Good news everyone!

Well, I am still angry that my last post got lost into cyberspace... so, I'll probably write about the Adobe live conferences when I cool down. For now, here's a suggestion. Usually we look for design competitions, but not everytime we look at the winning projects. Here are the student design winners of this year's IDEA competition. There are definately some clever ideas, altough some are not universal... I mean, even with GPS tracking to prevent thefts, I can't imagine the Amsterdam Bicycles in Mexico city. When we visited Copenhagen, they just introduced that idea of "refundable bikes"... and we used them a couple of times, when they were actually available. However, I liked the Min.chair and the disaster relief kit.

ciao

Oh, yeah!

It was many, many years ago. Sandra and I went to Eurodisney. After a whole week in Paris we needed some relax time. We passed in front of the "small world" but it was closed for technical difficulties or something. So, after riding on every game (it's a small park after all) we found ourselves in front of "small world" and this time it was open.

And just like the horror rides as "spook house"... just a few meters before reaching the end of the ride... all boats got stuck. We were trapped inside the boats for about half an hour before we could be "rescued". It was horrible!!! Can you imagine hearing that kitschig song "it's a small world after all, tra la la..." for half an hour straight!?? It was like psychological torture. Maybe we should sue disney for traumatic stress disorder or breaching the Geneva Conventions on torture or something. Anyway, after being rescued we went to the "nokia small world" to see the cute holograms... the song was just like an echo permanently etched into our neural synapses and our ears by then. I always remember that story when we see episode 9F11 when the Simpsons visit Duffland: "here's a duff beer for you, here's a duff beer for me... tra la la..."

Anyway, Raul sent me a very weird newspaper article: A guy from Guadalajara just got granted a Trademark patent for Duff Beer. Just a couple of weeks later he's selling thousands of duff beer cartons... unfortunately you can't buy a single beer, you have to buy the whole carton. Well, just like i told him: "ocupo" una de esas botellas para mi coleccion". Rumor has it, that he's looking for a suitable duffman. If you think you have a duffman muscular figure (including the beer tummy) go get some red underwear from suburbia. Auditions will be soon.

ciao

Crash!

I just wrote a very, very long post... it took me almost an hour... and firefox crashed when I wanted to add some images. So, I'll call it quit for today, and let's see if I get inspired to re-write it again. By the way, this new version of firefox is really a bad one: It crashes very frequently, it forgets the privacy and preferences settings without any reason... until I notice that something is going wrong and check my preferences just to see that they are reset to something else. The worst nightmare is when it forgets (or erases) all saved passwords or starts accepting cookies that are not allowed. When scrolling for a file (when you use the "browse for file" for some reason) the image that is supposed to be inside the "browse" box, appears on the top left corner of the display...

Those are serious bugs that should have been corrected from the Beta version... I can't understand how they realeased V1.5 with all those flaws.

ciao

V4

Coroflot just launched it's new portal version, with some improvements on portfolio management, networking, etc.

ciao

Designlab

Here's another interesting competition just for design students. Read more about the brief, rules, prizes, etc at : Electrolux Design Lab 2006 . Deadline is 18 August 2006, so hurry up!

ciao

ベンダ の いとこ

This week we just found out about Jaimesan's accident on the streets of Tokyo. At this rate, he will become a full "robocop" in no time. It got me thinking about bionics, new technologies for orthetics, robots, etc. Some implants are not science fiction anymore, and there will be more comming up. For example, this technology to manupulate a robot using brainwaves... with no implants or invasive connections. How is that possible? Well, using MRI, a decoder analyses the brain activity and sends signals to a robot to mimic the human commands with an 85% accuracy. Someday we won't be using a mouse or a keyboard to imput our computers.

About the title... well, here's Bender's japanese cousin: ASIMO. Learn everything you want to know about this amazing robot at Honda Worldwide's ASIMO. There are a couple of movies, videos, pictures, the story of Asimo, etc. My favourite video of Asimo... is this podcast by MobuzzTV from "Salon del automovil" in Madrid of Asimo dancing "I feel good". Jaime: we wish you a promt feel good recovery.

ciao

CardboardTube

Now that I finished doing my tax return, filling paperwork for the patents, etc. I started to upload some of the videos I have into a youtube account. Despite having kiwibroadband... it takes a long time to upload (upload data speed is limited to dial-up speed) So, I had to recompress some videos. Mac users may know that Quicktime cannot handle audio on mpeg videos. I learned that mpeg videos had to be split into an audio feed and the video file using a process called demultiplexing. Then, one has to re-process those files to convert them into .aiff and .mov respectively. Then, join them again using iMovie, Premiere, finalcut or any video editing suite. You may imagine that it was a very discouraging and time consuming process.

However, I found a miraculous new tool developed by Sqared 5 called MPEG Streamclip. It does batch processing and can export directly into any format, without all that complicated demuxing. I am now converting my old home-videos into iPod compatible mp4 at half the file size of a mpeg. I'll be uploading more videos into my youtube account in the next days.

Some of the latest additions to my youtube: the first "serie carton" 2002 and 2003 in Monterrey, the "serie carton 2005" in Guadalajara, the cardboard chairs, and a small clip with Edwina and Gabriel's conference at ITESM. I'll be uploading more videos into my youtube account in the next days. In my favourites you'll also find this amazing cardboard chair. Wow, it got me thinking about developing a foldable cardboard stander, he, he.

ciao