I was considering again to add the option of posting comments in this blog, but I decided (again) that I better not. The main reasons:

1. security: if I add some dirty script I made by myself, it may be easily hackable...
2. time: I have to invest time in programming the script, and the more secure I want it, the more time.... I rather invest time in other stuff ;)
3. my friends can already leave me comments on Facebook

If you just want want to send me a personal message, request a paper or something, please find my contact address in my resumee.
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I finally cleared the game. I started it long ago, but as it started getting repetitive, I stopped playing it. I finished it this week... It may be not worth playing Anyway, I updated my list of games.
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I have finished reading another book, "My stroke of insight", so I update again my list of readings. This book helped in understanding my brain a little more

Description from Amazon,

A brain scientist's journey from a debilitating stroke to full recovery becomes an inspiring exploration of human consciousness and its possibilities

On the morning of December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left side of her brain. A neuroanatomist by profession, she observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, all within the space of four brief hours. As the damaged left side of her brain--the rational, grounded, detail- and time-oriented side--swung in and out of function, Taylor alternated between two distinct and opposite realties: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace; and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized Jill was having a stroke, and enabled her to seek help before she was lost completely.

In My Stroke of Insight, Taylor shares her unique perspective on the brain and its capacity for recovery, and the sense of omniscient understanding she gained from this unusual and inspiring voyage out of the abyss of a wounded brain. It would take eight years for Taylor to heal completely. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and most of all an amazing mother, Taylor completely repaired her mind and recalibrated her understanding of the world according to the insights gained from her right brain that morning of December 10th.

Today Taylor is convinced that the stroke was the best thing that could have happened to her. It has taught her that the feeling of nirvana is never more than a mere thought away. By stepping to the right of our left brains, we can all uncover the feelings of well-being and peace that are so often sidelined by our own brain chatter. A fascinating journey into the mechanics of the human mind, My Stroke of Insight is both a valuable recovery guide for anyone touched by a brain injury, and an emotionally stirring testimony that deep internal peace truly is accessible to anyone, at any time.

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I cleared the game yesterday
I updated my list of games again. The game was not as bad as I read in the reviews. The story was captivating enough to make me interrupt my progress in Assassin's Creed. However, the game was buggy. I wrote the following to Support [at] Konami, but they haven't replied...:
Here is the lists of bugs I experienced:

1. the main problem is with the controls. I live in Japan, and I own a Japanese PS3, but I bought the game in the US (I guess that I'm supposed to buy Japanese games... But I prefer playing English versions...). Anyway, the game somehow recognizes that I have a Japanese PS3, and the selection button becomes the CIRCLE button, and the cancel button, the CROSS button. But at some points of the game (for instance, when you have to input a code in the keypad right after you start), the action button is hard-coded to be the CROSS button, so I can't cancel, and I get stuck in those screens, having to quit the game pressing the PS button... I've come up with a solution that makes the game playable:
   - go to the Settings screen
   - configure button options, and reset to defaults
   - at that point, selection becomes CROSS, and cancel, the CIRCLE (the American one, I suppose)
   
   I have to repeat this routine every time that the game loads a new area, since the controls reset back to CIRCLE-accept, CROSS-cancel, every time I enter a new area.....
2. if I quit the game using the PS button, there's no problem. But if I press START, and select QUIT from the option menu, sometimes the PS3 freezes completely! I have to turn it off....
3. "gimmick"-related bugs. In the "Otherworld Sheperd" house, one emblem of the door turned off after I solved all the puzzles. I checked a guide in gamefaqs.com, where they list all this kind of gimmick-related bugs, and I managed to avoid them, so I could continue playing. Check GameFaqs for details (search "GAME BUG" in the document)

Anyway, I got the happy ending , and I didn't feel like playing again, so I just watched the other endings on Youtube
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Finally I started updating my list of videogames. I've just started with the most recent ones. That's pretty much all the PS3 games I've played

I have also played some downloadable games from PS3 store, like Eden or Flower . I guess I should add them to the list too...

Anyway, I have also updated the interface for posting items to this blog. I even added a bunch of cute icons from Kopete, and some I made myself sometime ago , and even a preview function But all this is hidden from you guys, sorry
Is there someone interested in posting comments here? If so, please send me a private e-mail and I will think about it

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In the first post I said that I would be using iWeb'09 to edit my home page.... But after 4 posts I got tired of it. The main reasons:

1. I tried to change the design a bit and the design on some pages went nuts...
2. the page loading was slow
3. the resulting web page took too much space

So finally I decided to open a text editor and raw-program this page in PHP. I made a blog with RSS support. It's very simple, but it should be enough for my needs. I may update it in a per-need basis. Maybe I should add a comments section... Anyway, the main reasons for using iWeb was the simplicity of editing and the automatic generation of the RSS feed. I solved the RSS feed thing, but the editing part is still in baby stage... By the way, iWeb has comments support for your blog only if you are a MobileME user.... Another turn-down to decide giving up and do everything by myself...

So now that I am free to do my own style, I made this retro Commodore 64 style :) I hope you like it. I plan to add more CSS styles when I have time. Subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to be notified of the updates ;)

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I just finished reading “The Stuff of Thought”, by Steven Pinker, so I updated my list of readings. The author tries to understand how the mind works by analyzing human language. The book is full of references, so you can further the topics you like most ^_^

Anyway, here are some of my favorite quotes:

A speaker expects his listeners to share the grain size he has in mind, and when they don’t, the result can be a failure to communicate. (page 69)

The use of a mental echo-box in arithmetic and other forms of conscious reasoning is, I think, the main reason that many people report that they “think in” their native language. But these echoes are not the main event in thinking; most information processing in the brain is unconscious. (page 131) Basically, he says that we use native language as a kind of LUT (Look-Up Table) for algorithmic reasoning (like exact counting), but it may not be necessary for innate concepts (like “one vs. many”). In my case, I agree that even if you ask me in Japanese “how many people were there?” I could immediately respond “few” or “lots of people”; but if you ask me “exactly how many people were there?” I would probably start mentally counting in Spanish, my native language (multiplying number of seats per row by number of rows, etc.), and then translate the number to Japanese.

People often wish that they had an office with additional space, so they would have more places to put their books. But they never wish they had an office with additional dimensions, so they have more ways to arrange their books (Roger Shepard, page 155). (We think in 3D)

To think is to grasp a metaphor (the metaphor metaphor, Chapter 5). I think this is probably the main topic of this book, and it’s the way we have to scape Plato’s cave (as described in Chapter 9).

There are two ironies in naming (giving names to things or persons):

1. The act of pointing and the intent to replicate it connect us to reality, not just to our ideas about reality, though one might have thought we have no way of telling them apart;
2. the choice of a sound connect us to society in a way that encapsulates the great contradiction in human social life: between the desire to fit in and the desire to be unique.

Bilingual people feel that their second language is not as piquant as their first (page 332). This is on the emotional flavoring of words, cursing and swearing. It seems that this “flavoring” is part of the old brain (at the basal ganglia), and the links between words is established during childhood. So people can react to taboo words immediately (impulse), without thinking (self-control). I can’t give all the details here, but I think this is a very interesting topic. Chapter 7 I think is the most interesting chapter in the book.

The expressive power of language is a mixed blessing: it let us learn what we want to know, but it also let us learn what we don’t want to know. Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world. This is on indirect speech. So expect people to “sheathe their words in politeness and doublespeak”.

By the way, some time ago I made some slides comparing mind models of 3 different authors: Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky, and Jeff Hawkins. If you are interested, you can check the slides in Slideshare.

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The cherry blossoms started at last. I went yesterday to my old uni, and it was very beautiful, as every year. Yesterday it was my 7th anniversary in Japan: I first set foot in this land in April 4th, 2002.

Spring is a time for changes in Japan. Schools and new jobs start in April. After I graduated, I started working at Konami April 1st last year. I entered the R&D department, which it has been a very nice experience. But it’s spring again, so time for changes. Konami is restructuring, so I have been moved to another department: Kojima productions. It seems it will be an even more challenging job. I’ll do my best.

Anyway, entries of this blog should be for notifying updates on this home page. So here it’s the update: again, I updated my list of readings. I just added one book I read in the airplane coming back from GDC 2009 (San Francisco): Metal Gear Solid. It’s a nice adaptation, but I wonder if it will attract readers other than gamers ;)

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Finally I updated my list of readings. I had many ideas in my head about the list, but I couldn’t decide which one was better... Finally I’ll just use my old format...（＊°Д°）

In case someone is interested in the options I had in mind, here they are:

1. Use the WikyBlog. I dropped this idea because the style was too strict, and hard to customize. I wanted to use the country flags I used in the old list to easily recognize the language of the novel, and stuff like that.
2. Use iWeb. It doesn’t support tables! I thought you could import tables from Numbers (iWork), but it just attaches the iWork document... Also, I think these pages load too slow, so I wanted something lighter.
3. Use a DB. Actually, I made the database and stuff, but I still had to make a script for easily inserting entries. Once done, it’s the more versatile option, but then, every time you want to see the list, the web server has to query the DB and rendering the page may take more time. Also, I barely read many books, so just for a few entries a DB may not be worth the effort. So I decided to use simple HTML, and I already had my old list. I decided to invert the order, so recent entries are above, like blogs.

I’m still using my old CSS styles. I may change them eventually, or add more. Let me decide that later on ( ･ω･；) Anyway, I updated the list with the books I recently read,Tabloid Tokyo 2: “101 All-New Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan's Wild Weeklies”, 宇宙の声, and “The Martian Chronicles”, which I just finished reading tonight. Recently I’ve been reading Science-Fiction, but I hope to continue reading Steven Pinker books soon (´ー`)

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I think I made my first website in 1998. Above there's an screen capture I took while I was editing my homepage back then. I used a regular text editor for AmigaOS.

After I moved to Japan, in 2002, I also moved my homepage to a server here. Actually, my laboratory’s web server. I think I decided to call my site Hawk Home Hole around that time. People used to asked me about that strange name... Well, I’m going to disclose that information now.

Hawk was my nickname when I was active in the demoscene. It comes from my surname, which translated to English is Sparrowhawk. Sparrowhawk is too long, so I changed bird... Home... is obvious. My home page. And Hole.... I just finished reading Lord of The Rings around that time, and I imagined hobbits’ homes as if they were some kind of holes. Some birds also live in holes (no idea about sparrowhawks), so I thought it would be nice a name like Hawk Home Hole. But then, in Japan H means “hentai” (pervert), so HHH started to sound like some kind of embarrassing name...

So now what? I got my PhD last year, so I had to leave my laboratory and, with it, my HHH. That’s when I bought a web space and this new domain, endavid.com. I didn’t want to just migrate the old site here. I planned to make something new. I like to play with PHP and databases. But at the end of the day, I don’t have time for more programming after 10 hours of work...

So today I decided I will just use the easy-to-use tools I have for a decent starting page. Using iWeb’09 you can start a neat webpage very fast. Although it was fun making all those CSS style-sheets, XML & PHP based logs and some javascript fun, I better focus on contents this time. The problem with writing a blog with iWeb’09 is that it doesn’t leave much space for customization. For example, no idea how to add a space for comments here. But you can use the Talk page in my WikyBlog.

The name of “En David” comes (obviously) from my name. In Catalan, you put an article next to people’s names. In English, it would be like saying “the David”, or “el David” in Spanish.

And I guess that’s all you need (or you didn’t need) to know. I’ll keep track of the updates of this homepage on this blog, so you don’t need to search the site for new contents.

よろしく〜　(´^ω^`)

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