However, from that moment on, in a brief period of time I stumbled upon many articles about minimalist running shoes. Here are just a few: the 4 hour week, Mail Online, CrunchGear, Wired, the Daily Show, and even TIME magazine named these shoes one of the best inventions of 2007.

Here’s a short interview that took place last August 18th on the Daily Show. They talk abut people from a Mexican tribe who run hundreds of miles barefoot and despite such achievement, they do it without injuries:

Such a buzz certainly caught my attention and made me think. The truth is that, as a kid, I used to walk barefoot all the time, and loved it; but that was a long time ago… so I’d rather hear from Vibram owners. Fortunately, these shoes are available at Amazon, where a few buyers commented on them (all of them positive).

I noticed most owners are initially reticent (like me); running injuries, pain or just curiosity leads them to buy into this new barefoot trend; after an initial adaptation period, they simply love their Vibrams. I was so intrigued that I decided to join the FiveFingers club; After a quick visit to the official website (http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/), I learnt they were available in the Sports Chalet from Huntington Beach. After all, there’s no way I am buying something like this without physically testing them first. A couple of hours later, there I was, with my brand new “shoes”…

So here’s my take on them… I’ll admit at the beginning they feel kind of funny, and most of the time, you can definitely see people staring at them. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, since they are certainly noticeable; but who cares!?
The attention is granted, but reactions are diverse; some people simply find them horrible (my roommate started laughing when he saw them for the first time), while some others think they are cool and inquire about their name or where I got them. “Are they some kind of water shoes?“, “Are they for climbing?“, “They look comfortable, are they?“. Even my girlfriend hates them; although with a little bit of luck, I might be able to convert her .

Somewhere online a guy was comparing them to the feeling of wearing gloves instead of mittens; it sounded funny but now I actually think it’s a pretty accurate comparison. When you walk, you can actually feel the ground, which turns out to be a nice feeling. Try to think of it as when you walk barefoot in the beach; isn’t it pleasant to feel the sand on your soles? Obviously, asphalt or concrete is not the same thing, but you get the idea.

As soon as you put them on and try to walk, you’ll realize you cannot land with the heel first (as we are used to do), so you try to use the balls of your feet; kind of like walking on the tips of your toes. It feels a little bit unnatural at first since you tend to overdo it. However, after a bit of practice, the feet will land almost flat on the ground; it just happens that the front does it a fraction of a second earlier.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I read some people were concerned about them smelling. The truth is they are quite open so your feet don’t feel that hot. I already washed mine a couple of times, but it was not due to the smell (and I live in hot Southern California); I just wanted them to recover that bright shiny red color
Probably, a cold weather would be a bigger inconvenience for this type of open shoes; I guess that’s why Vibram created the KSO and other models which cover the whole foot and offer more protection.

I’d like to emphasize there is an adaptation period (which is clearly stated in the box). Don’t expect your feet and leg to be comfortable with them right away. If you haven’t used your feet muscles properly in a long time, don’t expect them to strengthen overnight. At first, your calves and feet arches will feel sore for a few days, but a couple of weeks later the transition should be complete; that is why, the more you wear them, the more comfortable they feel. At this point, I own them for over a month and I use them as often as I can. I tried running with them but I haven’t gone over 2 miles yet. Even running with regular shoes, I can feel my stride is different than it used to be. I ran over different surface types and so far I only had a problem with loose gravel on top of a hard surface such as concrete. Although I still don’t know whether my feet should get tougher or it’s simply not the appropriate surface.

My main concerns are regarding their durability. Not that I encountered any problems so far, but being made just of a thin rubber sole and some elastic cloth on top, they might give up on me sooner than I’d like. Another worry I have, is the lack of protection for the feet; I wear them regularly to the gym and I could see how some unfortunate accident could be fatal for my toes.

The bottom line is I’m really happy with them; so I guess I’m just like most other Vibram owners I had previously read about . If you have doubts, I’d definitely encourage you to give them a try.

Isn’t it ironic how much we are moving forward only to realize some things we just did better in the past…?

In any case, I got to play with my friend’s iPhone and what got my attention the most was this application called Shazam. Why is it special? Basically, you play any song and let the Shazam listen to it for about 5-10 seconds and it will tell you the title, author, album, etc.

Here you can find a video I found that shows it in action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(more detailed video review)

I am not gonna argue whether it is needed/useful or not, although I think online music shops such as iTunes could easily use the technology to increase their sales. As far as I’ve seen, the current iPhone implementation of the application is free, but their website refers to an existing previous service which was charged on a recognition basis. No match, no pay. So they have to be pretty confident on their recognition abilities…

What got my attention is the fact the application will succeed in recognizing the songs every single time just by listening only to about 8 seconds. It doesn’t matter what part of the songs Shazam listens to, how repetitive it is or how unrepresentative of the rest that segment is, it will get it right! Of course, I was able to make it fail, by feeding it traditional Catalan songs, but in this case, I’m almost certain it failed, not because the algorithm was not successful, but since it didn’t have that song in its database.

Having a background in electrical engineering and computer science I am somehow familiar with digital signal sampling, filtering, etc., and I find this product amazing. I googled around but could find no details at all (even high level ones) about its underlying algorithm.

It’s obvious the procedure goes something like this:

listen to fragment –> digital processing –> song signature –> database match

Given the low quality reception of the song, they will have to deal with plenty of noise but still manage to extract some fundamental audio parameters. If it were only dealing with voice, it would be something like pitch, tone, etc. the parameters that make your voice unique. That’s mostly how voice recognition works after all.

In the case of a full song, that’s not enough due to its high variance: The beginning might be completely different to the end, so the signature extracted by the algorithm has to be different every time. The only way I see they can do it, is by extracting much shorter audio signatures, maybe like 1 second long. I think it is safe to assume a song signature can remain constant within a second timespan.

Of course, with such short signatures, they don’t necessarily have to be unique, but at this point there can be more than one match. Yet, now it’s a matter of overlapping the result set for each of them. If the match is still not unique, signature sequences could also possibly narrow results down.

I read on their website the database is currently holding 4 million songs, which based on the 1 second long signature and assuming the average song is 4 minutes long (that is 240 seconds), that would give us a database of 1 billion (10^9) entries. Fortunately, a signature should be something tiny, similar to a hash value.

At this point, the issues are hardware resources and scalability, but given current technology with terabyte hard drives and mulit-core cpu’s this approach is clearly feasible. Isn’t that amazing? Maybe you don’t think so after all , but at least it makes me wonder where the limit is and where we can be just in a few years. Are we soon gonna see devices able recognize human voice given a 1 second sample in a unique enough way to discern it from the rest of humans? or maybe it can already be done…

By the way, does anybody have any details about the actual implementation?

Here are some pictures from some of the most fervorous soccer supporters:

On another note, and actually talking about soccer this time the outcome was quite different and Spain did actually perform up to the challenge. Game after game they showed their best game which led them to the final against Germany and ultimately to being the European champions after more than 40 years. Celebrations went on in Spain for many days and the local media argued that the country was finally united. However, as the BBC says,

…one trophy does not a unified nation make, and Mr Zapatero was perhaps overstating the point.

I couldn’t agree more. By the way, I grabbed most pictures surfing around, so they belong to their respective owners.

So guess what? I am spanish, I am an electrical engineer, and I am not currently working in Spain. What!? How can that be? Well, in such situation, companies have no option but to raise the wages in order to attract more engineers. These are the open market rules, right? So I must be crazy to leave my city, friends and family and, above all, an environment so favorable professionally.

It turns out that with such high demand the offered wages for a decent position are around 25,000 €/ year (pre-taxes), which would translate into a monthly pay of about 1300 €/month (after taxes). On the other hand, by working abroad, more than twice that amount can be easily made. And from what I’ve seen, it’s not only about the paycheck, but the jobs offered are also better.

After reading the article though, I didn’t find a single hint that situation was about to change. On the contrary, if I understood correctly, they were demanding more engineers with the mentioned salary. An offer impossible to turn down…

So let’s see how big the shortage has to become before they open their eyes and finally accept open market rules. For now, I know I won’t be coming back soon!

However, I recently discovered another show close to Irvine: Laguna Beach. Laguna is also a small coast town which happens to be really pretty and it happens to allocate a very high-class community. Besides, it has a high number of surfers which makes it even cooler. This MTV show falls into the category of reality TV and its plot reveals the beauty of Laguna and again is focused on the real lives of some spoiled teenagers. It’s official name is “Laguna Beach. The Real Orange County” which is kind of ironic since my first thought after watching it was: Are these people for real!?

If the show does indeed reflect reality I find it very sad. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any problems with rich people, it’s just that these kids are really spoiled, lazy, and have no idea about what real life’s about. It’s lucky they have money cause otherwise they couldn’t survive in the real world. It’s like they all live in a bubble, the Laguna bubble. Of course, there’s always the option they became this way because of the money; in that cause I think find ourselves in front of an interesting dilemma: What would you rather be rich and stupid or just plain normal?

I encourage you to take a look at the show, but I warn you: be prepared to see very annoying people in dysfunctional relationships and of course non-stop drama about pointless issues. The following parody of the show might give you a general impression of what I’m talking about:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I find it hilarious, and believe it or not it’s not that far from the real thing…

The meeting took place at floor 14 in an office building barely 10 minutes away from my home, an I got to see how people from 4 different companies asked for big money (around 1 million $ each) in a round of 20 minutes presentations.
It is a bit weird cause in a 2 hours period you can hear about completely different stories going from one of the many new internet opportunities to a company from the medical sector, and you should be able to recognize a winner horse from a money sink. Actually, before going in, I was a bit intimidated by the whole raising money procedure, yet I realized that although it’s not easy, it’s not that big deal either; and the truth is that in a 20 minutes speech you cannot really go too deep into the topic after all. The impression I had is that at some point the situation is similar to when meeting girls: of course you have to be prepared and know your stuff, but your attitude and self-confidence are a huge part of the deal. If you know what you’re talking about and are confident about it, they are gonna notice that (as girls do ).

I am aware this was another good opportunity to see how the real thing works before finding myself in a similar scenario in the future, and I got to introduce myself in front all of them, though my guess is by now, they have already forgotten about my name or what I do…

Another thing which got my attention is the average profile of the businessman in the room. It was a 50 something year old white man. No young people at all and just a single woman. A single woman out of 30 people! that is only about 3%. Well, being completely fair, there was the secretary too, but I don’t think she counts and by the way, as you can expect, she was indeed young and great looking.

Maybe that’s why I’d like to try something new; shake things up a little bit nothing big, just small steps at a time. This is how I came up with the idea of signing up for new activities. I go regularly to the gym, but all I do is weight lifting and running, and it never crossed my mind to sign up for other classes such as fencing, dodgeball or maybe even aerobic. After taking a look at the classes offered I decided for yoga. It always attracted my attention but I wanted a demanding activity and I didn’t know whether it yoga was too soft.

However, it turns out yoga is much more than a simple physical activity. As we can read in the wikipedia “Yoga is one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, focusing on meditation as a path to self-knowledge and liberation.”

On my first class, I didn’t know what to expect, but as people were arriving I soon realized that there were easily more than 30 girls and only about 3, 4 guys. That’s not my typical scenario: being an engineer, the lectures I attend have the opposite guys-girls ratio; so it was a nice change to begin with .

As I said before, I didn’t know about the physical requirements of the activity, yet it turned out that half way through the class I was already sweating, so it was a nice workout and at the same time it was a very good relaxation technique. Even more, the next day all my muscles (specially the legs) were quite sore.

So far, it has only been two sessions, but I am quite satisfied with the change. From now on, I may try new stuff more often!

It’s already May and as good as I am here in Irvine I still miss my friends back in Spain. I am not a person who usually maintains a lot of long distance contact (except with my mummy , but that is mostly cause she’s calling me like all the time).

This is partly the reason why I started thinking about the summer and when I’ll be able to see them again. I was checking my schedule looking for spots when I can leave UCI and fly back home so we can maybe put a trip together like we did last summer. Yet, as soon as I started thinking, I realized how great it could be if the process were the other way around… my friends coming to visit me. Not because I am that important but because none of them has been in the USA and particularly in California: We could all have a great time California Dreamin’ !!

After some quick e-mail polling, I soon realized what I had in mind was not likely to happen due to budget constraints (to put it in a nice way). Yet, since we already did a trip together to Italy last summer and had a blast I may use that to my advantage. Last year we flew to Rome (via Ryanair), rent a huge van there and drove almost till the most southern piece of Land in Italy: the Puglia. Lucky for me, technology is everywhere, so there are plenty of pictures and even some video content of the journey. I have put together a small video with some highlights in a clear emotional blackmail attempt.

Here are the results of my work:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ll keep you posted on how that turns out !

What a scary title for a post, isn’t it? Don’t worry though, I’m just referring to the Death Valley National Park. I soon realized that California is mainly a huge desert. Once you leave the huge metropolis such as Los Angeles or San Francisco, there isn’t much there. There’s a huge surface of empty land where small lost town are scattered. This took me by surprise, and after the initial shock I learnt that this is one of the beauties of California. This landscape begins as soon as you move away from the coast; this is why there are so many national parks:

• Joshua tree
• Death valley
• Yosemite
• Sequoia
• Mojave

During the winter quarter I had the opportunity to visit the first two in the list, and from what I’ve seen, they all are different types of deserts; empty but pretty; very pretty. Each of them has its own charms. In the Joshua Tree National Park, there are the unmistakeable Joshua trees; a weird mixture between tree and cactus, which is probably known worldwide due to the famous U2 album. It is also a great place to practice your climbing skills. Besides the endless miles of trees and rocks, there’s nothing else.

A similar emptiness can be expected from the Death Valley. It is a place so fierce and erosive that not much can survive there. In the weekend we went there, we went from an arduous heat the first morning, to a windy cold as soon as the sun set, to an intense rain during the night followed by the corresponding flood, and then finally some snow. It was crazy!

In the valley itself, these extreme weather conditions lead to very different environments in such a small area. Most of it is formed by the typical empty rocky desert, but the place is far from flat, and there are many water trails which make the place bumpy and inaccessible. Nowadays, the water is scarce though, and although most of the valley is actually under the sea level, unless it rains, no water will be seen. There was plenty of water in the past though, and today only a vast salty white surface remains. To make the place even weirder there are also huge sand dunes that look like an African desert. Finally the whole valley is surrounded by tall mountains which on occasions have a reddish tone as if they were partly made of clay. The description may appear a little bit weird, but you cannot make a clear idea until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. It is certainly a really pretty spot, and by the way, I find its name really appropriate.

We don’t have this type of landscapes where I come from; you can get away from the city but you will probably be surrounded by some kind of plantation and the next town will be probably less than 15 minutes away by car. However, here the immensity and vacuity of the landscape is overwhelming. I really felt so small and superfluous…

Since I don’t know how long I’m staying in California, we are already preparing our next trip to Sequoia. I’ll keep you posted.

And why is all of that relevant? Because, this morning I was fortunate enough to attend the talk he gave at UCI. It was at eight o’clock in the morning a tough time to have an active audience. However, the auditorium was almost full. As soon as he started talking, I realized he was good… and not simply good, outstanding. This is not the first talk given by this type of successful people I’ve heard. I don’t want to go into the details of what he explained, but how he said it

The thing is that this is only relevant up to certain point. You always hear about the same concepts over and over again: innovation, improvement, incrementalism, empowering the employer, the customer is the most important thing, etc. but all of them are introduced in a mixture of fine humour, personal experiences, out loud reflections and interaction with the public. He is giving a speech for a whole audience but it is as if he were talking directly and individually to you; and the thing is he might do so at any time.

Despite the early hours, the whole 80 minutes flew by, and I’m positive this was not just a personal impression. It is not easy at all to do what he did, and as I said, during the first two minutes you can already tell this is gonna be a great talk. The concepts introduced were probably key to achieve success when leading a company, but what amazes me is the way he spoke. He was constantly shifting the focus of attention away from him: although his many successes he was just one more of a team of people. More than that, “anybody can do what I do, you just have to surround yourself with smarter people than you” he said. I think this says it all; after all, humility may be the first key concept.

All of this was part of one of the courses about entrepreneurship which I am taking this quarter. I think I am starting to see the path I’d like to follow; now it is a matter of being able to walk through it, and how long it takes me to get there. You can take your own conclusions, but personally I’d like to think that today I learnt a lot. Finally, if you want to read a little bit more about Mr. Mazzo, here’s a short bio.