Yes, I'm still here in Brazil, but I won't be talking about my experience here yet. Maybe one day I'll be able to summarize it all, although last post was a hint of what it is about.
Anyway, trying to focus here on what I'm going to talk about, an email that I've received of people asking for money. I receive this all the time because of some lists I subscribe to, but this time I felt that the idea behind the group was quite strange (and worked well for the whole set of events around here):
Simchat Tzion: Wedding for Orphans in Eretz Israel
They get money to sponsor poor orphans to get married! This shows how important people think the wedding ceremony itself is. For most people that I know, if you want to get married and you don't have money for a ceremony, you still get married, but without one. The fees to just get somebody to marry you are quite low. The expensive part it the party itself.
However, in this case, they are aiming for the joy of the ceremony itself, hoping that it alone might help those poor people to get enough energy to improve their lives. Interesting concept. And, no, I'm not donating money to this organization. After seeing the stress of organizing a wedding here, I can't see myself promoting such things to other people. It would be just mean.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Article watch from Brazil: "Brazil: Still the Country of the Future"
I read an interesting article at The Wall Street Journal today (although the article is dated about a week ago) entitled "Brazil: Still the Country of the Future".
It was a very negative article about Brazil, actually. Showing that the current government is clueless and it is going to win the elections again this year anyway. At least this government is not really harmful to the other countries in the world, only to Brazil's future.
There is a lot to talk about this article, but I just wanted to quote the last paragraph:
"Such a myopic attitude toward markets, prices and investment illustrates what Brazilian entrepreneurs have come to recognize more broadly: that socialist Lula together with the Brazilian constitution enshrining the nanny state, spells four more years of mediocrity at best. For young, talented minds eager to create, innovate and profit, such a forecast makes even an enchanting city like this one a good place to be from."
Scary, but maybe true.
It was a very negative article about Brazil, actually. Showing that the current government is clueless and it is going to win the elections again this year anyway. At least this government is not really harmful to the other countries in the world, only to Brazil's future.
There is a lot to talk about this article, but I just wanted to quote the last paragraph:
"Such a myopic attitude toward markets, prices and investment illustrates what Brazilian entrepreneurs have come to recognize more broadly: that socialist Lula together with the Brazilian constitution enshrining the nanny state, spells four more years of mediocrity at best. For young, talented minds eager to create, innovate and profit, such a forecast makes even an enchanting city like this one a good place to be from."
Scary, but maybe true.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
You can't execute me, I'm too sick to die
So here I am back, getting myself ready to go to Brazil on Friday. Life has been quite hectic and I have had too little time to devote to blogging. It's tough!
Anyway, I was reading today on The Wall Street Journal (I won't give the link to the article, because it's only open to subscribers) that there are some Brazilian government people trying to fine Google R$7.6 million a month until it gives information about groups of alleged Neo-nazis, pedophiles and other illegal pratices in Brazil.
There are two interesting issues pointed out by this article: the difference in laws in different countries and how can this work in an international environment like the internet; and the weirdness of social networking systems that leave it open about the groups you participate (a issue also raised in the keynote speech by Jon Kleinberg (wikipedia, homepage) at SIGIR'06).
About the first issue, what can you do, as a human rights activist? You are trying to crack down on a group in your coutry, but the data is in a computer in another country that protects the privacy of those people. Technically you really can't do anything except creating something like "the big firewall of China" and not letting people from your country access sites that will hide information that you might want to track and harvest. You are just trying to do the job that your country considered important enough to add to the laws!
This problem is classically equivalent to people storing their money in banks from countries that both don't charge you taxes and keep you privacy, like Switzerland. What have people done about this? Pretty much nothing! They were never able to break those laws, they had to wait and monitor the person until you could find proof by looking at either transactions from banks you can monitor or physical travels and behavior of the alleged criminal. The only problem is that the internet makes crime easier to do and harder to track and this worries lawmakers.
Now onto the second issue: what is the effect of you having your social network open for anybody to see? Be afraid! I know you know that person!
Anyway, I was reading today on The Wall Street Journal (I won't give the link to the article, because it's only open to subscribers) that there are some Brazilian government people trying to fine Google R$7.6 million a month until it gives information about groups of alleged Neo-nazis, pedophiles and other illegal pratices in Brazil.
There are two interesting issues pointed out by this article: the difference in laws in different countries and how can this work in an international environment like the internet; and the weirdness of social networking systems that leave it open about the groups you participate (a issue also raised in the keynote speech by Jon Kleinberg (wikipedia, homepage) at SIGIR'06).
About the first issue, what can you do, as a human rights activist? You are trying to crack down on a group in your coutry, but the data is in a computer in another country that protects the privacy of those people. Technically you really can't do anything except creating something like "the big firewall of China" and not letting people from your country access sites that will hide information that you might want to track and harvest. You are just trying to do the job that your country considered important enough to add to the laws!
This problem is classically equivalent to people storing their money in banks from countries that both don't charge you taxes and keep you privacy, like Switzerland. What have people done about this? Pretty much nothing! They were never able to break those laws, they had to wait and monitor the person until you could find proof by looking at either transactions from banks you can monitor or physical travels and behavior of the alleged criminal. The only problem is that the internet makes crime easier to do and harder to track and this worries lawmakers.
Now onto the second issue: what is the effect of you having your social network open for anybody to see? Be afraid! I know you know that person!
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Starting somewhere: SIGIR 2006
I had to start somewhere or else this blog would be idle forever, so I've decided to start with my impressions of SIGIR 2006. The first one that I've been to. And I suddenly realized how much I should have worked with this group during my Ph.D. There is an interesting overlap with what I was working on, both in problems and solutions. I've actually seen a presentation that contained pretty much 50% of all the basis of my research, just varying the method used (and a little bit the expected results from its use). Of course nobody referenced any of my papers, but that's what happens when you are not in the same research area. There is just too much out there and so people tend to isolated themselves to a specific research group.
And this brings me to one of the most interesting things I've noticed when listening to the talks: SIGIR is a very small community. There were about 700 people in the conference. At least about 10% from Microsoft, about 5% from Google, 5% from Yahoo and some other companies. As of actual researchers, I'm guessing there were about 300.
Aside from that, my observation was on the tight relation between these researchers. There was a core of about 20 labs that basically define SIGIR. They seem to have been there for years, citing each other, collaborating, and defining the state-of-the-art datasets and baseline solutions. Compared to the other conferences I've gone to, this had the largest amount of people either pointing to the people they cite in the audience, or people standing up at the end of the talk and giving their personal experience with the dataset and making constructive suggestions about how they tried to tackle some of the issues observed by the presenters.
This is a very good sign in many cases. It creates a very productive environment; and a comparable environment, where you can draw better conclusions about what you have done (I know I've suffered with that a lot on my research). However, it also causes inbreeding. New ideas and types of solutions are harder to come by, mostly because labs are building large infrastructures for a certain type of system and it's hard to part with it (I've listened to a couple of talks that the presenter had a very hard time explaining what they did in 25 minutes, because it's a temporal slice of results from a system that has been in the works for 10+ years). But also because there is an incentive of creating things that are comparable to what other people created.
In summary, it was a very exciting conference. I still have to follow up with some people that I've met there, send them links to some of my papers so that I can feel that what I've done in the past is not going to the waste of the "paper cloud". We'll see what comes out of it.
I wished I had more time to maybe write reviews of specific papers, but I'll have to leave that for some other lifetime, or parallel dimension.
And this brings me to one of the most interesting things I've noticed when listening to the talks: SIGIR is a very small community. There were about 700 people in the conference. At least about 10% from Microsoft, about 5% from Google, 5% from Yahoo and some other companies. As of actual researchers, I'm guessing there were about 300.
Aside from that, my observation was on the tight relation between these researchers. There was a core of about 20 labs that basically define SIGIR. They seem to have been there for years, citing each other, collaborating, and defining the state-of-the-art datasets and baseline solutions. Compared to the other conferences I've gone to, this had the largest amount of people either pointing to the people they cite in the audience, or people standing up at the end of the talk and giving their personal experience with the dataset and making constructive suggestions about how they tried to tackle some of the issues observed by the presenters.
This is a very good sign in many cases. It creates a very productive environment; and a comparable environment, where you can draw better conclusions about what you have done (I know I've suffered with that a lot on my research). However, it also causes inbreeding. New ideas and types of solutions are harder to come by, mostly because labs are building large infrastructures for a certain type of system and it's hard to part with it (I've listened to a couple of talks that the presenter had a very hard time explaining what they did in 25 minutes, because it's a temporal slice of results from a system that has been in the works for 10+ years). But also because there is an incentive of creating things that are comparable to what other people created.
In summary, it was a very exciting conference. I still have to follow up with some people that I've met there, send them links to some of my papers so that I can feel that what I've done in the past is not going to the waste of the "paper cloud". We'll see what comes out of it.
I wished I had more time to maybe write reviews of specific papers, but I'll have to leave that for some other lifetime, or parallel dimension.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
So many things to say, so little time
Lots of things happened in the last few weeks. Two weeks ago I was in San Diego (and surrounding areas) for the weekend+Monday. Met my sister, a friend I haven't seen since high school and some of my girlfriend's friends (people that she talks about all the time). It was interesting, but I won't get into more details right now as I need to leave to go to work soon.
Then there was a rest-of-the-week of crazy work and weekend of shopping looking for presents to take to Brazil.
Then this week I was SIGIR here in Seattle. Lots of things to talk about the conference! And now I'm back to work and on-call until Wednesday next week. Besides the lack of time, I also don't know how I should structure the things I want to talk about. I've always had some issues about writing technical things in the middle of personal things, so in the end nobody ends up reading anything. I might - I said MIGHT - break this blog into 2 different blogs so that I can keep the personal and technical stuff separate. Let's see how much time I'll have.
Anyway, it's time to move on.
Then there was a rest-of-the-week of crazy work and weekend of shopping looking for presents to take to Brazil.
Then this week I was SIGIR here in Seattle. Lots of things to talk about the conference! And now I'm back to work and on-call until Wednesday next week. Besides the lack of time, I also don't know how I should structure the things I want to talk about. I've always had some issues about writing technical things in the middle of personal things, so in the end nobody ends up reading anything. I might - I said MIGHT - break this blog into 2 different blogs so that I can keep the personal and technical stuff separate. Let's see how much time I'll have.
Anyway, it's time to move on.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
What a president
I know this is something that everybody already knows about, but I have to post this here. It was just hilarious and extremely depressing to read it:
Bush curses Hezbollah on live microphone
I think what makes me depressed is certainly related to my deep dislike for curse words. I rarely use them and when I do I actually feed ashamed of it. I think that people have to develop a richer vocabulary that will easily "prevent" you from employing words that are potentially offensive.
Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm doing still awake. I have been planning on going to sleep it's been almost two hours now. And my bed isn't even made yet (weekend bed sheets washing event). Oh, well, let me go and stop reading the news and replying to emails I haven't replied in more than 6 months. Ashamed I am indeed.
Bush curses Hezbollah on live microphone
I think what makes me depressed is certainly related to my deep dislike for curse words. I rarely use them and when I do I actually feed ashamed of it. I think that people have to develop a richer vocabulary that will easily "prevent" you from employing words that are potentially offensive.
Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm doing still awake. I have been planning on going to sleep it's been almost two hours now. And my bed isn't even made yet (weekend bed sheets washing event). Oh, well, let me go and stop reading the news and replying to emails I haven't replied in more than 6 months. Ashamed I am indeed.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Small things that make my day
Sometimes it's strange how small details in a day can give you that extra energy to keep you moving. After a weekend of not-too-much-fun that actually ended well in a strict sense, I get this message from my best friend in Brazil (sorry, I have to quote him in Portuguese):
"Um grande abraço do seu eterno amigo e agora quase casado e muito feliz,"
What made me happy was not the "eterno amigo" part, but the end of it. They have been going through a very chaotic wedding process. Just for you to get an idea of the chaos, the bride was in the US for training for a whole month less than a month ago. Then she is going again to the US at the end of August and back on the 1st of September. On the 2nd they are getting married!
But he is happy, very happy. His email was a dual sign of being really busy, tired, but very excited and happy. The bad thing about being this far away from friends and family is that you lose track of how they are really doing. Even talking with my parents every week for at least an hour, I can't say I know how they are doing. Lots of things could be going on that I just don't know.
I'll be there at the end on August, so I'll have a better clue (hopefully)!
PS: Alright... Alright... The translation of the message: "A big hug of your eternal friend and now almost married and very happy,"
"Um grande abraço do seu eterno amigo e agora quase casado e muito feliz,"
What made me happy was not the "eterno amigo" part, but the end of it. They have been going through a very chaotic wedding process. Just for you to get an idea of the chaos, the bride was in the US for training for a whole month less than a month ago. Then she is going again to the US at the end of August and back on the 1st of September. On the 2nd they are getting married!
But he is happy, very happy. His email was a dual sign of being really busy, tired, but very excited and happy. The bad thing about being this far away from friends and family is that you lose track of how they are really doing. Even talking with my parents every week for at least an hour, I can't say I know how they are doing. Lots of things could be going on that I just don't know.
I'll be there at the end on August, so I'll have a better clue (hopefully)!
PS: Alright... Alright... The translation of the message: "A big hug of your eternal friend and now almost married and very happy,"
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Tell me what you wish for and I'll tell you who you are
The other day I was trying to find a present for a friend and decided to check if he had an Amazon Wish List. Well, I wasn't able to find his wishlist, but I ended up looking through some very strange ones (like people looking for books on meditation, Kabbalah, Tarot, Puzzles, and classic literature). This made me get diverted into looking at random wishlists and trying to puzzle out who the person is. It was quite entertaining!
I could go on forever, so I'll give you only a few examples (I have to go to work soon). Note, they are not complete wish lists, just a sample of what is there (a little biased). I have put in parentesis my crude classification of the subject:
Subject 1 (tv-watching, card-playing, nerd):
- McAfee AntiSpyware 2006 Version 2.0
- Star Wars The New Essential Chronology (Star Wars Library)
- Hands Free Card Holder (Set/2)
- Wolverine MVP-9060 60 GB Portable Storage and Multimedia Viewer
- Elongated Deluxe Soft Toilet Seat
- Idol Chatter: Best of American Idols, Season 3 (karaoke)
Subject 2 (educated, politically engaged):
- Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature
- Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus
- The Ethics of Identity
- Grey's Anatomy - Season One
- Coupling - The Complete Seasons 1-4
Subject 3 (a person of history):
- Slaughterhouse: The Handbook of the Eastern Front
- Corvette Restoration Guide, 1968-1982 (Motorbooks Workshop)
- Seven (New Line Platinum Series)
- Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe
- Auto Mechanics for the Complete Dummy
- Battle of Britain
I'll give one more strange detail about these 3 subjects: all 3 have the same first and last names!
Anyway, time to go.
I could go on forever, so I'll give you only a few examples (I have to go to work soon). Note, they are not complete wish lists, just a sample of what is there (a little biased). I have put in parentesis my crude classification of the subject:
Subject 1 (tv-watching, card-playing, nerd):
- McAfee AntiSpyware 2006 Version 2.0
- Star Wars The New Essential Chronology (Star Wars Library)
- Hands Free Card Holder (Set/2)
- Wolverine MVP-9060 60 GB Portable Storage and Multimedia Viewer
- Elongated Deluxe Soft Toilet Seat
- Idol Chatter: Best of American Idols, Season 3 (karaoke)
Subject 2 (educated, politically engaged):
- Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature
- Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus
- The Ethics of Identity
- Grey's Anatomy - Season One
- Coupling - The Complete Seasons 1-4
Subject 3 (a person of history):
- Slaughterhouse: The Handbook of the Eastern Front
- Corvette Restoration Guide, 1968-1982 (Motorbooks Workshop)
- Seven (New Line Platinum Series)
- Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe
- Auto Mechanics for the Complete Dummy
- Battle of Britain
I'll give one more strange detail about these 3 subjects: all 3 have the same first and last names!
Anyway, time to go.
Monday, July 10, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
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.
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.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
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.
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.
Friday, June 23, 2006
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.
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.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
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.
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.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
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...
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...
Thursday, June 01, 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
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?
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
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.
Audiophiles Become IPodiophiles
Quite interesting what they are doing with the poor iPod...
Yes, I'll write something more interesting sometime soon.
Friday, May 05, 2006
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).
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.
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.
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