Avatar official trailer available

AVATAR takes us to a spectacular new world beyond our imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery, as he leads a heroic battle to save a civilization. The film was first conceived by Cameron 14 years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, AVATAR delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film, disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.

Genre: Action and Adventure, Science Fiction
Director: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver

You can watch the trailer here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avatar/hd/

The official Avatar site is here: http://www.avatarmovie.com/


The Youtube channels is here: http://www.youtube.com/officialavatar#

Situation puzzles are a nice way to spend time near that camp fire

The first time I did a situation puzzle was over 20 years ago. I was on the beach with some friends in Istria (Croatia), we were drinking bambus (more about that tomorrow) and it was night time. You have to remember that this is in a small town, there is not such a thing as a board walk where you can go and buy stuff……no, the closest light source is half a mile away.

Situation puzzles are often referred to as lateral thinking puzzles or "yes/no" puzzles.The way you start with a situation puzzle is like this: you tell a short little story and people then have to guess what happened. The one rule is that you can only answer Yes or No.

Here is one example I took from Wikipedia

One of the most famous situation puzzles is told similar to this:

A man walks into a bar, and asks the bartender for a drink of water. The bartender pulls out a gun, points it at the man, and cocks it. The man says "Thank you" and leaves. What happened?

The question and answer segment might go something like this.

Question: Could the bartender hear him? Answer: Yes

Question: Was the bartender angry for some reason? A: No

Question: Was the gun a water pistol? A: No

Question: Did they know each other from before? A: No (or: "irrelevant" since either way it does not affect the outcome)

Question: Was the man's "Thank you" sarcastic? A: No (or with a small hint: "No, he was genuinely grateful for some reason")

Question: Did the man ask for water in an offensive way? A: No

Question: Did the man ask for water in some strange way? A: Yes



Eventually the questions lead up to the conclusion that the man had the hiccups, and that his reason for requesting a drink of water was not to quench his thirst but to cure his hiccups. The bartender realized this and chose instead to cure the hiccups by frightening the man with the gun. Once the man realized that his hiccups were gone, he no longer needed a drink of water, gratefully thanked the bartender, and left.


Here are 2 more examples; these are the ones that I have been told on that beach

Situation Puzzle 002: Why did this person shoot himself?
A person enters his room, goes to get something out of the closet, grabs the handle from the door of the closet, gets terrified, opens the closet takes out a gun and kills himself

Why did this person kill himself?
You can look for the answer here: Situation Puzzle 002: Why did this person shoot himself?


Situation Puzzle 001: What happened to this man?
There is man laying in the Sahara deserts, he has a toothpick in his hand, he is dead, there is nothing nearby for miles and miles. He is 300 feet away from an oasis; he doesn't have GPS on him or any food or drinks

What happened to this poor person and why is he laying here dead?
You can look for the answer here: Situation Puzzle 001: What happened to this man?

Of course these days with all the gadgets that we have and the ADD we have developed because of it makes these kind of things seem lame and also too long to play. But I think you should try and you will see that you will have a good time

Lego Town Plan...yes or no?

I am looking at this Lego set and I am thinking about getting this for me and my oldest son for Christmas. What do you think, is the LEGO Town Plan too much stuff for a 5 year old and should I get something smaller? Remember, he doesn't have to build the whole thing, he can just build pieces of it and then use the rest of the bricks to create stuff with his own imagination.

I was also thinking of the LEGO Star Wars Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. Lego + Darth Vader? Can you get any cooler than that?

I don't know...which one would you get?.....Just imagine that these are both priced the same so that that is not a factor in your decision.

As I kid I loved legos, as a matter of fact it is probably the only kind of toy I had after I was older than 5

Facebook buys FriendFeed and now we have FaceFeed

So Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, here is the press release.

Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

I really don't know what to say about this, I really like FriendFeed and just hope that Facebook will not disable twitter inside FriendFeed because that would really suck. On the FriendFeed blog Bret Taylor writes the following

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team

Mmmm, that doesn't sound reassuring does it?

What do you think?

BingTweets launched

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing

BingTweets enables you to see deeper, real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter by fusing Bing search results with the latest tweets. To get started, click on a trending topic, or search for anything that's on your mind in the search box below.



Check it out: http://bingtweets.com/

Example Of The Gimp Predator Filter

I was playing around with the Predator filter in the Gimp

So I took a pic of this little kitty



I applied the Predator filter and here is the result




What do you think?

Sandokan and Westworld, Two Movies/Series I Want To See Again

For some strange reason I was thinking about Sandokan and Westworld today.

Westworld

Westworld is a movie I last saw when I was probably about 10 year old. The main actors in the movie are Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin and James Brolin. Here is in short what the movie is about (from Wikipedia)

It is sometime in the near future, in a fictional high-tech adult amusement park called Delos. The park is divided into three zones: WesternWorld, MedievalWorld and RomanWorld. The entertainment in all three areas consists primarily of interaction by the guests with androids programmed to act in character (the Old West, medieval Europe, and pre-Christian Rome, respectively). The androids are indistinguishable from human beings, apart from minor flaws in their hands, and guests are encouraged to indulge in any fantasy, including killing the androids. The androids are programmed to respond positively to guest requests, specifically including requests for sex. Delos's guests pay $1,000 a day for the experience.

Here is a trailer for the movie

So as you can probably guess one of these androids goes a little crazy and starts to shoot back. This android is the Gunslinger and he is played by Yul Brunner.


I will never remember the scene when The Gunslinger gets splashed in the face with acid, and the skin starts to melt and you can see the inside of his robotic head, very much like terminator.


Spooky stuff for a 10 year old at that time.


Did you know that Westworld was the first major feature film to use 2D computer generated images (CGI)? Di you also know that Westworld was written and directed by Michael Crichton?


Update September 2016

So here we are 7 years later..and my wish came true. HBO is premiering the first episode of  Westworld this weekend. It looks really good. Here is the trailer for the HBO series Westworld

Sandokan

Sandokan is a fictional pirate of the late nineteenth century, Sandokan first appeared in a publication created in 1883 by Italian author Emilio Salgari.
He is appeared in 11 novels and is known as "The Tiger of Malaysia".

There are two scenes that I will never forget, the first one is when he jumps up ans slices the tiger to death, The second scene is when he takes the poison before they throw him into the ocean

I watched Sandokan when I was 7 or 8, this was a HUGE hit in Europe, you could catch it on any channel. It was played on Ned 1, ZDF, RAI, BBC etc etc. I remeber lots of people having a shirt with Sandokan on it, I did not have one but my cousins did. As a matter of fact i don't think I ever had a shirt with movie/music stars except for Superman
Here is the trailer for Sandokan

The actor that played Sandokan is Kabir Bedi and if you watched Dynasty in the 80s then you might recognize him since he was in a couple of episodes. I just hope that somehow we can get Sandokan on DVD soon, I would love to watch it again.