Hey, a long time since I posted a song. Here is a Japanese rock+hip pop video for one of the soundtrack songs of Naruto.



And if you like it, listen some more on this MySpace site.

I remember reading Greg Bear books a while ago and thinking they were really cool. The coolness, of course, came from his hard sci-fi style, mixing good ideas with believable science. Now, after about a decade I suppose, I've decided to read another of his books and here is my review.

Darwin's Radio starts a little like Village of the Damned, but without the extraterrestrial origin, continues a bit like The Stand, without the religious mambo-jumbo, and ends in waiting for Darwin's Children, the next book in the series. The plot is about a major and sudden evolution of the species, without the X-Men powers.

My personal feel was that the writing is less than I wanted. The book seems shallow and uninteresting after reading Peter F. Hamilton. While the science is interesting, it also makes huge leaps of faith and I wouldn't put it behind Bear to end the story with a good versus evil battle. Was I too young to appreciate good writing, starved as I was of anything interesting in my life? Or is this book not so hot?

I will certainly read the next volumes, but I am a bit disappointed. I feel like I am watching a play after seeing a real good movie.

The third in this category of blog entries, this describes the few TV shows I have been watching lately. The previous entry can be found here.

House MD is a doctors show. A bit more interesting than E.R. and Grey's Anatomy because they actually focused on interesting characters and interesting medicine. However, after three seasons, the quirky intelligent doctor is just annoying, the supporting cast makes no sense and the medicine is becoming a joke. It's never lupus!

Prison Break is the new Lost. It had an interesting premise and I admit I watched it with pleasure for about a season and a half. Then it all went haywire. I predicted it, too... When people recommended the show I said "How the hell can you keep a prison break for 3 seasons?"; and the answer is that you can't. Not without bringing in mysterious government secret agencies with hidden and malevolent agendas. As acting goes, I like Dominic Purcell, interpreting the older brother, but I can't seem to see him in any decent show. You may remember him from John Doe, another clicheatic TV dead end.

Also in the list:
Numb3rs, even if the math has gone sour already and the show has basically turned into another pure police show. (good versus bad silliness)
Stargate Atlantis, which will probably end with this season without any other decent sci fi to replace it.
Battlestar Galactica, which was great, but moving towards boredom.
Regenesis probably won't get another season after season 3. It was never a great show, but it was decent, being Canadian and all :), with a bunch of virus hunters. It could have been a lot more scientific.
Grey's Anatomy is still on the market for my wife, but barely. A doctor show, but now it is very little about medicine and a lot about the human side of the characters; and who the hell wants a movie about people, completely overlooking the cool stuff happening near them?
Private Practice is an off shoot of Grey's Anatomy, but we never even started watching it.
Ugly Betty still sucks enormously and the wife still watches it.
Eureka. The second season waits on my harddrive, cobwebs on each file. Maybe if I am really bored...
Desperate Housewives takes the desperation way too far, probably reflecting the feelings of the screenwriters when watching the audience numbers fall.
A new season of Doctor Who will start in December.

He did it again! Or would it be better for me to say he has done it afore, as I am kind of moving backwards in the Peter F. Hamilton writings? Night's Dawn is a huge book, about 9Mb of pure text, divided into three parts purely out of paper formatting reasons, I am sure. So far, this is the best thing he has written, at least in my opinion.

Maybe the guy is the kind of writer who writes his best work first, then tries unsuccessfully to follow up. Not that any of his followups could be called a failure, it's just that Night's Dawn is really cool! I mean who can seriously deal with possession, necromancy, devil worship, witch hunting, vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons, all in a future world in which humanity has conquered space an tries to attack the situation with science and rationality? Seriously! If this guy would have written the Bible, there would be no Muslims! (Ron Hubbard, eat your heart out!)

There isn't much else I can say. I certainly cannot summarize a book that spreads over about a dozen inhabited planets, all with their own history, socio-economic situations described and own characters to add plot (real plot) to the story. Right now I am terrified. I need to find the Greg Mandel trilogy, which is the last of the Hamilton big stories, and there are only two outcomes: a) I hate it, which would have wasted my time and trust in humanity; b) I love it, and then I go into withdrawal waiting for the last two volumes of the Void trilogy and whatever else he brilliantly writes in the future.

Bottom line: if you like Sci-Fi, you need to read this. Hamilton and the ReSharper guys are the only people I ever felt the need to send money to in order to apologize for my shameless Internet piracy.

Links:
Peter Hamilton's official site
Wikipedia's entry on the Night's Dawn trilogy
Peter F. Hamilton's entry in Wikipedia.

There are a lot of people in the world having problem with lateral parking. It is not only difficult to manage when you have nothing to go on but the little tiny images in the car mirrors, but stressful as well, as normally the procedure is done on a crowded street with drivers behind you urging you to do it faster.

Not a problem anymore! The Chinese have found the perfect way of parking in under 5 seconds! Here is a video tutorial on how to do it:



Here is an alternative solution.

Two months ago I wrote a post about the exotic fruits I found in a hypermarket in Sibiu, now it's time for additions, taken from the Bucharest Metro.


So here are the fruits I bought today:
the Maracuya
. It has the same feel as a fruit from my first post, the Kiwano. The taste, though, is very sour, like a lemon, and a little spicy. I could eat it, but I think people don't really eat it raw. The outer skin is hard, inedible and thick.
the Kaki fruit. It is very tasty, although it has a peary texture that I didn't quite like. It is a sweet banana tasting fruit.
the Cactus fruit has a sweet coating around the hard inedible seeds inside with a texture of baby food and taste like a not aromatic cantaloupe, similar to the Pepino. The seeds, though, make it less than pleasant to eat.
the Pepino mellon has a similar texture to the Kaki, but it has the taste of Cantaloupe, yet not so aromatic.
Now, the Papaya is an interesting tasting fruit. I am afraid my best approximation is still the cantaloupe, but the papaya also has its aromatic properties and the texture. Its aroma, though, is slightly different, more like banana. It has a big core of inedible seeds and the skin is also inedible. That makes the useful part of the fruit rather small.

In conclusion, one must definitely try the papaya and the kaki. The maracuya is the weirdest taste among all, not entirely pleasant, although I can try to eat it with sugar or something. The net suggests mixing the seedy content with water and sugar after letting the skin wrinkle.

I went to one of the Metro hypermarkets in Bucharest and I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of stuff one can find there, as compared with other hypermarkets that seem to be supplied from the same sources. Also check my next entry, I will write about exotic fruits there.

In this post I will talk about calamari! There is an entire store dedicated to fish in Metro, filled with a lot of nice looking and/or packaged treasures of the sea. My picks were swordfish stakes and one big calamari. Well, not that big... it's no architeuthis, but it will do.

I went home, made a longitudinal incision, threw away the awkward looking organ inside (which I suspect had a digestive function) and the eyes and beak, then threw it in boiling butter after putting a bit of spice over it. I removed it after 2-3 minutes and ate it. Yes, it's that simple! The taste is not strong, but really special and it was totally worth the buy.

Warning, as read from the googling on calamari: Calamari is either to be cooked in 2-3 minutes or in more than 30. Everything in between turns it to rubber. So, if you are like my wife and you want to spit it after you taste it, you might want to try the long cooking calamari recipes out there. :)

I saw this chick sing "They" on Mtv. She was stripping in space in that video, a thing that I found a bit distasteful, even if it did link to a Jane Fonda scene in a film called Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy. But that's the MTV world: strip if you want to get noticed. True enough, I haven't seen any other of her videos on any music television since, but then I stopped watching them.

Jem (real name Jemma Griffiths) is a Welsh singer and this is (I guess) the original video of "They". She is young, beautiful, but also has a nice voice and sound. Check her out at her official web site or the MySpace site.

I had to rewrite the entire post. It started from a nice article by a guy called Dan Wahlin and it ended with three (at least? :) ) separate links to his articles and his blog entered in my Technorati favourites.

Here are links to what appears to be a series about Asp.Net Ajax, really informative and concise:

Update Panel properties explained: Implement UpdatePanel Properties

Implement visual cues during updates:Inform Users With Customized Visual Feedback

Minimize the load on the server on many subsequent clicks or refresh requests:Coping With Click-Happy Users

Here is a complete list of the links in the same series:
ASP.NET AJAX Articles

I've found this while randomly browsing the net, a substance that is supposed to be increasing memory and brain plasticity called ampakine. An article called it steroids for the brain and I borrowed that in the title, since I found it is appropriate enough.

Like all mind enhancing drugs it was discovered by accident, while working on a cure for Alzheimer. Why would anyone try to enhance one's brain on purpose, anyway? :-|

I am not much of a biochemist (even if I recently made some acquaintances that are :) and I could ask them to enlighten me) so I will just post a list of links that I found on the subject. It seems that there are no publicly available pills yet, as the drug is still in trials, but who knows... maybe we can become smarter rather than dumber for a change.

Here are the links:

ampakines
A profile of the behavioral changes produced by
facilitation of AMPA-type glutamate receptors
ampakine
Ampakines
'Memory pill' for the forgetful

It happened to everyone: you opened a bunch of sites and you have to go or restart your computer or something like that. You would like to save those tabs for later reference. Well, Internet Explorer does have something built in to take care of this, but it's kind of stupid. A third party software would be far better.

But anyway, you are in a hurry, you want a quick solution and I have two for you:
1. Make sure you have set Warn me when closing multiple tags in Internet Options, then close your browser. It will ask you if you want to close all tabs, click on Show Options, check Open these next time I use Internet Explorer.

2. Go to Internet Options and then just click Use current in the Home page section. It will set all your open sites as home pages.

In Firefox things are far better. Just right click on the tabs bar and bookmark all. It will ask you to save them with a name. Then just go to the Bookmarks menu and reload them.

I remembered today of a song that I liked to listen to called Everything for Free, by K's Choice. Back then (oh, my tired bones) the Internet was not yet as... evolved as these days and you couldn't really get all the discography of an artist in a few minutes, so I only listened to this one song that was also on MTV.

I am putting the video clip here, but really do look into the singer, Sarah Bettens, who also has a solo project beyond K's Choice and has a lot of videos on YouTube. Here are some sites you can visit:

	K's Choice	Sarah Bettens
Official Site	X	X
Myspace Site	X	X
Wikipedia Site	X	X

[youtube:AxY6KrqGnCw]

This song is one of my latest favourites, even if the sound itself is a bit too much like country music, the lyrics are really funny. I wasn't able to find the video for the song, so here is a random video one.



Poe, by her real name Ann Danielewski is the daughter of the Polish director Tad Danielewski and is singing since 1990. Look for her other songs as well, some are really smart and they sound pretty cool.

How to Sleep Better is a BBC programme that tries to solve some of the issues related to sleep. It does NOT show you how to sleep better in a shorter time, it is about fixing the problems that make you sleep badly or less than you want.

The program is very interesting indeed. I was kind of put off when I didn't find it on video.google.com and it is not found freely on the programme's site either, so you should seek it on BitTorrent or DC++.

Anyway, long story ridiculously short, it started from a survey of common sleep problems and then they tried to find solutions. There was a snorer, a couple with a screaming child, a woman too obsessed by work to sleep well, an old man who couldn't sleep well from his youth, a flight attendant that could not sleep well in her own home, but could do it in a hotel and some guy that worked driving night shifts.

Solutions:

The snorer should lose weight to relieve some of the fat on her neck, but she could also try tennis balls hooked on her back (with a bra) to stop her from sleeping on her back. But there was a thing that she put in her mouth that solved it. Apparently, snoring is treatable in 99% of the cases.

The couple with the screaming child should not have had so many children in the first place and they could also have aborted, killed or at least seriously beat them to make the kid shut up. But what they actually did was to first analyse the problem, which was that the child associated sleep with the presence of his parents close by, and then solve it by slowly going further away from the child each night when put to sleep. Eventually the brat learned to sleep by himself and not feel frightened when alone in bed.

The woman that was obsessive about her work and other problems solved it by scheduling her activities each day and sticking to the schedule and also writing down any problem that obsessed her. It seems, at least in her case, to ease the need for her brain to ceaselessly remember and analyse the problem if it was written down.

The old man was so worked up about not being able to sleep that he actually kept himself awake by worrying that he won't be able to sleep. They solved it by forcing him to try to stay awake :)

The flight attendant has a clogged bedroom. Her room looked more like a prison cell than a sanctuary (that's more or less their words) and when they rearranged her room (basically by drawing a line in it and separating a third of the room for storage and the other two thirds for relaxation). That helped her ease up and feel comfortable in her own apartment.

The night shift guy "cheated". He quit his job! :)

There was also interesting information about the drinks that keep us awake (like coffee, tea, fizz drinks) and foods (apparently aged foods like salamis and a bit potatoes) and about how some people are night people and some are day people. Trying to wake and go to sleep early would work wonders on some and terrible on others.

Try to find it, even if the presenter, Robert Winston, is a bit silly looking. He is a smart man even if he does look like one of the Marx Brothers :)

Yes! A message for women everywhere :) Garbage has better songs, but this one is with dedication ;)