All posts by kirsch

MacBook Air

I stopped by the local Apple Store to look at the new MacBook Air. Man it’s so tiny! According to the reviews and to what little I played with it, it seems fast enough for most daily tasks. My only recommendation is to get the one with the bigger 128 GB hard drive. Not a single demo machine at the store had the 64 GB one, they all had the 128 GB drive. And all the demo units had their hard drives already more than half full. You do the math.

NutraSweet: Who thought this was a good idea?

Low-calorie sweetener brand NutraSweet just introduced a new packaging:

Seem familiar? Yes, the colors of the packets match the competition (Sweet ‘n Low, Equal, Splenda). Marketing genius?

Consider this: Allergy to phenylananine – which is found in aspartame (i.e. NutraSweet) – is quite serious. How long will it be until some groggy phenylketonuric accidentally grabs the wrong packet (right color though) for his coffee? Uh oh. You read it here first.

Via Brand New.

Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear

I went to Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear on Sunday. The finance department rejected my request to fly to Washington D.C., so I had to drive to the local rally at the Texas Capitol instead. Another 3,999 people had the same brilliant idea.

While my personal sanity was not entirely restored and thus the rally a resounding failure, I did manage to snap a few photos and had a good time while doing it and checking out the show…

Continue reading Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear

Newton 120

Is that some sort of iPad prototype? Nope, it’s a Newton: the original tablet, or at least the first PDA. Moi found Jaco‘s first Newton: a MessagePad 120 circa 1992. We took out the old batteries from the Newton and its the external 2400 bps Apple Newton Fax Modem which had luckily not leaked.

Plug it in to the wall and voilá! It works, and it still has a bunch of contacts stored from the mid nineties. These things were really, really nice and at least a full decade ahead of their time.

That's my reflection, not my photo... the screen is greyscale.

Festival Bella Vía

I was in Monterrey, Mexico all of last week. On Sunday, October 17th, the Nuevo León government held the Festival Bella Vía (website not updated for 2010) in the Macroplaza.

According to the brochure, a tradition started in the Lazio region back in the XVI century in which artists painted on the ground their works of art. So this is what was going on here: artists were copying very well known works of art on the ground using chalk. Very neat. Check out the photos below (click on the thumbnail for the full size picture). See if you can recognize any of them…

Goodbye, Cruel World

Adiós Mundo Cruel

I went to the Bob Bullock museum last night, home of the only IMAX screen in town, to check out Jack Zagha‘s first full-legth film Adiós, Mundo Cruel (Goodbye, Cruel World). It played in the Austin Film Festival and won the JURY PRIZE NARRATIVE FEATURE award.

The movie is a light comedy set in Mexico City that will keep a smile on your face for the whole duration of the movie, even if, like me, aren’t a fan of scatological humor. I won’t spoil any of the jokes here – but there are plenty of great moments. I’ll just say this: keep an eye open for it for when it comes out in the movie theaters. It’s good stuff. Congratulations to the director and everyone else involved!