Events, events, events…

Life has been quite eventful in the last weeks, reason for which I haven’t been able to blog. Taking advantage of the unbearable lightness of Sunday, I’d like to post some of the stuff I’ve been doing lately.

1. Rent a car and drive to IKEA to buy a drawer for the bedroom and a nice bench for my beautiful 40’’ LCD HDTV.

2. Go to ByDesign to buy our living room!!!! It is a fantastic white leather sectional with an additional armless chair. It bloody rocks:

3. Right after IKEA and ByDesign, drive for 3 hours to Fayetteville, North Carolina to catch a gig of my favorite band: Collective Soul. It’s been almost 8 year since my last Collective Soul concert (July 5th, 2001 @ Teatro Metropolitan, Mexico City).

They played a very very very good set list with almost all of the big ones (they left Precious Declaration out), 3 songs from their upcoming album (Ed Roland said it would be ready for September) and a couple of not-that-famous ones and the newly famous Tremble for My Beloved from their 1999 album Dosage (it is newly famous thanks to Twilight… it is the only good thing out of that crappy movie –which I didn’t see, but I know it’s crappy-).

My wife got me a Dean Roland’s set list. Nice souvenir.

The only bad thing is that since it was a town festival, not all of the people was a lot into the concert… but once we got to the front rows it was a great atmosphere. A couple of action shots:

And the other bad thing was the 3 hour drive back to CLT… but it was well worth it :)

4. Kings of Leon!!!!!! Yeah!!!! First KoL gig for me and Ojos. It was brilliant, even though the place wasn’t full (illiterate southeasterners) and the acoustic of the place wasn’t great. Other than that, it was a great concert.

Here’s the setlist:

Crawl
Taper Jean Girl
My Party
Be Somebody
Molly’s Chambers
Fans
Milk
Four Kicks
Charmer
Sex on Fire
The Bucket
Notion
On Call
Cold Desert
Use Somebody
Slow Night, So Long

Encore
Closer
Knocked Up
Manhattan
Instrumental
Black Thumbnail

Brilliant! They only missed California Waiting.

A bad action shot here (we had all the lights pointing to ourselves for some reason):

And 5.

We just received the CDs with the official wedding pictures!!!!!!! (By Enkuadre… hire those guys if you’re getting married around Mexico City).

Now comes the titanic task of choosing 200 pictures from 2000… but it promises to be a lot of fun. I’m of course creating a Picasa Web album for those!

Well… that’s it! thanks for stopping by.

Got a direct message from my fave band

Thanks, Tweeter :P

Whatever, they claim to follow back all of their fans. I told them they weren't in my case, and Dean Roland from Collective Soul sent me a direct message to prove me wrong.



It doesn't matter if I ended up looking like an idiot. It still is a direct message from my favorite band, isn't it?

BTW, this end of month looks great:

April 25th - Collective Soul @ Fayetteville, NC
April 30th - Kings of Leon @ Cricket Arena, Charlotte, NC

Have a nice weekend!

Let Me Google that For You

Ooooooooooobviously, there will be a post about my wedding, marriage and stuff. It was wonderful and married life has been great so far.

But that's not the subject of this post... "Let me Google that for you" is.

I'm sure that you know a lot of people who simply WON'T google and instead, they ask YOU how to do something. Let me Google that for you is a great educational tool so people will stop bothering you and start asking Uncle Google, who knows all answers.

Quick example. John Doe wants to know what a prompt in MicroStrategy is. Instead of googling it, he decides to ask Coller.

=======
John Doe says:
Coller. What is a prompt in MicroStrategy?

Coller says:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Microstrategy prompt
=======

John Doe will now get his answer and will -hopefully- learn to google stuff. Amazing!

Now go and use it.

mBanking - Telcel + Banamex

Y powered by Gemalto =)

Aquí algunas notas del lanzamiento:

El Universal

CNN

Invertia

Este amiguito me quitó el sueño de 2006 a mediados de 2008, cuando dejé México y el mundo de Telecom y las SmartCards por mi nueva vida gringa y el mundo de BI.

La solución es sumamente segura y la facilidad de uso se garantiza por medio de SIM Browsing, tecnología que permite usar el servicio hasta en los teléfonos más piñatas del mercado.

Así que los que están en México: corran y úsenlo!!! Pero ya!!!!

Y felicidades a los de GTO.PA

Mario Bros, cumbia version

Update: Here's this great band's MySpace...

My cousin sent me the link to this video. It simply kicks ass. These guys are legendary.

Just try to ignore the first seconds with the idiotic hosts announcing the band... it's well worth it!

From Windows Live Writer

I’m experimenting Windows Live Writer, a desktop client for blogging from the Empire. So far the experience has been pretty solid: an open platform that can be used for blogging not only in Live Spaces, but also in Blogger (hence this experiment), WordPress, among others.

It features a nice architecture that allows the use of plugins. The following picture, for instance, is from my PicasaWeb account and I’m inserting it using the Picasa Link plugin. It basically loads your albums and images to a side bar so you can choose the one to insert from there.

Another plugin is for Live Search maps. Here is where I live (or how it was some time ago… MSFT apparently had some delay on the pictures, when compared to Google Maps):

And everything is done with a few clicks. It even loads your template! It’s a true WYSIWYG.

It’s really surprising for a Microsoft product. Besides, the latest version of Messenger finally respects my decision of having Firefox as my default browser and doesn’t try to use IE when I click the Hotmail icon.

Recommended piece of software. Only thing I’d add is to load my tags (it has some tags providers but I don’t use any of those… I just want my bloody regular tags).

Download from here

Salsas in the US

Hot sauces are a basic ingredient of Mexican food. Arriving to the US I found they had different varieties and classifications for hot sauce.

The classification normally has the following levels: mild, medium mild, medium hot, hot, very hot, extremely hot and some places have one called infierno.

It looks complex at first! Especially for Mexicans who just arrived to the country... you want salsa, but you remember that in Mexico "extremely hot" usually means something crazy, like habanero or mashed dried chile de árbol... very hot stuff.

Well... no more suffering and wondering... after trying all the salsas they serve in different quasi-Mexican restaurants like Chipotle, Sandía, Cantina 1511 and Jolina, among others, I have prepared the following table to illustrate how salsas in the US correspond to how hot that salsa would be in Mexico:

• If you ask for mild.... you'll get mild
• If you ask for Medium mild, you'll get mild
• If you ask for Medium hot, you'll get mild
• If you ask for Hot, you'll get mild
• If you ask for Very Hot, you'll get mild
• If you ask for Extremely Hot, you'll get mild
• If you ask for Infierno, you'll get mild

There you go, now you can have any salsa in the States and know EXACTLY what to expect!!!!

Alcohol and Programming

From XKCD

Dream House (Heineken Ad)

I'm so having one of these rooms in the future!!!

How many countries can you name in 5 minutes?

I didn't like my score... it was 60. My girl is gonna do like 200 or something crazy like that (click on the image if you'd like to take the test).

60
Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Sites

The interesting part, though, is not the test, but how I got there. I was peacefully browsing through blogs when one of them led me to one made by a girl from the same company I work for, everything fine up to that point, in the end it's a 1600 people company (minus the folks they fired last week... stupid crisis), the surprise was to find a comment from Renán, from Gemalto, there. That led me to his blog, and ultimately to the above referenced test.

Renán is a talented engineer in the smart card world (my ex-world :P to say it in a way) and last year he got the chance to transfer to Paris, where he now lives a life full of glamour and crossaints (it's expensive to have anything else for breakfast).

I highly recommend his blog, Renan à Paris! He uses the same high-level prose and complex sense of humor that made lunch time a better time in my Gemalto days.