About three months ago I finished reading Steve Jobs' biography which was written by Walter Isaacson, the same man who wrote Benjamin Franklin's and Albert Einstein's biographies. The title of the authorized biography is simply Steve Jobs. i loved the book but was extensively saddened by it as Steve Jobs is probably the person I most idolize. I simply could not understand how he could simply die at such a young age, it was all very sudden. The biography was first scheduled for release on March 6, 2012 but because of his deteriorating health it was moved forward to November 21, 2011 and finally following his passing on October 5, 2011 it was moved forward again to October 24, 2011. All the information in the book was compiled by Isaacson both by interviewing Jobs, his family and friends and other people and through intensive research carried through by other means.
The book went all the way from his parents conceiving of his, to his adoption, through his all life, and finally up to his death in just over 650 pages. All his accomplishments both in his professional life and in his personal life are profoundly described by the author. I believe the best part of the book was Isaacson's reflection about Jobs' whole life at the end of the book, it was very emotional and it made me and probably any other reader reflect on his life too. I think Steve Jobs chose just the right person to write a biography about him.
Touch is a TV show written and created by Tim Kring which debuted on Fox on January 25, 2012 however it did not start to air regularly until March 22, 2012. The series stars Kiefer Sutherland - yes, the same actor who played Jack Bauer in the TV series 24.
Touch tells the story about how Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland) tries to communicate with his autistic child, Jake (David Mazouz), who seems to only know how to through numbers. Jake's mother and Martin's wife died in the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks. Since then, Martin has struggled to raise his 11 year old child who has never said a word in his life, only attempting to communicate through the numbers he viciously writes down over and over again in a notebook of his. In the series debuting episode, Jake's repeated escapes from his special school leads social worker, Clea Hopkins (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to question Martin's ability to raise Jake. Meanwhile Jake repeatedly writes down the same pattern of numbers in his notebook. Finally when Martin manages to interpret the numbers he finds out that it is possible for him to "touch" with his son, because of this he manages to save a man from dying. I will not give away any more of the series' plot as that is for you to find out by watching the episodes.
The show has received a generally positive review and, as you can see by the screen shot above, currently holds a Metacritic score of 63 out of 100. Verne Gay of Newsday wrote "A bit melodramatic, a bit manipulative, Touch is still one of the best pilots of the 2011-12 season to date." The debut was received by a whopping total of 12.01 million US viewers, however the number has diminished with every episode after that, the last episode that has aired, which is the 10th episode of the series received merely 6.02 million US viewers, almost half of the debuting episode. The last two episodes of the first season will both air the 31th of May in the US, the show already renewed for a second season on May 9th, 2012.
If you have for any reason recently searched "do a barrel roll" on Google you would have noticed that a weird, overwhelming and spontaneous trick occurs - go ahead, try it. If you did you would have noticed that the webpage rotates 360 degrees, that is, unless you try it on Internet Explorer where it doesn't work, such a surprise for Microsoft; lets not blame them too much.
The trick was developed by a programmer at Google to pay tribute to the Nintendo 64 video game Star Fox 64 as the character in the game would do a barrel roll when you pressed the R button two times or the Z buttons two times, this is the reason why you can also search "z or r twice" on Google and it does the same trick. The programmer at Google also made this to demonstrate the power of CSS3, the new version of CSS, a method of coding used to create and manipulate graphics in web development.
I think the new trick is very innovative and it shows that Google is constantly trying to create new things, it doesn't matter how important or necessary. I also like that they constantly pay tribute to innovations and people of the past, like for example the interactive doodle they made on Google's homepage of a Moog synthesizer, one of the first synthesizers to be used by musicians, to commemorate the 78th birthday of its inventor Robert Moog.
Cuevana.tvwas launched on October 1st, 2009 by an Argentinian college student called Tomas Escobar while at his small college dorm. Cuevana.tv allows people to watch movies and TV shows online without paying a single dime. Cuevana.tv doesn't store its content on its servers, instead it embeds content stored in file hosting websites like Wupload.com on their website - this permits them to lower significantly server costs. Cuevana.tv got a mayor blow this month when Megaupload was closed by the US government as many of the content they used on their website was stored in Megaupload.
Cuevana currently serves an average of 2 million users daily and shares 3,000 films and 250,000 TV show episodes on their website.
Cuevana's future is uncertain as it is being demanded by La Academia Nacional de Cine Argentino and HBO for copyright infringement. The probability of Cuevana being closed is rising constantly especially as they gain viewership and because of the sentence which was made by the FBI against Megaupload. The sentence made against Megaupload also most probably scared off content hosting websites and content uploaders. This is probably the reason why when I tried to watch the 11th episode of Modern Family yesterday on Cuevana it told me that they had no sources to serve that specific content.
