Saturday, September 24, 2005

Transfering license tags

Finally today I got everything I thought I needed (including time) and went to the department of transportation to transfer my tags from Oklahoma to Washington. I went through their website and was quite confused with what I needed, but I read the following:

"If a lienholder holds the title, you will need to supply a fax or photocopy of the title being held by the lienholder."

I have a lease, so I don't have the title. Last Monday I called Honda and asked them to fax me the title. Well, they finally did it on Friday (according to them, the title is held on a fire-safe building, so it takes some time for them to retrieve it - shouldn't have taken more than 2 days, but it took 4). So there I was, ready to pay I don't know how much to get this all done. Waited in line for about 40 minutes (it's because I got there just after it opened) and then the lady in the office looked at me and said: well, in Washington we need the actual title and a P.O.A. (Power of attourney) letter so they had to fax Honda themselves to get all this info.

They were pretty nice about it, getting all the information they needed by themselves and just asking me to call back for further instructions on Wednesday. The only thing that bugged me is that I thought I had read that I only needed the copy of it on their website... And that's what it was written there! Grr... I hate the web!

Well, there isn't much what to talk about here. It's getting colder and a little cloudier. You can feel people getting more nervous because of it. Quite an interesting topic for a study in psychology.

Alright, time to go and start cleaning all the mess around here. It's quite scary how much mess I can produce in a week without much free time.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Ah... Giants fail all the time...

I was looking around for news as I try to do in the morning, and, when looking at Google News I found the following articles grouped together under the "Health" section (the most terrible at Google News):

U of I: Student body growing
More dead birds in county testing positive for West Nile
2 more county residents confirmed with West Nile

Why do they still bother with all these silly mistakes? And they keep hiding behind this ridiculous "Beta" stage, where they will probably stay for the rest of its existance...

Yes, Google wants to take over the world, but they will never get anywhere that worries me if they still only create betas and never actually continue growing their beta systems (ok, Google Maps is still growing).

I know I still haven't left. It's just that I get caught with these thousands of ideas that go through my mind and I had to continue reseaching... It's an addiction!

Turning on the login requirement for comments

Dear commenters,

I'm sorry to announce that right now in order for you to post comments on my blog, you have to be registered. The reason for that is that lately blog spams have been pretty active. Most probably it is a direct consequence from the "wonderful" blog search that Google added.

I'm sure this is not a perfect solution, because I have been spammed in the past by registered users, but I'm sure it helps. If registered users spam me, I can always send and email back to Blogger telling them to cancel that user's account, or something like that. Anonymous users are untouchable.

So what if you want to be anonymous when you post something? Well, just create an anonymous account! I don't want to have a negative effect on the amount of comments I receive because of that. Yes, I am aware that I don't write pretty much anything that people would be even marginally interested in commenting on, but who knows if one day I will learn again how to blog interesting things... But first I will have to relearn how to actually blog, because this has been a quite rare event in the past many months.

Anyway, time to go to work. It is interesting what happens when I wake up early and get ready quickly... I find other things to do, like looking at a friend's wedding pictures (second friend that got married in the last week) and playing around with Opera and having crazy ideas of a new "secret project"...

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Out of a concert, back into oblivion

Here I am, just back from my first concert as a season subscriber of the Seattle Symphony. It was a wonderful concert, with 3 pieces:

Aaron Kernis's Musica Celestis: the only piece in the program that I hadn't heard before, and I was positively impressed. Celestis it is, arranged for string orchestra. Peaceful with powerful moments, but just plain soothing.

Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto, Op. 14: I was never a big fan of Samuel Barber's work and unfortunately this is another of his works that I can live without. It's not bad, especially the soloist, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, was impressive (although I don't trust musicians with their own web page that have worked a lot with "crossover" stuff). But... I just can't say I can really feel the music. Hopefully it's just me.

Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 in E minor, Op. 94, "From the New World": Well, this does not need a lot of introduction. Just a wonderful work of art. The guest conductor, Andreas Delfs, was amazingly energetic, although he made the piece a little faster than I would conduct it myself. The first movement was crazy with amazing tempo changes, congratulations Seattle Symphony! Just delightful.

Now I'm back to my office, but just waiting for the next bus (that will be out in 10 minutes, so I have to run). I'll get back to the oblivion another time.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Sometimes blogger makes life harder

Free time has been rare lately and twice trying to post and not getting Blogger to do the posting makes life harder. Sure you can claim that it was all because I took 3 hours to finish each of my previous posts, but, hey, the system has to get used to my posting style, not the opposite! :-)

Anyway, not too much to talk about. I've been busy, but surviving. Work is starting to let me get back home earlier, and also choir has been keeping me positive as for doing things besides work. My TO-DO list keeps growing and this does worry me and put me on a bad mood from time to time, but it's how life goes, I guess.

Today I went out to see if I could find a new apartment/house to live in. I've visited a quite interesting house. Hardwood floors in most of the place (that is pretty much the sole reason I'm thinking of moving - hardwood floors are more allergy-friendly than carpet, and I've had some pretty bad days in the past), a very nice backyard, a reasonable kitchen (not that great, but not worse than my current one), and not too big so that I don't have to spend more time cleaning. There are only two downsides: the rooms have different sizes, so my furniture does not fit as well as I had it fitting my current apartment; and it's a house and potentially it requires more maintenance (and taking care of the lawn, although I can add this maintenance to my rent).

Oh, and there is one more important downside to moving in general: taking my very heavy furniture from one place to another!

Anyway, the other thing I had to talk about was about how the world is close to a very important change. Mostly economic, but big changes in economy sometimes cause political changes with it. I'll get into more of that some other day.

Friday, September 09, 2005

The un-blogger

I haven't been blogging much, because I have been going through an un-blogging moment, the time that you feel that everything you say will be used against you in the future, so it's better not to say much.

Some of the things are not really my fault, but surely most of them are. But I'll go through the things that are not my fault, like the front page of the Seattle Times on Wednesday: "25 relatives are coming - Olympia family scrambles to make room for sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews"

Surely it's a neat story about what is going on with people after the great Katrina, but this story making to first page headlines... This is a little too too much, it's beyond too much. What is wrong with people's priorities???

You can think that this is just the US newspapers that are wrong, right? Of course this is wrong. I opened today the "Estadao" and what did I find on the first headlines? A picture of Gisele Bündchen full of tatoos and the title: tomorrow she will be wearing only tatoos for sandal comercials [source - in Portuguese]. It just makes my life much harder to see where this world is going. Then people claim that I should watch more TV and play more video-game.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Useful calendar

iCal is an interesting program that allows people to share very useful calendar, like this one that changed my life:

D'ni Holidays

Amazing. That's the only word for it.