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    January 29

    Urban Legend

    This is the queen of all urban legends. This about the guy that went home with a pretty woman. He woke up the next morning in a bathtub full of ice with one less kidney.
     
     
    This is not another weirdness from a corner of the world, this was an international ring.
     
    10:05 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it
    January 25

    AT&T to Read Your Email

    You read it right. They plan to filter *all* internet traffic to look for copyrighted material being stolen. Kind of unfortunate that there is no way to do that without reading everything (think mime types and base 64 encoding my dear nerds).
     
     
     
     
    Viva la Busha - changing a country in 8 years takes someone very special.
    9:25 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it
    January 24

    Old Dogs Can Learn

    My mother got the flu three days before her travel. She arrived today and is feeling alright, but she learned the same lesson I did when moving here more than seven years ago: skipping work because you have a "cold" is not reserved for wussies.
     
    We have nothing like the flu in Brazil. Of course we have our share of parasites and critters that can kill you, but not much of an flu outbreak. The whole avian flu scare doesn't make much sense to my relatives living there.
     
    I think the USA is way more vulnerable because there are orders of magnitude more people traveling to and from other places here. So while large companies may make advantage of the globalization to dissociate their destiny from the country that created them, I fail to see how this makes the country stronger.
     
    The same goes for the massive food processing plants concentrated on few places. One contamined food batch and half the country has a recall (spinach and peanut butter anyone?).
     
    So I cannot think on the Republican candidates as the "national security party". Some of them yes, of course, but the whole party looks like a huge display of greed.
    8:29 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it
    January 23

    My Parents Left Today

    I skipped work to take my parents to the airport (and run a couple of errands).
     
    They came with two large bags, two small ones and a box with a China set. United did what airlines frequently do and messed up our Christmas by losing the China set (and other gifts in the same box). They ended up finding it 28 days later, but the damage was done - I still think they'll end up paying our claim before realizing they found the bag.
     
    They left with four huge bags, all very heavy, and two large hand bags. They were so absurdly huge that the United "line coordinator" (you do your own boarding now) came to us asking if we weighted the bags home. She said the limit was 50lb per bag except for Brazil, where the limit is 75lb. Yeah! Take that, rest of the planet.
    I was wondering why Brazil is the only exception to their rule and visualized passenger after passenger cursing very loudly and opening their bags to rebalance weight and move stuff to hand bags in overcrowded airports. Without stepping aside, of course.
     
    So if you want better treatment from airlines then be completely unreasonable. So unreasonable that dealing with you is more expensive than taking it. But remember, it only works if everybody is unreasonable. I plan to start today.
    6:11 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it
    January 19

    Back From Vegas

    I spent last week in Vegas, staying at the MGM with my parents. The hotel is very nice, even the older rooms; and the weather was cold but with plenty of sunshine and blue skies.
     
    I gamble very little, mostly while waiting for my wife to come back from the restroom or renting a place to sit on the penny slots. What attracts me to Vegas is the weather and the infrastructure. The hotels are great engineering feats as well, and it doesn't matter how many times I see them, I'm always in awe. So if gamblers want to subsidize my vacation - power to them.
     
    Next Monday is back to work, and today is back to this soggy, miserable Northwest weather. The longer I live here, the least I understand why the heck they moved the company here. I'd take a pay cut to move South.
     
     
    6:17 PM | Add a comment | Read comments (2) | Permalink | Blog it
    January 07

    Jesus Camp

    I just watched the documentary and I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight. I wish the rapture was truth so those people would leave us. It’d be nice to take all other religious extremists with them too. Oh Marx, such a great diagnosis, such a lame recommendation.

    I thought Christian values would be a good thing to teach my daughter, but this thing settled it for me. She will get the values, alright, but without the theism. I'll use the good old empathy and game theory to explain why being good makes sense and why being bad sometimes pays off, but not on the long run. And just for kicks I'll use monkeys to explain where our behavior comes from.

    I already knew evangelical preaching causes bad hair. This documentary just made me realize it makes you fat too. They should all be praying for a cure of diabetes type II.

    We should probably propose a law so that creationists can only be treated with the original penicillin. After all the bacteria could not possibly have evolved, right?

    1:09 AM | Add a comment | Read comments (3) | Permalink | Blog it