Pedro Assunção

Archive for November, 2009

Can we finally get rid of oil?

The other day I watched a movie entitled “the age of stupid“. Long story short, it shows the point of view of someone who, around 2055, survived a human species near eradication and built a tower with all the digital records of mankind and a bunch of other stuff too, like frozen animals, art pieces, [...]

Another day in Teuge – 3 more jumps

This Saturday I went back to Teuge for another day of jumping out of airplanes. The day started a bit foggy but windguru never failed me so far, so I knew that it would clear eventually. And so it did; around 11 clock in the morning I was part of the first load of the [...]

SWIFT transfers are monitored by US authorities (even European transfers)

I was really in shock when I went with my mother to the bank the other day: There was a small sheet of paper stating that bank transfers done via the SWIFT network are prone to have its details shared with US authorities. The network currently has two nodes working with the same data in [...]

One weekend, one jump, totally worth it

I woke up today at around 9 am and proceeded to call my buddy Ricardo to see if he had talked to our big master Mario Pardo about the DZ’s weather forecast for today. He had. Mario told him that the clouds were ok and, although there was a bit of wind, we should go [...]

Weather issues, no jumping

Turns out that Portugal is in calamity alert due to the heavy winds and rain. The only place that seemed to escape this destiny was the country side, with just a few sprinkles in the morning and an afternoon of no rain. My only problem were the low clouds. As all skydivers know, low clouds [...]

Android location provider mock

So, yeah, I resumed playing around with android, this time version 2.0. I’m really tempted to buy the new Motorola Milestone that should come out in Europe sometime between… now… and early next year, so I wanna be ready to create all the crazy stuff I have in mind for it One of the things [...]

New programming language (GO) and new mobile OS (Bada)

Wow, these have been a couple of crazy days: First Samsung announced a new operating system for mobile devices called Bada – that will compete directly with Google’s Android – and the next day Google announces the creation of a new programming language, supposedly a cross between Python and C++, called Go. It looks like [...]

Derren Brown gets money from losing tickets at dog tracks

This is absolutely amazing. I can imagine that it will not work with every single person, but even if it works with only half a con artist can make a lot of money with these techniques: Checkout this and more videos of Derren Brown in action here.