las viejas del edificio no se quejen porque tienes la musica a todo volumen, no tengas que estar de portero cada vez que llegue un invitado y tener que abrir 15 rejas 4 puertas 3 ascensores, que no se roben ningun carro, que el mesonero no lleve los sobrados ni los fonditos de las botellas de Whisky, que le pongas la cola al burro, que no te vistan como un patiquincito y luego te regañen porque escoñetaste la ropita nueva corriendo por toda la fiesta, que no pongan Popy….. Bueno en fin, que la pases de pinga pues!
It's official. I have become a cyborg! Starting today, I have been "connected" to my very own insulin pump, which should be allowing me to achieve better bloog glucose (BG) control. As long as I test my BG prior to every meal (the pump 'talks' to the meter) and I enter the number of carbs I am going to be eating, it does all the work for me. This is nice also because I don't need to be getting as many shots of insulin (as many as 8-10 per day, some days). Still I need to change the place where it's hooked every 3 days, but that's nothing (do the math: 24-30 shots every three days vs. ONE?)
Anyway... I will keep you posted about it. :P
Agradable noticia esta. Penelope Cruz vuelve a trabajar junto a Pedro Almodovar en su nueva pelicula, "Volver". Junto a ella aparece nuevamente Carmen Maura, quien fue una de las primeras "chicas Almodovar".
El rodaje empieza en unos dias, segun este articulo.
Hace rato que paro de llover. Dennis se sigue adentrando en el golfo, rumbo a Pensacola. Ya retomo vientos de 115 MPH, que lo convierten de nuevo en Categoria 3. Podria llegar a cat. 4 mañana...
Entre tanto, pues ha sido un dia tranquilo en casa, viendo el re-run de Live 8, por MTV. El fin de semana pasado hicieron una transmision tan balurda, que se quejo un gentio: no se podia seguir casi nada, porque a cada rato, a mitad de canciones, etc. (al mejor estilo de Gustavo Pierralt), interrumpian para hablar pendejadas. Por ahora, los mejores artistas que hemos visto han sido REM, Madonna y, hace un rato, BJork, que canto en Tokio (que voz!).
Update (Jul-10, 10 pm): Dennis llego a categoria 4, para luego bajar a categoria 3 de nuevo, y entrar por el Panhandle, como se tenia previsto. Hasta ahora no ha causado tanto daño como se esperaba, pero hay que ver su evolucion a medida que se adentran sus restos en tierra, ya que el peligro mayor que queda es a nivel de inundaciones en en centro de los Estados Unidos.
Tags: weather
El huracan Dennis se empieza a adentrar en el Golfo de Mexico, rumbo al llamado Pandhandle (el "asa" del sarten, o parte noroeste de Florida) o Alabama. Salio de Cuba, dejando desastre tras de si, debilitado hasta convertirse en categoria 1 de nuevo, pero tiene mucha agua caliente y condiciones propicias por delante, para poder fortalecerse nuevamente.
En Orlando, apenas empezo la lluvia hace unos minutos. Se esperan vientos mas fuertes de lo normal, pero en principio, nada que exceda las 25-30 millas por hora, debido a las bandas exteriores del huracan, que nos van a tocar inevitablemente. En esta imagen de radar (localizado en Tampa) pueden ver la condicion del clima sobre Orlando. Pero eso no es nada, comparado con lo que pasamos el año pasado, asi que puede decirse tecnicamente a estas alturas, que nos salvamos de lo peor.
De todas formas, estas bandas exteriores pueden traer tornados consigo, asi que han emitido un "tornado warning" para el area.
Seguiremos reportando, pero en principio, todo bien.
Tags: weather
These guys are on the ball. Reading some more about them, they're pro Meteorologists. This one in particular just posted ahead of the 11 pm Advisory from the NHC, that the storm is now Cat 4... :(
Tags: weather
A community of weather hobbists has gathered around this blog. Seems like a nice source of additional details and analysis around the weather data we get from the National Hurricane Center.
Also, while digging into this blog, I found these additional links of interest:
-Hurricane City: very ugly site, but packed with tons of links and detailed "coverage" by enthusiast, Jim Williams. In his "About..." section, he claims "The idea of this site is that it allows the visitor to feel close to the storm without feeling the affects,unless you are in the path of the storm." :S
-Instituto de Meterologia de la Republica de Cuba (Cuban Meteorological Institute) - not the best site, but considering they are undergoing the worst of the hurricane in the coming hours, a site to check out, nevertheless.
Last year it was four hurricanes. This year, it's not even mid-July and we got our first one.
"Good" ole Dennis (the Menace, as some jokingly baptized him). Seems like the weather journalists (forecasters and Weather channel folks alike) get some sort of a kick out of these things. Yesterday I was watching the Weather Channel, and it was almost unbelievable the look in some of their faces. They were having a blast! It's like "Cool! We're going to have another Category 3 to cover this year!" I mean: WHAT IS UP WITH THAT??
Granted that there are folks who cover these things (mostly the local ones, who are likely to have to deal with it in person) in a way that's a little less "excited", but... come on! :)
Anyway. According to the latest Advisory by the Hurricane Center, issued at 5 pm EST (some 40 minutes ago), it's turned into a category 3 and it's heading into Cuba by tomorrow. There doesn't seem to be much in sight to stop it, so if it maintains its current course, it's going to hit an area that still has lots of structures that haven't recovered from Ivan, last year. PLUS, they just got the rain and tropical storm-force winds from Cindy...
Check out this not-so-trivial piece of "trivia", courtesy of the Weather Channel:
Four Atlantic weather systems -- Arlene, Bret, Cindy and Dennis -- reached Tropical Storm status by July 5, the earliest for so many named storms in recorded history. Only three major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher) have hit the U.S. coast in July in the past 100 years.
:S
Well... let's hope for the best!
I will leave you with a great quote from a Zen book I read recently, called ZBA:
"Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace within the storm."
Peace to all...
Tags: weather, spirit
It really doesn't matter if you are not... Dennis seems to be picking up steam through the Caribbean. At this point it's anyone's guess as to where it will land, but we'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
Trivia: did you know Dennis was the name of a hurricane back in 1999? I thought they "retired" names of storms if they ever turned into hurricanes... maybe they just do it with devastating ones. Here's a picture of 1999's Dennis "smiling" in front of the Florida/Georgia coastine.
Tags: weather
Well... I broke out of my TV abstention and we got it hooked back this weekend. As I expected, most of the channels continue to be more of the same. However, there is ONE channel... that has become an addiction. The programming is pretty good, I must say, but it's not just that... it's the image! Discovery HD Theater rocks my socks!!! I love watching it... there's more than the pleasure of finding out about things and all the cool documentaries they show... HD simply is miles away from anything else you have seen.
I know this goes without saying, but I just wanted to leave testimony of my amazement here! :D
Tags: media
Ok. Lo admito. Estoy PEGADO a Discovery HD. No puedo negar que la calidad de la imagen de alta definicion me tiene adicto. Esta noche vi un buen pedazo de una pelicula de ficcion completamente basada en argumentos cientificos, segun se explica en este comentario, acerca de la llamada Supererupcion.
Yo, por ejemplo, no tenia la mas remota idea de esto, refiriendose al Parque Yellowstone (el del oso Yogi):
The heart of Yellowstone is an enormous volcano that last erupted 640,000 years ago.
Other massive eruptions occurred 1.3 million and 2.1 million years ago.
The huge caldera, measuring 50 miles by 30 miles, makes it the largest active volcano in the world, geologists say.
Dicen por ahi "Ignorance is Bliss"... ;)
Que respeto le tengo a Lance! :)
Hoy fuimos a montar bicicleta al Cross-Seminole Trail, una ruta de bicicleta y jogging de la cual nos enteramos esta semana, que queda bien cerca de la casas. Hay un pedacito hacia el final, donde se sube una rampa mas o menos decente, la subida de ida la hice a pie, pero la subida de vuelta le rendi honores a Lance Armstrong, y me la lance montado en la bicicleta. Llegue arriba dejando el bofe y marcando 180+ en el heart rate monitor! No en vano, Lance es el champ!
Hicimos 4 millas de ida y las mismas 4 millas de vuelta. Nos gusto bastante: tiene buena sombra y es bien agradable (parece que uno esta montando bici a traves del bosque en muchos pedazos...)
Conocen a Miyazaki? Lo llaman el Disney japones. Ha escrito y dirigido un monton de peliculas animadas, cinco de las cuales estan entre las 10 mejores peliculas animadas, de acuerdo con el ranking de los usuarios de imdb.com.
Personalmente, he tenido chance de ver:
-Spirited Away - #1
-Princess Mononoke = #3
-Castle in the Sky - #7
Tengo muchas ganas de ver la que saco este año, Howl's Moving Castle (#8). Dicen que es genial, tambien! Alguno de ustedes la ha visto?
Que barbaro es este tipo! Anoche vimos un programa en Discovery HD (por cierto la imagen es fabulosa en este canal) sobre el y su equipo, ahora que comenzo el Tour de France en el que el dijo que se retiraria. Hablaron de su superioridad y condicion fisica: cosas como que su corazon es capaz de bombear un tercio mas (neto) de sangre por el cuerpo que el corazon promedio, a 200 pulsaciones por minuto! (did you get that??? 200??!!!) Cosas como que sus pulmones son 50% mas eficientes en procesar oxigeno que los pulmones promedio... genera menos acido lactico (asi es que se llama esa verga?) y de paso, su organismo lo procesa mas eficientemente! El tipo es un fenomeno, que te lo digo yo! :)
Luego tambien hablaron un buen rato de su bicicleta y todo el gear que el carajo usa. El frame de la bicicleta (la mas ligera, para las etapas de montaña) pesa el equivalente a un libro de tapa blanda! El jersey, los zapatos y el casco son tri-mollejudos, reduciendo cada uno la friccion en el orden de 10 a 20%.
Hoy pasaron la segunda etapa, y aunque no la gano, esta bien parado para el resto del tour. Yo le voy al tipo! Livestrong, Lance!
