Porres.com – Eric's Humble Place in Cyberspace

Over the past couple of months I’ve been taking inventory of the various ways in which I communicate, whether is be for myself to keep track of news and information (on NetVibes), externally through tweets, Facebook updates, NYGrapes updates, dojo updates, or this blog.  In short, while I hope to keep this site fresh, you are more likely to catch what I’m thinking about or doing via my Facebook (which is connected with Twitter) feed.  As the song goes (name that band!), “Time is the measure before it’s begun, Slips away like running water…” and I’m just out of time to write down at-length prose on all of the various topics I’m interested in.

So, if you know me (and by know I mean more than just we met once and/or we’ve communicated more than once since we were in highschool), have a look for me on Facebook.  Better yet, rather than pseudo-conversationalism through blogs, tweets, and the like, just pick up the phone and call.  Cheers.

Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to scouring the web I found the following blog from Tim Anderson where there were over 180 comments based on a post he made about a problem he was having in Word 2007…wading through the comments I found that they were all similar problems having to do with a corrupt registry.  I have no idea how I corrupted by registry, but be that as it may, following the advice of some comments and then a link to a buried Microsoft support page I was able to correct my problem…only wish I had discovered this yesterday and didn’t waste over an hour of uninstall/reinstall/office-diagnostics time.

If you see no other movie this summer, Ratatouille should be at the top of your list.  It is a perfect movie, brilliantly acted and musically scored, and another home run for Pixar.  Thank you the Pixar team for producing such a spectacular vision!

The inventor of instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, died today of a heart attack. He was 96. Those noodles were slurped, guzzled and all but devoured during my college days. May his noodly spirit live on!

• News report, BBC Asia
• Update: Appreciations – Mr. Noodle (From New York Times)

Yes, it’s true, my roots can be traced through Italy and back to nobles living in Spain (the Val de Porres). This is an image of my family crest. If you are feeling adventurous and your Castillian is up to snuff, you can read about the Porres name and history here or try using Babelfish to decode it. Unfortunately Babelfish does an only OK job with the task.

Porres history in a nutshell – The first references to Porres come from the Valley of Porres, in Burgos, Spain, and its lord, Rui Lopez de Porres appear in a document from 1133. It seems that it was the lord that took the name from the valley and not the other way around. The first Porres to arrive to America is also well documented. He arrived from Spain just some few years after the first voyage by Columbus. San Martin de Porres (1579) was a direct descendant of him, but the history isn’t quite complete as to whether he was his son or grandson.

With the help of my friend and technorati Glenn Rempe, a new and improved photo gallery is up up up. It’s a huge improvement, both visually and functionally. Check it out and big props to Glenn for helping me out.

On Easter eve, a gaggle of revelers descended upon the upstairs lounge of The Spotted Pig to ring in my 30th birthday. My sincere and heartfelt thanks to those who were able to make it out; it meant a lot to me to see you all there, and I could not think of a finer group of people to be with on the eve of my 30th birthday. Thank you all so very much! Some pictures of the evening festivities are here.

After many a long and sleepless night spent drifting and dreaming through old clothing, books, college reading materials, photos from the 1800s, finding an AOL Versio 2.0 (yes 2.0 folks) on a single floppy disk (yes, that’s a SINGLE floppy disk folks), CDs, furniture, more books, glass galore, electronic equipment, spices from the spice rack, and wine, the move is now over. I will continue to despise moving, but can relax for a few months while the renovations take shape.

Thanks to the crew from Arthur Werner for making the actual move easy.

So, as this is my first blog, I have to give some big shout-outs to the following people:

1) Tom Hespos – my business partner at Underscore who got me into the whole idea of setting up a blog in the first place. Were it not for his help, you would not be reading this!

2) Glenn Rempe – perhaps the only person I know who would say to me “Dude, check out the hacked Tivo” before I was able to crash at his apartment in San Francisco with my wife while he was galavanting in Hawaii with his girlfriend. Glenn is a rare combination of cool and geek (geek on the inside…he is afterall a technical architect at Accenture) who has helped me through numerous web related problems in the past, and who was able to get my photo gallery running.

3) Tom Simpson – without whom my html skills would simply be non-existent.

4) My darling wife Margaret – who has put up with many a late night of me tap-tap-tapping away while I got all of this running…thanks sweetie!