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Whale watching

A few weeks ago I had the chance to go whale watching on Drake Bay, here in Costa Rica.

All I can say is wow… it was an amazing trip. We had perfect weather, and were lucky enough to see several whales. On Saturday we saw a male whale for the longest time, and eventually heard him sing as well - it was amazing, we could hear the songs without any aid out side the water!!

On Sunday we had even more luck. We followed around 4-5 males and one female for about 2 hours. It was impressive to see those multi-ton animals ram and hit each other for the love of the girl…

Overall, it was a great trip, and I definitely recommend it. You can book similar tours through the OTS, a non-profit academic organization that has a Biocursos program to raise awareness about the environment.

Here are some pictures that I took:

Finally, TV shows manage to get the web part right

Ever since the web became available, TV execs have been struggling to integrate both mediums. Well, in my opinion, Heroes is the first show that gets the show/web integration right. How? The comics. After airing each show, NBC posts to the oficial Heroes website a comic that expands on the characters on the show. It is an amazing idea, it gives additional background to the series, additional plot developments, and more details on the characters in the show.

Of course, the TV/web integration doesn’t stop there… for the time being, you can watch all episodes of Heroes online for free!! You should definitely check them out, it is one of the best shows currently on TV - and the second half of the season starts this coming monday, so you have time to catch up during the weekend.

The funniest video I’ve seen in a while

This video is from a group of comedians from Costa Rica, called La Media Docena. It mocks the awful VJs we have here in CR, and also makes fun of metalheads, latin music, etc. It is very well done, and the irony is that the cumbia video actually looks better than most of the music videos from Costa Rican bands you normally see on TV.

Enjoy!

Youtube link

Palmares 2007

This past weekend was the beginning of Palmares 2007, and anual fair that takes place in Palmares, Alajuela, every January. This fair is very organized, and is by far the most popular festival in Costa Rica. Annual attendance reaches up to 1 million visitors (take into account that the population of Costa Rica is around 4 millon – I think only the annual pilgrimage to Cartago beats it in attendance), and you normally run into all your acquantaces.

Palmares is around 1 hour north of San Jose – but it takes you up to 3hrs to get there this time of the year. It is an urban legend that Palmares has the highest or second-highest rate of per-capita beer consumption of any festival in the world - but I’ve seen places that make me doubt that statement. There are strong controls for drunk drivers, so what most people do (myself included) is to rent a bus to take you to/from Palmares. That way you can drink ’til you drop, and don’t worry about being busted on the way home.

This past Saturday Moenia played in one of the big bar-tents (holds around 5,000 people) on the fairground. It was an amazing concert - I love their electronic sound, and they do know how to setup a show. They also handed out “flourescent cords” and dimmed the lights, which gave the whole concert a great atmosphere. Click on any of the thumbnails in this post to see some pictures of the concert.

So, if you are ever in Costa Rica in the middle of January, don’t forget to check out Palmares. There’s still one weekend left (it closes next weekend with a concert by Hombres G, a spanish rock band that has been playing for over 20 years).

At last! A great tutorial for developing OSX applications

Over at Wikibooks I found this gem, called Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners. So far, it is the best tutorial I’ve found on the web for developing Cocoa-based OSX applications. It takes you step-by-step on the process of writing a small sample app, illustrating the different concepts of both Objective-C and the Cocoa API.

So far, from what I’ve seen,. Objective-C is a nice language to work with. The syntax may throw you off a little bit at the beginning, but once you start playing with it, you’ll learn to appreciate features like having the parameter names as part of the method’s signatures. I also liked (for no particular reason, just personal preference) the syntax for message passing.

I think that more resources like this will increase the amount of applications available for OSX. One of the big advantages of developing for Microsoft or Java platforms is the vast amount of resources available in websites like MSDN or Sun’s and IBM’s websites. Apple’s Developer Connection, on the other hand, is not as neatly organized, and it is my opinion that it is missing more concrete examples and introductory material.

I also think that XCode could improve quite a bit. Now that I understand how Interface Builder integrates with XCode, one of my main isssues with it is gone (GUI-driven development a-la-Visual Studio). Still, it is missing features like a more robust Intellisense-like code completion, and a more intuitive interface. Maybe it is the fact that I am more familiar with tools like Eclipse or Visual Studio .NET – but still, maybe version 3.0 will bring it up to par with more mature development IDEs.

Check out the tutorial at this link: Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners

Cool map of the countries you’ve visited

I found this map that shows you which countried in the world you’ve visited. I travel a lot because of work reasons, and, according to this site, I’ve been to 10% of the countries in the world:

Check it out: TravBuddy - Countries Visited Map
(via digg)

Sam & Max are back!

A while back I commented on the news that Sam & Max were making a comeback. Well, the first episode in the new saga is here - you can read the details on the Sam & Max GameTap webpage. The first episode is titled Sam and Max - Culture Shock, and the idea behind these games is to release periodic episodes that advance the story line. From the website:

…The press calls it “gaming’s first sitcom,” we call it the world’s first truly episodic game. Sam & Max: Season 1 is comprised of six self-contained game episodes that are tied together by a larger mystery that will emerge as the season builds to a climax. You can play the episodes in any order you want, but you’ll appreciate the full story more if you start with Episode 1 and solve them in chronological order…

These are PC-only, unfortunately, but I may end up trying them out once I fix my house PC.

Check them out!
You can also catch Slashdot’s review here.

Tapanti National Park

I just uploaded some pictures I took in the Tapanti National Park earlier today. This park is located in Orosi, a beautiful region of Cartago, about 2hrs east of San Jose. The roads are in acceptable condition, but you’re definitely better of on an SUV. The park doesn’t have much in the way of infrastructure, but there are several well-delimited trails that take you straight into the rain forest, walking close to a river and with a beautiful waterfall in the background. Just be warned – it is very likely to rain while you’re there, so remember to bring along adequate equipment.

BTW, I finally managed to work around the issues with Picasa. I had to use a physical Windows box to generate the gallery!! #&$%$&!!

On Picasa and working with pictures

Why the hell hasn’t Google released a version of Picasa for the Mac? I know, we have iPhoto, but Picasa leaves iPhoto in the dust in terms of managing pictures, in its performance, and its image enhancement capabilities - 90% of the time a “I’m feeling lucky” will improve my pictures to a level that I could never reach with iPhoto.

Picasa is one of the few apps I have installed on Virtual PC for the Mac (the others are mostly .NET-development related). Today I imported several pictures from a trip to the Tapanti National Park here in Costa Rica. I enhanced my pictures to my liking, and exported them to a web page, as I have done several times before. Well, the @#!@# program created a bunch of thumbnails that look something like this:

Yes, that is the output of the Folder->Export as Web Page command. This is incredibly frustrating, as now I will have to re-import the pictures on a physical (non-virtual) machine, probably redo the changes (I’ll try Export to folder first…), and THEN create the web-pages. All of this could be avoided if I could use Picasa natively (hell, there’s even a linux version out now!), but no, I’m stuck with iPhoto and its stupid iWeb integration.

And you know what the irony is?? This is pretty much the only software from Google that is NOT BETA, and it is the one giving me a big headache today!!

Sam & Max are back! Who knew? More importantly, who cares?

Sam: Percent sign, ampersand, dollar sign.
Max: And colon, semicolon too!
Psychic: What are you [bleep]ing doing?
Sam: Swearing in longhand, asterisk-mouth.

That quote is from Sam & Max Hit the Road, one of the funniest, wittiest games I’ve ever played. It is an old adventure game from LucasArts in the vein of Day of the Tentacle or Grim Fandango. It was released in 1993, and follows the adventures of two detectives: Sam, the dog, and Max, his rabbit-like partner.
The thing about the game is that the interaction and chemistry between Sam and Max is just hilarious. I remember the adventure to be incredibly tough, but you still laughed out loud at the stupid things they say, specially Max’s wit:

Sam: [studying an Animatronic mammoth] I’ve seen hair like this somewhere before.
Max: Your butt?

Today I read the news that Sam & Max Episode 1: Culture Shock will be released in October. This game has been in development for close to FOREVER, so it is great news that they will finally release it. There was going to be a sequel in 1997, but it was canned - they can say whatever they want, but the reason was that it wasn’t a 3D FPS, the only type of game being developed then. When I heard these news I was like Max on the Jungle Inn:

Sam: I have this sudden craving for an umbrella drink.
Evelyn Morrison: Evelyn Morrison’s Jungle Inn has the greatest umbrella drinks in the world, with over two hundred and thirty-seven kinds of rum.
Max: All in just ONE drink? Which way to the bar!
Sam: Take it easy, Max; you don’t even drink.
Max: Oh, yeah. The toucan must’ve put words into my mouth.

BTW, this is the debut of the new Games category. Looks like shortly I’ll have more categories than posts. And yes, the title is also a quote from S&M….