Pulp Fiction

So on friday midnight I finally was going to watch Pulp Fiction for the first time on a big screen with decent audio... I love that movie, but never got to watch it in a theater, and they were playing it at the Studen Life Cinema here at FSU, and since I got the flyer I was very excited for it. Anyways, it started with my failure as organizer, cause nobody really showed up... anyways, I went to watch it. After waiting for about 35 minutes, they opened the doors, we got pretty good seats. When the movie started, it was really cool, cause at Dick Dale's intro song everybody got the beat really well and was really exciting... So everything was going good, I think there was a little cut in one part, but minimal, until the really bad happened. When Vince and Mia are about to get into the world Famous Twist Contest the film just BURN, yes you could see in the screen projected how it was melting. The worst thing is that we could have got to continue with the movie... Before the movie, they made a charity raffle and one of the prices was a copy of the movie, and the guy who won apparently left, I think he was just bein an ass... And so that was a frustraded night and had just to come back home... will have to wait for next time...

Fulbright Enrichment Seminar, SFO 2006

I've been leaving this post behind a few days, after I came back from San Francisco I had few things to take care of, mostly for school, and just didn't get enough time to write about this, but well, here it is.

Perhaps I'll never have the chance to share such experience as the one in San Francisco, apart of the beuty of the city, there was something greater, 146 people from 70 different countries, all with different interestests in their academic life, but still all share one common idea, the hope of making this little piece of spacial matter we called Earth a better place to live in. It was just amazing to find so many people from so many countries, countries we sometime even remember or think of their existance in our small, short looking minds. And even that you might think that people around the globe are different you fell identified with so many points of view and characters from this rich group of people. There are too many names to list here of all the great people I got to meet, but all of them are people you know you will see doing great things soon.

When I first got my grant, what I thought was "yes, it's a very prestigous scholarship the one I have" but that was it... I was thinking more on what my actual academic program will mean. I've had two experiences with Fulbright, first in Ohio University, also amazing people there, and I got to learn a lot from them as well. That is when I started to realized what really I had been awarded, and it does make you fell special, because you think "if I was chosen to be here among all these great people, it has to mean something..." and that cheers you up, the only thought of that motivates you to do better everytime. I'm really glad I got the chance to assist and meet with such a great people, even that the time was to short to really get to know or meet all, but I know one day I'll look up in the news, or read about important people, and I'll be proud to say "hey, I met this person at the San Francisco Fulbright Seminar"

San Francisco, CA (city impressions)

On a cloudy afternoon, March 9th 2006, I arraived to San Francisco, it was my first time to the west coast of the US, a place I've wanted to see from some time. I usually like to see the city during landing, specially with big cities as San Francisco, but this time I had to be happy only with a little corner of the window, considering the size of airplane's windows that's not really much, plus I was sitting on the aisle with two people separiting myself from the windows. Anyways, it was kinda cool the little I got to see (no pictures, sorry), the airport is really close to the coast, so when you land there it seems like it is going to touch the water and suddenly there is the airport. I've noticed that they don't inform you anymore where your baggage will be coming out so when I went to the baggage claim area, it turn that everybody was waiting in the wrong carousel, I guess that shows how people around the world will always follow what others are doing. But well, after realizing our stuff was coming out from the next carousel, I got my only bag I had checked and went to find a shuttle that will take me to the hotel.

On the highway I got to see the headquarters (I guess those might have been the hq) of Cannon, Unisys Data, and a few other companies. That was something for what I've been actually interested in visiting on that side of the country, and see the hq of many of the big companies... I know it really is nothing transcendental, or that will change the course of the world, but is one of those meaningless thing we all want to do at some point in our lives. It took probably 45 to 60 minutes to get from the airport to the hotel with all the stops to drop other people. I may say it was a nice ride, I got to get a little look of the city, gorgeous place. A completely different city from all the other large cities I've visited in the US, not that I have visited a lot, but still it had it's particular style. Mostly I was thinking of the differences between SFO and NYC.

Once in the hotel, I checked in and already met with some people that were also there for the seminar but that goes on a different post. We went to find a place to get some food, I was kinda surprised that there were no junk food places near the hotel, we didn't want to go to a restaurant because of the time, but we spend quite some time just looking for a place on Columbus St. we finally found one nice place and went in. On the walk we could see one of the main characteristics of SFO style. As opposed to the many of the cities that I've seen on the east coast and, SFO has slopes everywhere, I like that because it reminds me a little from Quito, actually, there are even mountains surrinding the city, not as big as Pichincha, but it is something :-)

I had a very good impression of the city also on Friday when we went for diner at De Ferrari's house. In the way to their house you could get to see the bay and all the boats there with a very dim light, very nice view.

On Saturday a traffic jam on the Golden Bridge allowed us to have a very good view. The afternoon was fairly clear and a nice shinny sun beutified the view of the bay. From the bus you could also get a clear view of Alcatraz, I guess I was even more interested to see that than the bridge itself, wich is amazing, but it actually looks more magnanimous when you see it from the bellow than being on it. The sun remained shiny for the rest of our day and we had a great view of the bay while in our boat trip, the water like a mirror reflecting the sun.

Even that I had not much time to really look at the city, I was enchanted by what I got to see, as opposed from NYC which is a city I loved when I went, I know that I could easily get used and live in SFO, and just fly to NYC to visit. I can't really say anything about the people, I had no chance to interact with people outside the seminar, but still, looks like a wonderful city, and I really hope I can get a chance to go back sometime with more time to look around.

Apple Technology Briefing

So today I attended to an Apple technology briefing @ FSU where they presented some of the tools that come with Tiger (Mac's latest OS Version OSX 10.4). While it was interesting some of the features that it has particularly Automator (which I never got to try while I had a Mac) which basically is a way to use pipes outside the shell, it can give users a lot of functionality and you can write your own scripts and feed them as part of the pipeline. In general I do like Mac since they got OSX, they have done a great job on creating an OS that is very good, stable, secure, and still very easy to use by any non-computer geek, but leaving the power user with a lot of tools in his hands. In general the presentation they made was interesting. I don't consider myself a developer and I don't think I'll be one, but the tools they showed from XCode look very usefull to easily create graphical applications on Mac. It was just the end that kinda turned the beauty away, when they started talking as sales people... "...and the new MacBook Pro is 4 times faster..." as any other corporation will try to use every second they have to sales hype.

Anyways, apart from the hype at the end, something that really can be useful is that they mentioned that FSU have been selected in the South East side to be part of iTunes U, they are still talking about it, and probably by next Fall content from FSU will be available to download from the iTunes U servers, that means lectures will be available for download, the same way there are currently from Standford.

My first rants

Ok... So I guess I have to jump into the "recording" train... There has been already some time from when I did wanted to start a blog, in fact I did open one that was when bloggin was still something fairly new, and is just today that I have finally come to write my first post... we'll just see how long do I keep up with it.

One of the reasons I never really posted anything is because I had nothing I considered interesting enough to be written about. Not that I have found any interesting topic yet... Aldo suggested me sometime ago to just write about what was going on during my studies in the US, he was just having fun on all the problems I was having during my first few months here, I really don't know if there has been anything really funny since then, perhaps the only idea of doing it just made the all thing boring...

Anyways, I'll see what I can do to keep this up to date and as possible, I will try to post interesting things, at least more interesting that this one, but in general my prediction is that most of what you will find here will be just some of my non-sense thoughts that come to my brain every once in a while when I have nothing else to think about. Perhaps with some practice I might even start to notice interesting things going on and talk about them, in the mean time if you have no other more productive ways to waste your time, you are invited to read/comment on whatever BS I write here.

Enjoy,

Fernando