Gavin's ramblings

Haile Gebrselassie: 3 facts about him

vainqueur — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:41:16 +0000

Haile Gebrselassie, the ethiopian long distance runner, is not your typical runner. He starred in a biopic movie about his life (up to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics). A book chronicling his running achievements (up to the Athens Olympics) was published in 2004.

Here are three facts about Haile that you might not know about:-

From nytimes: Haile Gebrselassie, the Olympian from Ethiopia who has won the gold medal at 10,000 meters, often requested that the techno song “Scatman”, which has a B.P.M. of around 135, be played over the sound system during his races.
In an interview with Track&field news magazine (Dec 2007 issue), he described how he improved his finishing by focussing solely on endurance workouts. Specifically he ran 3 – 3.5h long runs.
He runs several businesses in Ethiopia; namely a gym and a cinema. This fact was featured in a CNN Reveal documentary. Part 1, 2 and 3 are available on youtube.

Beautiful Anime

vainqueur — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 04:27:08 +0000

Note to self: I must watch these two anime movies:

Tekkonkinkreet
Paprika

You can sample some of the mind-blowing art from these movies at audrey kawasaki’s blogpost.

OSGi, Maven and Scala

vainqueur — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 08:19:56 +0000

I’m inspired by Neil Barlett’s experiment on writing OSGi bundles in scala. This blogpost will show you how to compile OSGi bundles written in scala using pax-construct.

The full article

Zeitgeist 27.09.2007

vainqueur — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:37:54 +0000

3 ideas, lessons or cool stuff I found in my life:

Listen to pi, the movie. This has to be one of my favorite movies. Backed by a wonderful electronica-infused soundtrack, this movie introduced me to GO (the game).

So what do you do? I work with computers, number theory.
10h18 press Return.
Just as the buddhist monks are staging a resistance against political oppression, two saudi girls fought back against religious oppression. Go get’hem girl.
Lance Armstrong: Pain is temporary, it may last a minute, or an hour, or a day; if i
quit, however, it lasts forever.

10 things about me with scandinavian influences

vainqueur — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:19:05 +0000

I ran the Stockholm Marathon in 2000 in a time of 4h20m22s
I own a Sony Ericsson handphone.
I use Linux (Ubuntu flavor) at home. (Linux is related to Linus Torvalds).
A few years ago,I bought a CPEN scanner pen.
My employer is a subsidiary of a swedish company in Malmö.
In 2004, a norwegian student, Jeanette, came to Kuala Lumpur and taught me to say Hei alle sammen.
One of my girlfriend’s favorite movie is The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman (great Swedish director). I’ve watched it but find it dull.
My daily backpack for the past few years is made by a swedish company peak performance.
Kuala Lumpur’s only IKEA store is just less than 5kms from my house.
Two of my current favorite songs are by swedish artists
1. Koop’s Koop Island Blues
2. Peter, Bjorn & John’s Young Folks