An good end and a wonderful begining

I had a talk with my dad, told him about my bisexuality. He doesn't like anything that has to do with gays,but he said that the only thing he wants for me is happiness and that he supports me completely. We opened to each other like we hadn't done in years. This was the best fucking ending to a really nice year and the best beginning to the new one.

With that said I wish everyone who stumbles to my little corner of the internet a wonderful new year. Be happy, you are alive and you can make your life better. <3

Sager NP8130 review

I had this laptop for about 6 months so I will give a little review.

Pros:
- It's a freaking monster of laptop(not size-wise), it's incredibly fast
- If you upgrade the screen to the 95% ntsc your eyes will fall in love with the laptop each time you turn it on
- The sound is good
- The graphics are awesome

Cons:
- If you connect an HTC Droid Incredible(and the device is on) when you turn on the laptop, the laptop will freeze the boot sequence after the bios. Simply turn it off, disconnect the phone and turn it on again, then plug the phone once more
- The matte texture of the laptop is prone to wearing off with use and it doesnt need to be heavy use.
- The button of the disc tray is not very noticeable to the touch so you might spend a few seconds trying to find it.


As you can see the cons are mostly annoyances, not really problems. If you want to buy this laptop I recommend it greatly. Just upgrade the display and add as much ram as you can. You will love this laptop.

Buy it from Xoticpc.com, you wont regret a purchase from there. =3

Happy holidays

This is to anyone who bothers to read this blog. I wish you the best at this and any time of the year. I hope that this 2012 will be even better for everyone, happy with your loved ones and filled with love.

=3

Saying thanks during christmas eve

After my family finished their thanks prayer(oh god, thou who hath done everything) I decided that I wanted to thank the people who made the food, prepared it(my mom) and made such a nice dinner possible. What was the answer from my dad? God made them. But you just said that my mother did nothing and you are thanking god. God made everyone who made the food therefore we have to thank god. How much more stupid can he get? I don't know.

Ignorance at its finest

My father just said that HIV/AIDS appeared because people started having sex using the wrong holes in the body.

At least he also said that he doesn't care what others do in their bed.

I give up regarding my dad

I decided to talk with my dad. He kinda gets evolution but still thinks that there is something that drives it. He kinda understands that dna might cause some problems with people but he still thinks that god controls it behind the scenes. He is a misanthropist that agrees that the reason because he doesn't harm others is because he doesn't want the consequences(punishment by god). When he sees a child with a malformation or other problems his conclusion is that god is punishing their parents. For him there aren't good people with problems. He says that if you have problems maybe you aren't as good as you seem to be. He doesn't understand reason and facts aren't important to him. Fixing a human body(getting a new kidney for example) is bad because for him the human body isn't a machine for which you cant replace its parts. I give up, reasoning with him is not possible at all.

"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture." My dad agreed when I said this to him.

Eating shit for jesus

This one is fun and shows how far zealotry can go. Part of the confirmation was going to a camp for 2 days. Among all the silly things we did(singing, dancing, seeing a guy being beaten with a gardening hose, guilt tripping us, and talking about ghost stories at night) something stood beyond all that.

What could possibly be worse than all that you ask? Well the counselors made a concoction made of water, spit, raw meat, possibly barf of others and pretty much anything else. The idea was this, the people that loved jesus were threatened with death and they didn't betray their master. So we should prove our loyalty by eating a spoonful of that.

That day I learned that I do not let peer pressure control my actions. I stood my ground and didnt eat that thing, two other guys followed me (we were about 50 in that place). Some of my friends got sick after that and one even fainted during the mass that sunday (this happened on a saturday).

Lesson learned, religion makes you do stupid and dangerous things. Jesus, next time why don't you shove up that thing into your sacred ass?

An exam for the confirmation

I learned the name of every book in the bible because some of my friends were asked that question. When I arrived the pastor didn't ask me anything related. I also remember the pastor flipping the bird and saying that we were the ones that had bad thoughts. I think that is the first time that I have seen a priest flipping the bird in my life.

Doing the confirmation

I did the confirmation when I was 15. This was supposedly part of the catholic sacraments. The idea behind that consisted on lectures each Saturday by a group of teens a bit older than us. I wont lie here, I only did this because most of my friends went here. But by when this thing was over I couldn't care less where my friends went. I wasn't putting up with this kind of bullshit again.

The talks were the usual things:

• Don't have idols(a girl acted like a fan of britney spears, yelling "You are my idol!" and some guards restraining her) 
• Not buying some lucky amulets (a guy selling frogs for luck, it was a 2x1 sale by the way)
• Not using the name of god in vain, how the father, the son and the holy spirit were the same thing *cough* bullshit *cough* (actually the one who talked said "a year ago I didn't want to talk about this because every time I think about it I get more confused". I wonder why was that?)
• Doing a kind of rally looking for hidden clues(one of them was buying condoms while being tied to another guy/girl's wrist and running in the middle of the cars. That was long before the pope acknowledged that condoms MAY BE useful sometimes. At least this church didn't demonize condoms.)

Now that I think of it this thing was indoctrination. I will leave for another time the tests we did here and the camp we had.

Thou shall not draw the devil

Or so my grandma thought. I remember drawing the devil (a humanoid figure with horns and drawn with red, orange and yellow). My grandma made me tear apart my drawing because it was bad. It didnt make sense then and it doesn't make sense now either.

Philosoraptor moment: If satan governs hell(I know this idea comes from the divine comedy) why does he punishes those that go against god? In any case he should praise them and give them a wonderful life down there.

How did god create the universe...

..if he was born after the universe was created? My 4 year old self asked this question to my mom. My family is catholic but not fundamentalist (thank goodness) and my mom said that god created the universe and that jesus was another being created afterwards. Even at that age I knew that this idea didn't make sense at all because catholicism states that the father, the son and the holy spirit are the same. When you think about it, how weird and fucked up would be to be your own father?

Adventures with religion

I am an atheist. I have been one for many years already. But this post isnt about this. This post is about the strange, creepy, disgusting and/or anecdotal things that happened to me with regard to religion during my childhood. I plan on posting a few things over the course of the next days to relate all these little stories about my upbringing.

I hope you find them funny or realize the wackiness of religion. If for some reason you are offended by any of this let me state it here and in bold. I don't care if you are offended, get over it and no I wont apologize. If you don't like it there is that little arrow on the browser that you are using to get out of my blog. Have a nice day. =3

Psychedelic animations

A couple of days ago a friend posted this image on my wall on facebook. Apart from the possible stoned references this image looked incredibly interesting to create. So the question was: how do I create one? The answer was relatively simple and the code wasn't too complex to write. So lets start with the explanation shall we?

First of all lets look at the einstein pic without animations.

The animation is only 10 frames long but something looks odd from the pics. Lets convert a single frame into greyscale like this:

The border of the hair and the shirt look darker than expected. Upon closer examination I finally saw it. The image is photoshoped. The face, hair and shirt are inverted compared to the rest of the image. This doesnt needs to be done other than to give the final image more contrast. Now that we know about that detail lets keep going.

The image seems to be changing from one color to the other and then back. Going for example from black to white and then back to white. So to start the program we need a function that bounces from 0 to 1. Its important to notice that this function cant be simply a triangle.

This is a simple function defined in the interval [0,1] being x, (1,2] being 2-x and (2,3] being 2-x. The reason for the last interval will be evident in a bit more.

Now lets talk about how mathematica represents an image:

As you can see in a greyscale image the values are only a list of lists with values between 0 and 1.

The algorithm is simply this:

For each pixel in the image:
Add a value to each pixel. When it reaches above 1 subtract the value instead of adding and then when it reaches 0 start adding again.

So for example if we started with 0.75 and the value we add is 0.2 the 0.75 will change like this.

0.75, 0.95, 0.85, 0.65, 0.45, 0.25, 0.05, 0.15, 0.35, 0.55

To make the image a nice cycle the last value should be the previous value of the starting one. This means that we could for example use a value of 1 and the pixel would be white with a value of 1 and the changing values would go like this.

1, 0

The function outlined before does this exactly no matter the starting value and the constant that we add to it as long as its between 0 and 1(including).

The next function that we must write is one that given an initial value and the number of frames that we want returns a list like the one above.

Now there are only a couple of problems to tackle. when we apply that function to each value in the image we are going to end with lots of lists. But the problem with this is that each list shows the life of a pixel but we need the snapshot of each frame. That is we need the first element of each list for the first row on the image and this is only for the first frame. 

We have this

{{0.1, 0.2, 0.3}, {0.4, 0.5, 0.6},{0.7, 0.8, 0.9}}

We want this

{{0.1, 0.4, 0.7},{0.2, 0.5, 0.8},{0.3, 0.6, 0.9}}

Therefore we need an interleave function.

Only two functions more and we are done.

With what we have so far we can create the images but only in greyscale. We want colors. Let me explain something about points in space. When you have two points and you want to create a line that joins them there is a simple way of doing this.

Lets suppose we have the point A and B.

A___________________B

To create a line that goes from A to B we can parametrize the line like this.

A + (B-A)t

When t is 0 we only have A, when t is 1 we get B but when t is 0.5 we get the middle point between A and B. Now this idea can be extended to points in any dimension. In our case points in 3D. 

Now lets get back to the colors. A color in mathematica is a list with 3 values Red, Green and Blue. These are between 0 and 1.

{0.21, 0.412, 0.634}

To go from one color to another we use the parametrization above.

P1 = {A, B, C}

P2 = {D, E, F}

 So the line that joins those two colors would be

 {A, B, C} + {D-A, E-B, F-C}*t

We finally have the idea that gives a color between two arbitrary colors. YAY Now you may be wondering what will be t? t will be the original value in greyscale. We will get the image, and for each line and then for each value we will replace it by a list with the value given by the function above.

With all this we only need a function that creates the frames and colorizes them.

This could make an interesting picture but we want the gif. This last command solves the issue.

 Enjoy

Buying a computer through xoticpc

I received my laptop from xoticpc today. First of all I am really impressed of the quality of the laptop. Really well done and really powerful on the inside. But this post has another reason to be. To help others with buying from xoticpc.


Does it ship to mexico?

Yes it does, the price in my case was about 160 bucks.


Did you have to pay any taxes?

Nope, I didnt pay any taxes at all. I gave some money to the delivery guys though, 2 bucks I think.

How long did it take for it to arrive?

I ordered on may 31, made the payment two days later through santander. The laptop arrived today June 21. Kinda late if you ask me but everything went well.

How did you pay for it?
I paid using a wire transfer, it cost me 30 bucks.

If you want to know anything else leave your question on the comment section. =3