On eating in my big company's cantine today...
25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Fun | 0 Comments
First, you check the menu: ok, today we have spaghetti "bolognesa" or some kind of beef loaf. Promising. You move ahead to where the food is and see how the food really looks like...Spaghetti bolognesa? Bolognesa!? And how come the sauce is 95% disgusting revolting brown stuff and 5% cheap ham? "Bolognesa" my ass! Dodgy...
Beef loaf? With all the top part overcooked, dark and "crunchy"? Besides, that doesn't really look like beef! And are you sure that slimy thing next to it is mushroom sauce? Are you really sure? Hmmmm, Scary.
I chose the beef because it was the less bad, but at least they had strawberries for desert. _Frozen_ strawberries from the freezer but at least something was saved from the meal. One would think that food in big companies is better but no, oh no, and the price... 4,70Ä. Of course all is different if you work in the headquarters...
WETA Digital uses Linux+KDE
25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Movies | 0 Comments
I spent this afternoon watching almost all the extra contents of DVD 3 and 4 of the extended edition of the The Two Towers. One of the documentaries shows how Gollum was designed and transformed into a computer generated creature. During the video they show several shots of the computers used by the 3D artists at WETA (the company who took care of all the effects in the trilogy) and to my surprise, they all seem to use the KDE desktop environment which is, in my opinion, the most flexible and powerful environment for Linux (and the one I have been using non-stop since version 1.0
) I managed to capture some screens of those computers so that you can believe me:shot 1(this one requires a bit of imagination)
shot 2
shot 3
shot 4
shot 5
shot 6
You can tell it is KDE because of the big 'K' on the bottom left corner of the screen (as in the Windows "Start" button) and because the big colourful icons in the desktop bar. This is hopefully a good exampe that Linux is not anymore for hobbyists and geeks and that we're getting close to world domination, mwahahahahahaha!!!
Outsourcing in the U.S.
25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: News | 0 Comments
Outsourcing has been a hot topic lately, all over the world but specially in the US, where many many companies have chosen to outsource part of their operations to cheaper countries such as India, China or Russia. The issue is reaching unseen proportions and even some democratic candidates for presidency (such as Howard Dean) are already planning some measures against it. Now, Yahoo is carrying a very interesting story about a report in which several american tech firms defend the idea of moving jobs overseas... While I agree on some of their claims, the last one is simply outrageus (and I am not a US citizen): "The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S". So basically, the guy is asking for highly skilled workes who are willing to work for peanuts while the CEOs, CTOs, CFOs and CxOs earn 15 times more. Guess you don't have to be american to find that outrageous...Apple stuff
25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: News | 0 Comments
Apple released a couple of days ago several new products including the iPod mini. Francesc talks about them in his blog so there's no need to write more about themAlso related to Apple, I found the following, detailed and well-written What is MacOS? article. For those who want to know more about the Mac OS X system in general, withouth unnecessary technical words, this is a great resource. Did you know that I've been thinking about getting myself a Mac lately? O
The Abyss
25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Movies | 0 Comments
Some time ago I bought a copy of the double disk edition of The Abyss. The movie tells the story of a group of deep sea divers, working for a petrol company, that end up in a mission to find what cause an American nuclear submarine to sink. But things are not quite what they seem and they'll soon realize that something else is happening down there...I really liked the movie, specially because of its claustrophobic feeling since most of it happens underwater. Acting is also quite good and the effects, well, sometimes they look a bit dated but they're good if you think that the movie was made in 1989. The special edition pack comes with two DVDs and a director's cut edition with over 40 minutes of additional footage (for a total of 2h and 43 minutes), kind of like what the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies have done recently
It had been ages since I last watched it but I can say that the extended edition added to the movie, specially in the end, when we get to know more about why those "creatures" are going to do what they are going to do... (I'm trying not to give too many spoilers )You could give it a try, it's a good one
Eating my own dog food
25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: General | 1 Comments
It's time to start eating my own dog food and therefore, I have upgraded this site to the latest development version of pLog, I hope that it all works fine