07.31.06
Fortune Of The Day
Time for a LOL with Homer:
Marge, please, old people don’t need companionship. They need to be
isolated and studied, so it can be determined what nutrients they have
that might be extracted for our personal use.— Homer Simpson
Lady Bouvier’s Lover
The Lake House
Plot Outline:A lonely doctor (Bullock) who once occupied an unusual lakeside home begins exchanging love letters with its newest resident, a frustrated architect (Reeves). They must try to unravel the mystery behind their extraordinary romance before it’s too late.
Personal Comments:
This is definitely the best movie I’ve seen in the last month or so… The plot is great, very very nice and original and the actors are stunning. Reeves and Bullock make a wonderful duo.
I noted however, although the movie was great the day the movie got to the theaters, the room was empty. There were about 5 people in a room for more than 150. This is sad, the Pirates of the Caribean, a terrible movie had ‘full-house’.
(Mid-Spoiler)
This is a very nice romance between two people that live ‘two years’ apart. They live in different time frames and somehow they are able to contact each other through a very mysterious mailbox. You may think of it as a time portal. Of course, you get all the niceties of this kind of travel, a change in the past affects the future immediately.
(Huge Spoiler)
As a side note on the movie by itself, something is quite sad if you get to think of it. Even though in they meet in the end, the ones that meet in the end were not not the ones which were corresponding each other since there’s no way they can leave their time frame. One might guess from the times mentioned, since they met in 2008 what happens seems to be the following: Reeves starts in 2004, Bullock in 2006. Since Reeves waits for Bullock until 2008, they meet in Reeves timeframe, so Bullock in 2008 is not the Bullock we see most of the movie, since that one is already in 2010. Well, at least this is what I caught the only time I checked out the movie. Maybe after getting my hands on the DVD I can say something more.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Plot Outline:Jack owes an unpaid debt to Davy Jones and his army of sea-phantoms…his soul. Now, he must find a way to save himself from becoming one of them, and suffering forever.
Personal Comments:
I’ll probably get arrested, bashed or worse but here it goes… I didn’t like the movie at all. It was bad. The first movie was not great but this one was terrible. Despite the nice visual effects, there’s not much more into it… It didn’t captivate me. I can’t understand why all the buzz around it. There’s not much into it. You can notice the flow in the story of Jack Sparrow but it won’t be thrilling like I though it would and the comedy is done ‘a la Scary Movie’. Patetic Comedy in my opinion. Stay at home if you can, or better yet. Check out “The Lake House”.
The Truth About Love
Plot Outline:As part of a drunken bet with her sister, a happily married woman sends an anonymous Valentine’s card to her husband to see if he hides it. When he does, what was a prank leads to a series of events and revelations that puts her marriage at risk, and leaves her looking for revenge.
Personal Comments:
I’ve went to see this one a week ago. It’s a nice comedy/romance movie where love and loyalty are at stake. It’s nice for an afternoon but nothing worthy of an oscar, obviously. I got amazed at how long it took to get to Portugal. This movie was released in 2004!!!
Overall, I think that the plot is original and the actors, although unknown are ok!
07.28.06
Interconnected Scientific Domains
Today I was just browsing some interesting C++ articles (which will be subject of later post) and I just got face-to-face with ACCU (Association for C/C++ Users) page. I went up to see the benefits of membership and not only the conferences but also the bi-monthly journals caught my attention (and the low-cost fees).
The nice thing is that I was thinking to myself: “So many people in the SAT world program in C++, are they in anyway connected to the more Professional Programming C++ community? My immediate intuitive answer was: No!” which made sense since most of the time people in the research community are worried on publishing the paper and as soon as it is sent for review, a long list of deadlines follows which brings up a lot of more work: more study, more developing, more benchmarks, more writing, more … researching! This is kind of an endless cycle and no time is left in the middle for participating in out-of-the-study-subject community conferences.
Anyway, I went on to check where are the conferences, who are the organizers and which kind of people speak at these conferences. Well, amazed I was to see a name: Oliver Kullman as a speaker for the latest ACCU’06. The name is familiar! The description confirms his identity:
Oliver Kullmann
I did my PhD at the University of Frankfurt (Germany) in Mathematics in 1997. From 1999 to 2001 I was a post-doc in the group of Stephen Cook at the University of Toronto (Canada). In 2001 then I was employed as a lecturer in the computer science department at the University of Wales Swansea, where I stayed since then. Like most researchers, I have given numerous conference talks, publish regularly in international journals and visit researchers at other places.
My research is centred around the understanding of hard computational problems, where “hard” means here something around exponential time, which is typical for most problems in hardware and software verification, in artificial intelligence and in planning and scheduling.
Especially I’m interested in the study of the so-called SAT problem, the problem of deciding whether a propositional formula (boolean variables, connected by “and”, “or” and “not”) is satisfiable or not. Several years ago I’ve written a SAT solver (which was successful at that time), and now for several years I’m developing a generative C++ library for SAT solving (supported by an EPSRC grant since February 2004).
A fellow researcher in SAT is a speaker in a C/C++ users conference. That’s great. Congrats to him!
The application of C/C++ in SAT is huge since most people use it for performance critic software like SAT solvers. The interaction of SAT researchers with C/C++ professional programming seems to be quite useful since SAT researchers spend a great deal of time programming, most of the time in C/C++. So there’s no reason why they shouldn’t try to improve their programming skills and sharing their experiences with these communities. Way to go!
Poseidon
Plot Outline:On New Year’s Eve, the luxury ocean liner, Poseidon, capsizes after being swamped by a rogue tidal wave. The survivors are left to fight for survival as they attempt to escape the sinking ship.
Personal Comments:
Some may not be aware but this is a remake of The Poseidon Adventure from 1972. I must say I’ve not seen the one from 1972 but this starts of as a Titanic’06 and then as soon as the ship turns up-side down and everything starts to collapse there is nothing but speed. This nice group of people sticks together so that they can get free and then each one of the will die until a subset of them gets saved. Same idea, different story. Unfortunately there are a lot of glitches and unbelievable stuff which just turns you off. If you shut your mind off before entering, everything will go well, other wise you’ll leave severely disturbed by seeing a movie where a guy is sucked into a huge fan at a high speed, gets caught by a window (which also holds in position a gas tube) and doesn’t break his spine.
The Break-Up
Plot Outline:After Brooke (Aniston) calls it quits with her boyfriend Gary (Vaughn), neither person is willing to move out of the condo they share. Taking the advice of their repsective friends and confidants (and a few total strangers), they both engage in mental warfare designed to force the other person to flee the premises — until they both realize they might be fighting to keep their relationship alive.
Personal Comments:
I went to see this with my girlfriend last week to the cinema, wishing it to be a very funny and pleasant afternoon… and it was! In fact, although I was not amused on how it ended, the movie portrayed some day-to-day issues between couples with a lot of irony and comedy. There are awesome parts like the fighting for ‘dish-washing’ when she says: “I don’t want you to wash the dishes, I want you to want to wash the dishes.” This is a very nice quote because most of the times, this is how thing really happens even if we do not say it in real life. Even the other day, my girlfriend wanted to see the soap opera but she was alone at home so she asked me to go there to see it with me. Although I do not usually see soap operas, at least, not lately I went there and it was kind’a boring, which I told her at the end and she just reminded me that she didn’t want me to see the soap opera with her, she wanted me to want to see the soap opera with her which is completely different. There are really nice moments in these day to day issues…
And the quote everyone reminds from the trailer:
Brooke: My sister has been through a lot…
Gary: …of dick?
Hypercube
Plot Outline: Eight strangers find themselves waking up in a strange cube-shaped room with no recollection of how they came to be there. Soon discovering that they’re in a strange fourth dimension where our laws of physics don’t apply, they have to unravel the secrets of the “hypercube” in order to survive…
Personal Comments
I’ve seen the first Cube quite some time ago (before 2000 as I recall). I was eager to see this one but I really never had the chance to take a look at it. Finally, I rented last week and the movie was unpleasantly worst than the first. Even though there were nice ideas like the shift of time frames and differences on the direction of the gravity field, it was not better than the first.. and it is definitely not an horror film. The deaths are badly thought and there’s no much more to it than the bunch of people walking around trying to find their way out of there and in the end, you don’t get the answer to some of the questions you made during the movie. I know there’s another cube: Cube Zero, but I’m not quite sure if I want to check it out just right now…
07.27.06
Protected: Poem…
O papel vai-se, os bit ficam, assim passo para bits o que o meu Amor me escreveu no papel:
Frente
Podereis roubar-me tudo:
as ideias, as palavras, as imagens,
e também as metáforas, os temas, os motivos,
os símbolos, e a primazia
nas dores sofridas de uma língua nova,
no entendimento de outros, na coragem
de combater, julgar, de penetrar
em recessos de amor para que sois castrados.
E podereis depois não me citar,
suprimir-me, ignorar-me, aclamar até
outros ladrões mais felizes.
Não importa nada: que o castigo
será terrível. Não só quando
vossos netos não souberem já quem sois
terão de me saber melhor ainda
do que fingis que não sabeis,
como tudo, tudo o que laboriosamente pilhais,
reverterá para o meu nome. E mesmo será meu,
tido por meu, contado como meu,
até mesmo aquele pouco e miserável
que, só por vós, sem roubo, haveríeis feito.
Nada tereis, mas nada: nem os ossos
que um vosso esqueleto há-de ser buscado
para passar por meu. E para outros ladrões,
iguais o vós, de joelhos, porem flores no túmulo.Jorge de Sena
Verso
Meu amor…
Este poema é um excerto de um discurso teu, daqui a muitos anos, quando fores mundialmente reconhecido o teu valor, e já tiveres feito inúmeras descobertas fundamentais para o desenvolvimento da humanidade, hà mais importante das quais terás dado o teu nome.
Nome que irá infernizar a vida de muitos estudantes…Espero que gostes da carteira e que sempre que a abras te lembres de mim e de todos os nossos momentos felizes.
Beijos infinitamente grandes e com muito amor
MatarinaMatos (assinado)
14/07/02
07.18.06
O Selo… Chegou!
Finalmente… Quando eu já começava a ter dúvidas quanto à chegada do Selo Automóvel que como já tinha referido, o paguei online, este chegou agora mesmo pelo correio.
Ufa! Menos uma preocupação… demorou pouco mais de um mês… mas ao menos… chegou! :-)
