When the hosing market has gone nuts and people have issues to afford living at a place, one thing the government tries to encourage is the allocation of affordable housing by means of laws that limit the prices of old buildings or by constructing new low-income oriented housing. My thought on this is that it doesn't really help solve the problem. I think what you need is not more affordable-housing. What you need is more-affordable housing..

Some member of the cabin crew: "Welcome to San Francisco, the local time is 2pm and the temperature is 15 degree Celsius".

What I think: "Why do you welcome me to San Francisco? You were not here in the city when I landed. You were in the same plane as me. I've seen you! Serving drinks and switching the cabin lights on and off and stuff. Don't you welcome me, we've arrived here together!"

I'm going to start welcoming the flight attendants back wherever I arrive on my next plane. As in:

them: "Welcome to San Francisco"
me: "Welcome to San Francisco you too!"

video projectors. in 2015. they are still not reliable.

i give quite a lot of talks and presentations each year, which means i visit conference centers, classrooms and company demo rooms very often. i always insist they double check with the local technicians before i arrive on site, and then i ask to arrive one hour in advance. i don't like stressful situations, but i am used to them now. cause the truth is that one in three times there's something wrong with the video connectors, screen resolutions, refresh frequencies or colors of the projectors. i know, you'd think that by 2015 the technology of video signals would be a mature and stable one. but it's not. there's always (i mean, 33% of the times) something just not working. so please, get . this . thing . right . for . once. thanks .

on a related topic, i think the engineers that design video connectors and projectors must be the same that create network printers and drivers...

just like everybody else, i receive lots of crap in my mailbox. much of it is actually not generic advertising but sent really specifically to me, to my name and address (which really annoys me, you might remember). clearly those hungry wolves want something from me.

i documented this fact by collecting all this attempts of these people to get my stuff for a whole 365 day year. from the 102 letters than i got, 34% where from Capital One, 25% from Chase, 25% from other banks and 16% from Comcast.

has anybody though of putting a quota to how much paper can companies waste per year?

- "good morning"
- "good morning!"

is that a wish? or a piece of information?

transformers. in my mind this is some sort of drag queen performance show in San Francisco, not a movie about robots.

these people really love fat. not only fat meals, fat cars, but also fat people. the standard of beauty for men and women is heavily shifted towards the fat side of the spectrum.

one day i was an adult.

i didn't decide it, it was enforced on me by somebody else. not my choice. i was never consulted on this

After giving two talks on realtime graphics and mathematical content, I'm finally free to code and contribute to the three days hackathon that I have organized myself. The theme is "Space" and despite I won't allow myself to enter the competition, I still want to take the challenge and do some life coding. In fact, since we just added the streaming feature to Shadertoy a couple of days ago, this is going to be the first time I live code for a life online audience, which is a fun feeling. Only 55 people followed me during the 30 minutes it took me to improvise the following image, which I titled "curvature".



The planet is a raytraced sphere, the atmosphere glow is done by computing the closest distance between a line segment and a sphere. The curved space plane is a raymarched plane. The rest, random polynomials and color ramps. To see the code and maths, or the image moving realtime, go to https://www.shadertoy.com/view/llj3Rz

simple little idea. adjust the time pedestrians wait for red traffic lights depending on the weather. good weather, let cars and pedestrians share the crosswalk at 50% time. when the weather is cold, re-balance it towards shorter wait time for pedestrians.

not a million dollar idea, but it will make our lives one mili-little bit better.

Some people know how to give a speech but then do nothing useful but talk. Others speak well and do great stuff as well! Others speak badly, but do get great things nevertheless. And finally, others speak poorly and bring nothing to the table, or even break things.

It seems speaking well and making are not correlated.

speaking of words, i think i hit another linguistic bump:

when i say i don't like something, i am not saying i dislike it. all i am saying is that i don't activelly "like" it, ie, fell attracted to it.

the word mortgage starts with "mort". pretty sinister, indeed!

if you speak a latin language

one of my favourite roller coasters in this city is Franklin St

as any good chameleon, Pascal is very good at camouflage. but today i saw him, hiding on a wall!