Another eternal fight

Just to wander a little bit away from the last topics, here is an article that I found quite intriguing. (I'm trying not to sleep too much tonight, so I'm doing many things to keep me awake and one of this pointed me to the article)

Homeopathy's benefit questioned

It is an old fight, as old as the creation of homeopathy. The concept behind this type of treatment is very odd... Imagine getting something that gives you the same symptoms of what you are feeling and dillute it to a level that the chances that you will injest a molecule of the thing is quite small. Scientifically, why would this work?

I've used homeopathy in the past and I don't know if it really worked. It is always hard to separate what our own antibodies are doing from what the medication is doing. My conclusion: do what makes you happier. The least stress you are going through while you are sick, the quicker your body will react to it and make you feel better. Never use a medication you don't believe, but do believe in medicine! Thousands of years of research must have brought us something good.

Things

There is so many things to talk about that I'll probably won't write much.

Sao Paulo is a great city. A living entity that is always moving, always changing, but not really evolving. It's growing, eating things, but the problems are still there and only get worse. Today, for example, I was listening to the news and they mentioned that there are 120 cars are stolen violently, i.e. using guns or other weapons, EVERY DAY in Sao Paulo! My sister's fiance was robbed of his cellphone, money and briefcase by a guy on a motorcycle the other day. This guy pointed a gun to him (although later he got the impression that the gun was a fake) and asked for everything. As easy as that. When he went to the police to tell what happened, the police officer said that there are about 20 of these A DAY in that region!

So violence is still here. Traffic is still here! Especially on Fridays when people try to get home earlier (and end up just leaving work earlier but probably getting home at the same time as always).

Happy people are still around too! Despite all the chaos in politics as I mentioned before, people are still hopeful of the future. They still think that things can get better and only need time to fix. So they go out, have fun, stay out until late at night and go to work as always on the following day (having a lot of coffee!)

Changing subject a little, my father went to a lecture this morning with an economist and this economist mentioned how worried he is about the world economy. One of the most interesting point he made was the real state bubble going on everywhere in the US (except from the midwest - but the money isn't in the midwest anyway). Houses and apartments are just ridiculously expensive and all the money that is driving this spike in prices is generated by other countries investing in the US, and not by the US that is way deep in deficit.

I'm a little bit more optimistic than this guy (although he is a professional and I'm just a very naive and uneducated guy). He thinks that everything is going to burst in less than an year and we will go down into depression again. I don't quite think that depression is that easy to get. The economy is much more stable right now to go through such a quick depression! But I'll have to wait and see...

I guess that's all I'm going to talk about right now. I was going to discuss some business opportunities I see around here, but I'll leave this for another day.

Getting lost in the chaos of the last week

The last week of my vacation arrived very quickly and now I'm a little lost on what I should do. I'm trying to organize to meet with some friends that I haven't met yet (because they were either traveling, or they don't answer emails and I lost their phone numbers when my PDA died, or because of mutual lazyness). The thing is that things end up happening in spikes of activity. One day nobody can do anything, the other everybody is free, but I can't take a person to dinner at the same time that I go to a choir rehearsal or have to meet somebody that lives and works in the other side of the city (just for the people that don't know Sao Paulo very well, the other side of the city does not mean 30 minutes from here, or 10 if you live in Stillwater, but it can mean anything from 1 to 3 hours away).

So, right now I'm home. My mother is asleep. I went to my father's company for a visit and had lunch in a really great fish place. I felt bad that I had forgotten to take my camera with me! The restaurant was very typical: a large area with simple tables. Around the place you had a small town by the dam surrounded by trees (very unlike Sao Paulo - I was not in Sao Paulo, by the way). The food was simple and delicious.

Then I went shopping with my mother. She had to buy a wedding gift, but she went away empty-handed. Then we drove back home. Tonight I have a work discussion with my father then dinner with some friends at 10 pm.

Tomorrow I'm going out with friends in the morning, early afternoon, mid-afternoon and then trying to drop by the choir to say hi to people. Thursday I'll do some touristy stuff around Sao Paulo with my sister and in the evening I'm tying to meet some friends for a pizza dinner. On Friday I'm going to go to a "churrascaria" with my other sister. Friday evening I think family is coming here for Shabbat dinner and Saturday I'm packing, buying some gifts and some stuff for me and catching the plane in the evening. In other words, it's going to be very busy last days here.

Unique Sao Paulo

First I have to rant a little about Blogger. It has been not very nice to me lately, not allowing me to publish posts, publishing things three times when I press "Publish Post" only once, things like that.

Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about. I'm here to discuss what I've seen on my long ride on the bus back home on Wednesday. First I was hit by the lack of good information about buses around here. There is a website where you can check bus itineraries. You enter two big avenues and it finds buses that connect these two places.

Note that there is no time, no regularity of the bus, just its number. Then you can go to the number and see what the itinerary of the bus is to have an idea how long it takes from one point to the other. And that's all.

With this tool, I found a bus line that connected two streets that I could use to connect where I was to my house. So there I went to the bus stop... I saw at least 15 different bus lines driving by that bus stop, at least 3 times each! So one hour after I got to the bus stop I decided that I should try something different to get home. So I went to another bus stop and asked the driver of a bus that went approximately to the place I wanted to go about how to get there. He promptly said that I should stay in the bus for one more stop and then transfer to another bus in the next stop. I've done it and I was on my way home, arriving safely.

Now for the interesting thing that I've learned on this trip.

Buses are very interesting in Sao Paulo. Some are old and not very confortable. They can get pretty crowded, especially on peak hours. Crowded enough that you have to squeeze your way out or else you miss the stop (that's what I had to do and almost missed my stop). But they show a lot of what life is about. You just have to stop and listen to people talk, and look outside on the places the bus goes through. Here are just small excerpts of these observations (lots of them needed pictures, but taking a digital camera inside a bus is never a good idea):

- A paper ad glued to a post: "Call Miss XYZ: Tarot, and a large list of other related future reading methods. Get your love to love you in 01 days!"
- A discussion between two high schoolers: "blah, blah, blah about boys. So what are you doing about it? Well, I'm going to talk with my grandmother and she always gives me good advice about it..."
- A set of very new buildings all made of glass and a homeless man walking with his cart full of trash and just ignored by everybody else.
- Very poor looking people entering the bus and paying their tickets using a very interesting smart card system (I'll get to this system one day)
- People entering buses to try and sell some snacks, ice cream and drinks and first going to the driver and giving them a free sample so that they can enter and exit the bus for free.
- Very well dressed people leaving and entering the bus at the same time as very poorly dressed people.
- Women walking by and seeing almost all men just turning around to see her back.
- Outdoor ads displaying nearly nude women and men to sell pretty much anything, from alcoholic drinks to lingerie

This is just what I can remember. I know I was actually quite delighted with all I was seeing and hearing. I do miss Sao Paulo, and I know I'll always miss it. Especially because my sister said that being a man in Sao Paulo is great right now, because there is a very interesting scarcity of available men right now.

Anyway, time for me to go to bed so that I can help my mother to prepare things for my party in the evening.

Spammed by blog comments

This is really new! On my last post (that was actually repeated 3 times for some reason) I got one comment by a spammer talking about buying cars. I've heard of this before, but it was new to my blog. The worst thing is that the only way to prevent this from happening is to block all unknown users from commenting (enabling anonymous comments doesn't really help, because they are never anonymous). This is fundamentally a Blogger problem, because they allow people to create any number of random users that can, in turn, start spamming you. It shows once again that Google is great, but they don't invest that much usability analysis in their "side sites" like blogger and orkut.

Anyway, no more ranting. Time to get back to thinking what I'll do this afternoon. I have mainly four options: (1) sleep (I woke up pretty early to go to the consulate to get my visa stuff done), (2) read a book (I still have two books I brought), (3) bake a cake for an event my mother is participating tomorrow, and (4) work on my paper. I'll decide on something eventually. I'm trying to be lazy a little and not do much.

Isolated in Brazil

Here I am, in Brazil again! Life is great! Lots of nice conversations with my family and my sisters fiancee. Cool guy, but I still have to finish my interview with him! :-)

The only problem that I'm seeing here is that my old PDA broke just before I came here and all the phone numbers of my friends were in the PDA. This makes me a little isolated from them, but I'm trying to fix it tomorrow (a day I won't be only sleeping and eating).

I don't have much else to talk about. The shock at the airport waiting to get into the plane to Brazil and in the plane were less than I was used to, to tell you the truth. Usually you meet those loud Brazilians trying to find the best seats and just kick out the people that seem too shy to do anything against them. This time was different, people were much more controlled.

Sure there were a lot of people making gossip about everybody in the airport. My guess is that they feel that the language is keeping them from being heard, that's why you don't hear Americans saying the same types of things. But I still think of it as a little disturbing.

Finally, politics in Brazil right now are pretty chaotic. They are finding a lot of "irregularities" on the way the party that is currently in power did their campaign and are governing. Lots of money going in many different directions. I've even heard somebody discussing on TV today that many people are trying to stay away from hearing and reading the news just not to hear even more problems. And the president (that some people starting thinking was going to quit) just said that he is confused and feel betrayed by the people around him, but that he will work towards getting it all sorted out. Interesting thing is that not too long ago he was against some of the investigation. Very interesting times...

This makes some people turn to me and say that I shouldn't come back to Brazil because things are just too chaotic around here and will never get better. I'm an optimist, though. I believe that this doesn't make Brazil a less interesting place to live. But I'm not moving any time soon. There are just too many things that I have to accomplish before I go for my next move in life.

What some people are worried about is that the government is seen as a model to the population, especially this government that got into power because they tried to represent the "simple people". Now these people have terrible role models in front of them... Who knows what they are going to do with it...

Nervous...

I think I've never been this nervous in my whole life about a trip. If you could see my second bedroom/office right now you would know the reason of part of this nervousness. If you could see my to-do list at work you would get another part of this reason. I've abandoned my perfectionism some years ago, but it seems like it never actually went away.

But I was not going to talk about my trip here... I'll discuss about... The new Nike Free technology! I'm not a friend of walking barefoot, but it really seems like all shoe companies right now are aiming towards making you feel like you are walking wearing only socks or something. It is strange, but not at all unexpected. The shoe evolution started with just pieces of cloth (a sock), then moved to a sturdy platform tied to your feet (sandals), then technology evolved on the sturdy platform side, increasing and decreasing its flexibility and the tying part, also increasing an decreasing flexibility and how much it protected the top part of your feet and calves. Shoes in this whole evolution were synonymous to "protection."

Then we entered an era of "shoes are supposed to offer you more than just protection" and then we got to the Nike Air type things, where shoes offered support, and spring efect to decrease impact on the floor and use this impact energy that is mostly wasted on our bone structure to give you force back to move faster ahead. Thousands of variations were proposed, looking more or less like springs on your foot.

But the world wasn't happy. The era of flip-flops was not disappearing, it was gaining strength. With the improvement in materials, it started to be possible to get back to the sock principle and just add a little bit more grip to it. And that's where we are right now. A sock that is more padded. Allows you to walk on glass, but still feel like you are actually touching the ground.

I'm an engineer, so I can say that I miss the "Nike Air" wave. It just makes more sense in an energy use standpoint. Not that it's gone, but it just became harder to find those shoes as they are currently deemed unfashionable.

Anyway, good that I was able to just talk about useless things for a while. I need to free my mind from other things.

Getting ready

The title says it all, so I don't have to say anything in the body of the post. That's why I'll change topics completely and write about frivolous things like:

Tim Berners-Lee interview for BBC: Sir Berners-Lee is a celebrity in the world, because I guess he created the World Wide Web. In this interesting article he mentions how blogging and wikis have transformed the web into something closer to what he thought it was supposed to be. Interesting that he doesn't talk at any point about the "Semantic Web," another of his inventions, one that is still to see the actual light of the day. I could right now go through a series of articles about why ontologies are gaining less and less interest in the actual knowledge representation community, but I'll spare you from that, except from maybe giving you the original spark to all this anti-ontology movement: Sirky's post.

I'll just go through a quick discussion why I think the whole movement is correct in some aspects, but falls short in many others.

First let's say that I like ontologies. I think they are useful if used carefully. They are able to present a consistent and clean universe of ideas and allow the manipulation of these ideas in a safe way. But what is the problem with them? Locality! Ontologies work well when they are global, or at least work globally. However, knowledge is local - a person is a specialist on a certain field and defines this field in relation to itself and not anything else.

I could go into a very elaborate example right now, but I'll skip that for the sake of not boring 99% of all my readers. Just try to think of something you are expert on. Let's say, music. Now try to compare classical music to popular music. Try to define common things and how they interrelate. Then after you are done, show this to a classical music expert and/or a popular music expert. Do you know what you are going to get? Well, most probably either people saying that your model is missing important parts, or that it is actually incorrect. For example (grr, I said I wasn't going to go through an example), some people would put "tonality" as a song concept. However, tonality in classical music is a much broader concept (because it changes a lot throughout the piece) than on popular music. Actually, tonality is not a very useful concept in popular music, as most songs are on very similar tones, to make them easier to sing comfortably. Then even inside popular music this changes.

Of course you can get into the discussion of what is classical and popular music... This is when I change topic!

Onto... the Blue Angels... They were here in Seattle last weekend for the great Sea Fair. They close the bridges and let them fly around in circles around the city, passing very close to some buildings. They play around and make some people very excited.

I can say I understand the excitement. I was an airplane-junkie in the past. I had many books about airplanes and knew a whole lot about the difference between many models (at least what my inability to memorize things allowed me to remember). I wanted to be an airplane pilot and even got into Aeronautics Engineering in Brazil. However, very soon I started realizing that that's not really that exciting. With the very powerful jet engines we have right now and very good control algorithms that are added to the modern airplanes, flying an airplane is not that hard any more. Making very complicated shapes in the air with your airplane is not at all that hard, considering that the control algorithms on board of the plane do most of the work for you. The only thing you have to deal with is the Gs of force that you have to go through on each maneuver. In other words, aircraft shows became boring to me. As boring as fireworks (ok, maybe a little less boring than fireworks). So I just decided not to watch it... However, I had to watch some of it on my way to the gym on Sunday.

Finally, I'm having a lot of fun with the toys that I have bought lately. They are all mine, you know, until somebody decides to buy them back from me. At least I ran away from spending $500 more on a camera for a friend today. Not that I really didn't want to buy it, it is just that I don't have that much time to go after it and make sure that I'll have space in my suitcase. So... Maybe next time!

Alright, time to have dinner and get back to packing here. I have to make sure I won't forget anything important.

The twilight zone is here

There are times in my life where things around me start to shift towards the odd. This usually happens when the stress levels are higher than normal, and my sleeping patterns get all confused. At times like this, only a poem can help:

Deep in the dark

The sun does not come in
Although it illuminates all
The stars don't shine
But they see it all
The hole in the ground reigns
The darkness overwhelms

Doubts and misunderstandings
Thoughts and words
The stars and the sun are there
They rise and fall and hide
As the hole in the ground reigns
The sorrow embraces

All around the world seems lost
Lost in the confusion of light
Impressed by the goal
The goal to move ahead
Down the hole that reigns in the ground
The silence leaves

And then
There is love
Feelings that takes us
Leaving us, embracing us, overwhelming us
The hole does not exist any more
The world stopped

Double or tripple argh

Today I'm starting to realize how many things I still have to do, even when I finish my big project tomorrow. One of them is a paper that I have to rewrite and has been looking at me for just too long. The problem is that I arrive home very late and I just don't have the patience to write papers. It is an important paper that I have to finish writing, but it's just that it's not that easy any more.

More things that I'm argh'ing about: I still haven't had time to go to the gym this week, since Monday! Just working until so late that I just feel that going to the gym right now will be more harmful than healthy. So I stay home, have a better dinner (or no dinner, like today) and go to bed... Or sometimes come to my computer and continue working...

Anyway, new argh? Well, I still have a ton of things to buy before I go to Brazil. Not too many requests from my family and friends, just things that I think I should take. So that means more time spent on doing other things except finishing this ridiculous paper! Grrrr!

Alright, no more ranting. Time to go to sleep!

Scared by Amazon

Sometimes Amazon.com scares me! Nothing related to things that happen at work (although these can scare some people too), but related to their ability to read minds. I'll give you today's example...

About a week ago, I remembered a book that I kind of liked called "Doomsday Book", by Connie Willis. I though what this author would be up to, but never had the time and the memory to actually open Amazon, or any other bookstore webpage, to check it out.

Anyway, today there I was checking around part of the thousands of requests that I have received from my family to buy at Amazon when I suddenly decided to click on my Gold Box. It started kind of typical (as of right now): lots of books that are out of stock. What amazed me was that there were 3 (out of 10) of these suggested books by Connie Willis!!! I looked at that I was shocked! All kind of old books, though, but nevertheless "Holy mind reading, Batman!"

Alright, I know it's almost 2 am and I should go to sleep. I'm on my way. I just feel like I'm forgetting something important to do... First I thought it was a credit card that I had to pay, but then I discovered I had already paid it. I should go to sleep...

More technology

Why do I think this is wrong?

The Jewish Watch

It seems like a good and useful piece of technology, actually. Here are the features:

The Jewish Watch Alerts you with messages during the following times:

* The time for reciting the Shema
* Sunset
* Candle lighting time on Erev Shabbat (It also rings 15 minutes in advance as a reminder)
* The beginning of each Hebrew Calendar month.
* The Shabbat of blessing the new month.
* A reminder to add the additions to prayer on Hanukah and Purim
* A reminder to add the additions to prayer on Chol Hamoed
* The count for the Omer.
* The Torah Portion of the week (with a choice of setting for Israel or the Diaspora)

Seems reasonable for some people, right? Well, I think I'm just too conservative in this area and think technology just shouldn't invade some things. Imagine that in the past it was forbidden to write down anything: services, rules... Then they decided that people didn't have enough memory to remember it all and we were losing traditions, so they set out to write it all (this was about 1800 years ago). Natural evolution... Natural evolution...

Thechnology amazement

I'm having fun today being home alone, cleaning, cooking and reading about some new technologies. As there isn't anything to blog about cleaning and cooking (although the tomato sauce I've made tasted just great), I'll give some highlights about my technology update:

Induction stoves: Neat technology that uses electric current induction through applied magnetic fields to heat the food, by heating the pan where the food is. There are two major problems about it: (1) like an electric stove top, it does not give you fire that you can use to flambée, for example; (2) it does not work with all pans, only the ones that can be magnetized (no cheap aluminum, I'm sorry). There are two main benefits, though: (1) there is no heating element, thus it does not leave a hot surface for too long (of course the surface in contact with the pan will heat, but not for long); (2) it only heats magnetic materials, so you can't get burnt after accidentally leaving it on (only if you leave a pan on top of it).

I only wonder how to deal with interference? Magnetic waves can interfere with everything and heat pans that are not on top of the stove! Oh, there is one extra problem with it: price! It is about 3 times the price of an electric stove! Sometimes even more! But it's a cool technology nevertheless!

Apple's Shake 4: You can look at Apple's website about it [source]. It is a software to do image composition, i.e., get a background image and add multiple other sources that were filmed against a blue or green background. What impressed me about it is the amount of features that you get. Complex slow motion, automatic 3D composition that calculates the perspective for you and allows you to move a "virtual camera" around, fixing shaking footage... Lots of very complex image processing steps, interestingly enough involving pretty much two procedures: tracking and interpolating. It is difficult to tell from their examples how well they actually do all this, but it does seem impressive. Hail to the technology!

The last one is not that great, but I just thought I had the "2" theme too much already, so I needed a third:

The new My Web from Yahoo: [source] (note: you will have to log on to a Yahoo! account for it to work) It is interesting to organize websites. It biases results on the websites that you go through and lets you add tags to these websites. It's Yahoo! continiously trying to get into Google's controlled territory. It's not that I don't like Google, but competition is always good. Monopolies are boring.

Amazon's 10th anniversary party

I know there isn't much I can talk about this interesting event I went to yesterday, because it was free for everybody to see through the web, but I can go through some of the things that I've learned:

- Amazon has lots of employees! Only employees were allowed to go to the event (and some invited VIP, but no families or friends) and the line to get in before the event started went almost completely around the block! There were about 2500 people in the concert hall.

- Benaroya is not made for big and loud concerts! First it was strange to see the hall with big speakers and microphones, but when it got to using them, concert halls have a lot of reverberation and when you put loud music with a lot of reverberation what you get is garbled music. If it was difficult to understand Bob Dylan (more on this later) on a clean CD, it was impossible to understand anything he was saying there.

- Bob Dylan is not supposed to sing any more! I should have been more prepared for it when one of my co-workers (or I should say former co-workers, because he left the company on Friday) said that he was not planning on going to the concert because he saw Bob Dylan in 1977 and didn't like him too much back then... 1977! Almost 30 years ago! But I have to say that his troupe was pretty good.

It was interesting, overall, as I mentioned before. Now back to the reality of cleaning my apartment (something that is a week overdue, because I was working the whole weekend last week).

Oh, and I watched "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" on Friday. There were some funny parts, I have to admit, but overall it is as bad as the original movie. The plot was too childish, while the content was sometimes a little deep for a child. I've heard lots of people saying that they enjoyed the movie, but I have to say that I don't enter this list of people.

Why again?

Please tell me why are we back to this:

Americans: U.S. Transit Attack Inevitable

New York police to warn public on suicide bombers

Don't we have enough terrorism in the world?

And on another laughable story (very sad, but it's better to laugh than to cry): the shuttle launch is delayed AGAIN. NASA, the great space agency of the world, just can't find good electronics any more! Oh, well... They have until the end of this month to figure something out! If hurricanes don't get in the way, I'm hopeful that they will make it.

But why go to space, people usually ask? Don't we have enough problems in our own world to deal with? We surely do! But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't develop this kind of technology. There are a lot of things that come with this development. In the computer and electronics world, we gain, for instance, much more robust components, because the electromagnetic radiation out in the space is very harsh.

A lot of numeric methods were developed to deal with the complicated gravitation and orbit calculations that are required to operate space systems. And without the space movement, we wouldn't have a very well developed satellite technology, and I can't imagine what would be worldwide communication without satellites.

Anyway, I should really be having dinner and heading to bed. I just got home from the gym (and then I stopped by the grocery store to buy breakfast for tomorrow). I need a shower too!

Still at work

Yes, I keep on doing it! And today I'm still going to go to the gym, something I haven't done since Saturday, since the day I think I overdid a little and got hurt. But today I'm feeling almost 100%, so I'll try to exercise a little, knowing that I should take it easy not to get hurt again. It was not fun to almost not be able to get out of bed on Tuesday. Interesting though that I felt alright on Sunday, but then Monday came and things started to get worse. Tuesday was the worst day! Then on Wednesday I was already almost 80%.

Not much else to report, though. I'm a little confused on when I will schedule my big Ph.D. party in Brazil. I have people with completely contradictory schedules that I just don't know how to accomodate. But I'll figure something out! Maybe I'll do it one day before I come back here, so that I won't sleep and will be able to sleep on the plane coming back.

Alright, back to work here, hoping that I'll be able to catch the bus soon.

Interesting article about blogging

Yes, I'm still at work here tonight. I said (to myself) that I wasn't going to do this any more, but I'm so close to the end of it... Anyway, that's not what I'm here about. I "semi-" read this article about blogging:

Bloggers Need Not Apply

It is about the actual dangers of blogging when you are looking for a job. Usually blogs show the extreme of people, it is sometimes used as an escape valve on your normal day. And this is not what a potential employer wants to know! How do you explode, what do you like to do with your "extreme" free time. One might say that this actually shows what the person is about, but I would claim that everybody has their weaknesses, and this only puts a huge magnifying glass on these weaknesses. Not very healthy at all!

Anyway, let me get back to work here, or else I will miss the last bus of the evening (I know, I still have about 2 1/2 hours for that...)

Ah... Working on Saturdays...

That's what I was doing until about 20 minutes ago. I just got home from my office! Yes, I know it's past 2 am, but that's what I have to do. There is always more work than you expect, always things you took for granted that they worked that suddenly stop working. Lots of fun, but we are moving forward. I see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I'm not sure it's only a day away. But let's see!

What else can I tell? Well, I am alive and ready to receive my furniture tomorrow. One more piece, leaving only one left to go. Now the only thing that is left is one more bookshelf. I'm not sure where to put it yet, but I really need more space for books. I won't worry about this right now, but soon I'll have to.

Alright, let me try to turn my brain off and sleep a little.

Join the military - replacements needed

That's what I read this morning in front of my bus stop. When I looked more closely, I realized it was all over town! A flyer with the above mentioned phrase, a war-like picture and the number of dead people in each side of the war. It had also a website for you to check:

http://replacementsneeded.tripod.com/

Ah... Living on a political world! So political that on 4th of July, when the US National Anthem started playing, maybe only 1/5 of the people actually stood up for it. Very scary! And think that I was in Woodinville that is not a very liberal area of Seattle Metro.

Anyway, today I found out that more Brazilians are dominating my area of town. I met a Brazilian couple at the gym tonight! Haven't talked to them too much, thought. I was a little tired and they were too! Maybe some other time.

Finally a scheduled trip to Brazil

Oh... Brazil... Friends, parties, relaxing without having to think about cleaning my apartment or going to work. That's what is coming up soon! Today I finally set the dates: I'll be arriving on a Friday, August 12, having my sister's engagement party on the 13th, family father's day on the 14th, visa interview on the 15th and then starts the plans for my big Ph.D. bash! If you live in Brazil, be ready to be invited for this big event! It should happen probably on the 20th (if I get a 100% confirmation with my sister that she is not postponing her party to the 20th) and if my friends still remember me, it should have as many people as I can invite. It is going to be hard to come back (something that will happen on the 27th), but that's life. We keep on living and when you least notice things turned around again.

Now I just have to start planning on the gifts I'm taking to Brazil and bag size...

Good literature...

I have realized that it's been some time that I don't read good literature and this is pretty sad. I've been reading very interesting stories, exciting ideas, but no deep writing... This changed when I decided to go back to a book I have been trying to finish for a long time: "The best 100 Brazilian Short Stories of the Century" (in Portuguese, of course). It is refreshing to read psychological master pieces written by amazing writers, such as Lygia Fagundes Telles.

It is actually interesting to see that Brazilian literature is fundamentally very different from American literature when it comes to complex short stories. I have researched in this area of the American literature and their goal is completely different. While Brazilian good literature is dense and contains very complex structure of ideas, the American literature is much more towards evoking thought through much more direct discourse.

Now that I've finally finished reading this very heavy tome of amazing stories, I have decided that I should go and continue my research into the realm of short stories and see if I can find any parallels in other cultures.

Well, besides that, I'm back from San Francisco, worked yesterday until 10 pm, had my personal training session today where I almost fainted (don't ask me why - I think I'm a little bit less in shape than I thought) and now I'm trying to clean my apartment a little to prepare for work. There are a lot of things I have to do and a lot of work that has to get done.

JavaOne

I've been having fun in JavaOne. I have gone around, talked to a lot of interesting people, listened to some good talks (although most were, in the end, quite useless), and got to remember a little of San Francisco (well, last time I was here was about 14 years ago!). The only bad thing so far is that I just couldn't find any good candidates (that was one of my primary objectives here). It's not that there are no good people around, but every potentially good person I talked to, either lives and works in another country or likes their jobs and didn't really find interesting what I had to offer (they were impressed, but not really their area of interest).

Anyway, I still have an evening and two days ahead of me to keep meeting people. I think I already gave out about 20 business cards (but no flashlights - didn't quite fit any of the conversations). As strange as it might seem, they gave us a whole 2h30min of break between the last afternoon session and the evening session. Bad thing is that I'm not hungry at all! Oh, and the evening sessions go all the way to 11:30 pm.

The conference model is very interesting. They have a keynote speaker in the morning and then 1 hours sessions throughout the day (about 6-10 happening at the same time). In the evening they have what they call the Birds-of-Feather sessions that are more informal and focus on specific experiences. Yesterday I went to two of them and they weren't that great.

My general experience so far is that POJO is the keyword (Plain Old Java Objects). And XML sadly is becoming the middleware of choice for everything. Web services is what everybody is betting on. 1 second delay parsing and processing XML is just considered "negligible time" (I heard people saying this today but on the context of Spring object initialization). It is scary where the thecnology is getting, but exciting at the same time.

Ok, done with my technical rant. Time to decide what else I can do without having internet access on my work laptop and not being hungry at all.

To San Francisco I go...

In 5 minutes I should be starting the process of leaving my apartment on my way for a 6-day trip to San Francisco! Staying away for some days feels great, but it is also a little scary (I can't ignore the fact that I have a lot of work to do and I won't be able to do this work while I'm there).

Not much time to write much else... And it's not that I have much to write, anyway. I just heard yesterday another proof that Israel, especially Jerusalem, has this powerful, almost magical influence on people. I'll be monitoring how much time its effect lasts.

I wished I had a better one

One more weekend is gone and I wished it was a more productive one. I did some work, but I don't feel like I've accomplished anything. I have received some of my furniture (and that's an interesting story that I'll tell later), and did visit some fitness centers. I have talked with my "health advisor" last week and he said that I should force myself to do some exercise by joining a club. Initially, all the clubs that I've looked around here were very "nice" and expensive. They offered towels, shampoo, soap... The one I visited today required you to bring your own towels and everything else, but it was about 1/3 of the price. I think I can buy many towels with the price difference!

Anyway, now for the more interesting story: the furniture. Well, I bought some furniture some weeks ago and they were going to deliver it today. So far so good, right? Well, so they tried to call me since wednesday to confirm the delivery and I was only able to have some time and call them back on Friday. When I got to the automated service they mentioned that I had two deliveries outstanding: one for the June 19th and the other for July 27th!!! I tried to talk with the service representative on Friday, but they left me waiting for 10 minutes and I gave up.

So, yesterday I called the salesperson that sold me all the furniture to understand what was going on. She was shocked and asked me to call her again on Friday, because she was taking the early week off and would only be able to get an answer from her manager on Thursday. Very sad. But there is one good thing: Now with my new headboard and rails, I don't have to use those hideous bedskirts any more. I don't know who invented those, but they are just terrible. Makes making the bed much harder and changing the sheets even harder (because if you want to change the bedskirt to match the new sheets, you have to remove the whole mattress and then put it back up). Sometimes there are reasons to be happy.

Another sad point of the day: I had a concert to go today. I left about 10 minutes later than I planned... But the problem is that I got even more trafic than I thought and I arrived by the concert hall already 15 minutes late. I still had to park and walk in... So, as it was a free concert I decided that I should just go back home and get back to work on my 3-computer-ed office - I feel like a geek!

Happiness brings pain...

The worst type of sadness is the one caused by a happy moment. One that you see everybody around you jumping up in excitement while all you want to do is to go a dark corner and stay there alone for some time. The interesting thing is that this happened to me quite often lately. I could go through all the cases, but I'll only mention the latest: yesterday my elder syster got engaged!

Isn't this great? A sister that many times said that she would never get married seems to have found her love and now, after about 2 years together, is engaged! What makes all this sad? That should be very evident: I never met the guy. I talked to him on the phone once for 10 seconds when I wanted to talk with my sister (he kept trying to be nice to me and I bluntly interrupted him asking to talk with my syster). It is scarry that I'm becoming this other person, distant from what is happening with my family. Yesterday I wished I could drop everything I have here and move back to Brazil...

I wished I had a lighter note to end this... Maybe "MY SISTER IS ENGAGED!"

SIFF

Sometimes Seattle is able to impress me still. Today I went for my first movie in the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). It was a movie called "Man About Dog", an Irish comedy about three friends that decide that they want to win money on Grayhound racing. It was interesting, sometimes funny, but what impressed me is that the director was there at the movie theater for a Q&A afterwards.

If you are a member of the SIFF, they have movie previews all year round when they invite the directors of these movies to later talk about the movie. It involves a lot of money! And very interested audience...

I wouldn't say I'm too sad that I have only gone to this single movie in the almost 4 weeks of the festival (the largest of its kind in the US), though. It's not that I'm that into the whole international movie scene (or any movie scene - I haven't even watched Episode III yet), but I'm just interested in the culture that this brings, the awareness that a country is not alone in anything that they do.

Oh, just as an aside, before the movie they showed a short film called "The Carpenter & his Clumsy Wife"... A movie that was a little gross, lots of dark comedy, blood... Ultimately disturbing, I was glad it was just a 10-minute short movie!

Friendship

Sometimes I just don't understand what is going on around me. Yes, I do tend to disappear and not send email, but this doesn't mean I don't care about my friends. I might complain about things that is a little difficult for other people to understand, I might be living in a different reality, but this doesn't make me less of a person, less of a friend.

There is no easy way to explain who I am and what is important to me (they are mostly interrelated). I have this strange tendency of never knowing what to say to people. I like to listen, I like to read, I like to know how people are doing; but I can't say I am a big fan of actually being there for everybody. I'm changing that, though. I think I have to give up on being myself a little and try to be a nicer person for a change.

Surreal morning

I'm always a little worried when I have those mornings where things are just a little off of the normal that they seem wrong. Today I timed myself perfectly to get to the bus stop at the same time as the bus, but it was about 4 minutes early! Because right now they cut the number of buses that stop at my bus stop by half, I would have to wait for about 25 minutes for the next bus, so I decided to walk to another bus stop (about 10 minutes away) where I had more options.

Getting there I looked at the times of the buses: 8:01, 8:10, 8:20... I looked at my watch: 8:08 so I felt alright, I just had to wait for 2 minutes. That's what I thought! The bus arrived at 8:15! And it was half full and at that stop it is usually only about 1/4 full. I got a bad seat and waited.

Next stop I recognize somebody entering the bus as one of the usual riders. The interesting thing is that he was getting the bus about 3 stops after what he usually gets. Next stop the same thing happened with another person.

Then it arrived at my stop and usually only a few people leave but this time there were masses of people leaving the bus at that stop.

As I said, it's not that something huge happened this morning, but when you are used to certain things and they are a little off, it just seems very strange! Little sleep does help to make things even stranger too... Anyway, long day ahead!

A proud workaholic I am

I know this is not news for most people, but yesterday I again felt that I'm proud of being a workaholic. I was at work at 8:15 in the morning and I left work at 10:40 in the evening. When I arrived, nobody of my group was there. When I left, I was also alone... But I felt like I was doing something important. I was actually trying to decrease the amount of work other people have to do and this makes me proud of myself.

Very interesting this fact... I spent some minutes thinking about it while in the bus going home last evening: I like to work in order to make other people work less. I should receive a prize for it! :-)

Anyway, not much else to say, unfortunately. I could go in length about Apple switching to Intel chips or that more Laptops were sold than Desktops (I helped that I guess) or even the continuing skyrocket rise of Google, but I guess I'll just retire and try to start my day around here.

I hope everybody is feeling great there and excited about their lives.

Silence

I know I have been silent for some time now. It's just that it's better to be silent than to say something useless sometimes.

A few things to report today, though. First and foremost, on Sunday I started the day having a tough issue with my computer. I have Linux installed and Windows 98 as my chatting machine. However, I wanted to make some updates, but Windows 98 is not really supported by Microsoft any more. So, after a long discussion and many blue screens on my Windows 98, I decided to sell my soul and install Windows XP instead.

So far so good, right? Not really! I've installed it but forgot to turn on my firewall before starting the installation. Result: my computer was compromised even before I actually started it. Lots of fun! I turned on the firewall and installed everything again. This time it worked! I installed all the service packs and it seemed to work fine... Right?

Not really... Suddenly I get a message saying that I'm running out of disk space! Mind you that I only installed Windows XP, the service packs, and browse the internet for a little while. The partition that I had for windows was pretty small, 4GB, but it was 4GB anyway! It should fit more than just windows and its service packs!!! That's just ridiculous!

So, after all these fights (and of course losing my dual boot in the process, so I couldn't even log on to my Linux) I decided to do the unthinkable: I bought a PowerBook G4! Crazy, huh? Well, I'm having fun! It's just very cool and neat looking. I'm on my couch right now typing this with it on my lap.

But I spent even more money on Sunday. I bought the furniture that was left: a coffee table, two end tables and a bedroom set.

Now that I'm poor, I think I should eat something. It was a tough day at work.. And I'm going to have some tough weeks ahead!

My trip

Checkout my trip below:



Total: about 1100 miles (1770 km)

Pictures coming soon! I didn't take that many good pictures because the weather wasn't that great and also we drove too much to really stop and take pictures. But it was great anyway. There are some very great things to see in Oregon if you like nature. Very interesting beaches, wonderful mountains with an assortment of lakes and waterfalls.

Ready for a roadtrip

I'm getting ready for my second actual roadtrip since I have arrived in the US. The first one took me to St. Louis and it was fun. Now I'm heading to Oregon, starting by the coast, passing by where they filmed "The Goonies" and then moving inland to the wineries and the mountains. The only problem is that it is a pretty big holiday right now and lots of things are going on. This means: probably it won't be that easy to find a hotel for a reasonable price. But it also means that there will be a lot of things to do! I should be passing by Eugene, where the Oregon Bach Festival is taking place, maybe Crater Lake...

The reason for the rain

Today I found out why the weather is so rainy here in Seattle (although I don't think it's that bad - Sao Paulo isn't much better in this sense): when the sky is blue it is just breathtaking - if it was this way all year long nobody would work! Today out of my office window I could see the Olympic Mountains with their snowy peaks behind a wonderful blue sky and the Puget Sound. When driving back home (yes, I had my car today, because I took it this morning for an oil change), just facing me was Mt. Rainier, a big cone of ice in the middle of nothing else. I was happy there were no trafic accidents because of people admiring the view.

Besides all this, not much is going on. I'm getting ready for a long weekend, when I'll do a road trip to Oregon, probably starting at the coast, passing through the wineries, then the mountains and coming back... Pretty cool!

Overhelping the internet

The internet as being a cheap medium to present your ideas, became also a cheap place to get people's ideas. Everywhere you go you are asked many questions about if you like the content, what would you make to change it, are you an expert to fix it? It is interesting, but after some time I started to think it is a little too confusing. Reading the news is not only like reading the news, but you are encouraged to rate the article you've read. On the Amazon side, buying something is not only like just buying it, but you feel like you should rate it to help other people decide.

It all comes back to cost. Some people think it's a win-win situation, just like reality TV, where you get some random people and put them through something odd. You don't have to pay actors, you don't have to write scripts, you don't have to do anything; and even with all this cheapness, people still like to watch the programs.

However, I'm personally tired of it. I was tired of reality TV since its inception, but now I'm tired of internet feedback. I am tired of people delegating to others the pain of doing things and then making the money out of it. I think there is a limit to how you should waste people's time online, and I think that we have passed this limit.

Thus, I'm starting a campaign right now of: do not waste your time posting feedbacks on commercial websites. If they want quality, let them pay for it!

PS: A blog is not a commercial website. You can still post comments here and I won't make money out of them.

Sunshine

No, it's raining here... The title does not reflect the weather in Seattle right now, but it is a lead-in to an interesting article I glanced through today: Scientists Say Sunshine May Prevent Cancer. Basically what they found out is that Vitamin D, the one that is supposed to make your bones stronger, also may help on preventing and fighting cancer. But what is the interesting part in all this? Is that if you use sunscreen you block most of the production of Vitamin D. Their theory then is that it might be better to have skin cancer that kills way less people than the other cancers that Vitamin D can help cure, like colon cancer.

Who knows what might actually happen with all this, but it will be an interesting study. I feel for the sunscreen companies that right now are preparing to publish long studies on how dangerous skin cancer is...

Oh, no! I saw lightning!

Only going and living in many places in the world that you will start to understand things that seem very normal to you might be not that normal. This week I learned one more thing: thunderstorms! There was one here on Thursday. A tiny one, actually, but there was lightning. And I saw people deeply concerned and genuinely scared of it! It was very strange!

I lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, most of my life, as most of you know. And we have thunderstorms all the time there. Then I moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA for almost 4 years and thunderstorms are pretty common there too (some really big ones too!). Then I moved here to Seattle and, although they say it rains a lot (yes, it does rain around here, but it's far from what I would consider "a lot"), it seems like it's very rare to have a thunderstorm. And when they get one it seems like the world is going to end.

And this same effect is seen on my Californian friends, so it seem like California is another place that doesn't see thunderstorms that often.

This reminded me of a number that I heard a while ago: Brazil is the country with the most lightning activity in the world, and the place where most people die because of lightning. When living in Oklahoma I saw evidence that these numbers might be wrong, but now I see that this is something that only happens in the midwest and the numbers start to make sense again.

Anyway, besides fighting with lightning, I haven't done much... Just worked a lot. This week I was so tired that on Friday I got home and at 8 pm I was sleeping on my bed! Hopefully next week it will be better!

Yes, I know I'm a bad blogger

Here I am again to talk about nothing at all. Lately I just have been working and solving many fire drills around here. Besides that life pretty much does not exist. The only thing I think I have to talk about is how I hate Murphy's Law. Yesterday I decided that I was too tired and I should leave at around 9:10 pm. So I started wrapping things up and left a little later than I should have left, something like 2 minutes after the time that I would need to get the bus. But I wasn't too worried, because the bus is usually 5 minutes late anyway.

However, as Murphy would have predicted, the bus was 1 minute early yesterday and I missed it! I then went back to my office and this time I planned to get to the stop at least 5 minutes early. What happened? The bus was 10 minutes late and I waited 15 minutes in the bus stop for it.

But, hey, I got some exercise and some work done! :-)

Tonight I don't think I'll last much longer here. But I will go home and study for my training tomorrow.

It was my birthday

Yes, Monday was my birthday and I'm realizing that I'm getting more and more alone in this world. It's not that nobody called me or sent me emails, it's just that I've realized that I've been ignoring my friends for too long. I said I planned to email them more often, but it's not happening as much as I wanted. Most of the reason is that I just haven't had much private time lately. And this is slowly killing me, but bound to change soon.

Maybe that's why when I opened my gold box (in Amazon - yes, they bought it back!), I received the following book suggestions:

Final Gifts : Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying

Who Dies? : An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying

Sacred Passage : How to Provide Fearless, Compassionate Care for the Dying
Invisible Acts of Power : Personal Choices That Create Miracles

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: The Spiritual Classic & International Bestseller; Revised and Updated Edition

Handbook for Mortals: Guidance for People Facing Serious Illness

Very creepy...

Anyway, thank you for everybody that wished me a happy birthday. I am going to be replying to your emails personally during the next days.

Family

Well, during Mother's day it is difficult to think of anything besides family. I just called home and my whole family is there having a great barbecue, while I'm here home alone. But one more thing made me think of family this weekend. I went to a Bar-Mitzvah yesterday. There are very few things in the Jewish life that is more powerful as a family event than a Bar Mitzvah. Maybe one of them is a wedding, but it is a little debatable. Wedding means that someone is leaving the house and starting a new house.

Maybe the Bris could be more family-oriented... I don't know, I don't remember ever going to any.

One of the conversations yesterday made me remember what is still my professional dream: a paperless world. I know I have bothered my readers with this view of the world already in the past, but yesterday someone mentioned that she wanted to change her office to a paperless office (she is a lawyer) and I was amazed with myself when I said that there are some things you can do, but there are things that you just can't yet. I started with the discussion of how it is still complicated to deal with current technology, but there are a couple of things that could be done, like scanning documents to PDF. PDF is a pretty stable technology, although Adobe keeps adding new features to it, mostly related to digital signatures and security.

What I think is still missing? An easy way to distribute and organize this information. Things should be as easy as "hand me the paper" or else it won't work. Sure email is faster than normal internal mail, but a lot of business is still done face-to-face and this technology is still lagging.

But I'm optimistic. I think that most companies are actually realizing this problem and working towards solutions. Integration is a challenge, but that's why I still have to go and open my own company to do this! :-)

Oh, before I forget, I have to talk about the most stupid thing I've seen done by a well-known company in a long time: Google's Web Accelerator. C|Net has a good article about it. Some people claim it is a good idea, it is a bold move by Google to have one of the most precious pieces of information that Google is still missing to improve search relevancy: click through information. Google is betting that they can deal with the bandwidth necessary for it. But beyond these interesting details, the idea is ridiculous. Websites are moving towards more and more personalization, if Google decides to be a proxy of all this information, personalization is dead. Web ads are also dead, because Google would cache them and they would be, for the advertiser, as if it was clicked only once. And this doesn't even get into the whole thing of the crawler deleting information or serving private information to other people.

If this can be fixed? Well, only Google will tell. I don't think so, but maybe they just don't care about it. Powerful companies that have the motto of "Do no good" end up just making people accept it and learn how to deal with it. Maybe it's the new Kirkland office that is making Google have some Microsoft-like ideas.

Tiger

It's sad to see that this blog is becoming a weekly thing, instead of anything more constant. It may not be sad to you, my dear rare reader, but it feels sad to me, because I do still go to my Firefox and open all the blogs I have bookmarked at once every day. My blog is the first to appear just for me to check if anybody left me a comment, but I always see the same last post and 0 comments. As most of you know, I dread "sameness"...

Anyway, now for business: yesterday I passed by a Mac store and saw the new Tiger. My impression from a person that does not use a Mac and didn't have that much time to play around with it: it is really nice looking. Spotlight is very cool, and their videoconferencing is also very nice. If you want more information about these features, this is a very good (and a little biased) article.

What else did I do yesterday? I walked a lot and saw more nice things about Seattle. It is a very nice looking city. Things tend to be a little hidden, but there are lots of things going on all the time!

Last week, besides working, I was asked to provide a finer table of one of my articles. It is nice to see people really paying attention to what I did during my research years. Surely it was a little sad that they asked for something that wasn't really related to the mainline of my research, but what can I do if I can't find time to finish my ultimate paper?

Alright, time to get back to cleaning here. Bad thing about walking too much yesterday is that I didn't have time to do much else. Oh, yes, I watched The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy! They really made deep modifications to the original plot in the book, but it was nice. Many fun parts were still there! A must for anybody that likes funny geeky movies (well, the book is much better, of course, but I don't expect people to have much time to read anymore - they are too bothered by ringing cell phones!)!

Emails and IQ

This is an interesting article that appeared at The Guardian (a very well-known British newspaper): Emails 'pose threat to IQ'. It talks about a study made that points that the constant lack of focus that you get currently because of the amount of assynchronous information you receive is very alarming. It is an interesting point! But I'm not completely sure how to deal with something like this, though... How to make emails, cell phones, etc. less intrusive in our concentration? Sure you can turn them off, but the problem is that our society is getting more and more towards creating devices that are always on, and always reachable. We want to be found, we want to be interrupted!

One good thing about this article: I can blame on something for feeling more and more stupid!

A Passover post

It's Passover again... Actually the first Passover I have here in Seattle. But I can't say it's an exciting perspective. Tonight I have the first seder at the house of a former mayor of Medina (the town where Bill Gates live, where 2-bedroom houses cost about 1.5 million dollars - yes, this place). But the rest of the week will be just taking food to work, because eastern asian food is not very Passover-friendly (too much corn starch everywhere).

Lately I have been going through this very introspective time in my life (again), where I'm having lost of thought, most of them work-related. I wished I could just forget the world for a couple of months and try to get these thoughts out of my mind before they consume me to death. The good thing is that so far I haven't lost nights of sleep because of them. Only had dreams about it.

Anyway, I'll shoot one of the ideas here just to get away from being "abstract": Imagine simulating the behavior of elements in a database to extract relations. This behavior is very simple (and, thus, hopefully scalable): send a message to an element that has semething to do with you. Then you can just analyze the patterns in these messages and extract the overall relations. Instead of creating a hugely connected graph, you can just see the log traces of a graph that doesn't actually exist and this requires much less memory and can be very powerful by changing the definition of "having somthing to do with you".

I could throw some math here right now, but this would be very cumbersome and nobody would actually be interested in it.

Now my only problem is to find time to get it done.

Earthquake in the world of online publishing

As most people already know, today Adobe bought Macromedia. What does that mean? Well, there are a number of things, but I think that most are good:

- Less competition in the field, less innovation
- More integration between important technologies, such as Freehand, Photoshop and Flash
- Cheaper packages for small companies that needed Photoshop for image editing and Dreamweaver for making webpages for example
- Better interfaces (there was a big lawsuit fight going on about Flash using some UI features that were patented by Adobe)

But when are we going to see any changes? Well, packaging is not too hard to change, so I would expect this to happen reasonably soon (in a year). Integration is always a headache. I wouldn't expect to see anything in this direction for the next 2 years. But I'm hopeful! I think that graphic publishing in general needs some sort of reality check.

Ideas.. Ideas... Ideas...

I don't know what happened to me yesterday evening, after watching Mendelssohn's "Elijah" and really missing being part of a choir, my brain entered this idea mode with thousands of things I want to try. Most of them are work-related, though. I can't stop. I wasn't able to sleep very well last night, I don't even feel hungry or tired (by the way, I haven't had dinner last night). It's been a LONG time I haven't felt this way. Last time it was the beginning of my research, when I had very similar ideas, actually. This time I won't be scared of the size of what I want to do, and that's what I'm doing today! My manager asked if I wanted to take the day off and I will... Off from normal work, but I just can't ignore all these new ideas in my mind. So, off to work I go!

The healthy Seattle

It is very interesting to see the psychological profile of Seattle. People here are a little strange in the sense of trying to prove something about their health. Not even getting into the big hype about "organic food" that is happening everywhere (btw: what is "inorganic food?"), but a good part of my co-workers are vegetarian, many people I meet around are vegetarian or vegan, I was asked last week by a co-worker if I ever thought of fasting for a week or so to "cleanse my body"... It is not crazy, it is just off the charts on the "normality" rate. And today I even heard of another person that used his mouse on his left hand, although he was right-handed, because he wanted to "train himself" to be left-handed too. All this "testing your body" type of thing just makes me amazed!

Of course this effect can also be bad. I think I never had so many friends around here that are big drug "enjoyers" or were a lot in the past. I won't say they are "users" and not even close to addicts, but it is just strange. There are still a lot of things I have to get use to while living here. But now I'll just go for a walk.

Resuscitating this blog

I don't quite know why, but I've decided that I do like to blog. Maybe it's because I have grown to be a terrible email writer, maybe it's just because I don't like the synchronous nature of other types of communication (sure I can write emails any time I want, but if someone hasn't had time to answer yet, I feel bad about writing another one), or maybe it's just that I feel that all blogs I read are dying and I don't like the feeling of it.

Anyway, here I am back to the world of blogging. I have been thinking of what I would change that might make my blog more readable, but I still have no good idea (besides working on the layout, but this will still be postponed to a time I have more inspiration - and maybe better software for image editing).

Where to start? Too many things happened since my last post... I went back to Stillwater, defended my Ph.D., came back a Doctor of Philosophy (no, I can't write "official" presciptions - not even to book on philosophy) and now work has been keeping me busy. Maybe I can rant about the Oklahoma Tax system!

Well, in the US you have to pay (in some states, including Oklahoma, but not including Washington) state tax. When it comes to the tax period you have to file all the tax return forms hoping to get part of this tax back. Anyway, I lived in Oklahoma for 9 1/2 months, right? And the amount I've made in OK was about 1/3 of what I've made in the whole year (as expected). The problem is how the OK tax is calculated: it is a part of what you make regardless of where you make it! So, as I've gone up a couple of tax buckets since I moved, I suddenly had to pay $250 in taxes to OK out of the money I've made in Washington!!! What actually happened is that because I went up in the tax bucket, the amount they were deducting from my salary in OK was too little. Oh, and for you to have a feel of how much I went up in buckets, the amount deducted from my salary was about $500.

That's life! Next year I hope I don't have to go through it any more! Hopefully my money this year will help the economy in Oklahoma (although when I was there I talked to a plumber that claimed that OK has enough oil to supply all the US demand for oil for 50 years! One of two things: either he has no idea of how much oil the US uses, or he likes conspiracy theories about hidden treasures).

This blog is dead

Today I have been thinking and discussing with myself, in between work and cleaning, what I should do about this blog. I found out that I just don't have motivation to write here any more. I don't have anything to say and this makes me feel bad! Thus, in order to keep people still excited about what the Internet can offer, I'm retiring this source of waste of time. I'll probably go back to writing for my own, who knows even composing... I'll go back to writing emails to my friends (something I just haven't been doing...). Until something proves me wrong, I'm retiring from being a blogger. It was fun while it lasted. I did write some posts that I feel happy to look back to, especially in my old blog. But this blog has never gone anywhere, so maybe I shoudln't have even tried to move it somewhere.

Goodbye

A weekend of different paces

This weekend wasn't a bad one, it was just very different. Yesterday I spent the whole day with my girlfriend. We went out for breakfast, went shopping for furniture for my apartment (but didn't find anything interesting) then in the evening, we went for a concert with Collective Soul. The opening band was called Low Millions and was interesting. Big U2 influence, nothing really new, but not too bad. But when we got to Collective Soul... It's not that they are a bad band, it is just that the person that was setting the balance simply disappeared with the vocals. It was hard to follow songs that I didn't know and couldn't hear the vocals. We ended up even leaving the concert early! Good that we didn't pay for it (she has a friend that works in the place where the concert was and was able to let us in for free). Then we ate at a vegan restaurant. Very interesting food!

Anyway, today was a complete change of pace. I spent the day cleaning and working. I'm still waiting for my advisor's comments to arrive, so I couldn't work on my dissertation. But I had lots of things to do for my "bills-paying" work and a ton of cleaning and laundry to do.

Alright, time to go!

News from my advisor

I finally got a call from my advisor (actually 2, I missed his call yesterday and only realized it today when he called me again). It seems like my dissertation is going the right way. He has a couple of things for me to correct and add, but is hopeful that I can schedule my defense for next month. That means that thare shouldn't be that many things to do! It is exciting! This weekend should still be ok, because I probably won't received his comments until early next week, but I'll have busy evenings next week.

Besides that, I can only say that I'm back to the "busy" stage. I've started dating again! Part of me was saying to let me wait until my defense, but it just happened. I shouldn't say much more about it right now, because it's just the beginning of everything, but we have been enjoying ourselves for now. She's been keeping me away from work as much as she can (she works too, and in the evenings sometimes) and we have been even cooking together, and watching some Food Network (that was yesterday - I think the first time we actually stayed in front of a TV with it on). Sure she made me watch "Wimbledon", but sometimes it is hard to run away from these things. It is actually difficult for me to rate chick flicks, because they all seem the same to me. Here is the basic plot:

They see each other, fall in love, there is something that happens that makes them have to stay away, usually related to family, they can't stand being away from each other and they break the rules, get together and everything works well!

How to rate it? Predictable? SURE. Bad? Well... Everything I say can be used against me, so I'll just stop here. Let's just say that I watched the whole movie, and she fell asleep in the middle of it.

Ok, back to work here. My day hasn't been too productive. After the call from my advisor, I just couldn't concentrate any more. But I'll get back to it. After my 11 am meeting.

Strange news about next shuttle flight

Can somebody actually explain this to me: NASA bumps return to flight. The strange thing is that this article claims that they changed the date because they had worries about "lighting conditions". Do they have some type of Egyptian Sun God device to which the light has to align perfectly or else they can't have a launch? It's only 3 days of difference, it's not that the sun will be on a very different position!

Oh, well... NASA people like to do strange calculations for everything! We just hope one team didn't use the English measurements while the other used metric.

After another very interesting Friday evening

Yesterday evening was another very interesting one. I was invited to have dinner at a Rabbi's place. Arriving there I found out that he organizes these dinners almost every Friday (when he is around) and invites as many people as he can fit in his house. The conclusion is that I met many different and interesting people. I've even met a medical doctor that has been to Brazil multiple times. He was even invited to work there at the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein. He started mentioning all the family he has there and some names even rang the bell as people that I might have met. Small world!

Not only that, I met a Brazilian guy that works at Microsoft right now. He was a little tired (he is one of those people that work 12+ hours a day - and imagine that, he is from Rio de Janeiro!), but we still had a very good conversation.

All of the people there were older than I was (well, except the Rabbi's kids). It is interesting to see how many things in common I can find when I go to these events. Especially when there is a Brazilian Jew around! I guess now I have new possibilities for Friday events, and a whole new group of people to get to know.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is that sometimes human nature is sad. Creating excuses in order to hide evident facts just doesn't get you anywhere. But it is not a person's fault, it is the way we operate. If it is because of culture or if it is genetic we will never know. I'm betting on a little of both, because of the wide-spread nature of this problem. It is that our brain needs negative reinforcement to learn or un-learn. Synapses have to be made stronger and weaker. And that's what our memory is all about. We can be made to believe whatever we want, as long as we know how to lie to ourselves.

A busy week behind me

This week was interestingly busy. It started with me not feeling too good (I got a very quick cold that just made me feel not too great for a day or so) evolving into big changes at my area at Amazon (re-org) and culminating on me being invited for dinner tonight at a Rabbi's place. Of course he won't be very happy to know that I'll drive there and drive back home, but I think he will live.

Just a little bit more on the re-org, basically my direct manager changed (my current manager became my manager's manager - I guess I can say I was demoted) and lots of things moved around. My project didn't change at all, and I think it was a good change (with some small disagreements, though). Like all changes, for some time people get a little confused with what they have to do now, but it'll settle soon.

I don't know what else to talk about. My life is changing in some subtle (and some not-too-subtle) ways, but I'm still trying to understand the change before I can really discuss it. I think it is a good change!

As for a link, maybe people should have a quick look into Yub.com. The concept is interestin: combining product and local reviews with social networks for you to get to know people that buy like you and get some idea of who is behind reviews. However, the good things, in my opinion, end there. The main problem with it is who joins the network. Social networks are dead... Most of the people that join these things are young, teenagers. What can they review in depth? Sure there have to be some interesting reviews, but most of them are around "Oh, man, this is soooo coool!"

The user interface is a little too busy, but there are good things about it. Oh, well, take a look and get your own impressions of it.

Ah, I should also send another link: Israeli-Palestinian Cease-Fire. I surely have to put a disclaimer here that this is a link to The Onion, if you know what I mean...

Valentine's day yearly rant

Valentine's day is a very strange day in the American calendar. I'm getting to the conclusion that Americans are just too jealous of each other, so there can't be any holidays that people give gifts to one person only. They have to extend the gift giving to everybody else, like co-workers, children, teachers. It is actually a big day at elementary schools (and even after that)!

The whole concept behind this date is wrong. The amount of pressure that it puts on a relationship (Will he get the right flowers? Good chocolate? Reservations on that expensive restaurant?) is just unreal and unhealthy. The psychological benefits from a common day of "love-giving" is also not that important. It can only go wrong!

I'm an advocate of the "every day is a good day to be romantic". I think romance has to be spontaneous and should have a set date for it. Restaurants and chocolate companies wouldn't know how to focus their work anymore, though. But that's a minor detail.

Alright, I'm falling asleep while writing this. I didn't realize it was already almost 2 a.m. Let me go to bed.

Just as an update, I actually went on a date technically yesterday. It was alright, but I'm not sure I'll get a second one. My boring inner self was not very impressive. But who knows?

Old patterns die hard

I'm starting to see some old patterns creeping in my life. I thought I learned, but it seems like I didn't. The problem is that, in a way, although most people around me have similar patterns, it seems like I'm the only one bothered by them. I think I care too much about these kinds of things, so maybe I should just stop caring.

Yesterday I went to the happy hour with my office mates. We had a good time talking, eating and drinking at a brewery just west of where we work called Pyramid. The beer tasted like beer, in other words, terrible! :-) One of the things that I was taught yesterday about Seattle is that I have to treat it as a small town. You will find people you know almost everywhere you go when you start to know more people. Actually I'm starting to notice that little by little. It's not Stillwater-small, where after a couple of weeks you can't really go anywhere public and expect not to be recognized, but I recognized at least 3 people last time I went to watch a concert!

Oh, talking about concerts, now I'm an official supporter of the Seattle Symphony. Not a huge supporter that my name will appear in all programs, but I will be invited for the founder's lounge, to a special concert, and a type of dinner sometime. It is exciting! I just hope I didn't choose a date that will conflict with my defense.

Well, time to go back to work here. It is time for major cleaning in my apartment! My allergies are starting to bother me, so I have to do what I can to control them. I'm not sure it's my apartment, but it's the only thing I can really control.

Here are two apparently unrelated articles that I found interesting during my morning sweep through the news:

Free Expression Can Be Costly When Bloggers Bad-Mouth Jobs. It talks about people being fired because they mentioned something that was against the company's image. It is sad how important this concept of image is for a company. Sure they try to prevent people from lying saying bad things about the company that could make investors run away for no reason. But, at the same time, isn't firing a person going to do more harm than not? It is as if you admit that this person was leaking information about the dark side of the company. At least they didn't kill her!

My point of view is that people have to be careful with what they post about work. Especially when it could be secret information of a product that will come out soon and knowing it early could warn the competitors; or the investors. But just discussing problems you have with some internal company policy should actually trigger discussion inside the company. Saying: "I read you don't like our way of doing things, so you are fired!" does not solve any problems. Oh, well...

Now for the next piece of news: Crime-Friendly Neighborhoods. This article talks about some modifications in some neighborhoods that remove the isolation that it had through the need of cars and ended up bringing criminals in. A friend of mine mentioned that this is one of the reasons why public transportation is terrible in many parts of California. People are afraid that if they put buses going to the rich areas, this would attract criminals to these rich areas.

It is the same idea of adding levels of security to your house or car, or even to a web site. They are not unbreakable, but they make the criminals decide that it is easier to go elsewhere. As human beings are naturally lazy, it works. But does this solve anything? It just creates a larger rift between the two groups that acts as a capacitor, letting charges accumulate. Think of a small capacitor exploding: just a small popping sound and the smell of something burning, not too bad. Now think of those huge mC capacitors, 40 cm of diameter or more... You don't want to be around when they do explode.

No... Not working 12+ hours a day any more... yea, right

After I finished my dissertation I saw that easily I was going to lock myself in the office for longer periods of time, because I don't have a reason to go back home any more. So I made a promise to myself: I'm not going to stay in the office for more than 10 hours!

Well, I guess that today I broke my promise. I had to work on some stuff and when I finished I looked at the watch and saw: oh, it's 8:45 pm... I arrived in the office today at what? 7:45... 13 hours? And thinking that my bus just left, so I'll have to wait until 9:20 to get the next one. Grrr... Hateful Michel!

But at least I got some work done. And I did it faster than I though I was going to. I thought that what I had to do was going to take 4 hours and it took me 3. Neat! The only thing is that now I have to go back to the hard work.

By the way, I realize that I can't form good phrases any more. I think I'm a little tired (and hungry). Just 20 more minutes and I can leave to get the bus... 20 more minutes.

Still learning things from other sources

Today I was going through my usual sweep through online news when I find this: Amazon invests in blogging site. Strange move... I'll try to investigate more about it. But of course I won't be able to post or tell anybody outside work what it is about, but this post is just to let people think.

Besides that, it was a pretty hard day at work today. In the afternoon I was interrupted to talk about an idea that I just thought it was reasonably stupid. But the person that had this idea insisted so much in it, even took me out to eat (dessert) to discuss it! I don't know why, one of my weaknesses is that things that I find are stupid bother me. It makes my mind go crazy trying to understand why that person gave this idea, and what this person isn't seeing that I'm seeing that is making me think it is stupid. The result of it: I just couldn't do any work any more. So I came home. At 7:15 pm I was home, imagine that!!! And what am I doing? Reading the news and... working. At least it is quiet here.

A depressing morning

I think I shouldn't ever chat with my parents in the morning. Lately they have been sending me through endless guilt trips because I'm not home. For instance, this morning my mother said that my sister asked her to say hi to me, because she can't chat with me any more or else she starts crying. She can't listen to classical music or R.E.M. (my favorite band) without crying. It is just hard sometimes...

Sometimes news arrive the wrong way

I was reading the news before going to sleep (I have to wake up early in the morning, because I have a chat with my parents very early) when I suddenly saw this article: Amazon searches for big office digs. I don't work at the PacMed building, but it's a very nice building! Wonderful view of Seattle! Pretty slow and strange elevators... But it is fun to always arrive in Seattle and see it looking back at me.

Anyway, time to go to sleep here. Not much else to talk about. I finally cooked today, actually! I'm impressed! But, of course, my evening was gone with all the cooking and cleaning up afterwards. At the same time, it's not that I have a lot to do in the evenings now!

Google maps

I have to blog this, although I'm sure the web is being infested by this news in all blogs: check out the new Google Maps. Google again showing that they know how to use JavaScript! If I was MapQuest or Yahoo Maps, I would be worried, really worried!

And now the next thing is to wait for them to combine this information with satellite pictures (they bought a company that does this not too long ago).

Starting to feel like I'll have a life in Seattle

After sending my dissertation out to my advisor, I went out to watch the end of the Super Bowl party and then went to a meeting with the Jewish young adults group. And I don't know... It felt strangely different. I wasn't talking to people thinking that I should be at home working on my dissertation and it was awesome! The only bad thing is that we were at a brewery that closed pretty early and nobody had the energy to do anything else. But, hey, maybe I'll have good days ahead! The only thing that worries me a little is that right now I'll have the tendency of staying until very late at work. I don't have a research waiting for me at home any more (at least until my advisor sends me correction requests). It's a scary thought, but I do need to get some work done!

It's out

Finally, after working for a good while on this, my dissertation is finally out to my advisor. Yes, it's not 100% complete. I need to work on the table of contents, table of figures, etc. (it's word, shouldn't take that long, right? Wrong! But I'll work on this). I also have to write the aknowledgements, and vita. But, besides this bureaucratic things, it's out! Now I don't know what to do! maybe I should go and join the Super Bowl party that is going on at my apartment complex's office.

This is an interesting article: Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill about how many people at Microsoft have IPods, although MS has their own options for MP3 players. The cool part of it is that they mention "Bellevue Square Apple Store" and Bellevue Square is the mall that is about 3 blocks from my place! And I'm not one of the people that buy the 400 IPods a day! Amazing!

Exhausted

I'm almost there. I actually was there, but then I decided to remove a whole section to start all over again. It's not supposed to be a long section, but an important one. The only reason why I haven't finished everything yet and I'm ready to start partying is that I'm exhausted! My brain stopped functioning!

And it's not entirely because of my dissertation, but also (and specially) because I got a phone call from one of the managers from work and he started asking me lots of work-related questions, to try to understand what I was doing, what other people in my team were doing, and why. Almost 1 1/2 hours later I was done and he was happy enough with my answers (I hope). But my brain decided that working on my dissertation since 7 am plus a 1 1/2 hour work-related phone discussion (have I mentioned that I HATE phones?), and 30 minutes of clarinet playing (do you believe in that? It was actually interrupted by the phone call - I thought it was my upstairs neighbors pleading me to stop playing)... Oh, I also had an hour chat with my parents and my grandmother (that's why I started getting the "conspiracy" that I mentioned before - although my mother mentioned more than once that I will probably never go back home, and that made me really sad). How come I was able to almost finish my dissertation then?

Now I'm trying to figure out what I want to have for dinner. I still don't have food at home and don't quite feel like grocery shopping and cooking. The first thing that comes to my mind on a Saturday when this happens is "pizza!", but this went through my mind last Thursday already and I can't eat the same thing only after two days... Or can I?

And the conspiracy starts to unfold...

Today I found some new details about the conspiracy that my parents are planning... Although they claim there is no real conspiracy: my younger sister (and my mother too) are looking for a boyfriend for one of my sisters best friend. You do the rest of the math!

Changing subject, my dissertation is coming, but I'm a little worried now. I have implemented something and when I was writing it down I suddenly had a great idea of how to make it more efficient! Now I don't know if I should go back and try it, or just add it to the "future improvements"... Actually even part of me is saying to write it down as if I did it! This last part is confusing me a little! Why am I thinking of cheating on my dissertation? It's something I should be proud of in the future and not ashamed that I actually didn't implement everything I claimed I did (although I can't say that my last and most efficient version of the software works with all the nice procedures that I've built before, but that's a minor detail! All of them used to work!).

Oh, well, time to get back to it. I can even start to imagine finishing it today! I'm so close!

I found an article about GMail's increase in the number of people you can invite: Google's GMail Goes Global. Nothing groundbreaking in it, either. I'm still looking for analysis of what this might mean. Doing that on my 5 minute breaks of working on my dissertation. It is getting there. I'm in chapter 6 out of 8! (yes, well, most of the changes happened in chapters 6 and 7 anyway... but that's a minor detail!)

Gmail's explosion of invites

I don't know exactly when this happened, but today I was checking my gmail and suddenly I have 50 invites left! And I do have two gmail accounts, meaning that I can invite up to 100 people! That pretty much means that there is only one thing that gmail does not allow: people have to have an email address to get a gmail address! This is the way you send invites, you give the email address of your friend and then this person receives in invitation. What is the reason behind Google forcing people to have another email address? Do they want to always keep track of who their competitors are based on where people send invites to? Or who they are smashing? With so many invites available, why don't they just open the floodgates? Afraid that people will have hundreds of gmail accounts to use as their backup system? Oh, well... Just thought I had to drop this note before going back to work on my dissertation here. It's getting there, but isn't quite there yet.

Some people might be thinking: "You work at Amazon, so why don't you comment on the huge drop in the stock price that happened today?" I don't think there is much to comment about that, though. Amazon is going through dangerous ways. It is positioned in a market that requires lots of investment, and lots of risk. The point that bothers investors is that Amazon likes to take risks and invest all the money it gets on strange projects that may or may not give returns in the medium and long term. An example? The A9 Yellow Pages. Lots of money was invested in going around 10 cities in the US to take pictures of pretty much all streets and then make them available online. What is the profit from that? Brand placement as a source of innovation! You go to A9, find the business you are looking for, then it throws you to Amazon to see the pictures. Now you are at Amazon and you may decide to look around and buy something! This may happen and probably does. But is it enough to justify the investment? Who knows? The only thing that people know is that Wall Street is not happy, and nobody likes to see an unhappy Wall Street.

It is an interesting environment to be in a company that just received "bad news." People lose a little excitement, start to get a little worried about their future. But, for me, I wasn't shaken by the news. I knew it was coming, because I can add 2+2 and see how much investment is happening at Amazon. Even the project I'm involved right now is a risky investment. We haven't delivered anything so far! Lots of really bright people (yes, I know I'm an outlier there... But they always have to have an anchor to drag them back, right? This thought make me feel good in the morning, so I'll stick to it) working on a really hard problem, both technically and politically. It's fun to be there!

Recognition to the ones that might not deserve it

In the same frame of mind of the now famous Ig Nobel, I cam across another interesting contest: The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. In this contest, they recognize the worst phrases in literature. I'll give an example: The winner for the 2004 prize on Children's Literature was:

Jack planted the magic beans and in one night a giant beanstalk grew all the way from the earth up to the clouds--which sounds like a lie, but it can be done with genetic engineering, and although a few people are against eating gene-engineered foods like those beans it's a high-paying career to think about for when you grow up.

Frances Grimble
San Francisco, CA

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Neat, huh? Don't you just feel like looking for a child to whom you can read this story?

Follow-up from yesterday's post

So, after getting depressed with yesterday's article that I've posted here, I get this one: Britain Pushes U.S. on Warming. I'm waiting for action, but I'll probably just hear how great the elections were in Iraq. We are still doomed!