I reactived my wow account and rerolled on a pvp server. I also went with a healer class which is something I had never played before (wow, or any other game).
I still find it lame that I can’t play with my friends in Europe and other last-century MMO limitations (shards, server maintenance, can’t communicate with the “other” side) but so far, it’s fun. There’s virtual no safe zone, and that keeps it interesting. At least for now.
I’m (still) not a huge soccer fan despite the worldcup fever, but liked this mod. (I do like mods). I wish they had pictures of the internals though, and the ventilation, and the CD/DVD drives, etc. Well, still very cool and it boots! (hah)
Ten years ago today, we were landing in San Jose, California to start our new lives. I’ve now officially lived longer in the US than in any other place!
Shortly after I started working for this very small “Java” startup, back when Java was super hot and somewhat mysterious (VCs would give you all their money, if you knew how to spell Java), I remember thinking “I can’t believe I’m here and being paid to work on cool stuff like this”. Granted I was not being paid much, but still, I felt very luck to be here. Good times.
In the last 2 months or so, I started getting lots of spam as blog comments. I don’t know why now, so I’m going to assume it’s because my blog is becoming a must-read amongst spammers.
I used to have the blog open for all comments, so anyone could comment and it would automatically show up on the site. Since I get emailed whenever there’s a comment, I could then delete the “comment” when someone suggests that my readers increase the size of their penises.
Deleting spam after the fact is okay by me, as I check email regularly enough. The problem is that everyone who had already posted their comments to the particular entry being spammed, gets spammed as well. And that’s not cool.
I also tried banning certain IP addresses, but it got boring very quickly.
Now I’m enabling the comment approval thingy. A comment won’t make it to the site unless I explicitely approve it. I still get lots of spam, but at least you don’t, well, at least not from posting here.
About 6 months ago, MSDN had an article on TDD (Test Driven Development or “write a test before you write that code”) and the article was just horrible. It had nothing to do with test driven. Apparently the community freaked out, afraid that Microsoft was trying to redefine what TDD meant (I guess) and very quickly the article was voted way down. Eventually MSDN pulled out the article. It used to be here.
A couple of months ago someone wrote a new article on TDD and this time it’s very decent. Phew, order is restored.
Some cool stuff is coming. (this page loads slow)
Warhammer Online and Spore are promising. Hopefully these won’t disapoint like Rise of Legends and Dungeons & Dragons Online did.
Excellent intro to functional programming. The author covers lambda calculus, closures, continuations, currying, and more.
A continuation and a pointer to the return instruction in the stack are really the same thing, only a continuation is passed explicitly, so that it doesn’t need to be the same place where the function was called from.
The “what’s next” part seems very promising too
In the future I plan to write about category theory, monads, functional data structures, type systems in functional languages, functional concurrency, functional databases and much more.
It seems that Zidane was reacting to some racial slurs involving him and his mother. They had a lip reader expert who doesn’t speak italian, to reveal what was said. If that’s true, then it’s too bad Zidane didn’t punch Materazzi in the nose, followed by a kick in the balls.
Anyway, this is fun. I never knew football was so charged with drama, I’ve been missing out. Now I need to find me a soccer team to root for.
There was a lot of crappy music in the 80s. Though I enjoyed listening to some of this old stuff I used to hate. Except for Hall & Oates, their sucking is infinite.
Nick Cave of course is the other way. Zero sucking there.
Here.
Zidane’s red card was just the icing. He couldn’t even be there to accept his silver medal, way to go on your last match. I like that ref.
I’ve been pretty oblivious to the whole Ronaldo-Rooney saga, but now that I finally solved a mystery, I’m happy enough I had to post about it.
The mystery started during the Portugal-France match. Every time Ronaldo would touch the ball, the crowd would just boo. I thought maybe the “superkid” (as they call him in Portugal) had done something nasty to the French. Or maybe that they were so scared of him (judging from his recent performance, I don’t see why they would be) and were booing to throw him off. Weird, but I guess it’s possible.
Then the same thing happens during Portugal-Germany. Okay, now something is not right. Ronaldo is not that good and he can’t possibly have pissed off the French and the Germans, in a way that deserves automatic booing.
After some quick investigation, it turns out the booers aren’t French or German, but English. And it’s all payback for Rooney’s red card. You see, Rooney and Ronaldo play for Manchester United, and there was an incident involving these two during the Portugal-England game. After Rooney decided to tapdance on a fallen Portuguese player’s groin (ouch), Ronaldo pointed it out to the ref. Rooney then proceeds to push Ronaldo, and he’s shown a red card. Depending who you ask, Rooney got sent off because of his stepping on Carvalho’s groin, or he got sent off because of his pushing Ronaldo.
Either way, Ronaldo then winks at his team, as he’s saying “pwned”.
Now there are talks of death threats. Not that surprising though and it looks like Ronaldo will have to play for Real Madrid.
The incident here. The people commenting on it are obviously on the English side, so don’t forget the salt:
Oh yes, other gossip, that also has to do with balls:
Ann Coulter called in 90 minutes late to Adam Carolla’s radio show, and then started complaining that she was tight on time. Carolla says “get lost” and hangs up. The transcript and the audio here.
Of course they got robbed.
There are less flags now though:
I counted 15 flags on that picture (the high res version helps).
And here’s how people celebrated Portugal-Holland, by making sure I could not sleep. The Portugal-England aftermath was louder. I wasn’t there for Portugal-France, but I understand it wasn’t as noisy.
I’m back home.
Unfortunately she didn’t make it, but she also didn’t suffer, and I got to say goodbye. To say goodbye seemed such a small and irrelevant thing to do, but I’m glad someone insisted (you know who you are). It makes a big difference. Thanks.
This is one of the last pictures: my mom and dad holding hands the day before, when we were still allowed to hope.
I’m leaving the Algarve in a few hours, though not before seeing my mom one last time. Visits are only 2 hours a day, so I’m waiting for my turn.
I’m staying in Lisbon tomorrow and should be home Tuesday evening, on time for the fireworks.
On better news though, I got to watch Portugal-England yesterday.
