Boardwalk Empire, a must see

This series, an adaptation of Nelson Johnson book written by the writer of the award winner series The Sopranos. It's an american TV series, and talks about Atlantic City during the Prohibition era. It stars Steve Buscemi as Enoch Thompson, aka "Nucky".
The first episode with a cost of $18 million (yeah 18 millions!!) was directed by Scorcese himself was the most expensive pilot ever produced in television history.
What I really like in this series is the historical accuracy, the visuals and the traditional songs, it really amazes me the effort producers make producing such a great ambience. It makes whoever is watching to feel like time-traveled back to those days.
Steve Buscemi has a great importance in making this a great show, he plays a dirty politician who controls Atlantic City during the 20's and 30's, and he interacts with some historical figures (probably the most famous Al Capone), are these kind of details (the appearance of a young Capone) that helps create the ambience I talked before.
I can't finish the post without talking once again about the wonderful soundtrack, you can find it in "Boardwalk Empire Volume 1: Music From the HBO Original Series" released in September 3, 2011. The Prohibition-era soundtrack is composed of original music from the 1920s re-recorded by artists such as Regina Spektor, Loudon Wainwright III, Martha Wainwright, Catherine Russell, Nellie McKay and Leon Redbone. I'll leave with the theme song "Straight up and down" by the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

To finish I'll just left you with a quote from Wikipedia of the critical reception
"Since debuting, Boardwalk Empire has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Metacritic, the first season scored 88/100 and the second season scored 81/100, both indicating "universal acclaim." The American Film Institute named Boardwalk Empire one of the ten "best television programs of the year"

If this can't convince you to watch it, nothing will.

Enjoy :)

Dennis Ritchie 1941-2011

Another great man from informatics has passed away. This week Dennis Ritchie left us. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie  commonly known by his username dmr, was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era". He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague, Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system, software that powers everything from smartphones to search engines.
Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory. Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and in 1968, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer.
Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language, a key developer of the UNIX operating system, and co-author of The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).
The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. UNIX has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now precepts of computing.
Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. Check this video "Unix history" by K&R

To finish the post I'll let you some interesting quotes from him.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
"C has the power of assembly language and the convenience of... assembly language."

RIP Dennis Ritchie

Containers, 20th century greatest invention?

What could be more random then talking about containers? Not much i guess...Today we don't give much relevance to them, but some say they were one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. For centuries people all over the world couldn't deal with the losses, breaks, and deviations in international transactions between continents. Only in 1937, an american Malcom Mc Lean, at the age of 20 and owner of a small truck business, as he watched the slow cotton cargo had the idea of store them and transport them in steel boxes that could be shipped.
With time Mc Lean improved his labor methods and his company Sea-Land, today Maersk-Sealand (I bet you have seen some containers from them out there). World War 2 delayed the expansion of this invention, and only in 1966 the first shipment arrived Europe (Rotterdam) already the biggest harbor in the world. The ship "SS Fairland" used his own crane to unload the cargo since there were none at the harbor. Today there are billions containers, very important in our economy, it really helped global finances.

Give your feedback on the comment box below please ;)

Enjoy

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

I couldn't continue my blog without taking a post to another homage, this time not to a show but to a great man. I'm talking about Steve Jobs, who passed away last night, at age of 56 from Pancreatic Cancer. Steve was an inspiration to hundreds, if not millions of persons and I think that's the great thing a man can left behind. Steve doesn't need any kind of presentation, I'm sure you all know his career so I'll just leave here his Stanford speech in 2005, one of the greatest speeches ever. As he said "life is probably the great invention in life".

RIP Steve

PS: I find it amazing the amount of people touched by his dead, not very usual these days.

Seinfeld - homage

It seems only right, to start this blog with a tribute to the TV show that gave name to the blog. As you may or may not know, Seinfeld was a "show about nothing". Seinfeld was on for 9 seasons from 89 to 98, and was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, who was also an actor, playing himself. The show was about nothing, i.e, it was about day-to-day situations, and that was what made it such a fun sitcom. Episodes of Seinfeld focused on minutiae, such as waiting in line at the movies, going out for dinner, buying a suit and dealing with the petty injustices of life. There are some great situations created on the show, "The Soup Nazi" was definitely one of the most hilarious ones. Check this video from this episode

Personally one of the situations I still recall today is this where Jerry responds to a telemarketer

This show was gold. Several awards tell you that, buy the DVD's and watch it, a must see for everyone.
To finish the post I'll just show you one of the most outstanding scenes from Kramer: the way he enters Jerry's apartment.

Cumps, and stay tuned for more on this blog

New blog emerge

This is not my first blog, I'm creating a new one beacause I felt the need of talking about some random stuffs that goes on. I really felt very attached to my first theme. The idea of this one is to talk about some day-to-day situatinons, some football, my college, tv series, some films, and the financial crisis we are going on all over the globe. Keep up with this one I promise you won't regret it.

Cumps