Grueling Sunday

I've been trying to post for some time now and I just can't finish it. So today I've decided to keep it simple and just talk about my great hike yesterday to Surprise Lake.

It's a great hike, with wonderful mountain views, waterfalls (not big ones, but a lot of small ones), creeks, and a cristal clear lake at the end of it. But it was HARD. We were in a group of 16 people and we took 2h 35min to go up (and when I say "up" I mean UP - we went up almost non-stop for all this time), stayed on the top having lunch and enjoying the view of the lake for a little over an hour and then took 2h 10min to go down. Total time for the trip: 6h 11min.

I was driving one of the cars, and this was another tiring experience. Especially because we were stuck in trafic on highway 2 for 40 minutes. And the trafic was there just because this highway goes through some small towns (with some strange names like Gold Bar and Startup) and everybody has to stop on lights.

When I got home I couldn't almost walk from my car to my apartment. It was exciting! But today I feel better.

Soon I'll have the pictures up and will post a link to them.

A potential great loss for Seattle

Rumors are going around right now that there is a chance that Seattle Symphony's music directory, Gerard Schwartz, might be leaving at the end of his contract (i.e. end of 2007-2008 season):

Discord at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra from the PI.

This is certainly sad. I'm not saying that the quality of the Seattle Symphony will certainly decrease if this turns out to be true, but any transition is always painful for any orchestra. You lose the ability to predict what the conductor will do until you get used to the new one and this always increases the level of stress, decreasing the quality of the music you can produce.

Anyway, I'll try to keep an eye on the development of this story.

The future of Microsoft

Just because there has been a lot of talk lately about how Microsoft will come out of this quicksand that some people say it has fallen, I've decided to write something about it myself. Yes, I know I'm far from being an expert analyst on Microsoft, or on anything at all. But I do read and have opinions of my own.

Will Microsoft buy eBay? It would be an interesting move by Microsoft, with a lot of money involved, but I don't think that MS management really thinks this way. They always have this idea that MS can do something much better with MS technology.

There are few counter-examples that actually prove the point, but I'll cite only one: Hotmail - one of the WORST free email systems out there because it seems that nobody even maintains it any more. You can't search your email, its spam detector is absolutely terrible, it tends to be slow and has some strange restrictions like if you don't pay for it and don't access it for some time, they clean all your messages! What is Microsoft's answer to it? Create their own Windows Live Mail from scratch.

Then you have Windows Live Shopping, still in Beta. The most AJAX-intensive shopping site out there (out of the real ones, and not small stores or front ends to other stores, as far as I know), and one of the ugliest in my opinion. Also, it doesn't accept a lot of browsers. Anyway, not a great site at all, but built with MS technology by MS people.

So, my conclusion: I don't think so... The proud Microsoft will continue working on their own projects and never get anywhere. What do I think they should do? I never liked eBay and I'm not that big of a fan of Microsoft, so go ahead!

Will Microsoft buy Yahoo!? That's actually a new idea that I've read yesterday... Yahoo? That's way a lot of money and a lot of people! Surely it will be great to get almost 40% of the search market in one move, but the management headache that it will be to merge the monster that Yahoo is with Microsoft will be something that I don't think the "great" MS management can do correctly. I would be very scared if they decide to go with this idea. Scared for the quality of the internet.

So what is the future of Microsoft? In my opinion is a much smaller and leaner company. Break it apart (not necessarily in completely independent companies on the outside, but certainly on the inside), restructure all its management for this new reality and focus on core technologies like its operating system, database, email system, office suite; and open it so that people can use your system in the backend and not try to create a competing system. It might dilute the Microsoft brand recognition, but it will keep it in the market and not as this hated example of who you should beat.

A concert report

In a day a fighting fires (quite literally, but without anybody or anything getting charred), I at least had a very pleasant experience that I wanted to convey here: a Seattle Symphony concert.

In the program there were two pieces: Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, "Unfinished"; and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 7 in E minor.

Schubert: a wonderful "short" symphony (short because it has only 2 movements), full of very great things, and this whole feeling that you are missing something. Brilliantly executed by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. A very energetic, precise and yet emotional interpretation.

But nothing compared to Mahler's 7th... Sure right now I'm being biased because I do prefer late Romantic period to Schubert's early Romanticism, but it was such a fenomenal (for my poor ears) interpretation that I'm still a little stunned. If you haven't heard Mahler's 7th, and I wouldn't blame you, as it seems to be something that is not that popular, you are in for an interesting surprise.

A very odd sounding 5-movement symphony, with strange instruments (for a symphony), like a guitar, a mandolin, a tenor horn and lots of different percussion varieties. A huge orchestration with 2 harps, 4 horns, 5 clarinets (1 bass and one Eb clarinet), 4 flutes, typical for Mahler. Quick variations between slow moving meditations and sudden quick and loud interludes. Or would it be quick and loud parts with sudden slow moving meditations?

If you ever come to Seattle, make sure to enjoy a Seattle Symphony concert. It will be worth it!

One interesting thing that happened in the concert is that when coming back from the intermission, there were a couple of people that were late arriving to their seats and Mr. Schwarz waited patiently on stage until all of them arrived to their seats to start the concert.

Another unexpected event was when the first violin simply lost one of his strings in the first movement of Mahler. We had a minute or so break to the second movement while he added a new string and set it all up.

Anyway, it was very exciting. When I came back home I was tired but I still had a lot of not-so-exciting things to do, but we have to pay the bills somehow. Pay for all the "yes"s that I've said in my life. But I did buy my tickets to go to San Diego and meet my sister. I just now need to book the hotel and a car rental.

A wedding later

Sunday's wedding was quite pleasant. A small event with about 45 people where two friends got married (oh, yes, people do get married in weddings). Now they are on their way to Hawaii for their 8 days of relaxing.

Sunday was also father's day here in the US. Not in Brazil, though, so I'm not worried about it. The strange thing that I've seen about father's day was on Seattle Times last Wednesday was this article. A Brazilian talking about doing food for father's day in memory of her father. So strange that it was done by a person from one of the few countries in the world that doesn't celebrate father's day on that weekend.

But this is not what I wanted to discuss here today. I wanted to talk about so many things that I ended up not really finishing this post. I've started it on Sunday and suddenly it's Thursday already! Where did the week go?

What is new? I bought a new computer (at least the parts to build a new computer) and it should arrive early next week. Now I should be able to play games on the computer again, an exciting thought!

Also I finished one more step on a project for my father. I'm actually getting a little bit more excited about this project, a little bit more accepting of PHP as a web development language. Maybe it was because I had less errors with no error message at all and that I had to remove line by line to figure out what was killing the PHP process. A lot of fun as you can see!

Finally, I've been tired. Trying not to snap on people as I tend to do when I'm tired, and also trying not to think that everybody is wrong. Most of the cases, I'm the one who is wrong! :)

Alright, time to get to work. I just wanted to finally finish this post.

Another long winter

And I'm back to write something and prove that I'm still alive... Somehow, at least.

I've been busy and tired lately. So tired that sometimes I even start fights with people without really realizing it. But everything has calmed down a little this weekend.

The problem of taking this long to post anything is that I have some intereting things to talk about, but those are going to take a lot of time, so I'll have to keep the post to the secondary subjects.

1) The gay parade in Sao Paulo just broke a record of the largest parade in the world with about 2.2 million people. But what makes this news interesting is not that, it is that they are sad because it didn't break the record set by another parade last thrusday: the March for Jesus that also happened in Sao Paulo in the same area. [source - in Portuguese]

2) I've been reading "The Wheel of Time" series, by Robert Jordan. It's a very famous series that I have always kind of ignored. I have never been a big fan of fantasy stories, to tell you the truth. But actually I'm happy with this series. Quite interesting setup of events and complications within complications. I'm just starting book 7 right now, A Crown of Swords. Some people claim that this is the beginning of the REALLY SLOW part of the series. I'll see...

One weird thing about it is that I have talked with my former roommate today and he is actually reading the same series! And is approximately at the same place I am right now! Quite a coincidence.

3) It's weird to read in the bottle of a mouthwash: "Do not use if cap seal is broken". How are you supposed to use it if you don't break the seal?

I guess that's the time I had. I'll maybe try to write some more in the next few days. Tomorrow I have a wedding to go. A wedding that will make me miss half of the Brazil World Cup game. I'm not a big fan of world cup as some of you might know, but it was the only weekend game until potentially the final and I wanted to organize a soccer watching party. Too bad...

Still no news

I know, I'm still not writing anything useful here. But I just don't have much to say. Life has been quite hectic and stressful. A lot of things not happening the way I wanted them to happen. Surely a couple of the things are better because of that, but it hurts my unselfish self.

Unfortunately I'm not here to talk about this, but to post yet another interesting article that I've read today:

Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista

Quite a good article trying to put in perspective what still isn't there on the Windows front. It's interesting how misguided Microsoft has been in the past years, lost in its goal of trying to build something that is just good for everybody. It's a little of the pattern that we in software engineering call "the curse of the do-it-all frameworks" - they might be more advanced than most overall, but what matters is what you want it to do. And on this area, they just can't win.

Make two classic comparisons: Mac OS X and Linux. The first one is aimed at user interface and stability and excels at that. It is painful, though, if you want to customize your system. A lot of the configurations are quite hidden, or simply not there at all! For example, I wanted to set my mouse scroller button to fan out the windows for selection (F9 in the keyboard), but because I don't have a certain brand of the mouse, I just don't get the option to do so.

Then comes Linux, the complete opposite. Linux (pretty much any of the hundreds of distributions) allows you to do whatever you want. You can set up initialization scripts, change colors, create new skins, even recompile the kernel if you want it to work with your new FireUSB port (no, there is no such thing)! But on the realm of ease of use, it's decades behind. User interface is clunky, options are non-intuitive and spread around the system, installing software can be a multi-day procedure if the software was not packaged specificly for your distribution, and so on.

So why Windows? The simple answer is: market share. Windows dominates the market share and with it it dominates the software and hardware development. Find me a product that does not work on Windows (alright, take away the ones made by Apple or open source things) and I'll show you things that won't really get anywhere.

What should you choose then? If your goal is to just use a computer for web and occasional document writing, I'd go for a Mac without any question (except money). If your goal is software development for yourself, Linux is your best bet. You have no idea the improved efficiency you get from not being tied to Visual Studio. Oh, but I did mention that it's good for "development for yourself", meaning that if you have to write things for .NET, well, you are out of luck there.

Finally, if your goal is to play games, buy new gadgets to connect to your computer, or use software from medium to small size companies, you can't escape Windows.

What about me? Well, I have two "working" computers at home: a PowerBook and a Linux box. Sometimes I do feel like I need a Windows box to invest on some "entertainment" but I just never found the time for it so why bother.

Alright, wrote too much already. Back to work here! Too many things to do, very short night ahead.

There are some ridiculous things out there

And one of them is this:

Apple's new store in New York City

It certainly looks cool! And it's 24 hours! But why?

Brazil with no Orkut

I don't know what would happen if this actually ends up doing anything with the Brazilian presence on Orkut:

Google in Brazil May Face Criminal Probe Over Orkut

It is quite scary. However, it's not that they can really shut down Orkut, they can only shut down Google's Orkut office in Brazil. And this won't really affect anything, only that maybe Google might decide that it's not worth the investment any more.

iPods and audiophiles

I found this very interesting article in Wired today:

Audiophiles Become IPodiophiles

Quite interesting what they are doing with the poor iPod...

Yes, I'll write something more interesting sometime soon.

Was bleibt? Es bleibt nur die Muttersprache

This is one of the most interesting classic articles that I've read in the last few years. It was actually an interview with the great Hannah Arendt (Wikipedia The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Günter Gaus. If you want to read it in German you can at Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. For the faint of heart, you can find the tranlation to Engish in many books, such as the one I'm reading Essays in Understanding. Just for you to have an idea what you might be missing, the title in English is "What remains? The language remains". Not quite the same thing...

Anyway, it's a great discussion. It starts a little cold with many misses from the interviewer trying to pry about the interviewee's past and the Jewish persecution before WWII, when she left Germany. This part, although it is a little weak on details, gives an interesting perpective on what it was to be a thinker in the time on the assention of the Nazi party in Germany. And the shock of finding out much later about Auschwitz.

What triggered my interest in this article is the core captured in the title (something that I don't think is even the main subject of the whole talk, if there is one): what always will stay with you wherever you go is your mother tongue. Your brain was tought to think the way your mother tongue works, so you will never quite express yourself very well in any other language.

This is just too true. Not that my expressivity right now in Portuguese is very good. It's interesting how quickly you lose the fluency of a language if you don't speak it more than about once a week, but I still end up resorting to Portuguese expressions when I want to say a more complex idea.

This lead me to a more interesting line of thought (I had reading thought-provoking things): the concept of multiple overlapping sub-ontologies of the world. There is no unique way to represent things, only a unique local way. By getting away from the restriction of global logic rules, you will potentially be a little closer to what reality really is.

Not a new concept, I know... I am fully aware that the implementation of my overlapping sub-ontology world would be both very hard to scale to a reasonable size to see anything interesting and non-elegant. People are looking for things they can relate to. But if you are only one person, you are seeing the world from your sub-ontology. A lot of things can be represented, but an even larger amount just can't. And this doesn't make them less or more important.

Anyway, that's pretty much as far as I went with my thoughts. Actually I did go a little farther in writing down a schema for implementing this, but while I don't have real, exept when I riding the bus, to work on it, I'll stop this explanation here.

It's time for me to go to bed now. My eyes are closing (or have been closing for the last 45 minutes).

When posting does not happen

It's something like the 4th time that I'm trying to post since last time I actually finished it. It's either that I forget about it and close the browser, or the browser decides to crash and I can't finish it. Quite astounding!

Anyway, I'm back after a long time to say that I'm alive. Time is flying, I'm close to getting older, and I wished I could say that a lot has changed. Unfortunately life has been quite the same, only more hectic in the last weeks.

Last weekend I had a choir concert and before that I was fighting with some people in choir to get things done. I didn't have much time to devote to getting all the things for the concert done, and the people that were helping me didn't really make matters any easier. Let's say that until the last day I didn't know what was going to happen with the program for the concert.

But in the end I did find some people that were willing to help, including Amy, and everything worked out fine. It was a nice concert, sad that I was in the beginning on my cold, that still hasn't gone (most probably a side effect of all the stress to get the things for the concert done).

This cold has been quite interesting if you ask me. It started with a terrible stiff neck. This started on Saturday afternoon and is still around, but much better. On Tuesday the dry and sore throat started. On Wednesday it was the runny nose and last night the cough.

Anyway, that's not part of the interesting things I want to talk about. I'll finish this post here so that I would have at least posted something and leave the more complex posts for later. There is a good change I won't finish them tonight.

Celebrating Brazil's self sufficiency in oil

In this day I celebrate a great feat that has deeper meanings than what the title mentioned. Yes, right now with the barrel of oil skyrocketing, it is important to say that you have reached a point where you don't really care about international prices. But what else does it mean?

I am no economist or even living in Brazil to present an in-depth analysis of this. But I can certainly make some observations: Brazil is about number 12 in oil consumption [source] and number 9 in GDP [source]. Quite close, but as it happens with all this distributions, the power law tends to hide the importance of it. Take Russia as an extreme exemple: the GDP is pretty much the same ($1.5 trillion with purchasing power parity), while the oil consumption is 50% higher!

The important thing to take away from this is where your energy comes from. The whole ethanol push that Brazil has undergone might not have been as important as some people have claimed, but it was surely a good part of it.

Anyway, I'll stop here as most probably I've already gone far away from my domain of knowledge and will end up just embarrassing myself. With oil prices still going up and strong, it is an important thing to know... Or maybe you should just ignore it all and start walking.

And streams of time flow

Sometimes it is hard not to look back and realize the time that has gone by and wonder if you've used it well. This happens in all dimensions: personally, professionally, globally. You look at the things you have done, the things that define what you are right now and just wonder: have I traveled the right way? Have I traveled at all?

It has been tough to get a closure on this. Sometimes it feels like I'm not really doing anything; that I'm fooling myself and letting time just flow by. On other cases, I feel like it is just taking me downstream to a large clearing, I just have to pass through a few turns and everything will be easily visible.

It's interesting how it is easy to lose readers with only a couple of paragraphs. So for the people that are still reading, people that think that can extract some of the hidden meaning behind what is written here, I'll stop. There is no benefit in dwelling on things that are and just dreaming of what might one day be. Today I'm a little depressed, but the reason is not really something I can write down here. It's certainly temporary, but not isolated. It seeps into the future as well as illumine the past.

Alright. Writing too much, time to change topic. Time to go techie.

And the experiment began

Remember some time ago I mentioned Kevin Kelly's interview where he mentioned that in the future scientific articles will be done "wiki style"? Well, it seems like it had already started:

QEDen - a collaborative site to solve the Millenium Problems that are worth 1 million dollars each. It would be quite a feat if it works and I'll bow my head to Mr. KK for his vision.

Even if I haven't been blogging much lately, I have to blog this:

The Time Is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Ingenious observation! I think I'll stay up just to enjoy the moment! Of course that my headache might change the plans, but we'll see.

Besides this strange fact, not much to talk about. Daylight savings time is here and everything is so bright until so late... It's weird! And it will only get worse. At the height of summer here, the sunset is at about 10 pm.

I've been busy, trying to reorganize my life here and put some things behind me, but I haven't been able to complete the whole operation yet. There are some things that I just can't find energy to finish, like my father's project. I start working on it and when I see, I'm reading about JDM (Java Data Mining), Barnes & Noble's rejection of Sony's eBook reader (something that it looks like Amazon and Borders are hoping that will get some more traction on the books business), reading how people can waste time and not really realize it (not really reading it, just realizing it).

Anyway, I've been tired and a little stressed. This last weekend was just something to increase in my level of stress instead of relaxing. On Saturday I spent a lot of time digging out ivy at Golden Gardens Park. Then the rest of the day I did laundry and tried to relax a little. It was quite tiring! Then on Sunday I had two choir "pre-concerts". We went to a library and then a bookstore to advertise about the choir and our upcoming concert. I thought it was quite a waste of time. Surely there were people there, but I don't think there were enought people to really make a difference.

The choir I used to sing with in Brazil had a lot of those events. Singing in short events just to see if people would care enough about the choir. And it never really worked. In many times it seemed like we were not really welcome there. The conductor's theory that it also helped for us to get used to presenting had some merit. But after some time it made no difference at all. The current choir I'm singing, people have years of singing experience. I don't think they need to worry about "how to present". But, hey, who am I to say anything, anyway?

Alright. Time to move onto something else. Maybe I'll get some work done finally...

Busy. Busy as always

That's what I've been hiding behind lately. The fact that I've been quite and weirdly busy. What is weird about it, you might ask, and I say that it's not that I've been working until late at night and weekends... But it's also that I have been working late at night and weekends.

Contradictory, huh? Surely!

But I'll leave it as a contradiction and move on to more details on what is going around in the world.

CNet has an interesting article saying that one of the reasons why Linux hasn't been adopted as much as it could is the dress code that tends to follow it. It is quite scary that I do know a quite a few people that look just like that at Amazon.

So, why does dress code still influences things that much? Well, I don't know why it wouldn't. Dress code means two things: importance and tradition. You wouldn't wear something that is less confortable if you don't think it's important. And it all ties back to what it used to be done in the past and should be rememebered.

Anyway, I'm not being able to make much sense this morning, so I'll move on to the next piece of news:

This is indirectly from a silly book I've found around (but don't own) called Blogosphere: Best of Blogs that, as the title explains, contains a list of "best blogs" in different categories. Of course it suffers with the same effect (if not greater) than lists of best websites: it goes stale quickly. So some blogs don't exist any more, some haven't seen a post for some months, and a coupld even changed subject a little.

Oh, yes, the article:

Kansas is keeping their nuclear power plants safe. These terrorism-inspired reactions always amaze me every time I see them. People pile rules in order to make people feel safer, but it only ends up causing confusion and, later, legal disputes (no, he wasn't heading to the plant when he was shot... the pack that he had on his hand was a shoe box...).

Alright, I know I'll never make it to the list of the best blogs out there. Maybe when my new blog is ready (hahaha - think something like one year from now! I can't even have enough time and energy to finish a reasonably simple project for my father!) I might start to get a little bit more activity around here. I have big plans for it. But, again, I always have big plans for everything. Even the laptop that is taken apart and sitting on my desk (and partly lying on the floor) right now.

And I have to note here that certainly the highlight of this last weekend (wow, it's Wednesday already???) was being able to talk with my best friend and his fiancee using Skype. Made my otherwise quite crappy weekend.

I've also received messages from my sister that works at American Express in Brazil. AE Brazil was sold to the largest bank there, Bradesco, and people are trying to flee, my sister included. One of the ideas that she has in mind is to continue at AE, but move to the US, New York City to be more precise. I don't think my mother will be very happy with that! But It's just in the wishing and planning phases right now.

Oh, and on a sad note: no solar eclipse around here.

An interesting article

Just because Kevin Kelly has been everywhere I've been looking lately (more on this some other time), here is his latest slashdotted article:

SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE

I think he has some interesting points. However, I think most of the things are a little too hopeful and naive. For example:

The creation of "wiki-type scientific articles" is a little silly. Very few scientific articles actually would benefit from a wiki style mechanism. Most are just self-contained. I think what has to change is the delay for you to add small comments to an article. It's easier to keep up with authorship (and blame) and allows you to organize information in an easier way than a huge 100 people article.

There are lots of other things I think are a little too far-fetched. Unfortunately, I won't give me that much time to comment on it right now. Maybe some other day when I don't feel too guilty that I haven't finished working on everything I need to work today.

blah.. blah... blah... bad blogger... blah.. blah...

I know that I haven't been blogging much lately. The worst thing is that I don't know if I have a good reason for this lately. Yes, I have been busy and I haven't been spending time in front of my computer much lately, but I'm not sure this is actually the reason for my disappearance.

However, instead of trying to analyze why I haven't been writing (something that I've actually tried to do and post about maybe 3 times between the last time I've posted and now), I'll just move one and post something!

Well, I'm back! It's been a very good week, I guess. Last weekend I was in Colorado Springs visiting my former roommate and a very good friend. It was a lot of fun, but very cold too! Amy and I arrived there on Friday evening, were persuaded to have dinner at my old roommate's place and went to sleep at about 1:30 am. Woke up Saturday early morning and went skiing. It was quite a nice day to go skiing!

We went to Loveland, quite a nice ski resort with something like 11 lifts. We kept ourselves to the only one corner of the resort that had only 2 lifts. The first one for beginners (from which I went up maybe 4 times) and one that had some easy and intermediate slopes. At the end of the day, I've decided to go crazy (and I would found out quite soon that I was REALLY crazy) and went to this second lift.

There I went, sitting down at the lift and seeing it going up, and up... The base of the resort was at about 10K feet high (about 3 km). Let's say that the ski lift took us to almost 13K feet high (almost 4km). I was petrified when I got out of the lift. There was an easy way down, but easy was based on the slope of the way down and not the length. Let's say that I had to stop maybe 4 or 5 times on the way down just to wait for my legs to start responding again. I was exhausted, but alive! I only fell twice getting out of the easy lift and once on the way down the long path (just because I felt I was too fast and my left leg didn't want to help me turn right - so I just forced myself to stop by sitting down).

Sunday we went to the Mountain Zoo in the morning. Quite a nice zoo, actually. Just was a little cold sometimes. And in the afternoon we went to the Garden of the Gods. It was also quite nice, but the weather wasn't very nice. Very windy and cold... And then it started snowing, the time we decided to head back to a warm place; my old roommate's place.

There we ordered a pizza and played some group games, like Apples to Apples and Wise or Otherwise. It was fun!

On Monday we woke up at 4 am and started our way to the airport to arrive at work at about 10:30am (keep in mind that I've won an extra hour with the time zone difference).

What happened is that I've spent the whole week trying to recover from the weekend, but I would do it again!

As for the rest, I've finished two books this week: Olympos, by Dan Simmons; and A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. Both very interesting and entertaining! Olympos is the continuation of Ilium. While Ilium was quite interesting because it tried to put a huge twist to the Greek-Trojan war, Olympos pretty much decides to divert completely from this line of thought and goes to a much more "action-packed" and quite inventive hard sci-fi.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is a must read! There isn't much else I can say about it! It's a very readable and sane description of what science knows (or maybe knew, as it was published in 2003) about the creation of the universe, physics, biology, astronomy, geophysics, and many other sciences that relate to who we are and where we are.

The rest, there is nothing much else to talk about. I have tried to work on my taxes today and got scared with the fact that I might have to pay federal taxes this year. This puzzled me greatly, as I don't quite understand how this could happen. So, instead of spending my whole day trying to figure this out, I've moved on to posting on my blog.

Learning to sleep

I think I forgot what it means to go to sleep. It's not that I don't sleep, it's just that I don't really want to sleep any more. It's not that this is something new, it's just that it has been bothering me lately. I get home tired of spending a whole day refactoring other people's code to enable unit tests (more on this some other time). I get to my computer to check my emails and then just rathole into reading papers, studying new technologies, checking the news... When I look again to the watch it's past 2am. In the morning I just jump out of the bed and get moving. My body is tired, but I just don't want to waste time (even though I have been getting late to work, as I've been just doing random things at home in the morning, like doing the dishes and cleaning)

In general, lately I've been busy. Lots of things to do and think. And what worries me the most is that things are starting to pile up and I just can't get to finish any of the things I have to do!

Tomorrow I'm going to Colorado Springs, Colorado to meet some friends. My former roommate moved there and another very good friend was going to visit his, so I decided to tag along. But I think I mentioned this already in the past. The plan there? Talk, entertain girlfriends/wifes, visit and just take my mind ouf the the things I have to think about lately. Try to restore my sanity a little.

Oh, last weekend I bought one more missing part for my recipe reader project: a new wireless router. My old one (my cable modem) is only 802.11g compatible, but my cheap laptop has an 802.11b wireless card. Also my PDA didn't like to connect to the network that much either. It would work sometimes, but most of the time it simply wouldn't be able to get an IP address. Now it works perfectly!

Anyway, step by step I'm getting there!

Now it's time to have breakfast and head to work!

Web as a source of information

I've just read a very interesting article on the Wall Street Journal about fake web "original content", written by Lee Gomes. He claims that he was once hired to produce "original content" for $2 an article where he just had to get articles from other websites and change the wording just enough so that it will look like something different. He ends the article saying:

"In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

"Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world's "information." Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations. Nothing very useful about that."

Very well put and quite scary what search engines are doing to the web.

But then there is a second side to it: people are actually finding information (if they know how to search, or are looking for the same thing that most people are already looking, something that is cannot be old information)! And with this, people are making money! I've talked a week ago with a web designer friend of mine and he said that buying an ad at Google was the best investment he has ever made. It is very inexpensive ($1 per click) and he said that it makes him about 150x profit. I guess I've just been the only one that never clicked on an adsense ad.

Finally, soon you will see some changes to this site. I'm planning a major change in direction of this blog, both making it nicer to look and easier to see what you are looking for. One detail: I won't promise any more and better content. It's just that I'll be a little bit more proud about it. One of the major things that will happen is that I'll be moving off of Blogger!

Scary thought, huh? It's been a long time that I just haven't seen anything new coming out of the Blogger team. Pretty much since blogger was bought by Google, it stalled; much like any "already established" system at Google. Look at Google news! Orkut (although it looks like there is a more complicated story behind that)! Google itself! Just projects left aside to give way to more "AJAXy" things, like Google maps and Gmail. By the way, talking about Gmail, I HATE that you can't click "back" to go back to the page you were.

A weekend of deep work

That's what I'm doing this weekend. But I'm actually having fun, because things are actually working, except something very silly like the connection between my laptop and my linux desktop (my server). It works after I disabled all the firewalls on the server, but it is SLOW, very slow... Not completely sure what is going on...

But now for the more interesting things: it is confirmed that I will be going to Colorado to get together with some friends in two weekends! It's going to be fun! But nothing comes without weird coincidences, right? Well, we are all going with our "significant others". Two of the "significant others" are called "Maya" and one is "Amy". Note that all the names have only three letters: A, M and Y. Just weird.

On another completely unrelated note, today I've received my touch screen glass. Very neat, although being a little bit bigger than I was expecting. I tried to plug into my $200 laptop, installed all the software, but it didn't work for some reason. I'll leave it for some other time to figure out why. But it's exciting that I have almost all components for me to start working on my recipe reader project.

The rest of life has been quite the same.

The error series

Just to continue my error series... Here is an error I got today:

---

Error 500--Internal Server Error
From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:
10.5.1 500 Internal Server Error

The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.

---

It had to be in IEEE with all this explanation of what is the standard that is providing explanation about the error. Ah... Engineers...

Oh, and finally Imagestation worked! Now I just have to weed through about 200 pictures (from my last two weekends) remove the ones that are not that interesting and put captions on the ones that deserve explanation. Quite some work still left.

What happened to me yesterday? Not much... Didn't sleep that much last evening trying to figure out why I was getting a strange behavior on a system yesterday (and I still don't know what it is) and going around and getting a bunch of papers on a wide variety of topics that seemed interesting. Some very interesting concepts! I might start writing here some comments on the papers I read, mostly for my own future reference, but trying not to be too selfish.

Just a random status... I just tried to access Imagestation again and got the same error! And because I'm feeling like sharing the happiness, I'll quote the error message for the few of you readers that might appreciate it:

---

Oops ...

Unable to write to cat list file:can't create /raid/mason/www/comp/sony/htdocs/category/.catlist.dat: No such file or directory at /raid/mason/www/sitelib/Zing/DB/Category/CreateFile.pm line 154 Stack: [/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.2/Carp.pm:191] [blib/lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into blib/lib/auto/Storable/logcroak.al):71] [blib/lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into blib/lib/auto/Storable/_store.al):206] [blib/lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into blib/lib/auto/Storable/nstore.al):166] [/raid/mason/www/sitelib/Zing/DB/Category/CreateFile.pm:154] [/raid/mason/www/sitelib/Zing/DB/Category/CreateFile.pm:188] [/raid/mason/www/comp/zing/htdocs/album/edit/info.html:264]

Try Again

---

Fun!

I'm a little scared today. Lots of things are accumulating on my to-do list and not that many are getting done. And when I try to get some things done, something happens and I just can cross it out of my list. Today it was Imagestation. I use it to store and distribute my pictures. I was adding the pictures from yesterday's hike (more about it below) when suddenly I get a Mason error! Something like not being able to cat a file. Very ugly error - made me a little scared about using the service. However, there was one thing I liked about it: I went to the help page, clicked on "live chat" and suddenly I was talking to someone that just told me that they were going through some maintenance right now and that I should try it again in the morning.

Alright, now about the hike on Sunday... I went with some friends from Jconnect to Oyster Dome. It was a little tough - 8 miles both ways, ~12 km - elevation gain of 2,200 ft, ~700m - in other words: 4 miles going up and then 4 miles going down. My legs are a little sore, but the view was worth it! Drop me an email that I'll send you an invite to see the album and you can see for yourself (although the pictures don't really make justice to the great experience that was seeing it all).

There were two interesting things that I've learned in the hike:

1) People like to take their dogs on long hikes. Lots of dogs going around!
2) They are trying to protect that area from logging! Logging is actually a very interesting money source for the government, so they reserve some areas to be logged from time to time. Walking around we saw traces of the last time they logged the area and left it pretty much bare - about 70-100 years ago! Now they won't be cleaning it all, but will leave some empty spots all over.

I guess that's all I have to report. Maybe this and a link to an interesting but sad article that a friend sent to me today:

The Social Life of Paper, published in the New Yorker in 2002. This was written by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink and The Tipping Point, two very famous books that are not too bad.

TagCloud

As you must have seen (if anybody actually reads my blog - not blaming anybody, it's just that I haven't been posting anything lately), I have added something to my side bar under the Pheromone Trail part. I found about it randomly going around some blogs the other day and I was interested in knowing what it was going to say about my blog. But, so far, nothing. I'm not sure if it is by date, or if it doesn't like my RSS feed, or maybe it's just broken. I'll wait a week (that sometimes may turn into a month with my level of updates on my blog) until I just give up.

So the weekend is here. Lots of things to do! But what I'm most excited about it that I am planning on going on a hike tomorrow! It's a little cold here and my legs are sore from going on the "forbidden machine" at the gym on Thursday, but it should be fun!

On the more geeky side, I'm testing Camino, a new browser made only for Mac. It looks pretty good so far, but I'll still keep on testing. It so far looks like Firefox (well, maybe it's because it also uses Gecko as the rendering engine).

Another thing I'm testing right now is a suggestion that I've got from a co-worker and reiterated by this interesting Mac Freeware list: Buttler. It is quite interesting, but requires you to get used to it.

Alright, time to get to work!

Posting every other week makes it hard to follow what is going on. I know... But maybe it's because not much is going on right now. I'm still recovering from my crazy times of working late, but I'm still not back to my old self. I've been getting home nervous for some reason that I'm not completely aware of, and this makes me just not do anything really productive until I decide to go to sleep (or am lulled into going to sleep).

There were a couple of events of note, though (in no particular order):

1) I got an email from a total stranger from Brazil asking what it is to go for a Ph.D. at Oklahoma State University. Ok... He was not a "total" stranger, as he is a student of the professor that gave me the contact to the professor in Oklahoma that offered me the position. But it was quite tough to reply to this email. It's not that I didn't like Oklahoma, it's just that I don't know many people that would enjoy the experience as much as I did. It was a very introspective time of my life.

2) I took my camera for a trip to Central Washington, the other side of the mountains. It was a very nice day trip with Amy. The first experience is that you get out of a place with a lot of trees, go to snowy trees, then just snow and when you least expect, the snow is gone and the only thing you see around you are small and sparse bushes! Semi-dry, a complete shock in vegetation change. Very interesting. The rest had some very nice views, small towns and quite some driving. We left my place at about 8 am and were back at 6 pm after driving for almost 400 miles (almost 650km). Fun to be away!

3) Oracle is trying to buy everybody lately. They finished their purchase of Sleepycat, now they are eying JBoss, Zend (that makes PHP-based systems) and even MySQL. They are following the plan of silencing the competition before they are too loud. Something that Cisco has always been very good at doing in the networks world.

4) I'm moving forward on one of my projects. I bought a $200 laptop and now I just need to be brave enough to buy a touch screen attachment and destroy the laptop. It the project works it will be very cool!

5) I'm also working on my spare time on some things for B'nai B'rith do Brasil, organizing publicity for the Cascadian Chorale, and even sometimes going to the gym (didn't go today because I hurt my back doing volunteering work last Sunday and it's still not good enough for me to feel confortable in potentially making it worse again)!

I guess that's what is going on in a nutshell. I still need to write and reply to so many emails that makes me sad just to think about it. So many "I'm sorry for taking this long to reply to you..." that it makes me feel like I shouldn't even bother replying. And I know this is the wrong feeling.

Randomly saying something

I'm back.. So what's going on here? Well, a lot of things, but nothing really that exciting to write about. Yesterday I went to a Superbowl party just to see the local team, the Seahawks, lose. Everybody was a little sad, but it's not that I was paying too much attention to the game anyway. There were about 65 people in a house that perhaps could accomodate 40. Fun anyway! Oh, and the highlight of the party was that one guy proposed to his now fiancée during half time! No, it's not that they love football and felt that this was a great opportunity to get engaged. It's more like they've met in this same party for last year's Superbowl and thought this was an important day in their lives.

Another thing I did this weekend, besides my normal cleaning process, was playing around with my new toy: Canon EOS-D20 SLR Camera. I'm still in awe with what it can do... It would have been a little better if the weather on Saturday hadn't been so bad.

I've also been sadly following all the rage about the Mohammed's cartoons. A sad, sad moment in the history of freedom of speech and tolerance. I found this article on the Financial Times quite interesting to show what acutually happened: Timeline: How the cartoon crisis unfolded. Sure, like all news, it will probably be outdated by tomorrow, but...

Finally, to finish this post on a positive note, Wired finally published their famous "Vaporware Awards". There are some very interesting ones there, but I can't say that I've seen any earthshattering technologies that were never released. Just modifications on the same theme over and over.

Time flies and life remains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screening the Latest Bestseller

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

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

The vibe, the time

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had to steal this from Amy's blog:



create your own personalized map of the USA

Yikes, 33% of the states in the US. But most of them were only driving by on my way to Buffalo, NY.

Been trying to post something useful, trying to remember that it's been 5 years today that I've left Brazil to embark on one of my craziest ideas: go abroad for my Ph.D. But, besides that, because I don't have time to write something useful, I'll just post this interesting news (at least interesting to us, paper haters):

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

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

The power of learning

When I finished my Ph.D., something changed in me and it took me all this time until this last weekend to realize it. I was tired of learning, I was tired of expanding my knowledge into new and exciting areas. I felt like it was time for me to apply what I've learned into something productive.

No, it's not that I didn't learn in the process, it's not that every day I haven't really learned anything new, it is just that I had lost the desire to learn. I had lost the wish to stay up until late at night reading papers, reading books, studying a new score, talking to new people. I put myself inside a hole and decided that I was going to build a way out using my own limbs.

What changed this was something very simple: I was home alone in the weekend and looked at an IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and decided to go through it. Suddenly I found an article that seemed kind of interesting, "Fast and Memory Efficient Mining of Frequent Closed Itemsets" by C. Lucchese, S. Orlando and R. Perego. It's not an extremely well-written article, but it contains some interesting aspects that I was always searching for during my research: namely memory efficient algorithms for data mining.

Suddenly, when I realized, I was reading the whole issue, and looking for past issues, searching the internet, digging and learning. Not only that, I looked at my clarinet and when I realized I was playing! Terribly, but nevertheless I took my clarinet out of the box and played around with it for about 30-40 minutes until my embouchure couldn't me maintained any more. My neighbors must hate me now, but I was happy.

I realized that I suddenly was getting interested in reading the news, analyzing how business was doing, and this wasn't really making me grow in any way. Business is plain boring. Companies go up and down, bigger companies buy smaller companies, and nothing really new happens. Non-business news is the same thing. Wars, people claiming that other people are wrong, accidents, deaths, stupid people going to jail for silly things... Also nothing really exciting.

So I guess I'm a researcher and that's what I'll always be. Surely I'm not a very good one for many reasons, but it's what keeps me excited.

Some people right now might be thinking: but what about your job? Are you leaving your job and going back to academics? Actually this idea didn't even cross my mind (well, it did, or else I wouldn't have written it here, but not in this way). I'm very happy with my job. It keeps me entertained and focused on the difficulties that exist in the world. It gives me the challenges, but I'm the one that should look for the solutions.

But now I should try and get some sleep and stop getting people worried.

Banks and money

So today, like many days, I receive a check on the mail. It was a $10 check by Chase saying that if I cash the check I'll be automatically enrolled to their 2% cashback deal. Then you start to read the details of the deal:

2% cashback in the first $5000 of the year, or up to $100 per year.

Then you have to go and dig for the cost of it... Only $11.99 a month!

WAIT! $11.99 a month for a whole year is more than then potential $100 that you can make a year! Or did I just forget all my math???

Actually there is a "benefit": special deals with companies that might give you up to $500 in discounts a year! Sure, if you decide to buy all the merchandize they offer you, like a couple of watches, pens, this great odorizer that you put in your car, auto-adjusting sunglasses... Only high-tech stuff that everybody needs to buy! You also get a couple of cupons worth $40! So, in a way, you end up making almost $500 a year! What a deal!

Anyway, I'm just a little bitter today. Work has been very tiring. Just as a baseline: it's Wednesday and I have already worked about 50 hours this week. Sure, I've done much worse in my life, but what worries me is that things are still far from over. I still expect to be at work until late for the rest of the week and into the weekend.

Alright, time for me to get some things done here before heading to bed.

Coincidence of common names

Today my cell phone rang with a 405 number (Oklahoma). I didn't recognize the number, but I answered it anyway. Here is a transcript of the conversation:

- Hello?
- Hi... Michael?
- Yes?
- Is Amy there?
(confused...)
- No... She is not here...
- Oh, is this the (a name I won't write down)'s residence?
- No...
- Oh, I'm sorry, I must have dialed the wrong number.
Click.

Yes, that proves that both Michael and Amy are very common names. I think my name should be Michel from now on.

The pain of statistics

Yesterday was my first choir concert with the Cascadian Chorale and, just like my first big choir concert I had in Brazil (Mendelssohn's Elijah), I got sick just the day before the concert. At least this time was much milder than the one in Brazil, when I had a very high fever and I can say I don't remember much of that concert. I have a cold, my second one this season.

This actually got me a little worried. I rarely get sick, about maybe once a year if that much, and why did I get sick twice this year - even after I, for the first time in my life, took a flu shot? Well, suddenly my statistics neurons fired and gave me the answer: if your chance of being sick each year is about 50%, the chance of you getting sick more than once a year is still quite high. If you model it as a random process where the probability of being sick each month is 1/12, the probability that you will be sick at least twice a year is about 25% (you get the same result if you model it as a Poisson distribution - but I thought it would be easier to understand in the normal probability way)

The concert itself was quite interesting. I had about 70% of my voice, so I could still contribute some. There was only one big issue with the concert, as a concept: we only have one 2 1/2 hour rehearsal a week, and there is a limited amount of things you can rehearse this way. So we end up going through a lot of material in the beginning and then focusing the rehearsals on things that are supposed to be more challenging. Problem is that when we get to the day of the concert, we are asked to remember pieces we haven't sung in the choir for more than a month! And they were in Latvian, Catalan, Mongolian, Estonian... While melody and harmony wasn't that difficult to remember, the text was a whole other story. But it all ended up fine. We can always use the fact that you can't really understand the text sung by a choir.

Now I'm just sitting on my couch, listening to some music and thinking what I should do for the day. I'm trying not to do much, but I just can't stay on here the whole time. Maybe I'll bundle up and go for a walk soon, try to breathe some fresh (and cold) air.

Oh, yes, talking about cold air, we had our first day of snow here! But it was just too warm outside, so there was no snow on the ground... We had what is called "white rain". It's been pretty close to freezing in the last couple of weeks.

Alright, back to trying to do something that doesn't require my brain to function.

Close to madness

No, that's not really me, but I just didn't know what to write in the title.

Life is going alright here. Been really busy lately, with a lot of late nighters working on work-related things and on the program for the choir concert this Saturday. Me, as a "yes" guy decided to help out and suddenly I had just too much work to do. But it was done and not it's with the printer. I'm not sure if I'm excited about this concert or not. The music is quite interesting, but I guess I've been so tired lately that my feelings are simply numb. And, hey, I'm not complaining.

Now for a view of the world out there:

* Real-state in downtown Bellevue is going quite crazy! There is a new mall that just opened about 3 weeks ago, they have plans of another one in a couple of years and there are two new apartment complexes also being built right now. One of them in place of a half-finished structure that has been around here for many years (I can only attest for one year of these many).

* Christmas is coming and with it some terrible music. Worse is that I live 2 1/2 blocks from a mall and from time to time they blast the music so loud that I can hear it from my apartment with all windows and doors closed.

* This is a little old, but some people might have missed it: Kansas now allows schools to teach about "intelligent design". At the same time, the Vatican says that evolutions does not contradict the bible.

* This is also a little outdated, but there is this interesting note about Tamiflu: Suicides raise fears over Tamiflu. If they distribute Tamiflu for all US citizens... Well, I don't think it will change anything! :-) Actually this article reminds me how weird our brain really is - how some things might cause very strange reactions to the way we deal with the world.

New services...

I've decided to start updating my blog with new services, and I found out about something quite intriguing: PheromoneTrail. Not that it really works right now, but the idea is to capture the path that people take around the internet. Because I am curious and would like to see what it actually will do when it's up and running, I decided to add to my blog. Right now the script seems to be down, but when it's up, the icon in the left side, under history, should have a popup iframe with information about how people get to my site and out of it.

Geek, me???

I've received a worisome email the other day suggesting that I was getting geekier and that this was a bad thing.

I first have to say that I do agree that it is mostly a bad thing. But being a geek has its advantages too: it keeps you busy and happy. But I won't say that I'm that much of a geek yet. I still go to choir, I still study music, even compose, go to concerts, cook, enjoy reading non-geeky novels (although I have to admit that most of the latest books I've read were very geeky), I go out do non-geeky stuff, like... Like... I don't know, what is there to do out there that you wouldn't consider geeky? Hiking is getting more difficult because of the weather, going out to restaurants is something I have been doing lately, but it's not non-geeky. I haven't been able to watch movies, because my free time does not match with anybody else's. Oh, well... I try.

But I think the major problem is that lately I have been quite busy with work. It has been invading my mind every minute. Just lots of things to do! Lots of interesting things to do, and that's the major problem. But I keep on being busy and trying not to be called a geek too often.

Digging and finding the list of geek novels

I've been looking around on digg, a news "aggregator" that is starting to rival the great slashdot, and found the following article:

Top 20 geek novels.

It's an interesting list. The sad thing of it is that I've read about half of them and I only haven't heard about 2:

10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks

My favorite out of the list? It's hard, but I think I'll go for:

18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson

Way down to the bottom of the list, but one of the most enjoyable read I've had.

Such a tiny world

There are a lot of things to post about, but I think I won't have enough time to get to them anytime soon. So, I'll just leave you with this very strange observation that I've made last week and has just been stressed even more today:

I was at the gym last week and suddenly, besides me, there was a guy with an OU t-shirt! OU meaning the University of Oklahoma, the other university in Oklahoma (the famous one, because they have a better football team, the Sooners). He was busy working out so I decided not no bother him with this coincidence.

So today I was opening my computer, trying to look at emails and work. Well, my internet wasn't working, so I decided to check if I was connected to the right wireless network. When I looked at the list of available wireless networks what do I see? A network named "OU_Sooners". As Robin would say: "Holy coincidence, Batman".

Hope everybody is having a good week there. Mine has been quite busy. Just having fun with JavaServer Faces and building something much bigger than I should be building. I probably should just give up right now and get some sleep.

Yay - time for nerdy stuff

Before I get back to writing web pages (oh, lots of fun), here is an article that I was reading the other day:

Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head

It is about a scientist (our "scientist") that claims that he found a way to create more energy by, at the same time, breaking some laws of physics! Two in one, what a great discovery!

What do I think about this? Well, I think I'll just wait and see. I'm not all that hopeful because of the amount of hype that is around this, but, at the same time, it would be great to find a new clean and efficient energy source. We are in great need of that right now! So, good luck to you Mr. Randell Mills!

ongoing · Wikipedia Notes

This is my first post trying to use ecto combined with NetNewsWire. ecto is a weblogging client that is actually paid. I'm using their 20 day trial right now. NetNewsWire is an RSS reader. What I can do is look at a news article and click on "Post to Weblog" and this is what I get:

ongoing · Wikipedia Notes:
Wikipedia Notes
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This week I had a pleasant, relaxed, sit-down conversation with Jimmy Wales, the main man behind the Wikipedia. The purpose of this note is to pass along some interesting facts about the project that I hadn’t previously known. This is timely in that there has been a recent flare-up of the usual Wikipedia controversies, with mostly the same old players flinging the same old slime; those who care might want to revisit my essay from last year, which takes a careful look at the project as contrasted to the world of conventional reference publishing. I stand by my conclusion: the Wikipedia dwarfs its critics. The rest of this piece is just a recitation of facts, but some of them are surprising. [Update: PHP@Yahoo!]

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It is actually interesting as a concept, because it makes passing on links much easier. At the same time it is just forwarding information and not really helping you create something new (and don't talk to me about creating something new, because I always have hundreds of ideas inside my mind, some using weblogs, but I never get time to actually develop them... Who knows one day I might...).

Anyway, just logging technology accomplishments!

Weekends

It's been another while that I don't post. I'm sorry for it. Life has been just quite hectic for me! When I get home in time not to just go to bed, I am so tired that I can't really do any writing. At the same time, there isn't much to talk about in the personal front. Life has been quite the same. Today I had another round of volunteering for GambiaHELP, an interesting organization that helps some Gambia communities. We did book sorting, separating children's, middle school, high school and college books. I had flashbacks from when I worked at the Amazon fulfilment center, looking at the quality of the books that people have bought and donated.

This weekend Amy is in California for homecoming, so I'll be home having fun with my personal projects. I've worked a little too much last week (including Thursday to Friday when I pretty much was only able to sleep for two blocks of 2 hours to get everything done for an urgent change that was going live on Friday), so I decided that I won't work this weekend. At least not directly; I might do some studying for things that are related to work.

There are a couple of news that I found interesting and wanted to share and enrich people's life (as I can't do that by myself):

UK Female Sci-Fi Viewers Now Outnumber Males - This is a little depressing, actually, for two reasons: first the reason for it is the popularity of Buffy, Lara Croft and Xena. There are so many better things to watch! The second is that if these shows made the difference it means that the better things are watched very little! Quite sad.

'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google - This article is not that interesting per se, but I liked it just because it continues to show how much Google influences the web. Its behavior (and misbehavior) define how professional web developers (spammers are pretty much the definition of it) deal with the web. Amazing power!

Alright, time to go and have some time for myself. I'll stay away from birds and enjoy it.

Time goes by

And I'm still here. That's what I always say... Sometimes it's just as if I'm in some kind of highly sticky substance and I just can't move as fast as what is going around me. I get to do a couple of things and when I see 4 hours are gone!

As you can see, not much has been going on lately. I have been really tired for some reason, but not getting that much accomplished. My projects are still only theoretical, I can't say I'm learning anything new, although I have been trying. I've been looking around and reading, trying to get ideas of things to invest on, but really nothing seems that interesting. Maybe that's why people say it's the best time to start your own business: there is nothing else to invest on. But this is not in my plans right now. I just want to do something useful with my time, and not feel like I should be working right now, because work is much more interesting than anything else I have the chance to do.

What makes things worse is that with the small projects I have going on right now at work, it is hard to compete...

Still alive and busy

That's all what my life has been lately: just busy and quite confusing. At the same time that a lot of things are starting to get in control, I have this tendency of getting into these cycles of "useless" creativity in which I have a lot if ideas, but I just can't seem to get any of them out of the ground really. I start on something and then I move to something else and so on. Let me list you some of the projects that I'm working right now:

a) Reviewing a paper I'm coauthoring
b) Building a dirt-protected wireless terminal for following recipes in the kitchen
c) Keeping track of my finances
d) Planning for investment
e) Continuing my research with a couple of analysis I want to make on product extraction from the web
f) Making my printer work under my Mac
g) Going back to the gym (I was sick last week so I had to stay at home - this week I just haven't had time yet)

And this is just a very simplified list that doesn't include any of the projects I'm doing at work.

One thing though that I'm enjoying right now, in the lines of (d), I have downloaded an RSS reader for my palm and now every morning I go, synch my palm and I get all the news to read in the bus! Very convenient and, more importantly, paper-free! I'm getting there, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, where our world is free from this terrible paper thing.

There are a lot of things that are going on in this world. For example, Amazon stocks went down today because we had another quarter of lower revenue. This time it was due to a patent lawsuit that snatched $40 million and greater operation expenses. The company is certainly still growing, getting more and more market share, but the cost is always great. I'm excited with what is coming up in the future (no real secret projects that I know of, though - I don't hang out with these secret project people), but always a little worried as I'm a stock holder.

The other thing that is making a lot of people think is the Google Base: a free database service offered by Google. No, it's not available yet, but there are enough discussion about it already. People think that if Google can pull this off, it will bite a huge market share from eBay and eBay-likes (such as Craig's List), because it would be free and would have the Google seal.

I hope that the project actually works. Not that I want eBay to die, on the contrary! I like eBay, but I think that an open scalable generic database can do so much! Once it's out there, I can play around with some of the infinite ideas that are going through my mind and let you know what happens. I just have to find time... Find time without forcing myself to disappear even more.

Yea!

This came from a CNET blog article: Want to be immortal, check this box. Quite an interesting option you have of killing your best friend and becoming immortal. I chose no.

Back from a tough Yom Kippur

This High Holiday season for me has been quite interesting. Much less introspective than the previous years, but much more nervous. Somehow, somewhere I've gotten a little bit out of sync with things and it is just corroding me from the inside. Not literally yet, though.

Fasting was tough. I think it's been the first time that I join an orthodox service from the beginning to the end. Imagine this: You stop eating at about 5:30 pm. Then you go to services that start at 6:30 and go all the way to 9:30. You go back home, can't turn on or off any lights, so you just try to go to sleep and is only able to get to it at about midnight.

Then you wake up at 6:30, without any alarms, go around the house, read a little, get dressed and go to services that start at 8 am. Stay there (remember, no food since 5:30 pm) and mostly stand until 7:20 pm, when the shofar is sounded and you can happily go back home to have something to eat. It was rush hour, so it took me some time to get home, so I was only able to eat something at about 8 pm.

It was tiring. But these kinds of experiences is what really makes you experience religion as it was supposed to be in the early days. Something that takes you away from your ordinary life and makes you go through disconfort, especially when you are talking about such important religious event as asking for forgiveness for your sins.

Anyway, I'm alive and well. Had too much to eat last night, had a tough headache that is still with me this morning, but I'll live. Now I have to get back to a LONG day I'll have today.

Anonymous people are welcome again

I've decided that the best thing to use against spammers is not blocking anonymous people but to add the basic "write down this distorted word" method that blogger allows you to use. So there it is! Welcome back you that want to remain unknown.

On Intelligence

I just finished listening to my second audiobook ever: "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee. It is quite an interesting book. I can't say that I was impressed by any of the ideas - none of them seem novel to me. The discussed a lot of the things that I was actually looking into 6 years ago when I started the license plate recognition project (that actually didn't work) and then when I was working on my first Ph.D. research topic.

It is difficult to summarize the book in a post, but I'll try without boring you with the details (and focusing on the ideas I found most interesting): The point he tries to make in this book is that the brain works by hierarchical prediction. A set of inputs in any layer of the brain causes it to try and predict the next set of inputs and pass it down the hierarchy. This has two positive results: you know what happens next so you automatically build a model of how the world works - this lets you plan what to do, where to look, etc.; and also helps the lower levels of the brain learn how to represent something in an invariant fashion. If you move a pen and you expect it to write a letter "a" on a paper, your lower level neurons that actually look at the "a" would associate this "a" to the concept "a" independent on where in the page it appeared.

I know it might sound a little confusing if you haven't read/heard the book. He spends about 275 pages or 9 hours or talking to explain these points. You shouldn't expect to understand it all in a paragraph. It's not a romantic novel or movie I'm talking about here. :-)

Alright, time to move on and get some cleaning done.

Disaster season

I'm not sure if it's because I'm paying more attention to them, or I'm looking more at the media that is highlighting them more often, but it's been quite a natural-disaster-full period in the last year. Tsunamis, hurricanes and now the earthquake in mid-to-south Asia. Before and during all this we have Iraq, Afghanistan... Then Israel... But these last ones weren't natural, just due to human stupidity. A disaster anyway.

All this made me think a little about life and what to do in the potentially short period that you have to stay around. I know it's a little morbid, but if I died today, would I be happy with what I've accomplished? All this thinking is boosted by the "great" 8 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The time that you look back to the year that just finished and you try to atone for the things you did wrong, or didn't do right. There were lots of them this year, actually. Starting with my difficulty in sending emails and calling friends. But I won't list them all here, because or else this post will haunt me beyond Yom Kippur.

But one thing I will post here: I'm sorry! The "Michel" people know has changed a little too drasticly. I've closed myself in a cocoon waiting for me "creative and active" period to cease. I wake up with ideas of things to do and if I don't get them done because I spent time blogging, writing email, talking to people on the phone, going out with my girlfriend, etc., I suffer. So I end up just leaving out the things that people won't haunt me face to face for.

One way of solving this problem is to try and organize my life enough to leave time to be "social". Biggest issue with that is that creativity is not something you can schedule.

Anyway, I'll figure something out. I still have until Wednesday to think of something.

Huge and scary

This is both huge and scary: Google and Sun team up. It could mean nothing, because they don't give out that many details, but it could also be a huge change in many things. Sun wasn't doing that great for a long time, and this annoucement didn't change much on anything. Google stocks fell about 2.5% today (but it could have been before the announcement, I'm not sure), Sun stocks are still worth nothing.

But who is currently scratching their heads are the people at Microsoft, of course. It is interesting the huge fear that MS has of Google, fear and near hatred. The hatred is also shared towards Sun. So, naturally, if you are an enemy of my enemy, your are my friend, right?

Let's wait and see. I'm not buying Sun stocks right now, for example... Distributing the Google toolbar with the JRE is just silly. And I'm not buying MS stocks either.

Volunteering

Yes, that's what I did yesterday, my first volunteering event in Seattle! It was quite interesting. We went to the Hillman House, organized by Multifaith Works. It is a house for AIDS/HIV victims. Most of the things I did were gardening work, but I also helped moving furniture around and talking to people.

One of the most interesting talks I had was with one of the residents there that spend his whole day doing penny stock trading. If you don't know what this is, well, I'll tell you that this is what is considered "forbidden" in all "how to win in stocks" books: pretty much the most risky side of the stock market.

Take an example of PTS Inc.. Their stocks currently are worth 0.008. Yes, 8 tenths of a cent. So why would you have a share that cost this little? Because if it goes up 1/10 of a cent it is more than 10% increase! You don't get that in your everyday stocks! However, they tend to be quite volatile. Jumping tenths of a cent up and down, requiring you to be quick and a little lucky to cash on these stocks.

The interesting thing is that it does fuel people's hopes. Most probably they will either end up losing a lot of money, or maybe they will just not make any money and keep themselves busy. The stock market is great at making people busy, because there is so much information you have to absorb to be able to get anywhere in this are...

Alright, time to continue getting some cleaning done here. And I'm getting hungry.

What do I want?

Directions change
The grass on the floor under me
It is getting brown and disappearing
Oh, sun, why did you stay here with me
While everybody else just went away?

The brown grass
As if you could call it grass
Dead and gone, as if it has never been
But there is no one to see it
Just me looking at my own shoes

Where to go? Why to go?
My shoe laces are untied
If I move I'll fall
Or can I just tie them?
Why change? Let it be, it's better

Silence around me
Where am I?
What do I want?

Transfering license tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning on the login requirement for comments

Dear commenters,

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

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

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

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

Out of a concert, back into oblivion

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes blogger makes life harder

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

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

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

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

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

The un-blogger

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

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

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

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

Useful calendar

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

D'ni Holidays

Amazing. That's the only word for it.