Last Saturday I went to our company picnic. It is hard to imagine how anyone can organize a picnic for 30 thousand people, but they manage. It is a dreadful experience for adults, but my daughter loved it. I got bored, dehydrated and ate something that did not agree with me (no, not a republican). I had a headache for 3 days.

 

They had a circus act halfway during the day and my daughter had a blast. The clowns were very funny and handled the audience well. I confess I was playing Tetris on my cell phone, but one act caught my attention. They let small kids tell jokes and, surprisingly, they were mostly funny. One little kid went on a long "joke" on how three illegal aliens got to the US without knowing how to speak English. They learned one word each and when the police stopped them after a crime was committed nearby they repeated the single word they knew. They ended up arrested.

 

Ah, kids. They say the darnest things. Who could possible think they deserve an ass-whooping for telling a joke like that in public? No one, of course. After all, the first alien spoke three idioms more than his parents, the second had a higher education degree and the third manages them all. A fourth alien stayed back and got dad's outsourced job. The kid was bitter.

 

 

Today I booked my first trip to Europe, and it is a business trip no less. I'll be traveling to Oslo via Amsterdam. Other than the sticker price shock, I also receive a debriefing about security concerns and tips on how to behave on a business setting in Norway. They even instruct us to keep the fork on the left hand and the knife on the right. Sometimes a piece of advice says more about who gives it than who gets it.

 

Considering it is Europe, I'll stick to business attire, the "traditional education" I received and watching the locals. As they say, "traditional education" is great if you can survive it.

 

On the "watch the locals" department, my favorite history happened to a group of German tourists about ten years ago. My wife and I were visiting a beach location right on the Equator (Natal). "Hot" does not begin to describe it - scorching is more like it. We were both in the shadow, every other local person was hiding from the sun, the beach and water were empty. This is around noon, and I'm concerned about being burned by the light reflecting on the sand and drinking as much water as I can. A car with five German tourists stop, they jump out of it and, as white as humans come, run to the water without hesitation. The whole beach looked at them in disbelief. The guy bringing me a beer stoped on his tracks and watched the scene. I could swear a bird hit a coconut tree, distracted looking at them. In less than five minutes they got out of the water and "boiled lobster red" is the best approximation I can come up with to describe their color.

 

Someone slept standing that night.

 

 

I cracked a tooth last week and had some work done this morning. My dentist is awesome, very quick and expensive. He even has a trained dog to reduce patient stress - the dog pretends he likes you like a professional actor. But this time he hit a blood vessel applying the anesthesia.

 

Holy cow! My hands started shaking and when the nurse put a clamp in my mouth I had a claustrophobic attack. I jumped off the chair and I don't know how I didn't run out the office. What a horrible, horrible feeling.

 

Apparently they train dentists for this type of stuff. My doctor started explaining the effect in such boring terms I almost fell asleep. The desire to run grew, but he also gave me some oxygen to counter it :)

 

Another pretty interesting architectural idea I have come across recently is the lighthouse building. It stacks on top of other buildings to create a luxury apartment. They created it out of very light material so existing structures would be able to support it, and the construction is modular so raising one should not demand a lot of work to put it together.

 

I like browsing architectural websites such as Skyscrapercity.com, but I found the lighthouse building reference as sample data on a software demo (from all places).

 

Janaina, a friend of mine, started a new blog. She was taking care of a neighbor's fish and it died, so she wrote a post about it. Instead of posting a cranky comment on her blog, I decided to post it here.

 

Here is what I've learned about pet fish:

As my profile says, I work with computers. But I always saw computers as tools, not an end on themselves, and I don't like puzzles as anything but occasional fun. I picked computer science as major because my first passion would certainly lead me to poverty. People that say "follow your passion" never tell you that you will starve and never make enough money to keep a family if your passion is Philosophy. My second passion is architecture, but I decided to stay away from it because slaving for 20 years and having others sign their names on your work would probably kill me (or put me in jail).

 

I still marvel at what architects create. When I saw the sketch for a rotating building in Dubai, I almost dismissed the thing as silly. But the project is way smarter and complex than the media gives it credit for. The media, as usual, produces a brain dead version of the facts for their hare-brained, 3-second attention span audience. Dubai's rotating building includes a wind-powered power plant and is designed to be self sustained. It also requires less than half the number of workers on site and cuts the building time by half.