Well, this last Friday I had the pleasure & displeasure of getting to know the brand new Terminal 5 from the Heathrow airport in London.

Pleasure because it’s gorgeous: lot’s of top shops (Harrods, Prada, Tiffany’s and many more), interesting restaurants and what is most modern in airport technology.

Displeasure because it’s luggage system seems not to be working at all. My plane boarded on time but we sat almost 1h without even a glass o water waiting for them to find our luggage. The pilots words were literally: “Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for this delay. We have lost your luggage but we are using all our efforts to find it and bring it safely to the plane.”

After another 30min, the pilot announced they finally found it and we would be departing shortly. When we had almost reached the line for taking off, the pilot announced: “We will have to return to the terminal since there was some kind of confusion with the luggage. We are taking the bags of a passenger that didn’t board and for safety reasons we can’t depart with it on the plane.”

NO WAY………

We returned to the terminal, they opened the luggage compartment and another 30 min went by before they said: “The passenger is actually on board, so we are preparing for take off in another 5 min. We hope to be reaching Düsseldorf before the closure of the Airport.”

At that moment, I was just thankful for the fact that there were only German and English people on the plane, besides me. If it were in Brazil or Italy for example, people would be screaming and flying out of the plane already! hehehehe

Anyway…in the end, after a glass of wine, I was glad that after more than 2h of delay we managed to take off and arrived in Düsseldorf at 11:29PM, just one minute before the airport closed. I think we flew in 40min, they gave really gas! To land in Cologne and take another 30min bus ride would be really messed up, especially on Friday at midnight after working my ass off this week!

So people, I would really recommend avoiding British Airways from/to Heathrow for now, until they fixed this whole luggage system.

I hope they find a solution soon!

When we thought it couldn’t get better…

Check it out!

I was recently reading the informatics blog Circuito Integrado (in Portuguese) from Folha de Sao Paulo (a newspaper in Brasil) where they stated in January that Web 2.0 is already in the past, giving space to the new Web 3.0 a.k.a web semantics. I have to admit, this concept of Web 3.0 is totally new for me, I was still getting used to all the cool things from Web 2.0!

According to Wikipedia, “the first step towards a “Web 3.0″ is the emergence of “The Data Web” as structured data records are published to the Web in reusable and remotely queryable formats, such as XML, RDF and microformats.“

In other words, web 3.0 websites would be developed in a way that data could be shared and reused through applications, communities, companies, etc. basically transforming the web in a huge database. Nice!

In the Circuito Integrado blog, he gives the website Wuala as an example of a Web 3.0 website, which I had never heard from before and found preety interesting!

Wuala is a free desktop application compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux where you can drag and drop your files from your PC directly to the web, and vice versa. You can also access the uploaded files anytime from anywhere, even when your computer is offline, meaning that you can also use it to share all types of files with other people. They start giving you 1GB free space and if you want more, you are able to trade your hard disc space for more online space, making the idea “not to give you more storage in total (apart from the first GB provided by us), but to change the quality of your storage“.

Of course you have a public space, guarantee of the security of the data and many other services…check out their website here for more. Anyway, it’s my discovery of the week!

Nothing like being “on the beach” and having free time to read my feeds!

A re-creation of famous scenes from Alfred Hittchcock “greatest hits”, starring Jodie Foster, Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, Naomi Watts and others, including the Oscar winner Marion Cotillard.

In the Vanity Fair website you can see all of the pictures (11 in total), the original photographs for each one and a video of the making of.

Gor-ge-ous!

Great great great great!

I just noticed that almost all of my posts (not that I have so many) were written around 3PM, most precisely between 2 and 4PM.

Interesting, isn’t it? Is it maybe a clue of my most creative time of the day?

And here I thought I was more of a night person!

I got to the conclusion that boredom is stressing!! Would you agree?

Until 24th of March, an impressive fashion picture exposition is happening in the NRW Forum Düsseldorf: Mode: Bilder, a collection from F.C. Gundlach.

I was there last weekend to take a look: very interesting pictures, some very old ones, some modern and some shocking ones make the experience a nice journey through fashion in the last 160 years. They have one that I really like, in which John Lennon is naked hugging Yoko Ono, both laid in a bed. This picture was a cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1981 and is worth seeing again.

Also worth to say: German Vogue did a special edition with some of the pictures in the exposition, which is being distributed for free in the museum.

My first experience with the Jazz Schmiede here in Düsseldorf was worse than ever. I was very curious when I saw “von Carlos Gardel bis Piazzolla” in the program, awaiting a nice evening of quality Tango.

What was my surprise when suddenly a guy starts reading German poems accompanied by an Accordion and a Bassoon, really nothing to do with Tango at all!

People started going out, some were looking with disbelief…terrible! We drank a beer but couldn’t stay until the break, so you can imagine…

At least we got to know the place, which is very nice and worth giving another shot, but then for a real Jazz band!