I love vampire stories. I've loved them ever since I first learned what a vampire was. The idea of blood-sucking immortal beings roaming the Earth that could only be killed with a stake to the heart… come on, how can a little boy not enjoy that? Oh, that and Zombies (preferably with their heads blown up with a double-barrel rifle)! But that's another story :-)

Needless to say, I watched every vampire movies that I could get my hands on and when the Twilight series started I was curious too. Sadly, I didn't know this was based on a series of books in which a teenager falls in love with a century-old teen vampire and everything is so depressing that you just want to kill yourself. That, combined with poor acting and a terribly-adapted script, was the recipe for a disastrous movie, in my opinion of course.

But still a good friend convinced me to read all four books and I decided to do so in the hope that my opinion of the story would change. Details of all four books below:

Twilight (3/5): The book tells the story of Bella, a teenager girl that moves to a small town in Washington state where it rains almost all the time. This is specially depressing for a girl that comes from a place like Phoenix, Arizona. Then she meets a family of vampires at school and falls in love with one of them, Edward, apparently "the most beautiful thing in the world". The story then revolves around their relationship and the dilemma of wether they should be together or not, considering he's a vampire and that he's constantly fighting not to suck her dry. Towards the end, finally, an interesting situation reveals itself ending up in a fight between clans of vampires. This didn't actually changed my opinion of the story but the book is obviously much better than the movie, mainly because it brought some sense to some of the things that I found ridiculous in the movie. Of course the excessive teenager-like discourse of feelings is tiresome but then again, who wasn't like that at that age?	New Moon (3/5): This one picks up on Bella and Edward's relationship and on how dangerous it is for her to be around vampires. A particular situation causes Edward to leave Bella and then, obviously, an endless sequence of depressing chapters ensues. Bella then finds comfort on the arms of her friend Jacob. Yep, this looks like a typical saturday night "telenovela" and it is as boring as it sounds. Fortunately the story then reveals a more interesting aspect when we actually discover that werewolves are involved too. In spite of the book's terrible start, it becomes interesting as new characters are presented towards the end of the story. This balance is the only thing that allowed it to have a rating of 3 out of 5. After reading the book, I decided to go see the New Moon movie and I have to say it doesn't suck as much as the first one. So I guess they're learning with their mistakes as this movie is much more inline with the book than the previous one.	Eclipse (3/5): The pattern of the two previous books is once again present: the start is somewhat like a soap opera where Bella deals with the inner conflict of loving both Edward and Jacob, who just so happen to be mortal enemies. But once again, towards the end, the book presents an interesting twist in which the mortal enemies have to form an alliance in order to fight a common enemy. Also, the book starts to shift to a more interesting pattern in which Bella's feelings are not so teen-like anymore and gain less importance in the story. Instead the focus goes to the supernatural aspect of the story, (which in my opinion, should have been from the start) where we learn more about these vampires and their enemies, the werewolves. The final battle in this book does make me curious as to how they'll be reproducing this on the upcoming film of the saga.	Breaking Dawn (4/5): Definitely the best of the four books (which is perceived by the rating), Breaking Dawn does what all previous books should have done: focus on the supernatural aspect of these stories. I'm not going to reveal the story of this book because it would be a definite spoiler but I have to say that I was pleased with the way this story was presented. We learn a lot about the vampires, we meet new (and very interesting) characters and the ending is quite interesting (except for the happily ever after part! Oh shit! Sorry for the spoiler!!). I was just disappointed with the fact that the whole universe of characters that was presented here was underused. Either the author didn't have enough imagination to do better or she's saving it for a sequel that I suspect may be coming sometime in the future.

In the end, I don't understand the enormous hype surrounding the whole thing but I have to say that I don't regret having read the whole saga, because I did like some of the aspects of the books as you can read above. I sure hope they can produce some decent movies out of the two final books, instead of the rubbish done so far. I'll admit: I'm looking forward to them. What can I say? I like blood squirting around … but maybe that's just me :-)

So, that takes care of one of the vampires' sagas. Next up: The Southern Vampire Mysteries saga, which tells Sookie Stackhouse's chronicles that is the basis for the HBO hit show True Blood (which I love, of course). But this one is 9 books long, so I guess it'll be quite sometime until I post something about it.

It's no coincidence that I'm writing this just as I got back from a 3-day conference. I enjoy going to conferences because there's always interesting people to meet and to talk about common research interests. However, there are painful moments and most of them revolve around… boring presentations.

I don't hold the secret to do the perfect presentation and that's exactly why this post is not called "What to do in a presentation". Instead it focuses on what NOT to do. And I mainly address this from the point of view of the person that is watching because, well, that's what it matters: to make a presentation that the people attending won't find boring.

So, here's the list of no-no's (in no particular order of "boringness"):

• No excessive text - Presentations are to be "presented". Not "read", otherwise they would be called "readentations" or "book-clubs". The text on the slides should be concise and bullet-like, with no details. The details will be provided by you, while presenting, hence the name "presentation".
• No dead-slow animations - I saw a presentation in which a certain slide took almost one minute to fully load. You could feel the viewers' stress building up in the room as the circles and arrows would come up. It's even worse when the speaker isn't actually saying anything during that time.
• No slide reading - Do not, under no circumstances, read the full text of your slide. Again… that's not a presentation, that's reading. And assuming that your audience is literate, you're not doing anything extra to help people understand your presentation. And no, waving like a maniac while reading it won't help… at all! Neither reading it with an attitude or in a Shakespearian way.
• No huummmms - If you open your mouth and say "huuummm!" between every two words, people will end up thinking that you have no idea what you're talking about.
• No clouds - Using clouds to obfuscate details of a system is soooo 2001! A little detail is always useful to offer the necessary insight into your system…but not too much.
• No note reading - Prepare your presentation and don't spend the whole time reading a script, especially if you're with your head buried in papers and not facing the audience.
• No dinosaur talk - Focus on the subject of your presentation and don't wander about trying to explain everything starting in the jurassic era.
• No excessive laser pointing - The laser pointer is quite useful for explaining complex diagrams from afar, but don't use it all the time and especially not as if you're in a rave party after taking LSD.
• No clipart - Nothing says "lame" like an abstract picture of a well-dressed man smiling and talking on the phone in front of a computer to depict the "User" of your system.
• No intimidation - Don't babble for hours about a very complex issue with vocabulary that is only known by a dozen people around the world and then finish with expressions like "Trivial!" or "Obvious!"

If you have any other tips to share, please do so. Feel free to use this knowledge to prepare your next presentation. Your audience will thank you.

I'm in Valencia, Spain, for a few days for a conference on Artificial Intelligence and just arrived this morning. Having some time to kill, I decided to go for a walk in the city (since my hotel is actually a few miles from the city centre, closer to the beach) and took the mini-bus (which the hotel so kindly provides to its guests free of charge) to the city centre directly to the main train station, Valencia Nord.

With no knowledge of the city at all, I decided to go inside the main train station in order to look for a tourism office to, at least, get a map that would allow me to easily stroll around. Since the station is huge and I didn't actually know if there was a tourism office there, I had to wander around a little bit looking for one.

Apparently, this is not the kind of behaviour that is tolerated around here because, just 4 or 5 minutes after I entered the station, I was suddenly approached by a couple of undercover policemen that very subtly showed me their badges and persuaded me to join them to a less conspicuous area of the station (since I was more or less in the middle of the main hall) to ask me a few questions.

Needless to say, at this point my balls were the size of sesame seeds mainly because my thriller-fuelled stupid brain started to imagine that I would end up in a secret government prison being tortured (permitted under some devious terrorist act law of some sort) to provide answers about some secret terrorist cell, just because they confused me with some terrorist guy.

Luckily, my brain was wrong and the policemen were very polite and went on with the "routine questioning" quite efficiently. First, they asked for some identification, which I provided, and took some notes, which one of the officers used to contact a central service of some sort. In the meantime, the other officer was asking me routine questions, always in spanish.

He started by asking where I was from since it became quite evident by brilliant and fluent "castellaño" that I wasn't spanish at all. Then he asked what did I do for a living. At this point, I was afraid that my answer that I actually develop intelligent software entities for a living, would not help me get on the policemen's good side, so I decided to simply say that I was in Valencia for a conference that "involves computers". He did give me that suspicious look and decided to dig in deeper and asked me exactly what the conference was about. That's when I decided to give him the usual answer that always work on these situations: intelligent robots. Surprisingly enough, he said: "Oh, that kind of technology from the future, that we see in movies? Cool!". Great, I was home safe…

But my brain was still not convinced about the whole thing and I still decided that I owed it to myself to try to find out why the hell was I being questioned by undercover cops. Just in case, they were in fact criminals trying to kidnap me or something, you know… the usual (I really should stop seeing so many action movies). So I started asking some questions and at this point I was quite amazed with the fact that I was maintaing a conversation in spanish for about 5 minutes and the guy was actually understanding what I was saying. I asked why did they approach me and why was the other men calling someone.

The explanation was simple: that train station is the main connection of Valencia to the remaining cities in Spain and they do a lot of these routine questionings for people that fit a "certain" profile, which in my case meant that a shaved-head guy with a green-military jacket zipped all the way up (that's me!) wandering around in a station like if he's scoping the place triggered a lot of red flags on the surveillance room. And basically when that happens, the guys on that room contact the undercover guys so that these can approach the person, ask the routine questions and check the IDs.

Meanwhile, the other guy was seriously chatting on the phone. When he finally finished I was amazed with the amount of information that we was able to collect about me just using my ID information. They already knew that I've arrived that morning (including flight number) and that the info on my ID card was genuine. So, it was easy to believe they were the real thing.

And that was it. After that, they just sent me on my way apologising for having disturbed me. I still thought about asking to take a picture all together so that I could remember this precious moment (in which I was considered a potential terrorist) forever, but I guess that would be pushing my luck. And so, I said "Buenos Dias!" and went for a walk on the small but picturesque city of Valencia :)