Creative protesting

While disgruntled citizens choose to brake windows, disrupt traffic and cause chaos to show their feelings over personal matters, other disgruntled citizens just choose to be creative!

http://kotaku.com/5097959/shenmue-fans-plan-toy+based-direct-action

Shenmue is a game where the main character can choose to do any number of things, including getting a job (imagine that! playing a game where you get a job). One of the “jobs” include shipping small toys.

As a way of protest the cancelation of the series, Shenmue fans are now sending small toys (just like they did in their virtual life “job”) to the developer, Sega of Japan, to remind Sega how much they enjoyed having “virtual jobs”. I’m not in any way making fun of their efforts. I’m praising their creativity in sharing their opinion. So, if you are a Shenmue fan, starting writing! As for me, I’m still hoping to get a copy of the game to find out what the fuss is all about.

Not dead yet!

I’m not dead, faithful occasional reader. Just very busy at the moment. I’ve also had an interesting case of blogger mental block. I’ve wanted to write about a couple of things, but sorta refused to do it since it would take actual work! So, in protest, my brain has refused to think up anything else creative or even remotely interesting.

I also wanted to share today’s Dilbert. It perfectly depicts what a day here at work is like. Click on the link if you can't see the whole comic. Enjoy!

My Dear Comrades

 

And that’s all I’m gonna say right now.

Times sure have changed

I don’t normally browse youtube…. It can be a very big time sink, grabbing me with its many oddities and never letting it go. This one is a gem, however, so I couldn’t pass it by. I really don’t know what to say…. Were we really that irresponsible back then?

Money in the time of Cholera

 

Alright, so maybe cholera is not the right word here, but the situation right now is really bad, and it will probably get worse before it gets better. Thankfully, there’s a bunch of financially-oriented people out there, writing great blogs on how to deal with this mess. My current favorites are

www.consumerist.com

The Consumerist is a blog listing all sorts of great things, such as scam alerts, money-saving deals, customer complaints, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

www.thesimpledollar.com

This one I just discovered, but I really, really liked their 18 Things a New Homeowner Should Do Immediately to Save Money article. I’m going to make this a regular read.

www.yodlee.com and quicken online

The two links above are for two different website, both providing the same service: manage all your bank/credit card accounts at the same time.

You know that excel spreadsheet you’ve setup, with all your bank transactions, that you religiously kept updating until you forgot/deleted it/realized there was an error on it and just went crazy? These websites are the solution you’ve been asking for. The process goes something like this (using quicken online as an example):

1) Create a user account with quicken online (it’s totally free!)

2) Add your bank/credit card accounts to your quicken online account

3) Watch as quicken online downloads your transaction history, categorizes each transaction, then creates a expenses chart that tells you exactly where you’ve been spending your money

4) Come back the following day and watch quicken online update with your transactions from the previous day

5) Realize you’ve been spending too much money at gamestop, and that you need to start spending that money somewhere else (hmmmm….)

And that’s it! It’s much better than microsoft money, and there’s no files to worry about, since all the information is kept on the website. I’ve tried them both, and the process is the same (and both are free, no costs or strings attached). The main difference for me is that yodlee has a lot more features, but it is a bit rougher around the edges. Quicken is more streamlined, but much easier to use. For me, the extra features totally compensate for the occasional issue, so I’ve become a die-hard yodlee fan.

What about you, o ye reader? What do you use for your finances?

oh boy

Nothing cute to post right now…. The whole family was sick over the weekend. It actually started on thursday, and I thought it’d mostly gone away, but it hit full-force on saturday when Ginger really wasn’t doing very good, and then it hit me on sunday. Poor kids, had free reign of the house while Ginger and I mostly just limped around the house, and that when we had the energy to do that much.

We’re doing better know, thankfully. I’m at work, and Ginger is taking care of the kids. My apologies to any one we spread whatever-this-is to.

No bacteria, virus or pumpkin were harmed in the production of this post. The pumpkin depicted above is a talented stunt-pumpkin, hired exclusively for this post.

Babysitting duties & Peanuts

Some kind of bug hit at home, and Ginger and the kids aren’t doing so great today. Truth be told, I’m not feeling so great as well, though not nearly as bad as Ginger or CJ. I got permission from the boss (thanks, Jeff!) to go home and tend to the family. So I got to play baby-sitter and nurse today!

Ginger was really tired and needed some sleep, so after making sure that the kids had something to eat, she went to take a nap. Jordan wasn’t quite ready yet, so she went through some more nursing and a bottle of baby food before she finally crashed. CJ got to feel better soon, so now he’s back to his usual bouncing around the house. In an attempt to keep him under some form of control (I also needed to get some work done), we decided to go through a Peanuts marathon. So far, we probably watched about 8-9 episodes of peanuts. The funny thing is, there’s only 6 different episodes of peanuts between 3 dvds, so we’ve watched some episodes several times already. He doesn’t mind it at all, he’s loving it.

Snoopy prepares a choice Thanksgiving meal: Toast, popcorn and candy. Yum!

I used to be a big Peanuts fan when I was a little kid, until I was about 6 years old, when they stopped broadcasting it (along with the pink panther, mr. magoo, mighty mouse and a bunch of other pretty good ones). So i haven’t really minded the whole marathon thing. Besides, i was able to get much of my work done, with Jordan asleep and him mostly quiet in there watching it. Quiet, of course, doesn’t really apply to Caio, so it’d be more accurate to say that he’s not causing major chaos while watching it, so I guess we’re all good. Hopefully, everybody will wake up feeling better soon.

Video-game soundtracks

I’ve always been a little crazy about music. No, not the type that just listens to music all the time, and any type of music. Crazy as in, it has to be just right: the right style, the right type, the right sound quality, etc… I drive my wife crazy with complaints about bad speakers, distortion, mono sound, vibrations and other things.

My obsession with music actually extends to other media that use music, such as tv shows, video games, movies and just about any other thing that plays something on the background: does it match the mood, is it just plain stupid, is it too loud, on and on and on. I’ve just about given up many a movie and game because I couldn’t stand the soundtrack. After all, if it’s not pleasant to the ear, why stick around? (I told you, it was nuts)

I’ve recently started listening to game music more regularly than “music”.  This may come as surprising or even the ultimate expression of nuttiness, but if you think about it, why not? We’re very long past the age of pc speaker buzz and tweets. Even the not so recent games had real composers and musicians creating their music, people that have a passion for music. You’re bound to find good music to listen to!

To prove my point, I’m linking some of my favorite tracks, some new and not so old. Let’s not think of piracy or that it comes from a video-game; Instead, let us try to enjoy this as it is, just music!

First one up is from Harry Gregson-Williams, of “The Rock” fame (the movie, not the actor)

Second one up is from a very famous Japanese composer, Nobuo Uematsu

Next time I’ll post some of the really old school stuff. You’d be surprised!

Pictures of my kids!

I love my kids, and I love taking pictures of my kids. I don’t care if the pics aren’t that great, and I don’t know a thing about lighting, positioning, exposure time, blah blah blah blah. I just enjoy capturing those moments, or just any moments.

SO, I end up taking lots and lots of pictures. If you’d like to see them, the link is http://picasaweb.google.com/marciolsf. They’re organized by albums, and there’s about 70 albums, with varying number of pictures. Here’s a sample of some of the stuff you’ll find:

Feel free to link, download, comment, whatever! I try to keep it all up to date, so check back, there’ll be more stuff semi-regularly. Enjoy!

Feeding the urge

I just had this great urge to update the blog.... I sure do have a ton of stuff going on right now, but since there's way too much stuff to write about, I'm just going to summarize it, bulleted-list style

* baby #2 on the way! baby girl is due in jan 1st
* bought a house in west valley
* new job as a DBA for UPS. Who would've thought, huh?
* growing a beard. Watch out, soup!

That's some of it, for right now at least. So busy lately, I hardly have any time to write, but since I'm waiting for this 100GB bunch of files to copy, and I'm trying desperately to stay awake (long night!), I figure I'd kill the urge dead by updating.

Finishing off with a great site I found a while back:
http://spiritsnodeal.canalblog.com/archives/b__my_movies___mes_films_/index.html

Some guy with loads of premiere talent put a bunch of movies together, great mash-ups.

Hasta la next post!
--Marcio

Hopefully now

So now my coworkers convinced me to use firefox (instead of IE 7) as my main browser. As I was looking through the lists of plug-ins, I found this handy-dandy blogging plug-in, which should make blogging a lot easier, less time consuming, and hopefully help it happen more often! All I need to do is click this little button on the bottom of the window, and voila! A new editor window shows up, and it should allow me to publish from right here. We'll see it in 2 seconds, when I click the publish button...

powered by performancing firefox

New home!

Welcome to the new brazilian geek blog! I've switched the site over to the new blogger template engine, which is lots nicer than the old one. It took me a whoppin' 60 seconds to add a new item to the side bar **and** reposition it around the frame. Go google! I for one welcome our google overlords.

back to work....

So, thanksgiving came and went, a very nice (but clearly not long enough) extended weekend came and went, and now it's back to work.

It's always kinda hard to pick up the threads after being away for so long (4 whole days without a thought or care about work), so I spent some time today just figuring out what's going on. Our monitoring program managed to generate ~ 35,000 messages over the last couple of days, so I wasn't even able to get to my regular list of stuff to do for several hours.

I also just found out that a group from Juarez, Mexico, has been added to our domain. fun fun fun! Now I have extra work queued up for the next 2-3 weeks...

On the happy side of things, CJ learned a couple of new tricks over the weekend... One is his new dance move: Whenever he hears a song he likes, he will bounce up and down *and* swing left and right! Now that's coordination! He's got more dancing skill on his pinky than I have in my whole body...

The case of the finger eating case (not for the feint of heart)

So, this morning I was attempting to open an external hard drive case (it's something you use to carry your computer hard drive outside of your computer) because I could replace the hard drive. It's a very nice enclosure, very solid, made of brushed aluminum, probably very expensive.

Anyway, it's so solidly built that the internal tray (which holds the hard drive inside the enclosure) got stuck when I was trying to pull it out from inside the case. Trying to unstuck it, I pushed the tray back into the enclosure, only to get the side of my middle finger caught between two very sharp pieces of metal (the tray and the case). Did I mention that the aluminum enclosure and the tray's edge have very sharp edges? Here's the moral of the story: Do not get your finger (or part of it) stuck between two sharp pieces of metal, because it'll hurt. A lot. Oh, yeah, and it'll bleed too.

In other news, it sounds like CJ has an ear ache. That probably explains why he had such a hard time falling sleep last night. Ginger is taking care of him, though, so I'm sure that he'll be ok.

ragin'

I have a great desire to rage right now.

I don't mean just shout, or just yell. I mean, grab the stack of external HD cases and cannon-ball them against the wall. Next I'd take the 17" laptop (the source of all my current problems) and similarly throw it against the wall, except that I'd follow it up by smashing it with a hammer. Hard. And then I'd do it all over again.

Whew. Venting feels good. Now back to work.

On formats and price tags

So, today sony announced the price for their long-coming playstation 3. Back in 1995, sony totally changed the market with the original playstation, then in 1999 ruled the market with the ps2, and now they are hoping to keep their mighty throne with the ps3 (due out in november 06). Sounds exciting? Only if you can afford the $499 price tag (and that's if you want to go cheap -- the full version of the console is $599).

Why should you care about the cost of the ps3 and their main competitor, the xbox 360 (other than the hole your kids will make in your wallet, after you buy the consoles for them)? You can find the answer to this question by taking a long, analytical look at none other than your dusty vcr.

A number of years ago, there was this big fight over what type of video tapes you'd use to watch your movies and record stuff. On one side of the ring was sony with their betamax format, and on the other side was JVC with their vhs. Long story short, the betamax was a higher-quality product, but it couldn't beat the ease of use and price of vhs, and ended up pretty much dead (betamax isn't really dead, but you need to click the link to find out more about it. VHS became the standard, and it's still a favorite (cheap and easy to use), even while suffering a gruesome beating at the hands of DVD.

Now the fighters in the ring are sony's blu-ray disk, and phillips/microsoft hd_dvd disk, the self-proclaimed successors of the DVD. Once again, Sony's product is technically better, but more expensive. The hd_dvd is cheaper, and it enjoys better support from the movie industry (Paramount, Universal, etc).
The reason you have to watch the playstation 3/Xbox360 war is that sony is bundling the ps3 with a blu-ray drive, while microsoft promised a device that will enable you to watch hd_dvd movies on the xbox. Both formats will give us amazingly good-looking movies; However, the winner of the war will define what we will be watching for the next couple of years. Maybe sony will have better luck this time then what they had with the betamax? Or maybe Microsoft will get a really good foothold in the entertainment industry, when everybody uses a xbox to watch their movies and play their games? Only time will tell.
In the meantime, I better start saving my money. That ps3 sure looks nice...

Yep, I gave in

No, no one made me (or even asked me) to start a blog. I just decided that I wanted to write one. Maybe I wanted a place to vent out stuff; maybe I just went through a huge ego moment and realized that millions of people are interested in my musings and that I'll become a blog celebrity. Who cares? I sure as anybody don't. I'll just write (because writing is fun), and hopefully I'll inspire/make you laugh/make you cry/make you whish I never touch a computer (ever again!).

But who am I? If you are here, you probably already know. But let's go over it anyway:

My name is Marcio Silveira. I've been very hapilly married for almost 2 years now. My wife, Ginger is my anchor, she keeps me sane and makes me happier than she'll ever know; I can't imagine life without her. Our son, Caio (CJ) was born the day before my birthday, becoming the best present I've ever got! He's very smart, and brings much joy to our home (I just need to remember that when it's 3:00am when he's wide awake and ready to play all night).

Why Brazilian geek? It probably has something to do with being Brazilian *and* a geek. One day I'll ramble about the greatness of being a geek. For now, I'll just go ahead and post this.