Brazilian food innovation |
The other day in my travelogue from Brazil with more from Rio I mentioned a little hole-in-the-wall where I ate lunch, which featured an interesting innovation, apparently common throughout Brazil; a buffet where you pay by the pound. It was a nice system, you pay only for what you eat, and you can have a lot or a little depending on how hungry you are (and how good the food looks :) Brazil has a lot of people, a lot of poor people, a lot of people who don't have enough to eat every day, and in consequence serving you only what you want to eat is an important meme. Even the wealthy do not waste food.
One night we had dinner in a fantastic Churrascaria, a Brazilian steak house, where the staff brought a continuous stream of joists of meat right to our table.
You choose which ones look good, and they slice off a piece for you. I say continuous but actually there was a simple pacing mechanism, a little round card which was green (Sim = yes) on one side, and red (Não = no) on the other:
Put the card green side up, and meat comes to your table, red side up, it stops. This seems like a great system. First, you get to see exactly what you're going to eat, and it is served hot, right from the barbeque. Second, you only eat what you want, no food is wasted. And third, you can eat at your own pace. All the accompaniments to the meat are available at a buffet - salad, grains, vegetables, etc... again, you take only what you want.
I have to smile as I recall this São Paulo restaurant was named "Texas de Brazil"; just as we think of Brazilian or Argentine meat as being really good (and it is), they think of Texas. The grass is always greener...
The emphasis on eating only what you want is important, I think we could use this in the U.S. There are restaurants I frequent - you do too, I'm sure, (the Claim Jumper chain comes to mind) - where you get a huge serving, more than anyone could possibly eat, which you have to pay for, and the remainder of which after you eat is subsequently thrown out. Not only is it wasteful and expensive, but you are encouraged to eat too much :)
black is the new black (New Yorker, 11/18/08) |
Nice.
I must admit, the New Yorker staff are better winners than losers.
The 11/17 issue was their post-election celebratory effort, and although there was a little gloating, mostly there was good analysis and some sober contemplation of the road ahead. Now that they won, perhaps they can go back to non-partisan analysis instead of being such incredible shills. We'll see...
"Reflections" (New Yorker 11/17/08) |
"reflections"
The New Yorker celebrates :) Well done.
Another long day... but better than yesterday. Progress is being made on a few fronts, not least my todo list, which is still scary, but at least the first derivative of the length is negative :) No ride today; I walked outside at 5:00 all ready to go, only to find a freezing fog. Yuk. I wimped out and went to dinner instead.
Foreign Policy has Five physics lessons for Obama... These are all good, I especially like the one about nuclear energy, let's hope that becomes reality.
Mitt Romney thinks we should Let Detroit go bankrupt. Me, too.
Tim O'Reilly: Daddy, where's your phone? "The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on." Huh. I've experienced exactly what he describes - the incredible convenience of having Google and Wikipedia in your pocket at all times - but I'm not sure about his conclusion. The user experience of a "real" computer is still too much better. It might not always be so, but it is today...
Fregata magnificens from Panda's Thumb...
Here we have the Infinity Bookcase. It's excellent, but perhaps a bit impractical; not all the books are easily accessible, and it does take up a bit of space...
Jerry Yang is stepping down at Yahoo. So be it... the next leader of Yahoo will definitely have her work cut out for her...
That's it then: Steve Ballmer says Yahoo acquisition won't happen. Well... if they were interesting to buy at $20/share, wouldn't they be more interesting at $10/share? I'm not sure this isn't a plot to sink the stock lower, then buy them anyway...
Ouch in re: Floyd Landis; The bionic man joins OUCH cycling for 2009. Excellent, we will be following his return - and recovery - with great interest...
The 2010 Tour de France is departing from Rotterdam! How great is that? You can already predict one billion people will be there, it will be amazing. (I wonder if Floyd Landis will be in the peloton?)
Excellent: Virtually gone, giant clams make comeback.
Google voice search [for the iPhone] hits a home run. Sounds massively cool. The number of reasons to get an iPhone keep increasing. Maybe with voice you don't need a real keyboard?
Chris Anderson considers the miraculous power of scale. "The Internet, by giving everybody access to a market of hundreds of millions of people, can work at participation rates that would be a disaster in the traditional world of non-zero marginal costs. YouTube works with just 0.1% of users uploading their own videos. Spammers can make a fortune with response rates of 0.00001%. " It is a bit disorienting; there is just no way to picture the numbers of users out there. Probably all reading this right now, too :)
Hard to believe, and yet, not: PC Magazine ceases publication. I can remember when it was like a 'phone book, with 500+ pages, but I guess the days when people care about their PC in that way are gone. It is now just a tool. In fact for many people "computer" is synonymous with "internet", or even "Google". They're going to try continuing on as a website; good luck with that...
Whew, today was a l o n g day; I spent the day working in Vista, meetings and discussions from dawn to dark, and didn't escape for a ride until 9:30 (!); I just got back. Glad I got it in though, I was in a first class funk, and rode it off somewhat. Still there may be an edge left, sorry in advance :)
The Economist on Putting the Air Back In. A great explanation of the current financial crisis and the options available to governments to address it...
The Onion wonders: Should the government stop dumping all our money in a giant hole? Classic.
Apropos: Obama's Car Puzzle. "Even as GM teeters toward bankruptcy and wheedles for billions in public aid, its forthcoming plug-in hybrid continues to absorb a big chunk of the company's product development budget. This is a car that, by GM's own admission, won't make money. It's a car that can't possibly provide a buyer with value commensurate with the resources and labor needed to build it. It's a car that will be unsalable without multiple handouts from government." Are you getting this? GM is spending all it's money building a car that won't make money, while asking you and I to pay for their ridiculous union worker's wages and retirement plans. No thanks.
So Malcom Gladwell has a new book out, Outliers. The early reviews are a bit, well, negative; consider this one in the NYTimes: "Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success." Joel Spolsky does not like anecdotes as proof of anything, although he himself engages in the same thing :)
I think this book suffers from something different; some of Gladwell's observations are more fundamental than others; Tipping Point, for example, was more insightful than Blink. This seems more derivative than either...
Wow, real pictures of exo-planets; the first is FomalHaut B. Sounds like the name of a "B" movie :) These planets are all really big, Jupiter-like gaseous giants, but at some point I'm sure we'll find another Earth... how cool will that be?
Sailing Anarchy has an innerview with Dennis Connor! (Entitled "hell freezes over" :) A lot of DC's observations are pretty dead on, IMHO: "In just a few years we went from all-amateur teams at the very top echelon of the sport, to teams of paid professionals earning something comparable to what they might be making at home as a plumber or carpenter or painter or whatever." I've seen this myself; when I was a kid, all sailors were amateurs, even the best, now, at nearly every level they're pro. Check it out.
Yay, Winding Road is available as a downloadable PDF again. We win! (In case you don't know, this online 'zine was formerly a PDF, then turned into this weird must-be-online-to-view thing. Through it all the content remained excellent, but I missed the simple download and view model, and now it's back...)
I continue to love my Kindle; Slashdot looks at the economics of the Kindle... This is all very interesting, but nobody buys a Kindle to save money on books, any more than they buy an iPod to save money on music. The key in both cases is the ability to easily carry way more content around with you. It is fundamentally better. That it also costs less is a bonus :)
instructions |
How many times have you flown, in your life? And how many times have you heard the flight crew explain the safety instructions, the oxygen mask and the life jackets and the flotation cushions and all the rest? If there were really an emergency, would you know what to do? Yeah, me neither. We don't really pay attention to instructions until we need them.
A key problem in all user interfaces...
This is why affordability is so crucial. People have to be able to figure out what things are for and how they work "on the fly". I'm guessing I would be able to use an oxygen mask, or inflate a life jacket, or use a flotation cushion without instructions, because of their inherent affordability.
Would my customers be able to use my software without instructions? I'm guessing yes :)
maresia |
Each culture has unique words that describe concepts important in the culture, and so it is with Brazil; and upon landing in Rio de Janeiro I was vividly introduced to maresia. This word, loosely translated as "sea air", or "smell of the sea", refers to that warm relaxed comfortable feeling you get when you're at the seashore. It is partly the physical; the sand, the warmth, the humidity, indeed the smell of the sea, but also includes the mental; the feeling of relaxation and lessening of tension. Picture yourself at the beach on a summer's day, with nothing to do but read a book and drink some beer. That's maresia. (Just typing these words brings a smile ;)
Really back today, from Brazil, it already seems a bit of a dream... and I'm back to reality, with commitments and deadlines, and a long todo list, all against a backdrop of steady gloom and doom from the economy. I didn't even ride today, was too tired and too cold, ended up having a nice dinner with some colleagues though, in which we sampled the inimitable Stag's Leap "Artemis". Perfect for washing down great fish and bad news.
Powerline analyzes the 2008 Presidential election and concludes It's all Relative. "This year's presidential election came down to two questions: first, do we want major change and second, which candidate will provide it. Both questions proved fairly easy for the electorate to answer in the end: it wanted significant change and believed that Obama, not McCain, would provide it." That seems exactly right to me.
Chris Cillizza in WaPo: Five myths about an election of mythic proportions [ via Althouse ]
- The Republican Party suffered a death blow.
- A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama's victory.
- Now that they control the White House and Congress, Democrats will usher in a new progressive era.
- A Republican candidate could have won the presidency this year.
- McCain made a huge mistake in picking Sarah Palin.
I agree with his list. #4 seems especially true.
Eco-geek tells us Navy-Funded Wave Farm Under Way in Hawaii. "Ocean Power Technologies and the Navy have joined together to create a small wave farm off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii. The company has installed one of its PowerBuoy units one mile off the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corp Base, with plans to install others in the near future to generate 1MW." Excellent! Although don't in any way confuse this with a viable alternative to fossil fuels. That list has one entry: nuclear power.
You may have read that President-elect Obama is going to appoint a CTO for the country. Robert X. Cringley volunteers for the job. "The U.S. CTO would have to be a dynamic leader capable of speaking his or her mind and holding his or her own against a tide of critics and special interests. Hey, that's what I do every week (sometimes twice)! Maintaining and defending technology opinions is my only business and some people think I do it too well, which I take as a compliment." :)
Has anyone seen The Rocker? It looks pretty good... never heard of it though. Apparently it features an iMac prominently, as a kid uploads video of her uncle the rock drummer, and it goes viral.
Whenever you read about car companies lately, you read how they don't make good cars anymore. Well, unless it is about Toyota. So here's a nice review of the Volvo C30 T5 on TTAC (not noted for being kind :). "The Volvo C30 T5 is all the car you need. The more I drove it, the more I was struck by the feeling that this is exactly what a car should be. And nothing more. To recap: it’s good looking with a great interior, has more than enough power and handles with class-leading aplomb."
I'll add parenthetically we have a 1998 Volvo station wagon with that same T5 engine; weirdly, it is a turbocharged sideways-mounted front-wheel-drive 5-cylinder engine. It's powerful, thrifty, and lasts :)
This is excellent: Popular Mechanics says Supersonics Return: Engineers to Push Business Jets Beyond the Sound Barrier. "Civilian aircraft designers have been trying to get back into the supersonic business ever since the 2003 forced retirement of the Concorde, but they have been hampered by the Federal Aviation Administration and international regulations that prohibit sonic booms over inhabited areas. Now, in a bid to bring Mach-busting jets to wealthy travelers, aircraft vendors including Gulfstream and Lockheed Martin are designing airplanes with features such as retractable nose spikes that may reduce these bone-rattling noises." Can't wait to fly in one, it is when not if... [ via Instapundit ]
Finally, did you know? Unhappy people watch TV, happy people read and socialize! And blog!!
Well I really am back - spent the day catching up, on email, on RSS feeds, on status reports, on pretty much everything. And I'm not caught up entirely yet. My life takes a lot of work just keeping up with all the inputs :)
One thing, I happened upon my BOO! post of 10/31, in which I summarized a wild and unpredictable October. I cannot believe that was only two weeks ago! I guess it was the week in Brazil because even the week before that seems like months ago. Weird how time passes so slowly when you're in the moment, and so fast in retrospect.
The fires around here are terrible: Los Angeles ringed by wildfires. The scenes of homes burning just tear at your heart, don't they? Thinking about all that is being lost... just horrible.
An old post from John Robb that bears rereading: Very interesting times. "Ben Bernake: 'We have lost control. We cannot stabilize the dollar. We cannot control commodity prices.'" This was posted on 9/18, just before I became aware that something was happening, but quite a bit before the magnitude was apparent. Huh.
Michael Yon, from Baghdad: "The war is over and we won". Great news, although a bit, er, under-reported.
Drudge reports Senate will take up $25B auto bill Monday. Boy, I sure hope they don't do it, the automakers are in trouble because they don't make cars people want, the unions are out of control, and their retirement plans are draining all the cash out of them. It has nothing to do with this economy. If they go bankrupt, so be it; that's how the market is supposed to work. Bailing them out would be wrong.
Can this be right? Obama considering Hillary for Secretary of State. No way. Right?
Well, well... Obama meets with Hillary. Maybe they were just catching up on old times. Yeah, right.
I love this [Photoshopped] picture from Sailing Anarchy: The Uninvited. Referring of course to the meeting of America's Cup challengers held in Geneva, which did not include BMW Oracle, the renegades of the group who have created the Trizilla trimaran and are threatening to race it in the next contest, alleging that "anything goes" in the boats' design.
And speaking of which, here's a great shot of Trizilla sailing in San Diego, flying along in just 12 knots. Wow is that thing powerful.
CNet reports T. Boone Pickens may stall wind farm plans. If they aren't economically feasible because of a down economy, then they aren't worth doing in any economy. Wind power is like solar power, it can only be deployed with government subsidies, because it is fundamentally more expensive than other sources of electricity.
American airlines are experimenting with 2D barcodes on cellphones as boarding passes. How cool is that?
I guess this was predictable: Engineering suddenly sexy for college grads. As opposed to, say, financial services?
Here we have failing hard drive sounds. [ via Daring Fireball, who comments "some of the most terrifying noises known to man" ] More proof, if any were needed, that you can find anything at all on the Internet. Anything.
I'm back! |
|
Hi y'all... well, I'm back. Whew. Back from a whirlwind trip to Brazil, culminating in a wonderful incredible party last night celebrating our 50th birthdays!
So here's what's going to happen, you get a peek behind the curtain. When I blog, I use a WYSIWYG tool called Citydesk. I create pages, and then sync them to my server. When you access pages, there is a little additional logic that happens dynamically on the server which adds all the trim - the header up at the top, the navigation bar at the right, etc. Sometimes when I'm traveling I create pages but can't sync them right away, so stuff appears kind of out of order. And so it will be now, because I have a weeks' worth of stuff queued up! Posts about the world, which didn't hit pause just because I was out, and posts about the blogosphere, which never stops, and posts about my experiences in Brazil.
So.
Please stay tuned, and watch this space for updates :)
- Monday 11/10/08
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- Tuesday 11/11/08
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- Wednesday 11/12/08
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- Thursday 11/13/08
And so now we're up to date, whew, no more queued posts.
Friday was spent in Salvador, and that night I flew back, arriving yesterday morning (five hours to São Paulo, ten to Dallas, and three back to L.A.); fortunately I managed to sleep (!), and in between I picked up email, read blog posts, and delighted in my Kindle. Upon arriving I managed to squeeze in a little ride - my first in a week! - and then it was on to preparing for the great 50th birthday party, as we celebrated our "Midway point" with approximately 50 of our best friends.
We now resume our regularly scheduled blogging...
And so the Ole filter makes its daily pass, from Salvador, and this time well rested...
Brad Feld has a few requests for President-elect Obama:
- Appoint Some High Profile Republicans to Your Cabinet.
- Veto The First Pork Laden Bill.
- Continue Being Confident But Not Certain.
It's a good list, I agree with all of them. It will be interesting to see who he does appoint to his cabinet, that will determine much else that happens...
John McWhorter: What Obama means for black America. "The issue is not only the emergence of the new but the eclipse of the old." This is all good, really good.
- "The studious black teen will no longer be tarred as 'thinking he's white.'" Yeah, who's cooler, Barack Obama or Fifty Cent?
- "The illusion that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are black America's leaders is now officially dispelled." I never thought they were, now they don't, either.
- "The idea that for black people, underdoggism is higher awareness is obsolete." Excellent, the culture of victimology totally bothered me.
Maybe I'm going to end up glad Obama won, even though I was afraid he would. (In the end I suspect his effect on the economy will determine how I feel, not his effect on "black America". Still.)
Powerline on the bailout situation: More to come. "Given the latest announcement by Secretary Paulson that none of the $700 billion appropriated by Congress will be used for the originally-stated purpose of purchasing distressed financial assets, it seems clear that neither the administration nor those in Congress who voted for the bailout had any idea what they were about." Ugh.
TechCrunch notes a scary line has been crossed for VCs... "money going into VC funds is now more than the money coming out of VC funds. That line was crossed last June and there is no going back anytime soon. The big institutional investors who tend to put the most money into venture funds as limited partners are hurting right now. They’re other investments have gone south, they are over-leveraged, and there is buzz that some are pulling back from their commitments to venture funds." And that is why there's a credit crunch for funding startups.
A cool new Dutch coin. Really cool.
Ted Dziuba reports Valleywag dies, takes Internet celebrity with it. "Now, Valleywag is going to be relegated to a column on Gawker.com, where it's going to be abundantly obvious that nobody cares about a group of well-to-do twenty-somethings going on vacation to Cyprus. This is actually Web 2.0 coming full circle. In the beginning, nobody cared who you were, and in the end, nobody cares who you are." The crocodile tears are flowing :)
The Sea Orchestra, an animated United Airlines commercial. Beautiful! I watched it several times running, to take it all in...
Tim Bray on discipline and his 2 1/2 year old daughter. I love it.
from Salvador |
This is coming to you from Salvador, and I must tell you I finally got a good night's sleep! Yay. Today began in Rio, and I had half a day to be a tourist before flying on to Salvador and took full advantage; I visited the famous Jesus the Redeemer statue which overlooks the city.
Jesus the Redeemer; sandstone 120ft tall, 635 tons, erected in 1931. Wow.
The statue itself is amazing, but even cooler is the view of the city you get standing up on Mount Corcovado, where the statue is located.
Panorama of Rio from Mount Corcovado; click for larger version
(my hotel was just about the fingertip :)
Off I went to Salvador, a city of 3.5M people (larger than Chicago!) located almost due North of Rio on a peninsula that encloses the Bahia de Todos Santos. Here's a map; small children are born knowing all this, but then, those are Brazilian children; you and I need Google.
Brazil - map showing São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador
Once in Salvador we checked into our hotel and explored the seafront a bit; we walked to the Forte de Santo Antonio da Barra, which encloses a lighthouse at the Southern-most tip of the city.
the Forte de Santo Antonio da Barra silhouettes the sun
Then it was back to the hotel for a beautiful Brazilian sunset - enjoyed from the pool deck, of course, and finally on to an excellent African-inspired seafood dinner.
Salvadorian sunset, as seen from the pool deck
I can recommend the shrimp with the pepper sauce, although you’ll need to have a fire extinguisher handy, or at least a Caipirinha. Yes, more cycling to do…
Elise Aparecido, Leila Vecchio, James Wells, Sandra Martins-Boyte, Ole Eichhorn, Flavio Santos
And so ends day four! Tomorrow, another presentation / demo, and then tomorrow night I fly home!
Today's filter pass on the blogosphere, again from Rio, and still without enough sleep...
Dave Winer wonders Is Obama truly world-wide? As someone presently in Brazil, the fifth largest country, I can unequivocally answer Yes. It is amazing to see how many Brazilians followed the U.S. elections, and how glad they are that Obama won. And how much they expect from him and the U.S. as a result.
Ronald Bailey argues No New Energy Czar (we've been down this policy dead-end before). [ via Glenn Reynolds, who asks "have we ever solved a problem by appointing a 'czar'?" No. ]
Inhabitat: Californians vote yes on 800 miles of high speed rail. Yes we did. "According to the High Speed Rail Authority, California is the 12th largest source of greenhouse gas emission on earth, 41% of which come from transportation. Traveling at 220 miles per hour, the trains will reduce greenhouse gases by up to 12.7 billion pounds annually, the equivalent of removing 1 million cars from the road each year." So that's all very exciting, and I would ordinarily be very excited, but in these times we have to ask, can we pay for it?
Sprint's Now dashboard... OMG how cool. Really you must click through and see this for yourself... [ via Daring Fireball ]
Tim Oren has some questions for Jerry Yang's successor at Yahoo. "If the Yahoo board is evenly vaguely doing their job on behalf of shareholders, they are searching for a successor. So here's a gratis list of questions they ought to asking a CEO candidate, who should either have defensible answers walking in, or develop them as part of his or her diligence process, before agreeing to take the hot seat." They're good questions...
Photos of unexpected buildings - which don't actually exist. But they should... Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin makes images of unexpected buildings; he "combines photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures." I love it.
Eric Raymond has more on 'moogly', his Google G1 phone. "My more considered verdict is this: HELL YEAH! The iPhone should be feeling teeth in its ass right…about…now. It’s not any one feature that makes me say this. It’s that the gestalt, the entire experience, is so comfortable and pleasant. I enjoy using my phone." Not to mention (and he doesn't), it has a real keyboard. Some people say it has a crummy real keyboard, but still...
RAID explained! Thanks to these guys for this excellent explanation.
(For RAID 6, simply add one more bottle to the RAID 5 example :)
The Cleveland Clinic have unveiled their annual list of top 10 innovations in medicine; interestingly, #4 is multispectral imaging in pathology...
Apropos my current location, the Breezy, Beautiful Brazilian leaf-house. This house is outside Rio, can't be that far from where I am!
Pretty different to the favelas (Brazilian slums) I passed today... wow, what a study in contrasts.
Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) finds his voice. "Here's an update on my voice, in case anyone is curious. Thanks to surgery in July to correct my exotic voice problem (Spasmodic Dysphonia), I now have a virtually normal voice... This is a life changing event for me... However unpleasant you imagine it is to be unable to speak, I can assure you it was worse. But thanks to one surgeon, Dr. Berke at UCLA, apparently my problem is solved." How excellent.
more from Rio |
This is coming to you from Rio de Janeiro, my second day here, and I still haven't slept very well. The effort of concentrating on Portuguese conversations while tired is significant, whew...
So today was amazing; we spent most of the day at the INCA (Instituto Nacional de Cancer). The INCA has a long history – commemorated in various Brazilian stamps...
INCA – Instituto Nacional de Cancer
I must say INCA is in a horrible section of Rio, right near the commercial port. The taxi ride over was like entering a war zone. There is an armed guard at the entrance, covering a bulletproof front door. You begin to realize that Rio is like a movie set; the beaches and the tourist hotels are amazing, but behind the scenes there is a lot of poverty and strife. There are 6M people in Rio - it is, for example much larger than Los Angeles - and a significant number of them are literally dirt poor; they live in the favelas, the Brazilian slums, which are shanty towns of corregated steel shacks and dirt floors. Everyone warns you not to get near them, they are rife with drug dealing and gang warfare.
I present Aperio's image analysis solutions to a room full of pathologists...
Anyway my presentation went well, attended by 45 people (as with São Paulo, more than expected), and afterward we walked to lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall nearby. I must tell you I was pretty uncomfortable with that area and would not walk through it again. Wow. For the first time I transitioned to thinking of Brazil as “third-world” instead of pseudo-European. The restaurant featured an interesting innovation, apparently common throughout Brazil; a buffet where you pay by the pound. My total for a surprisingly good meal was R$5.50, a little over $2. Seems like an idea that would work in the U.S.; no food is wasted, and you pay according to how hungry you are…
After lunch we had a nice tour of the pathology lab; pretty cool, an interesting mix of old and new technology, e.g. human cover slippers and a spiffy new German tissue processor. The lab processes about 1,000 slides per day, all [suspected] cancer cases. The highlight for me was the basement where they store slides; the warehouse in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark was vividly brought to mind. Check out all the slides and tissue blocks spread out on tables for sorting...
Sorting slides preparatory to filing them in the archive…
Later we returned from the “war zone” back to our first-class hotel in the middle of Copacabana Beach; a pretty weird transition. And still later we walked down the beach to a wonderful seafood restaurant. Yet another meal which will require a weeks’ riding to work off, sigh, but it might possibly have been worth it :)
Yes, that is Sevruga, and yes, I ate a lot of it :)
So ends day three! Tomorrow we travel to Salvador, Brazil's third-largest city...
The Ole filter makes a pass, from Rio de Janeiro, still with very little sleep...
Slate says don't count Matt Drudge out. Okay, I won't. In fact, I wouldn't think of it; although I rarely visit drudgereport.com, I am subscribed to their feed and it is one of my best sources of breaking news...
BusinessWeek ran an interesting article about Reid Hoffman, CEO and founder of LinkedIn and my old colleague at PayPal. Not only is LinkedIn a major player in the valley (with so many layoffs, a lot of people will be looking to use it to network their way into their next job), Reid is a prolific angel investor and is involved with a lot of Web 2.0 startups. He must be one busy guy, but then he always was anyway...
This is pretty amazing: New MRI screening technique differentiates malignant breast tumors. "Latest results from researchers at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland demonstrate that 'shutter-speed' computer analysis can distinguish malignant from benign tumors 100 percent of the time in breast cancer screening, a method likely to reduce or eliminate unnecessary biopsies. Their findings are published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." 100%? Wow. That is amazing.
Here we have the five strangest Kuiper Belt objects. They are all strange - the whole Kuiper Belt itself is pretty weird - but these are especially interesting. And you probably wouldn't have expected it but Pluto is one of them :) The one that threw me for a loop was... Triton! Neptune's large and weird moon is really another Pluto, captured by Nepture's gravitational field. It doesn't even rotate the right way around its planet...
Check out this Task Manager picture, of an HP SuperDome64 Itanium, Dual Core, HyperThreaded = 256 Logical Processors. Wow, how cool is that?
Speaking of parallel processing, Parallels 4.0 is supposedly 50% faster than the previous version. This is of course a virtualization solution which allows Windows to run on a Mac under OS X. I like Parallels better than VMWare but I have to admit, it wasn't as fast, so I can't wait to try the new version!
Want to upgrade your Mac? No problem!
Global Warming update: Snow arrives early at Snowbird. I know specific examples don't prove anything, this could be an insignificant outlier, but I still think it's fun. When the shoe is on the other foot the media are all over it...
The New Yorker has a new online Digital Reader; I have just started experimenting with it. It is free to all print subscribers, and provides access to all their archives as well as all the material of their current issue. A pretty ballsy and cool thing they did... [ via Jason Kottke, who loves it but does say "Sadly, the actual reading interface is the worst part of the DR." ]
Going back to how the Kindle really rocks, the most rocking thing about it is that the reading interface is excellent. Brings to mind the comment of Steve Jobs when introducing the iPhone: "the killer app for a phone is making phone calls". :)
The New Yorker's Digital Reader
from Rio de Janeiro |
This is coming to you from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where my sleep deprivation experiment continues; not having adapted to the [six hour] time change I didn't sleep until 4:00AM, and had to get up at 7:00 for a meeting with Ambriex, Aperio's Brazilian distributor. After a good discussion which continued over lunch we flew to Rio de Janeiro, had an amazing dinner, and here I am.
Sugar Loaf mountain from the air - looks just like the pictures :)
Lunch was so nice we missed our flight to Rio de Janeiro. We booked on the next flight, and then missed that one too while chatting directly next to the gate. Some things cannot be explained. Fortunately there seems to be a regular bucket chain of planes between Sao Paulo and Rio and the third try was a charm.
The 50-minute flight into Rio was cool; as you land you can see the hills of the city (including the famous Sugar Loaf) and fly over the bay and islands, then land at the an airport which is itself an island. Interesting factoid: Santos Dumont airport, named after a famous Brazilian aviator, is noted for having some of the shortest runways of any commercial airport in regular use.
Copacabana Beach - the view from my hotel room. Wow. That’s just about all I can say.
We checked into our hotel and discovered that the rooms set aside for us had flooded and were unavailable. The hotel graciously booked us into another hotel at the same rate, a much nicer hotel, in fact the tallest and nicest hotel in all of Copacabana Beach. How great was that?
Leila Vecchio, Sandra Martins-Boyte, and me: dinner in a great restaurant
at Copacabana Beach in Rio with two Brazilian women. Life on the road.
To top it off, I had an amazing dinner with Sanda Martins-Boyte, Aperio's South American channel manager, and Leila Vecchio, a Rio-based sales rep for Ammriex, at the Skycab restaurant at the top of our hotel. Another meal which will require a week’s riding to compensate.
And so ends day two! Tomorrow we are meeting at INCA (the Instituto Nacional de Cancer) and giving another presentation / demo... should be fun.
Posts and articles in the last month:
11/10/08 05:27 PM - Monday, 11/10/08 05:27 PM
11/10/08 05:20 PM - Kindle really rocks
11/10/08 05:14 PM - from São Paulo
11/08/08 05:38 PM - Saturday, 11/08/08 05:38 PM
11/08/08 09:46 AM - Kindle rocks
11/07/08 07:40 PM - Friday, 11/07/08 07:40 PM
11/07/08 01:43 PM - fun with gravity
11/06/08 11:09 PM - Thursday, 11/06/08 11:09 PM
11/06/08 10:34 PM - a perfect day
11/06/08 06:54 AM - more reactions
11/05/08 10:20 PM - Wednesday, 11/05/08 10:20 PM
11/05/08 08:05 AM - what matters II
11/05/08 07:16 AM - what matters
11/05/08 06:07 AM - reactions
11/04/08 07:40 AM - the big day
11/03/08 11:11 PM - Monday, 11/03/08 11:11 PM
11/03/08 07:21 PM - the world's dumbest installer
11/02/08 10:38 PM - Sunday, 11/02/08 10:38 PM
11/02/08 10:07 PM - the big Five-O
11/01/08 10:30 PM - Saturday, 11/01/08 10:30 PM
11/01/08 08:46 AM - the morning after
10/31/08 12:31 PM - Ole votes
10/31/08 09:17 AM - BOO!
10/30/08 05:30 PM - Thursday, 10/30/08 05:30 PM
10/30/08 09:18 AM - Firefox realtime address-bar search
10/29/08 11:51 PM - Wednesday, 10/29/08 11:51 PM
10/29/08 11:32 PM - whew
10/27/08 12:54 PM - Midway
10/26/08 11:56 PM - thank you unknown Hyatt person
10/25/08 09:58 PM - Saturday, 10/25/08 09:58 PM
10/25/08 11:15 AM - relatively deprived
10/24/08 08:54 PM - Friday, 10/24/08 08:54 PM
10/23/08 09:40 PM - Thursday, 10/23/08 09:40 PM
10/22/08 11:21 PM - Wednesday, 10/22/08 11:21 PM
10/22/08 11:15 PM - smokey
For older posts and articles, please visit the archive.
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