The World at Night (via Digg) one of my favourite images ever. It trult shows the wealth distribution of the world. Enjoy!

I was browsing through some books in amazon.com, when I discovered that the magical powers of Harry Potter have hacked the website. Normally, when I browse through a book, I always look at the section “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing this Item?”

I find it very useful to gain insight on alternatives, and I eventually end up buying different books. Well, today, HP7 is on every single alternative list. See two examples (click to enlarge):

Try it for yourself. Pick a book, and give it a try at www.amazon.com So, what happened: Hack, magic or numbers?

Probably the later (I know, what a dissapointment!). Given the millions of copies sold, it’s no wonder that, no mater which book you pick, someone who has seen the webpage for the book… ended up buying her copy of HP7.

I found it funny, for a second (and until the effect wears off) it seemed that HP had hacked amazon!

Note to self: Always install  BlockSite, the Firefox extension that allows you to block domains of your choice. Fantastic to block all those timewasters as digg.com and others. Highly recommended if you want to use Firefox for work only. The anti-online-procrastination tool!

I installed it on the new mac. The rationale is simple: If I have the extratime to go waste at digg… I’d rather take a walk or something even better! But I might go there as an automatic distraction. With blocksite, I can’t get there! So I don’t waste my time, plus end up going for the walk later down the road!

Found via digg.com in Bad Gods | MMBRPG (click on link to see full version). I love the final square.

A big THANK YOU to  J.K.Rowling for her fantastic books. The Harry Potter story has come to an end, and I feel grateful for having enjoyed it live as it was unveiled and published for all to see.

Some time in the future, I’d like to read again the seven books, because there are so many hints and ideas about what is going to happen since book one, that I’ll amuse myself finding all the relationships and reference, now that I know how it ends.

A final note goes to all those who have not read the books yet: Make yourself a favour and give them a try. I did it when I catch a VP of my previous company reading them, circa 2001. Amused, he explained me that the books had unplugged his kids from the Play Station, without any parental intervention, and he wanted to know what they were reading. I thought to myself that an item powerful enough to unplug kids from a Playstation was something worth paying attention to. I am so glad I did.

Thanks J K Rowling!

Interesting article by Jobacle.com BLOG about 5 career tips you could learn from JK Rowling rise to stardom. Interesting read, especially if you are just anxiously waiting for the final book to come out.

The tips are explained in  detail in the link, they are quite unconventional.

Since I installed the wonderful Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Image Plugin for WordPress, I haven’t had a single spam comment. This is priceless, and the only minor price to pay is to write a minor buzzword easy to read captcha to publish a comment. I recommend it to anyone using WordPress.

Finally, a quick MBA related advice: If you are about to join the MBA of your dreams after the summer, do exempt as many subjects as possible! I guarantee you that you will have plenty of “more interesting stuff to do” instead of revisiting “once more statistics”.

Probably, the tradeoff between some extra peace of mind now vs redoing IT&Business on October seems unclear now. But, please trust me on that one young future student, it will be a pain to sit trough classes you already have some serious knowledge about. Exempting now (exam, project, etc…) will not “totally spoil” your holidays, plus it can feel so good when you leave the room because you are not required to do course X, Y, Z and you can dedicate to explore some other interests.

Completely off-MBA-topic.: I am fascinated by the contents of strange maps, a blog on unusual maps. It has some of the most beautiful maps I’ve seen in a while…

In the next month, I should update my CV. It’s a tedious task, but given that I have it published online, it might as well be an updated version.