Incredible, horrible tragedy in Asia with (so far) almost 100,000 people who died from the tsunami... and all the others that are left in the worst conditions, potentially exposed to diseases and that have to deal with the aftermath!! What the hell was that?! Some people from there maintain blogs that give us a more immediate, alternate source of information from traditional media. The picture above was found on this blog, and there is also the Tsunami Help Blog which tries to coordinate help in the area... -- By the way, I was "surprised" by the number of my American friends and colleagues who donated money right away (even small amounts to organizations lik Red Cross , Medecins Sans Frontieres)...

The Adbusters Media Foundation which is against globalization and market domination by big corporations recently launched the Blackspot sneaker, a converse-like shoe with a black spot instead of a brand logo.

The idea is to go against brands, and especially against Nike with the no-brand shoe. According to Adbusters, every shoeholder will be a shareholder, meaning each buyer will have 1 vote in the company... they also claim that the sneaker is 75% bio degradable. Nice idea, but isn't "no brand" a brand? I am not against getting a pair but something tells me I will more likely shop at Tecnica in the near future...

Adbusters also pushes counter-culture ideas around Christmas like: "Buy nothing for Christmas", and they post testimonials of what people do instead of buying gifts on their web sites (one gave each of his family members a membership to a non-profit organization)...

Many people like me got new cameras for Christmas and I am sure the question "what do I do now with my 2 GB of videos?!?" might have popped into others' heads. Well, here is my advice: delete them. ;o)
Ok, you can also use Procoder from Canopus. It converts pretty much any video format into, well, any other format...

First visit at the new Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), which reopened a few weeks ago. The collection is amazing and we will surely return soon. One of the most regarded paintings was "Les demoiselles d'Avignon" from Picasso, which apparently was recently restored. 

Woohoo, we just received our new camera: the Canon SD200. It's without regrets that we will put the old one away (Canon Powershot A10, aka "The pound"), although it had been very reliable. Among other things, the SD200 takes videos in 640x480 in 30 frames per second, which looks really good on TV. It is a 3.2 Mega pixels which means that it can take pictures in 2048x1536, which is quite more than what we need. Only one drawback: it does not compress the videos in mpeg and they take way too much space: with a 1GB card we can only take 8 minutes and 30s of film... of course, once it is on the PC I can convert it to mpeg4 and shrink the size by 10. 

First snow in New York...