Pedro Assunção » findings

Everything is new all the time

Pedro Assuncao — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:18:55 +0000

It’s funny how the greatest revelations come to us in thee strangest places. I’m having dinner in a shopping mall and all of a sudden, while thinking about why humans get bored, it strikes me that we are the ones who make everything boring. It’s our brains, all the time!

Consider this: how many times have you closely looked at something as trivial as a chair? Look again at that same chair. And again, and again. How many screws does it have? How is the place where you sit your butt? Is it curvy, flat? What’s the color off the chair? How much does out weigh?

Do you catch my point? You can walk the same path a thousand times and you will always, and I mean always, be able to see something new. The problem is that our brains trick us not to.

And this is probably valid for social relationships. There is always something new to talk about. You just need to train your brain to think outside the box

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Landing is every man for himself

Pedro Assuncao — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:24:37 +0000

I hurt a knee the last time I was out jumping, on a downwind landing. And it was all because of a combination of stupidity and lack of knowledge.

The first because I did something I shouldn’t: I trusted a fellow skydiver’s direction instead of the wind sleeve. Turns out his direction was perfect for his canopy’s rate of descent, which allowed him to make his final turn upwind.

The second cause for the crash was the lack of experience to deal with a downwind landing. Apparently one of the safest ways to do it is to land like a tandem: on your butt

Lessons learned and hopefully my knee will heal fast so I can jump again soon and put all this behind me.

Blue skies

My face in space?

Pedro Assuncao — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:02:45 +0000

Congratulations, you're face has been stolen...

Wanna get your face in space? Just go to NASA’s website, choose a mission, and upload your pic. Time waste? Maybe. Fun to see your face in the rocket? Yep.

Feedsquares: A refreshing view for Google Reader

Pedro Assuncao — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:03:33 +0000

I don’t know about you, but i have still to find the perfect RSS reader. I don’t dislike Google Reader, but i always feel that things can be better (yeah, it’s both a curse and a blessing) and, recently, i found a little thing – called Feedsquares – that puts a nice twist on its interface, making really non-distracting the act of reading each piece of news.

Feedsquares looks nice

It is comprised of a bunch of squares (one per feed you have) and, when clicked, it will show yet more squares; this time the stories in that feed. Clicking those will open the story full page. Check it out, you might like it

Google introduces GMail image drag and drop

Pedro Assuncao — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:41:27 +0000

At least if you are using Chrome

If you drag any picture from your desktop to the message body it will get automagically included in the email. Pretty neat, uh?

Crazy cool Google Chrome speed ad

Pedro Assuncao — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:25:39 +0000

The best drummer of all time

Pedro Assuncao — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:14:09 +0000

As far as drummers go i always looked at Mike Portnoy – from the band DreamTheater – as one of my all time favorites. Only recently (and to my sorrow since he died in 1987) i came across the one who is definitely the greatest drummer of all time. I’m talking about Buddy Rich.

Don’t believe me? Check it out!

Super regeneration, here we go

Pedro Assuncao — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:46:25 +0000

A new study has found that a specific gene (P21) is directly linked to regenerative properties that you typically find in reptilian creatures, such as salamanders. Apparently, when deactivated, this gene allows mice cells to behave more like stem cells and fully regenerate wounds without leaving any scars. Are we close to super fast regeneration, and eventually immortality?

You can find the entire article here.

How to beat a nail into a hard wall

Pedro Assuncao — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:09:52 +0000

This is probably the first useful mass email that my mother sent me in a long, long time

In any case, it shows how to put a nail into a really hard wall without ending up bending the nail. I know i had this problem before in more than one occasion.

Layar rocks, or how the Berlin wall is back up

Other (probably intelligent) wordpress plugins to install

Pedro Assuncao — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:24:36 +0000

Following up on my post about RAM (or lack of it), i decided to install a proper wordpress plugin to cache most of the stuff in static HTML files. It’s called WP-SuperCache and i’m hoping it’s really super

But now i cannot but wonder if i shouldn’t – somehow – find a way to have nginx serving these static files instead of passing the request to apache. I’m already caching static JS, CSS, and image files with nginx, so that would probably make sense.

In other news, installed a plugin that serves a different WordPress theme for mobile phones. It’s called wordpress-mobile-edition, in case you are interested.