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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….

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 :-).