What was in my mind in January?

Brain Challenge - Status

I’ve be practicing these days. I must confess that I love challenges. This game caught my attention and part of my free time. My results after 6 days has satisfied my ego and make me start to think about buy the sequel. I started with 47% and now I have 87%. My main area is memory, I reached 100% (supposedly all my potential) and the lowest one is visual. That’s something I can’t understand. I need my visual abilities to achieve the rest, but I don’t have a good score on that.

Does it works? Well, I don’t think I’m smarter but I feel faster to do some activities, specially calculating, which is one of my weak points. Can I achieve 100%? I think is totally possible, but hard to get. At this rhythm, maybe at the end of February I'll get it.

Google Docs vs. Microsoft Office Live Workspace

I used to share documents with my colleges and friends, using emails to send the files. This is inefficient because you can easily create a parallel version or lost track of the file. For this issue there is a solution: Google Docs. A versatile option to share documents for free, allowing you to edit them online.

Google Docs now has a competitor, Microsoft Office Live Workspace. Like SharePoint, you can share documents and manage versions. I made this chart to compare some of the features I already tested in both. I will continue comparing them.

Features	Google Docs	MS Office Live Workspace
Allow edit documents without installed software	Yes	No
Integration with MSOffice	No	Yes, installing a plug-in
Versioning	Yes	Yes
Collaborative work	Yes	Yes
Available mobile (Symbian)	Yes, read only	No (web browser no compatible)
Web Browsers	IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari (mobile)	IE, Firefox

Happy Chinese New Year! Year of the Ox

Happy New Chinese Year!!! This year is Earth Ox year. Also it is my sister’s year; because following Chinese calendar every 12 years from your birthday is your year and a lot of good things will be happen to you.

This time I received the year in a casino, touching the dragon as a symbol of prosperity and good luck. My problem was there were a lot of people also wanting to touch it, I fought a little bit but I did it!

My sign is the Sheep, but some people say that I share more characteristics with the Monkey. I wish this year be really prosper and I achieve all my goals.

P.S.-  If you like the Ox, Silkysteps is a nice web with a lot of images for colouring, including the whole Chinese calendar.

Brain Challenge

Aging is hard. I slowly notice that every day is more difficult to me make simple calculus or remember facts. It’s part of leaving my brain being lazy. 

Train your brain is not difficult; however the lack of time makes it almost impossible. In my researching of a nice way to get fun and become smarter, I was very tempted of buy a Nintendo DS and Brain Age 2, but it’s not a good idea if you’re saving money. Luckily I found a game for N95: Brain Challenge of Gameloft.

This game focus on 4 abilities: logic, math, memory and visual. And each one has 3 activities with skill levels. You can practice every activity or measure your current level. My Achilles heel is logic, here is a sample of Balanced activity, in which you should choose the heaviest thing, but it’s tricky because you should follow the balances and not the shape or the object. This is the heaviest bird I seen in my life.

These are my last results. No bad I think. I’ll try to play every day and see if I can improve my skills.

 

There is also a sequel, Brain Challenge 2: Stress Management, which I’ll get after pass 80% on each ability.

Word cloud – Wordle

Surfing on Internet I found Wordle, a Java applet for create word clouds. You can create your own at www.wordle.net

What are word clouds for? Well, I took the text of my most active months in this blog and made some clouds. They really explain what I had my mind busy in each month.

Crosswords

My mom used to solve crosswords. I remember that we bought newspaper almost every day and she read them almost completely, but Wednesdays and Saturdays were special days for her. Those were the crossword days.

Time to time I solve, or tried to, a crossword who come with the Sunday newspaper, but it’s a mixture between easy and silly. Some weeks ago I found a huge crossword on Saturday which made me remember old times. I couldn’t resist the temptation and started to solve it. After finish I asked again my dad to put it the office because there is a contests with prizes and extra money is always welcome.

Nowadays I’m solving one divided in 3 pieces. Yesterday I got the second one and when I get the final piece next Saturday I’ll put them together, solve it and participate in a new contest.