Yesterday I spoke at Take Off 2007, a tech event on entrepreneurship and innovation which was held on the beautiful city of Coimbra (proving that not all tech events need to take place / centralize in Lisbon).

The nice people from Ideias3 were very kind to invite me and give me this chance to share some knowledge and inspire a great audience of students, web enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and business people.

In the end I think I’ve managed to achieve the goals I had set up for my presentation:
-make people forget about the recent negative thinking around Portugal;
-show some examples of fantastic entrepreneurship and achievements;
-talk about my personal project (weSpendMoney);
-share some advices and tips on entrepeneuship;
-inspire people to do more, learn from my mistakes;

I also had the chance to meet up with some friends and fellow colleagues from past conferences and bloggers from Planeta Asterisco.
It was very nice to meet new people and socialize ideas, this was very important.
I enjoyed most of the conferences, there was great value and knowledge from them so I suggest listening to the podcasts or take a look at the presentations from the official site (all in portuguese).

As it’s expected the community responded to the conference, there were some interesting and incredible reviews on the event, let’s have more this year. :)

“The organization was good, and the event went well. It was awsome to see that many people, some presentations (like the one from Gonçalo Quadros) were so full that there were nowhere to seat, not even on the stairs. Wow. I hope that take off happens again next year, in an wider space.” - Marcos Marado

Update 30-04-2007: And thanks to everyone for the feedback on the presentation, without it, I can’t improve. As requested, here’s the slides (10 Mb!) in portuguese and english until the official site is updated.

I’m having a trouble trying to find time to spend on so many hobbies, side projects, social meetings and world domination schemes (ok, I partially forgot about these for now hehehe!).
As a result my gaming consoles have been neglected for a while in exchange for other stuff I’ve been doing, so here’s a quick look at the games I’ve started playing lately and still haven’t finished.

And you? what have you been playing this month?

Excite Truck

It feels strange at first to use the Wiimote (or Wii wireless controller) to control the truck’s mouvements but it compensates in the end for a great experience. I enjoyed the graphics but I think more could have been done in terms of debris and surroundings.
It’s very fun to play this with another friend and laugh as we spin the Wiimote up and down and to the sides franquily. :P
The soundtrack is horrible but you can put your own in a SD card so kudos for that decision.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves

WarioWare consists in a series of mini games that are all played with the Wiimote, each one is stranger than the other and as you keep progressing the game speed and dificultyincreases.
The multi-player aspect is the best part of the game and makes it the best party game for the Wii, if you’re going to play alone then the lifespan of the game won’t compensate that much.

Garanted to giver you a laugh (especially drunk).

Hotel Dusk 215

I’m a big fan of old school graphical adventure games and this game reminds me alot of those times. The environment is very unique, kinda reminds me of a certain 80’s music clip featuring the A-Ha but mixed with Twin Peaks.

There’s plenty of intriguing puzzles to solve and dirt to uncover in other people’s stories through the game. The Nintendo DS must be hold like a book and the use of the stylus is very intituive. Recommended.

Marvel Ultimate Heroes

Bash and smash your way through 5 chapters of Marvel goodness, what more could you want?

You can create your team of 4 heroes from the list of dozens of characters, ranging from the Avengers (old and new), X-men, Fantastic Four and a few other freaks ( here’s looking at you Ghost Rider). There’s also several costumes to choose from and unlockable powers.

The levels have a few suprises along the way to avoid keeping it boring but you’ll only make the most out of this game with severall friends which is easy on Xbox Live, erm, not so easy on the Wii.
As a bonus, the Xbox 360 version will have new characters to download soon. :)
Very fun to play and recommended for all comic lovers.

I’m posting this on the new version of Reinventar, the redesign is more or less finished and all the essential stuff are here (but expect some tweaking in the next days).
I think it’s more clean and some visual bugs are now gone, although I would like to hear from you and know what you think.

Someone sent my this handy guide to keep near you Apple computer or in the bag of your new Macbook, with only small 8 pages you have all the steps necessary to reanimate your Mac from not booting up or at least to copy all necessary data to another hard-drive. :|
Actually this could have been handy a few days ago when my Macbook Pro suddendly died on my hands and with no more options I had to return it to the store for repairing (whatever the problem it has).

This of course made things more difficult for me since I have a presentation scheduled for next week at Takeoff 2007 and alot of my files on weSpendmoney were on the hard-drive (not to mention other stuff).

Good thing I have a plan B for the conference that doesn’t envolve juggling, stand-up comedy or flying monkeys.

On another note, if you happen to be in Lisbon I recommend you visit BDMania, which is in my opinion one of the best places to get international comic books or other interesting/rare merchandise.

Spider-Man 3 is coming and it’s shaping up to be fantastic, in the meantime, here’s some juicy content from the extended fight scene with Doc Octupus on the train from the second movie on Youtube.

Posters for the upcoming Transformer’s film are up at SuperHeroHype.

Ruby in Portuguese was redesigned this weekend and is showing off a new warm look with colors based on red, wine, and black giving it a cosy feeling (erm, at least for me). Some bugs with Internet Explorer 7.0 were fixed and the archives are now fully working.

The new design was first shown in public at the “XVI jornadas de informatica” but we only managed to finish some of the details and tests now. I think it’s a great improvement and of course I’m hoping on more feedback and contributions from the rest of the comunity to keep pushing the site forward.

I’m also preparing a reboot for Reinventar in the next few days.

I’ve posted about the subject before but if you’re new to Ruby on Rails and Restful development, here’s a couple of usefull links and tutorials to get you started:

“Introduction to Restful Rails Development in Rails”

“PeepCode ScreenCasts: RESTful Rails”

“How to Create a new Action in REST”

“Caching XML in REST”

“Rails Restful Authentication”

If anyone has more resources on the subject, don’t hesitate to share.