Despite what it looks like, I had one of my best dinners ever, yesterday. This was at my colleague Zubaria’s wedding. Post to come soon when I join my picture’s with Tina’s, who did the official paparazzi role. I am a fan of Pakistani food from now, officially.
By the way, sorry for the post slowdown but I am in my second week with my nice whooping cough (coqueluche, pertussis) so what I want most when not coughing and specially after back from work is to rest.
[PT] No comments… Gostei especialmente das luzes que piscam “assim”.
Yet another CastroVerdian visit (getting really common lately). Chic Alfred’s and Dealer’s Silvia (Silvia do Chico Alfredo e da Dilar) this time. And for a change, we (that’s Me, her and João) ended up in the alps, Jungfrau region. No snow anymore but weather was great and sunny for a nice hike… 22 Km downhill all the way from Mürren to the Hotel in the valley. Probably they hate me now. Obviously this was after knocking at the producer’s doors at Gimmelwald for cheese, dry sausage, bread, milk and homemade yogurt. And eating like there’s no tomorrow with quite an interesting view, as the photos can show on the gallery below. We even were able to take a picture of Heidi’s grandfather smoking his pipe on his balcony. I took the opportunity to paint Marta’s (Simões) ribbon for her end of studies ceremony, “Queima das fitas” (finally). I tied a cow bell in on of its ends and draw a picture of Heidi (afterdark version). Congratulations by the way (Marta, not Heidi). The last day we visited some waterfalls inside the mountain, quite claustrophobic, draining 25 square quilometers of glacier and snow. Our ears were buzzing for quite a while afterwards. Then we headed towards Geneva again, stopped three hours soaking at the Lavey-les-bains SPA/thermal baths and after completely set in zombie mode, drove to Evian and had some pizza at my boat (with sunset included) before ending in Geneva. OK, enough blah blah blah. Click below for the gallery.
So here’s my little contribution to 30onAIR. Put quickly, someone arrives at you with a camera and you are supposed to have 30 seconds (or so) to say something, in this case about the conference. In my case, Koen the Weggheleire was the cameraman. This was on the second day. After day one, at the end of the day, we had dozens of (sponsored) bottles of wine following us around the hotel (together with the sandwich basket)… until almost 5am! By the way, nice to meet you all: Koen, Robin, Michael, Cyril, Tomislav, Georgik, Rostilav, Antti, Marco and everyone else I might have forgotten the name (like the guy hiding bottles of wine on his pants). Hope I see you all in Max/December/Milan again. Email me at meATfcolacoDOTcom. More info (Facebook, Hi5, MSN messenger) in my about page. Say something if you’re around Switzerland!
Highlighting again my geeks-might-have-sense-of-humor pseudo campaign I suggest you see some of my favorites, listed here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRVqUt4BbXE (Silverlight premonition)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0DfLw2Yu7Q (The surreal salsa train)
Entire collection HERE and more at 30onair.com
Cyril also did put a Flickr Group in place. Thanks.
[PT] Daqueles que valem a pena referenciar:
Conversa numa paragem de autocarroPai: Não sei qual é o autocarro para o CERN. Vamos perguntar ao motorista.
Filho: Acho que é o 56
Eu (a tentar ajudar): Boa tarde. Os autocarros que vão para o CERN são 56 e o Y
Pai (com voz grossa e de poucos amigos): Merci, mais je ne sais pas…O que o terá levado a mudar para francês de repente? :)
Post completo e respectivos comentários em:
http://emigra.blogs.sapo.pt/10372.html
Não resisti a contribuir um comentário da parafernália de belos exemplos q tenho :)
O meu comentário foi:
Muitas vezes já me senti tentado a meter o PDA a gravar no eléctrico especialmente quando vou de casa para o trabalho ao final do dia, pois é rara a vez em que não se apanham pérolas destas. Dava para fazer um podcast só disso. Normalmente enervam-me essas situações mas ultimamente fazem-me apenas desatar a rir (para dentro).
A semana passada, uma peixeirada entre um casal dos seus 40 e poucos anos: Aparentemente ela viu que o marido tinha uma chamada não atendida de uma Araldete (nome bonito). Em 5 minutos de gritaria decidiu-se que ele tinha de apagar TODOS os contactos com nomes de mulheres no telemóvel. “Quem é esta p*** desta Sofia” > “Mas essa é a minha sobrinha” > “Apagas já essa m**** meu grande ****ão filho da ****” (etc). No final do circo, depois de alguns 20 ou 30 contactos apagados, o momento em que tive de desatar a rir e perder a minha anonimidade como tuga: “PRONTOS! Agora essas bacas já num te podem telefonar!”… No comments!
So here’s my first post from Milan, where I arrived yesterday and had a few hours to look at the city with my personal guide, Entrances’s Little Susan (Susaninha de Entradas). We didn’t saw each other for more than 10 years. She is in first picture below:
Second picture (above) it’s me smashing the balls of some bull illustration somewhere in the Duomo’s mosaic floor, which they convince me it would bring me lots of luck doing so. I wait for my turn after a dozen of other tourists and do the ritual. I was not that convinced about the good luck thing but I gave it a chance. It would be harder to convince me if it was a real bull, specially in a public place. There was already a huge hole on the floor. The balls were not visible at all, and they told me they just did a restoration of the mosaics less than one year ago. Poor bull.
I am kind of exhausted at this moment writing a post in a less than 10 minute break between two sessions. Kind of exhausted because after arriving and dropping my stuff at the hotel, wired everything and left the laptop doing a never-ending data restore from an external drive (details below). Then was walking around the city with Susana and Gian-Luca (her boyfriend), shopping at Armani for some gifts for my niece and nephew, and arrived back to the hotel a bit late after eating almost 1 Kg of Susana’s excellent home-made lasagna. And lots of cheese and sausage before that. With beer. And she was able to force me to eat a huge bowl of fruit salad, after all that.
After the food overdose I had to recover data and reinstall everything since my mac laptop, the one where I had everything, decided to die Friday afternoon, and Saturday my company got this new one I’m using now since it’s weekend and the dead one has to be sent to apple. By the way, recovering data trough migration tool into a new installation from time machine backups doesn’t work that smoothly, so don’t trust it religiously like most mac users. Specially applications seem kind of erratic and I might have to uninstall and reinstall everything in order for them to behave normal. The one I need most (Flex) had to be reinstalled about 7 times before everything was OK. I was burping lasagna (silently) between every installation. The sessions for 360 Flex started quite early and to be able to get in time for breakfast (as if I wasn’t still digesting that lasagna) I had to sacrifice even more the few hours I had left for sleeping. Anyway, coffee does wonders. The giant pizza I just had for lunch is probably having a chat with the lasagna (and maybe the full english breakfast) since my stomach is doing odd noises randomly (very convenient for being at conferences).
By the way, for everyone thinking that programmers and computer geeks in general do not have any kind of sense of humor look how Koen engaged people before starting his session, against 3 in other rooms (click picture to read):
OK, there’s still one (long) session to go today, then I just wanna sort out some stuff online and get out for a Tiramisu, or two. Arrivederci (or whatever it is for goodbye in Italian).
[PT] Ontem tive uma curta visita, só de um dia, e em que eu estava a trabalhar. Mas deu para meter cerca de 30% da conversa em dia durante o almoço (pato à Pequim), e numa visita guiada (de carro) seguida de jantar (italiano, selecção de várias “pastas” de onde saímos quase capazes de rebolar). Ainda sobrou algum tempo para o gato e tudo, como se pode ver nas fotos. Felizmente, vou ter mais visitas para breve pois ela acabou de entrar para a TAP como assistente de bordo (já agora, parabéns) e vai andar a “aterrar” por aqui de vez em quando.
Printer Hacked! I’ve just found a PERL script that changes any HP network printer’s default READY message to whatever you want and I have it running in Terminal on my Mac.
For now the message is set as on the picture below. Let’s see how long it takes for someone to notice.
I have a few messages “waiting” to try later, like:
I AM WATCHING YOU,
CHECK ENGINE OIL,
NO TOILET PAPER,
LASER RADIATION PROBLEM
PLEASE STAY AWAY,
PLEASE INSERT MORE PAPER
IN TRAY 5 (which doesn’t exist)
PLEASE CHANGE
PINK TONER NOW (it’s a black&white printer)
THIS PRINTER WILL EXPLODE
IN ABOUT ONE MINUTE
and whatever comes to my mind, also accepting suggestions via this post’s comments (please).
Next time someone gets in the printer cubicle, which I can see from my desk, I’ll try to start a dialog:
HELLO, “WHATEVER_NAME”
I NEED YOUR HELP
PLEASE HELP ME
I AM BEING MOLESTED BY “NAME”
UPDATE:
I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and the process didn’t went as smoothly as expected. Please bear while I am fixing some plugin issues. The blog might look weird meanwhile (as if it looked normal before).
Just a late-night cut and paste video of the best (or worst) moments of the big weekend.
For this Easter micro-holidays, comprising Friday to Monday, I had Erica and Andrew (top-left picture) as my Canadian guests (they are living in London now). We had an abusive cheese raclette for lunch-dinner, since their flight arrived quite late, and finished the day in a lazy way (well, we couldn’t move anyway) watching the full season 4 of The Office (US).
Saturday, we left Geneva really early in the morning towards the Jungfrau region, after Interlaken. We arrived to our hotel in Stechelberg, dropped our stuff and took the cable-car up to Gimmelwald, were we planned to stay but the mountain hostel was fully booked. After the typical knocking at the locals doors to buy Cheese (from Esther) and dry Sausage (from Erika). We walked around Gimmelwald, stopped in some panoramic-view-bench and started eating… more cheese (bottom-right picture). Heinz, the cat (we named it like that almost 2 years ago) appeared as usual in the same spot while we were eating.
We took the other cale-car up to Mürren, where after a short walk and thousands of pictures we rented some sleds and moved further up to Almendhubel, taking the funicular train. First day we only sledged once (the slope is quite big) and got enough bruises. There was some trampoline randomly in the middle of the snow (top-right picture) so we stopped and waited for 3 kids (aged 6 maximum) to get out of there, complaining to their grandparents that “that was not for adults to play”. Well, after they kindly leave, the “adults” gave it a try. It was quite fun as the pictures might show and the video will for sure, as soon as I find some time to cut the best-of for the weekend.
Back to Stechelberg, in the valley, we get drunk at the hotel. Licor Beirão with snow works very well (middle-left picture). For dinner we eat until we are almost able to roll. The food at Hotel Stechelberg is outrageously good as usual. There’s accordion swiss country music until late but we are back to one of the rooms, drinking more.
Sunday started kind of early, with me defrosting the car with some good 3cm of snow on top (middle-right picture). After annoying Erica and Andrew knocking on their window we had a (40% cheese) breakfast that would be almost enough to feed 4 families for a week. We check out and get to the cable-car station to go back to Gimmelwald-Murren-Almendhubel and go on the sleds again for a few times. After collecting some more bruises (specially Erica) we eat some more cheese and stop for a coffee. Instead of taking the cabe-car from Mürren to Gimmelwald, we buy an extra plastic bum-sled (sku). We go downhill on our bums trough snow, ice, asphalt and even wooden stairs. My jeans get a huge hole and end up looking like some Village People’s outfit (bottom-left picture), with the difference that I have underwear. Some tourist films us on the last slope just using a hill as shortcut.
We drive back to Geneva completely exhausted. We have cheese fondue for dinner. And chocolate fondue with fruits for dessert. We rest a bit on Monday morning, to have an abusive Röstis lunch with cheese and sausages and more cheese. Afternoon is spent boiling in Lavey les Bains SPA, between Jacuzzi, Whirlpool, Sauna, Turkish Bath and whatsoever. After we are cooked, in zombie mode, we get back to Geneva but driving on the other side of the lake, to stop in Evian and have 2 huge pizzas (more cheese) in my boat. We head to the casino afterwards and quickly back to Geneva (none of us won anything, apart from awareness that gambling is stupid).
Today we were planning to have roasted Peking Duck (at a great Chinese restaurant close to my workplace, but ended up changing our minds to something lighter (I wonder why) and ended up having sushi.
Andrew and Erica are leaving in a few hours and are now doing the last shopping for tons of Rösti, Cheese and Chocolate to take to the UK. They bought a raclette machine after lunch time. Click the mosaic on top to see a picture selection. Video will be coming soon on the next post.
[PT] Há uns dias, andei no Flickr com um amigo a vasculhar fotos da terra onde ele cresceu, mais pecisamente, Beira, Moçambique. Confesso que me chocou um pouco bastante ver as fotos do “antes”, altura em que a cidade florescia e as do “depois”, ou seja agora, em que está completamente degradada. No meio de algumas fotos aleatórias, outras pouco politicamente correctas de senhoras ou casais em passeio, muito chiques em carrinhos (num carril) a ser empurrados por negros e ainda outras de placards de publicidade jurássica da coca-cola, houve uma foto que me chamou a atenção e me fez desatar a rir nem sei bem porquê:
