UTWOU

I remember it as if it was today.

We were living in England. It was mid August, summer ‘99. I was talking to a friend about time traveling, and the way we could test if this would be possible or not. After a lot of ideas, I told my friend that a good way to see if its possible, would be to tell his descendants that if anytime they are able to time travel, they should come to visit him on September 9th, 1999 (the short for this date is a very easy number to remember, because it is “9/9/99″ and was the last funny date of the previous millennium)

Thursday 9th September 1999

The day arrived and although we were very skeptic about a time traveler appearing in front of us, coming by bicycle, taxi or whatever, we went to work (it is supposed that the time traveler would have had the address of our working place) after work, we went to my friend’s home (the time traveler should have had his address too)

We cooked something to eat, ate it and waited all the afternoon for the time traveler to come but no one appeared at his home.

Does that mean that time traveling is not possible? Well… It doesn’t mean this, but it means that nobody traveled to this specific date. Why was that? We can find some logic explanations:

1) My friend never told this story to his descendants, so they are just playing with the time machine, visiting some other more interesting years.

2) He told his descendants, but as nobody came before telling them this is not going to change. So they can be there, traveling to this precise date, but in a parallel reality.

3) He told his descendants, but someone forgot or his descendants never reached the era of the time machine (they were extinguished)

4) The Earth didn’t exist anymore when the time machine was invented, so… How the hell could they travel back to Earth if they don’t know where to find it in the future? Or may be they know where to find it but as the Earth doesn’t exist anymore they probably live in another planet, have alien appearance and don’t wanted to fright us.

Maybe time traveling back is not possible…

What we know for sure, is that time traveling forward is possible, because we do it every second

Have a look at my article: Time traveling issues

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For the title it looks as if I were going to write about a cooking machine or a chef, but it doesn’t have anything to do with cookers

I found this while surfing on Youtube. Leonardo Bonanni invented a machine to “make dishes on demand”. This means to make the dish itself (not the recipe). It works with discs that are converted to dishes and once you have finished are converted back to discs (so you can store them without the need of a big cupboard)

There is some confusion about this machine on youtube, because Leonardo says that this machine has the same size of a dishwasher and at some point of the video, he says that you wont have to clean the dishes made with the dishmaker. This made people think that this machine was intended to replace the dishwasher and would reshape the dirty dishes back to discs without cleaning them. I think that the objective of this machine is to replace the lots of cupboards we have at our kitchen, filled with dishes, cups and glasses with the “on demand” model. Probably they will have to include a loader, so you can have fifty or one hundred discs loaded, you program the amount of dishes, bowls or glasses, and the machine starts making them while you can do anything else. Probably the machine should have a basket too, to store the dishes when they have been made, so you don’t have to be in front of the machine taking one by one every made dish till the end of the process. If the shaping process can be reversed with heat, may be, the dishes will go back to its original shape while we wash them in our conventional dishwasher (dishwashers normally heat water and produce heat at the end to dry the dishes) If the process couldn’t be reversed this way it would be very boring to put the dishes, one by one, back into the machine till all of them are reshaped back to discs. It would be good to have a loader too, but this would be a little bit more complicated I think

Have a look at the video and make your comments

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I recently bought a Roomba-SE (I would have liked to get the latest model, but SE is the latest model we have in Europe) The first I have to say is that it is as marvelous as everybody says it is. The most annoying thing to me when vacuuming, was to vacuum under the bed. Our bed is in the middle of the room, with just one wall on the head side. It’s a little bit wider than a Queen size (63″)  and although it has got plenty of room under it to vacuum comfortably, I didn’t like crouching to vacuum  everywhere under the bed (not to say that under the bed is where most of dust gets accumulated)

Now, with my new Roomba this is a task I dont mind doing anymore. I switch it on, put it under the bed (as centered as I can), press the “clean” button and wait for it to start vacuuming in spiral When it finishes under the bed, it continues vacuuming all the room and that’s a good point too.

One inconvenient is that the rotating brush that it has to sweep dust from corners, creates a slight current like a ventilator, and some particles of dust end up in the air. The rotating brush also doesn’t reach the floor very well. It is a little bit elevated and as it is made of a very soft material, when it rotates, it goes up a little bit more. I think that the nylon hairs of the brush were supposed to point down, but probably they bent or squashed to another direction in the package (they are squashed horizontally and I think they should be vertically) I tried to squash them to the right direction with a small clamp, leaving it for some hours and I got some results.  Probably I’ll be doing the same again sometime.

Another problem I have found is that although Roomba is supposed to detect stairs to avoid falling down, it falls down my first floor stairs. Well it really doesn’t fall down because when it reaches the edge, one of the wheels comes out, the Roomba stops and starts beeping (see how I workarounded it) . This problem doesn’t happen on the stairs of the lower floor and neither on the second floor, because there are no windows in front of the steps.

When using Roomba, you have to remove any small obstacle that it could find on its way during the vacuum process. For example, sleepers, cables, furry mats and anything where it could get stuck. If you have anything that blocks it to get anywhere, it would be recommendable to remove it too (I usually put things on top of tables or beds) otherwise it wouldn’t be able to vacuum behind or under the obstacle. Once, I left it vacuuming the living room and I went somewhere else. When I entered in the living room, I found it making circles, stuck with a TV cable. This helped me to finish the installation of the TV cable, and find some alternatives for other cables I had in the middle of the living room and my wife was always telling me to remove, so Rommba also helps you to be more organized

My wife was very skeptic about Roomba and I think she still is, but she told me that she likes a lot how Roomba sweeps carpets. Our carpets are not furry at all. Otherwise Roomba would have got stuck on them, as happened with one we have at our bedroom.

Next thing to buy should be Scooba, but I am not sure about it right now. I will wait for a while before buying it because main shops and malls don’t sell it and are the ones that give you satisfaction guarantee or replacement services (other shops have also those services, but I don’t know if they would be as serious as main shops)

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Yesterday I went to my sister’s home after work because I had to get a replaced monitor that HP sent me to her address and also to make her a visit, of course!!

When I arrived, my nephew was sleeping. It had been his first day of what it’s called an “urban camp”, so he was very tired (He is nearly three years old)

As I hadn’t eaten yet my sister served me a recipe of pasta she made herself. It was Lumache (snails) pasta with cream, Parmesan cheese and mushrooms. It was delicious! (I’ll be writing the recipe some day)

After dinner, my nephew woke up and he was kind of a little bit angry (he always gets angry when he is tired even if he has slept a lot) and I started to search pictures of animals with Google. We searched for crocodiles at the beginning and then we searched for spiders. While we were watching spider pictures, he asked “Why the spider doesn’t move?”. And we answered “It doesn’t move because what we are viewing is a picture and not a movie”. So I thought that there should be a spider moving on youtube.com so I searched and found this video.

Enjoy the video.

After this video we were playing with the Subservient Chicken (Burger King interactive chicken). You should have seen him yelling to the chicken to make things. It was very funny

http://www.subservientchicken.com/

If you want to see a history of the Subservient chicken and a list of commands, have a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subservient_Chicken

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