Rui CarmoA colleague of mine went to Paris for the weekend, and we just had to dig up the old joke about it being a perfect city despite the French.
But that is not my point.
Don't get me wrong: I love Paris (used to go there for the Network+InterOp events, back when Ethernet switching was all the rage) and one of my old colleagues was a Frenchman, notorious for living off his sailboat in Lisbon and being the quintessential motard.
He once came to the office very late at night dressed in black leather from head to toe and looking not unlike Darth Vader as he slowly paced through two sets of black doors, his back ramrod straight and his dark helmet visor down.
I'll never forget that moment. He walked up to my desk, stopped, looked around (it was very late, and I think I was the only guy on the floor), and in one smooth movement undid his helmet, cradled it on his forearm, pointed to the visor and asked:
"Do you want French, Spanish or Portuguese mosquitoes?"
It's a great (true) story, and it sort of balances the opening point, but it's not my point either.
No, my main point is that neither of those have anything to do with my work day, but, in an odd way, they sort of bracket what didn't go right. If I were to try summarizing things in a single sentence, I would probably go with -
There are few places that are able to rise above the people who inhabit them, and there are very few people that, given the choice, I will never want to forget.
Fortunately, I have an actual life, too, so here's an update on the geek angle of it.
- Some of you may have noticed that there's a bunch of people out there eagerly hacking the Wii remote, and I've been kind of keeping track of some efforts for getting it to work on a Mac. But it already works on a Mac - sort of. Miguel Duarte posted this link of a Wiimote being used as a mouse under Windows, which is almost what I envisioned except for the Windows bit. I suppose we'll get there eventually.
- I've been kind of slow catching up on a lot of things lately, so I missed this beautiful tutorial on using Quartz (via Daniel Jalkut). I am starting to have a love-hate relationship with coding (maybe it's my age, or my interest on getting as far from technology as humanly possible on the professional plane), but this nearly restores the balance.
- Ah, the wonderful rumors of an Apple sub-notebook. I missed those, with all the iPhone tomfoolery going on these days.
- Finally, Parallels has been making waves with its new "Coherence" feature (i.e., blue-screening a Windows desktop inside a Mac one), and it does look very nice, although not very appealing to my personal taste (I use Gnome and Citrix daily now, and believe me, after a while having two distinct sets of windows becomes a major visual irritant) .
My favorite "brainless" feature, however, is the apparently seamless inter-environment file drag-and-drop feature, which I hope will make its way to Linux VMs some day (I may be geeky, but I don't enjoy jumping through hoops to access files). Me, I'll just wait to see what VMware will come up with (my MacBook is still MIA, so there's no hurry).
One thing to note regarding the Virtualization space is that it is heating up quite a bit, but not just where the underpinnings (i.e., virtualizers) are concerned. In the past few weeks, companies like moka5 and JumpBox have popped up in my radar, which means that we're starting to see a little service-driven ecosystem flourishing around the core suppliers.
Still, it's kind of funny to think that the Russians thought of it first.