Segway i2

First and foremost a Disclaimer: Who hasn’t ride one, doesn’t comment for now, unless if it’s for asking to try it out. Trust me, it’s the best approach!

And now the story! Me and Patrícia just lost our minds and decided to buy two Segways. The first has arrived by a lucky strike last Friday!

The intro is short and for those who don’t know what the heck its a segway, to put it simply, a Segway it’s a Human Personal Transporter, something with a nifty name and that I assure we’re just starting to hear, but it will in our life span give a lot of conversation.

The Segway has been part of my dreams, for as long as the day Dean Kamen introduce it to the world as his “Ginger” project. At the time I found it amazing, and from the first images that I wanted to try it. Well it wasn’t exactly easy, even Patrícia tried it before I did, well she had actually tried a x2, the whole-terrain version, which I haven’t yet tried, so I guess she still leads the way!

During a weekend in Porto, some weeks ago, while I searching online for some guided tours and what to visit on such short break, I found the amazing Porto Tours from Santiago and Mariza, and I have to honestly tell you that I really never expected it to be as amazing as it was! In fact 3 very special and unique 3 hours in my life. Best advice, if you don’t want to increase your expenses, don’t try it! All the rest, add a Segway ride to your personal list of things to accomplish before you die and start saving money!

It’s expensive, way expensive for the Portuguese income, but not all in this life can be bad, and sometimes, you just have to work for something that really drives you and makes you a little happier, something that might change all that’s coming for good!

So I just declare this post an open-invitation for try outs! Will all safeties ON, the helmet and me running aside, as a friend I am most delighted to let anyone that requests try-it out.

Next stage? Be able to commute every day for work riding it. In my case involves two separate tracks: home-train and train-office, besides all practicalities I still have to realize how can I store it while at the office.

16 comments October 2nd, 2007

SAPO CODE BITS

Well, SHiFT isn’t happening this year… and yeah, believe me no one’s more sad about it than myself, well may two other crazy guys! But we couldn’t stand still so we’re helping SAPO in an astonishing event:

and trust me, we’re all aiming high, as high as we’re allowed to get all the Portuguese developers an amazing event, party and mash-ups contest!

The event is obviously inspired in the Yahoo Hackday which totally contagious us back in May in London when some of us managed to attend it. Since not all Portuguese can afford traveling as far, SAPO decided to recreate it!

We’re trying to include everyone that wishes to go, but since the seats are limited, I urge everyone who praises for his/her geekiness without shame to register at:

Time as come for all of you geeks in the closet to come out, so I really hope we can all meet up in November in Lisbon!!

4 comments September 21st, 2007

Jeff Han’s Multitouch Demo (II)

Last year Jeff’s demo at TED made sensation throught out the net! This year he just showed us a bit more about the future of interaction, check out his demo video:

nice hein?

6 comments March 21st, 2007

Sun BlackBox

Miguel just sent me the email alerting to it, but I couldn’t resist to actually write about it here, Sun just release what seems to be a self contained portable datacenter:

After today, you’ll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized datacenter–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.

Designed to address the needs of customers who are running out of space, power and cooling, Project Blackbox gives customers a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future–where thinking out of the box means putting an IT infrastructure in a box.

I can’t stop thinking about the whole list of possibilities for its use, from war conflicts to international aid missions there’s a whole lot of situations to choose from. I actually haven’t read the policies of its use,if its just a demo product or something to be used only by Sun, but one thing is for certain, these are indeed great times, one we can already pack an entire datacenter into a container box.

Check out some more use scenarios Sun just put up online for its use.

1 comment October 18th, 2006

Plazes reDesign (beta)

Plazes is still in beta, but today i just noticed they launched a new website with a whole lot of new features.

For those who might not know plazes yet, Plazes is a geo-reference serviced based on ip, meaning that you don’t need to have a gps for pin-pointing your location on the web, you can just trust on the connection points that you hang to (to be more precise, it uses the mac-address of the router you’re connected to, to save your location at plazes). If the “plaze” is unknown plazes asks you about details on that particular location, otherwise it just saves your locations based on the information others have submitted on that precise location!

Here’s where I am right now:

Rather nice, don’t you think?

Add comment July 5th, 2006