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Amazon does it again: "Frustration-Free Packaging"

Every once in a while when you load Amazon’s front page, you find a letter from Jeff Bezos. Most of the time they deal with marketing deals from Amazon, so you pretty much skip them quickly. Today, however, when I loaded the page, I found this gem:

Hooray Amazon! It was about time somebody stood up for us, the consumers.

Here’s why I take this personal: When I travel to the US I normally do my shopping online, mostly at Amazon, and have them deliver the goods to the hotel (I’m not really a mall person). Opening them is incredibly frustrating, as shown on the videos at Amazon’s The Gallery of Wrap Rage page. It usually involves going down to the front desk, borrowing scissors, then remembering to bring them back after the fact. And, as I normally don’t start opening stuff until late, there’s a preliminary step that involves putting something presentable on, since I am already in my “sleeping gear”. Once I tried to get creative and open it by using the iron to melt the plastic - let’s say that I’ve had very few worse ideas in my life.

So, let’s support Amazon in this pro-consumer initiative and buy products from the companies involved!

My Pictures page

I created a new “My Pictures” page here in the site using Wordpress. You can now click on My Pictures at the top of the page, or follow this link to check out the picture galleries I’ve uploaded.

Battlestar Galactica Webisodes

Today scifi.com started webcasting new webisodes of Battlestar Galactica. The webisodes are just a few minutes long, and are supposed to fill in the gap between seasons 2 and 3 of the series. They will be released on Tuesdays and Thursdays between now and the start of season 3, on Oct. 6. You can check them out here.

BSG is, for me and tons of other fans on the web, one of the best series ever - not only Scifi, but in general. It has very strong writing and characters, plus amazing stories. You can get the miniseries and seasons 1 and 2 from Amazon if you need to catch up on the plot - I don’t recommend that you jump into the webisodes without watching the series first, as lots of twists have happened on the previous two seasons - plus, it’ll ruin the surprise at the end of season 2 for you :-).

This is a sample post from Writely . Not too bad from where you’re away from your computer.:o)

You can expect to see ANYTHING in the streets of Costa Rica

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

I took those pictures some days ago, on different days, on my way to work. Yes, that means that they were taken between 8am and 10am, in the heavily transited roads of San Jose downtown, at rush hour. My commute sucks, and these people are not helping.

I used my cellphone to take the pictures, that’s why they look like cr*p.

Who? Here? At the mall?!?!?!?!?

Guess which famous fivesome was doing a presentation at the mall where we went to eat here near the hotel in Makati?
Give up? Well:

Yes, none other than the guys from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy…I have to admit that I like the show (guilty pleasures…) but come on … if I ever thought that I would run into these guys, the Greenbelt mall in Makati would be one of the last places on Earth were I would think that would happen. Then again, it was one of the last places of the world were I though I would end up, so…

Virtualization

I recently did several “how-to” posts over at my ArtinSoft blog regarding virtualization. I’ll be adding more in the following weeks, but so far they are:
Compacting a Dynamic VHD image

Sysprep is your friend (for deploying pre-configured virtual machines)

Network Connections not showing the Virtual Machine Networking Service

Check them out, you ay end up learning something new

Windows Fundamentals

While scanning the news headlines here at the airport, I noticed that Microsoft just released a new version of Windows called Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs. It is supposed to allow old PCs to run applications as thin clients, and it is based of Microsoft Windows XP Embedded. Seems like a cool idea, too bad that it is only available to customers with the Software Assurance License.

More on A Scanner Darkly

I don’t remember being so obsessed about a movie in a long time. I just ran into this article, called Watching the Detectives - Richard Linklater adapts Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, that talks about the film adaptation for ASD. I suggest you check it out, especially if you’re not familiar with the source material. Or especially if you are. I’m starting to consider creating an “ASD” category…

Blogjet sample post

This is a sample post made with Blogjet. I’m already using it on my other blog, and it works great.

I’ll upload some pictures with it later today.