I got this book as an offer. I has been long to read and sometimes thought to leave it. I try to take the positive side. I learned about the different Apollo missions, challenges, failures, successes and the people who step on the Moon. Each one with its own peculiar character.
One can think that the huge investment in taking humans in the moon has not been recovered. I think that helped the USA beat the URSS, and get something positive while Vietnam war…
Maybe we need something similar again, a far fetched goal that gets us together and focus in something bigger than ourselves.
GTC 2026 Build HP Research Cluster: s81731 – Very good presentation going to the low details of tools to use to build a GPU cluster. Storage is VAST, NVIDIA Spectrum-X (Ethernet), N-S is a different vendor, issues with L1 (maybe co-package optics can improve that?). SU = scalable Units. 64 spines upfront
stop watching more youtube videos and motivation things (like above… action)
Longevity Lie: Longer life without quality is not life. Agree current medicine wants you to live longer but hooked to medicines… at least when you are old… Keep muscle!
I dont look like a navy seal: just get it, do very hard things but just concentrate in your next goal… it is breakfast. Little victories. Positive aptitude. Your worse enemy are your doubts, fears and everybody else that doesnt believe on you. Keep moving forwards.
In the last couple of years, I have seen some videos from Boulangeries in Paris that I had to visit at some point. So this weekend was the time. I reviewed these videos (random, Luis, Joshua) to make a list and see how many I could visit. Honestly, Joshua video is the best (and longest) and gives you so many sites to visit. Luis video is the funniest.
What surprised me from Paris since my last visit: There are a lot of bike lines!!!! How many churches are in Berlin compared with Paris, so many kiosks with paper magazines…
These two boulangeries were closed for winter holidays! A bit disappointed because the references were really good: Du pain et des idees and La Maison D’isabelle
On Friday, I tried “Liberte“: cheese baguette for lunch and an almond croissant. The croissant was well filled and tasty. Then I went later to La Panifacture and tried a croissant and Pain aus Suisse. They were really delicious !!! The outside form of the croissant was perfect. Lacked a bit of butter for my taste. The filling of the Pain aus Suisse was suprising: cream and chocolate chips. The whole Friday afternoon/night was raining (not hard). I spent several hours outside so I hope I burned some calories from the pastries
From Liberte
From La Panifacture
On Satuday morning, I went early to Cedric Grolet, as there are always queues. I knew it was going to be expensive and a bit of hype. I bought a “flower of passion fruit and coconut” and Pain aus Suisse. The Pain was really big, supper flaky, super tasty, and expensive, but worth it for once a year/s. The “flower” was not really sweet, that surprise me, the form was astonishing. Flavour wise I only tasted a bit the passion fruit. This is not the place to go every day for a croissant (or you have more money than sense). It was an experience. Then I went for a long walk until my slot in Musee D’Orsay. After that I walk up to the hotel and stopped in “Tout Autour du pain” for a croissant and a baguette. The croissant was a bit more buttery than La panifacture, and the form/look was not as perfect, but still really good. The baguette was tasty too.
From Cedric Grolet
From Tout Autour du pain
On Sunday, I went for breakfast to “Maison Bayat” I tried a croissant, pain aus suisse and a pain aus raisins (6€ something). Very tasty all of them. The pain aus suisse was the smaller of all I tried but still crunchy, buttery and the cream/choco filling delicious. The croissant was very buttery, warm and flaky, the form not as perfect, but didnt really care. The pain aus raisin felt juicy and still warm. Then I went to climb as I was tired of walking. After climbing I bought a big piece of bread in “Ernest & Valentin” I tried and it was good, it had some walnuts and raisins, something I would like to avoid but didnt know when ordered (learn French mate!) And in my last stroll, I stopped in “The French Bastards“, it seems it is a chain. I tried a croissant and pain aus raising and to be honest, compared with all others they were the less good.
From Ernest & Valentin
In summary, I enjoyed good pastries and bread, contemplate great art and walk around without much goals.
This book was a gift. I knew about Tommy Caldwell, famous climber in USA and that’s it, but never thought he wrote a book. As one can imagine, the great climbers, start very young. And everybody has a drama/s in life. Nobody is immune to love problems, so suck it up (look at me). It is interesting how he changed his training method for the last attempt of the Dawn Wall and with experience he noticed that he sometimes over did it. It is interesting the evolution of the person regarding how climbing should be lived and practiced, as he needs to live and maintain a family.
I have baked a vegan version but I wanted to try the traditionalversion.
Ingredients 1 bag of tea 200g fresh Medjool dates 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground ginger 1 teaspoon grating nutmeg 85g unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing (at room temperature) 85g dark muscovado sugar (I used brown) 170g self-raising flour, plus extra for dusting 2 eggs pinch of salt
Carame Sauce: 125g unsalted butter 62.5g dark muscovado sugar (I used brown) 62.5g white caster sugar optional 1 shot dark rum 200ml double cream
Serving
Vanilla ice cream
Process
Pre-heat oven at 180C
Chop the dates and cover in boiling water until soft with a tea bag
Cream the butter and sugar.
Add the eggs to the butter/sugar, the add the flour. Pinch of salt
In a hand blender or similar, add the dates with some water and the spices.
Add the date mix to the butter/sugar/flour. Combine properly
Grease a pan with butter and flour. Pour the mix.
Bake for 40-45 minutes. Use a stick or knife to be sure the cake is ready (should come up clean)
Prepare the caramel sauce, in a pan, add the butter and two types of sugar. When it is boiling add the the shot and wait for the alcohol to evaporate.
Add the cream and mix for 1 minute to avoid burning. The more you cook the sauce, the thicker will get later on.
Remove the sauce from the heat.
Once the cake is ready, make some holes in the top and pour the caramel sauce on the top, use a brush to cover the whole surface.
For serving
Cut a portion, add a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a bit of caramel on top.
It was really tasty. I wonder how the restaurants serve it always warm! I guess the caramel sauce and cake can be pre-heated?
This book is about the end of the Roman Republic. How the social tension (abuse of politician taking taxes, slavery, etc), corruption (Senators taking bribes), unequal wealth distribution (few had property, Senator were super rich), immigration (Romans didnt want Italians to have Roman citizenship) evolved to violence, civil wars and finally the dictatorship of Sulla. There are many people mentioned in the book, how the rise to power and how they are killed (most of them). Looks like a routine. Most of them didnt know them. I guess we learn mostly the Emperors in school and not much about the Republic. One example is Marius.
It is striking how things are so similar more than 2000 years ago. I read the book as a recommendation as it shows what can happen to the current empire (USA). It can be pessimistic but you can see patterns, not just in USA but in the rest of the world.
And it is incredible how just one city, had some much influence in that region of the world. The republic expanded to feed Rome, to keep the price of grain low, to keep the population content… it is crazy.
There were a lot orators, but the power came mainly from serving in the legion, wining warns. The army is the base on any empire, old and new.
This is a “new” recipe It is a bit different from the one I used before as it doesnt use bread starter. One issue is still the sugar (I think) I use orange juice and that is not as sweet as Mosto.
Ingredients
250ml orange juice 125ml olive oil 62.5g sugar (next time use 100gr) 14g dry baker’s yeast (1 sacket) 2 medium eggs (reserve 1/2 for brushing) 1 pinch of salt 500g strong flour (>12gr protein) (maybe a bit more next time)
Process:
Warm up a bit the orange juice. Dont boil it. You should put a finger without burning
Mix in a bowl the orange juice, yeast, oil, sugar and eggs.
Add the flour bit by bit. And the salt, It will be sticky
Knead the dough by hand until smooth. Mine was sticker than the video and took me a while until it became that shiny.
Put it in a bowl and let it rest until double in size
Then divide the dough. I made pieces of 190gr aprox. Then pinch them to form a ball and shape them.
Let is rest until double is size
Pre-heat oven at 180C
Before baking, brush them with a mixed egg and add a pinch of sugar on top.
Bake until golden (20m or more)
Just before getting into the oven
After baking
The ones from my hometown are more spongy, mine are a bit too dense.
The color and share were good (still far from the real ones) and the taste as well was not close to it. Still you can enjoye them with a nice hot chocolate 🙂
This book was a gift from Christmas and to be honest, nothing special, I will always remember the “Pillars of the Earth”. The plot is a bit similar but fails to deliver. Still, I have read many really good books from Ken Follet, so no complains.
AWS Network Infra 2025 NET402: From minute 29 is the most interesting for me. Precast fiber duct banks, TE pre-signalled bypass IP tunnels for each path (without RSVP-TE?) and constant recalculation. UltraCluster3, connector improvements (36% reduce link failures! 76% reduce time for cabling!). UltraSwitch with dynamic LB and adaptive routing (like IB and UltraEthernet)
Nice the NVIDIA presentation from a mechanical engineer.
Meta Catalina pod 33:39 – 4xracks for liquid cooling! for 2xIT racks. 42:39 3 networks: frontend (N-S), backend(E-W) and management/console. Leaking monitoring
Google TPU rack Ironwood: I need to research the 3D Torus connection. 1h15m16
Intel IPU E220: This is a NIC although I wasn’t 100% sure until I checked in another site. You can use P4
AMD Pensando Pollara 400 (NIC). P4 architecture. UltraEthernet ready. 48:36 95% network utilization (intelligent LB, congestion mgmt (RTT-based), fast failover and loss recovery (select ACK)= the trinity)
NVIDIA ConnectX-8 SuperNIC: 1h13m multiplane – as I understand, you use more leaf switches, in the example 4 planes = 4 leaf, and you have 64x gpu scale
I haven’t tried in a while so yesterday was the day. This hit the spot.
Simple ingredients and good result. Although I struggle when recipes use “cup” measures…. I did a smaller batch (two cups and one egg) and my batter was too liquid compared with the video, so I will have to try again.
Dry Ingredients
3 cups of flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp baking powder
1 1/2 tbsp baking soda
Wet Ingredients
2 1/4 cups milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
3 eggs
Frying
Butter or coconut oil (I guess whipped salted butter, is just buying salted butter and whip it?)
Process
Mix all dry ingredients in one bowl
Mix all wet ingredients in another bowl
Pour the wet mix into the dry bowl and mix a bit, dont overdo it.
This is the difficult part. In a hot pan (at mid-heat), use the butter or oil for frying. I used a small frying pan so I just did one big pancake at each time. Wait for the edges to by brown/fried. Dont stir. Once you see (several) bubbles on top, then you can flip the pancakes (I had to add a bit of oil to avoid burning)
I made 6 pieces. Dont look amazing but tasted really good. So can’t complain
