Saturday, January 28, 2006

Time flies and life remains

sorry for the absence, but it's been busy times. I've been working a little hard to get a project out of the door, and this is not only taking most of my time, but most of my energy to do anything else. But things are nearing conclusion and I have even forced myself to stay this weekend without working. The only interesting thing of it is that anytime I sit down or lay down to rest, work keeps popping to my mind. Nothing really bad, just ideas that I have, or lists of things to do. I've been dreaming and breathing work lately, so it's expected. It's been fun, nevertheless, but I'll be glad when it's over.

Nothing much else is going on. Besides this strange thing that I saw on Amazon today:

I was just trying to buy some stuff and then suddenly I look at my dangerous Amazon Prime "1-click shopping" buttons on the top of my screen and read the following: Get it Tuesday, January 31st - Overnight; Get it Saturday, December 31st - Two-day.

Then I was shocked: had somebody at Amazon invented a time machine? December 31st, 2005 was a Saturday and it won't fall on a Saturday again until 2011! So they must me talking about last December, right? Anyway, shopping at Amazon when you work there sometimes is so painful. On Monday I have to figure out who is responsible for this page and let them know. I know some people that work on Prime, but I'm not sure it's their piece of the system.

Anyway, I have to go back to doing nothing here. Yea, right... Doing nothing. I was cleaning and have been cooking a lot this weekend.

Decided to buy a bread machine yesterday and so far I haven't been impressed. I've set it to prepare bread overnight so that I would have fresh bread at 8:30 am today... Making the bread I've set up was going to take 3 1/2 hours approximately. At 6:30 am I was up and decided to check on the bread. When I got there it was a half mixture, far from homogeneous as you would expect.

I restarted the program and saw what happened. For some reason the whole bread dough ball had stuck higher up on the cooking bowl and the mixing paddle couldn't reach it. I mixed it all by hand and restarted it all, so the bread was only ready around 10 am. It has to cool down for 30 minutes before eating so, at 10:30, after alreayd having had breakfast, I tried the bread. And it was a little too dense for my taste.

I won't give up just yet... I'll believe that there was something wrong with the recipe or the weather, and will try something new one of these days.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Sorry I haven't been a good blogger lately. Too busy with work without really much to talk about. I'm blogging right now just because I was late for the bus, so I have 5 more minutes for the next one and because I found an interesting article on Wired about Sony's next eReader:

Screening the Latest Bestseller

It is cool to see that technology is still moving to go beyond the paper. Yes, there is still a lot to go, but hopefully we will get there in my lifetime.

Alright. My 5 minutes are almost gone, so it's time to move to the bus stop. Lots of work still to be done today. I estimated that I have about 20 hours of work to do this weekend so that I can have a less hectic week.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

The vibe, the time

Nothing much to talk about, I'm afraid. I've been working a lot lately. It is interesting that it hasn't been as much as I used to work. For instance, I have slept about 10 hours in the last two evenings combined, but I feel much more tired that I used to feel when I slept 5 hours every night. I'm growing old, I guess. But I do have other theories that I went throug here once, so will leave you without.

Yesterday (ok, technically the day before yesterday), I had my first choir rehearsal of the year. Also I got a personal invitation to sing in the premier of an opera, Stargazers, by Garret Fisher. I really would love to participate, but the concerts are going to be next Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Yes, a week from tomorrow!!! With me working 13 hours a day, it is just hard to put aside the time to learn the piece. It's not hard, but requires memorization. Moreover, I have already paid to go watch a concert next Thrusday. It is so painful to have to reject it but I will...

Another thing that is going on in choir is that they want me to lead the PR committee. They liked what I did for last concert and want me to continue the work. Again, I just don't know if I should invest my shrinking free time on that. I have so many things I want to do... But, at the same time, this would be so much more like me, to do things that are actually useful for other people and not really anything that I had planned to do for myself... I'll probably won't escape from this one, but I'm trying to buy some time before committing to see if somebody else appears to save the day.

What else is up? Oh, I finished listening to Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Sure it is number 3 on the NY Times's most blogged books of 2005, but not without any merit. It is an interesting book mostly because of the summary of some of the results from phychologist researches, and not too much for the overall meaning of the book. I think it lacked some sort of cohesive story, a real conclusion. Another book like that is number 1 on the list, Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Full of interesting facts, very bloggable, but not really cohesive.

Right now I'm trying to finish reading Ilium by Dan Simmons and then I already have about 10 books lined up. It is interesting how quickly my pile of books grew in the last month or so. I think I have been going home and to work a little bit more tired than usual and this has decreased my book throughput. I have to do a study about that!

Ok. Time to go to sleep some. I think I gave myself enough time to digest my midnight dinner.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

I had to steal this from Amy's blog:



create your own personalized map of the USA

Yikes, 33% of the states in the US. But most of them were only driving by on my way to Buffalo, NY.
Been trying to post something useful, trying to remember that it's been 5 years today that I've left Brazil to embark on one of my craziest ideas: go abroad for my Ph.D. But, besides that, because I don't have time to write something useful, I'll just post this interesting news (at least interesting to us, paper haters):

Fujitsu plans to start selling electronic paper within the fiscal year of 2006

Let's see what this will bring us. Resolution still seems a little low, but it might be just a temporary thing once the technology is established.