Spaghetti joke

One dark night in the small town in Garfield, NJ, a fire started inside the local sausage factory. In a blink the building was engulfed in flames. The alarm went out to all the fire departments for miles around.

When the first volunteer fire fighters appeared on the scene, the sausage company president rushed to the fire chief and said, 'All of our secret sausage recipes are in the vault in the center of the plant. They have to be saved, so I will donate $50,000 to the fire company that brings them out and delivers them to me.'

But the roaring flames held the firefighters off. Soon more fire departments had to be called in because the situation became desperate. As the firemen arrived, the president shouted out that the offer to extricate the secret recipes was now $100,000 to the fire department that could save them.

Suddenly from up the road, a lone siren was heard as another fire truck came into sight. It was the fire engine of the nearby Lodi , NJ volunteer fire department composed mainly of Italian firefighters over the age of 65.

To everyone's amazement, the little run-down fire engine, operated by these Italian firefighters, passed fire engines parked outside the plant, and drove straight into the middle of the inferno. Outside, the other firemen watched in amazement as the Italian old timers jumped off and began to fight the fire as if they were fighting to save their own lives. Within a short time, the Lodi old timers had extinguished the fire and saved the secret recipes.

The grateful sausage company president joyfully announced that for such a superhuman accomplishment he was raising the reward to $200,000, and walked over to personally thank each of the brave elderly Italian firefighters.

A TV news crew rushed in after capturing the event on film. The 'on camera' reporter asked the Italian fire chief, 'What are you going to do with all that money?'

'Wella,' said Chief Pasquale De Luccinelli, the 70-year-old fire chief, 'de fursta tinga we gonnna do isza fixa de brakes on dat fockinna truck!!'

Parallel Lives hot 'off the press' re-print: Pericles and Obama

As I was driving to my class this morning and listening to an audiobook to kill time in traffic, Will Durant's The Story of Civilization, Book 2, The life in Greece, I couldn't hide my awe at this passage (which I transcribe here word for word for you to enjoy): "The familiar analogy between Athens and the great modern democracies is truthfully enlarged upon in the life of Greece. The astute Pericles had to face much the same sort of problems that the astute Roosevelt had to face in the 1930s. The building of the Parthenon was part of Pericles’ WPA programme. Many lived on the dole and the administration of the dole money was not without its scandals. Taxation and tax evasion were both as ingenious as they are today. The class war, family limitation, sexual freedom and the conflict between religion and science played their part in a civilization resembling our own in everything except machines..."

Does it sound familiar? Pericles built the golden epitome of the Western Civilization in 447-431 BC to both create a monument about the glory of Athens and at the same time launch his very own WPA (stimulus plan) to provide for jobs as many were on unemployment benefit.

Here's some excerpt from a short Pericles bio I found on the net:

Pericles entered political life as an adjutant to a radical reformer with a popular constituency. With his dignity and patience, a reputation for integrity, his artistic ambitions for Athens, demonstrated abilities as a peacemaker, plus the convincing force of his oratory, he won the support of the people. In 460 BCE, he was elected to the political leadership of Athens. Except for one brief interval, he was reelected every year thereafter until he died of the plague in 429 BC.

Democracy in the Greek city-state reached its zenith in Athens under Pericles, providing the building blocks of modern democratic society. Supported by the citizens of Athens, reforms inaugurated by Pericles passed the governance of Athens from a tight aristocracy to its citizens. Under Pericles, official offices were rotated. Citizens provided essential services to the state. Officials and jurors were for the first time paid by the state, thus opening up public service to the poor and minimizing improper control of the law, justice, and civic resources. All citizens were encouraged to attend the Assembly of Athens and participate directly in acting on legislation - public safety, religion, security, food supply, and public expenditures. Much of the magnificence of Athens today reflects the vision of Pericles, and his ability to gain the popular support and provide for funding the vast construction projects of the Acropolis, Parthenon, and other works that today represent the glory of Greece.

Now folks, and especially those of you GOP dickheads: Does this ring a bell? Like a modern day add-on on Plutarch's 'Parallel lives', going like, Pericles and Obama?

PS. WPA (from wikipedia): The Works Progress Administration (renamed in 1939 to the Work Projects Administration; WPA) was the largest New Deal agency, employing millions of people and affecting most every locality in the United States, especially rural and western mountain populations. It was created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential order, and funded by Congress with passage of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 on April 8, 1935.

Breaking News: Windows 7 beta!

Well, maybe not so Breaking News, other than to report that it's no more no less than old wine in some new bottle. As I'm not following Windows too close nowadays, I happened to pick up the 'rumor' that their free Win 7 beta would stop shipping today; so for kicks I rushed before the break of Feb the 10th to download the 2.44Gigs of "Vista-reinvented". I heard the news on Cranky Geeks (their latest episode, with that moron Adam Curry attending as a guest, who better go back to his DJ stuff than pretend he understands ICT, at all, and keeps throwing pompous geeky terms he picked-up somewhere in the nerdy tents he attends nowadays). Someone else in the Cranky party mentioned he'd installed the beta on a virtual space via Parallels on his Mini Mac and it seemed to work surprisingly well. So, I'm like, what the heck, if that moron can do it I can do that too.

First extremely surprising news: it took me less than 15 min to get the basic install done and another quarter of an hour to get it configured with Parallels Tools installed and up and running! Well done MSFT! Of course with the usual Windows like UI stuff we are so used from XP and later Vista, but, maybe a bit less irritating (other than their security confirm pop-ups...gosh, I hate'em!) ... definitely not worse. Anyways, their standard desktop wallpaper is very representative of Microsoft's perception of users of its products... We are all goldfish in a ball, exhaling bubbles (see pic above). You know, kinda like fish, with no short term memory, so the Redmond freaks can fool around with us pretending a 'refresh' version of their old crack is a brand new hot gig! Anyways, my 'honeymoon' was soon over: within the first fifteen minutes, as I was testing a few of their trivia free applets delivered with the base, I experienced my first mega crash. All I was trying to do was to open up a jpg into their Explorer standard viewer. A bleedin' JPG it was, not the full library of the blueprint CAD plans of the Space Shuttle, mind you! All dead! I had to 'force quit' Parallels and start all over again. Jee, can U believe that? Of course it's a freakin' beta they dare say and you gotta do your backups before you plunge into it, they dare say again... but open up a JPG and crash? R U shittin' me? Gimme a break, brother!

Anyways... now that I know what it's like, I am not too impressed whatsover other than its fluent install (I'd be impressed though if I moved to Win 7 from Ubuntu... not Mac OSX for cryin' out loud!), but now, I can twit along with them other nerds on the net when they get high in talking about Win 7. Poor sods! I only feel sad about some very good friends of mine and ex-colleagues who joined Microsoft long ago, for life, I think... and now have to work for the biblical monster Steve (monkey boy) Ballmer managed to create in the few years he took over from Bill the philanthropist!

Politics Made in USA

Republicans in Congress are such monumental dicks! For months now I follow the press and TV reports on American Politics, and I must say, I have lost all my confidence in the Parlementary leadership of a country that I spent the best part of a lifetime career serving its mutinationals. It's just appalling to see what's going on there. Republicans lost the last presidential elections not just because BO was a much better candidate than their confused geriatric sample and his populist bimbo, but because of their arrogance in the last eight years and their total lack of perception of the common man reality. They still didn't learn their lesson. Far from! Since last November they have started an insane by all counts anti Obama crusade that risks to alienate them from the American public way more than they ever imagined possible. Pity that Obama so naiefly believes he can bring together a strong bipartisan Congress to work 'patriotically' for the revival of the country. What do you expect from a party that asks a moron like Joe the plumber to come to their strategic gettogethers and give them direction? How low can they still go? Read that excerpt from a Reuters article earlier today:

'...There are big political risks for both parties in the struggle over the stimulus, which at about $838 billion would be almost 6 percent of gross domestic product and about a quarter of the size of the U.S. federal budget. Congressional elections are less than two years away and without some improvement in the economy, Democrats in control of the White House and Congress could be punished by voters in 2010. Republicans have argued that the best way to boost the economy is mainly through tax cuts instead of jacked up government spending. But with a new Gallup survey finding that 67 percent of the public approves of the way Obama has sought stimulate the economy, their opposition carried its own risks. Even as the Gallup poll found that the approval rating for Republicans in Congress was 31 percent, less than half of Obama's rating, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said: "I think that this is a poorly crafted bill."...'

That's it then. All they care is make the Democrats fail in the next Congressional elections so they can easily screw Obama's life afterwards. Care about the electorate? No shit! Yeah, they care about getting re-elected themselves and make an easy buck for pissing around for the rest of their miserable and corrupt lives. Whatever I feel about them GOPers in Congress though is totally irrelevant. I live on this side of the pond anyway, and like my old boss used to say, I have an opinion like I have an a-hole... like everybody else. What I feel very depressed about though is that some of my friends, born and raised in this wonderful US of A, are so pissed with the whole circus themselves that they seriously think of leaving the country and move to Europe to spend the remaining of their retirement days in peace, away from that mess. It must be really sad there. What a clusterf@ck!

Doodle Kids

I've read this report a few days ago and, honestly, I didn't know what to think. I went right away to download the little app and I tried to crawl in that kid's mind by digging into his app. Admire my Jackson Pollock artwork that emerged as a result of my fooling around with it, a.k.a. Doodle Kids. I guess, the idea behind is way more important than it's actual programming. It's all based on using randomness to generate simple geometric shapes where, I reckon, about half a dozen parameters are involved. Things like shape, color, size, full or empty 'closed' shapes, position, etc... Then, some extra calls on Apple's UI touch screen libraries and Bob's your uncle. I guess, for an adult developer this is not so much of a rocket science, but a nine year old?! I mean, I was in my late teens when I first came across random numbers for crying out loud... Let alone programming (I think I was about 20 then, programming in Fortran 2 - not 4 - of all things, at the Athens Polytechnic, with bleedin' punch cards in those IBM punchers that could chop-off your thumb if you weren't too careful).

We've come a long way... and the credit for this incident goes certainly to that kid's genes and brain in the first place (let's clone him and save the world), but also to his dad, who, BTW, is a company CTO and loves to develop stuff for the iPhone... but, not to forget, to Apple itself that made iPhone developers' life so easy... from building apps with the iPhone SDK, to marketing them via the App store!

I like the comment on one of these articles about the Singapore whiz that a reader in the US made... mind you, he said, while you lay back and relax that kid is busy programming a robot that is about to take over your job! Jeez, how do you reconcile this with a $800B 'job creation' stimulus plan, brother Barack? Is Wall-e about to come to life from the keyboard of a nine year old in Singapore? Why not?