Sorry for not really posting much lately. I have moved to a new house last weekend and I don't have internet until (hopefully) tomorrow.
But this morning, I'm not really sure why I should use computers any more:
- I got to my office computer and it was frozen.
- Then I tried to check my emails and Hotmail just wouldn't allow me to log it (I really don't like Hotmail - if you send me emails through my hotmail account, please switch)
- Tried to log onto my Yahoo account (with the new Beta Mail - amazing interface, if they could just remove some of those changing ads) and got an error message saying I couldn't log in
- Then I did a normal work-related search on Google and got the following results:
"Results 1 - 11 of about 17,400 for prettyprinting jaxb. (0.07 seconds)"
There were 17K results, but only 11 were "unique"??? (and didn't really have the answers for what I was searching)
And it's not even 9 AM yet...
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Starting and putting out fires
Yes, finally I'm being literal on my post titles... I'm writing this as I observe my neighbor (but not my neighbor for much longer) try to put out fire on a cardboard box. He put the box outside his apartment on the walkway and was running in and out of his apartment with a cup of water and dumping it on the fire. Then running back in...
It's not wrong to use water to put out fire on paper. There are two things that are wrong with it. First: why is there a box on fire? Second: a cup of water? Can't you just use a pan, or, if you want to bed fancy, a bucket?
Sure, there right now there is no fire any more. He is still going in and out of his apartment to dump water on the walkway where the box was burning, trying to cover what happened.
What would I do? Usually the easiest way that I know to put out fire is not really using water (especially on small fires), but by starving the fire of air. Get another piece of cardboard and just use it to remove the air from the place on fire. It's easy, safe (again, only for small fires) and doesn't really require you to turn your back to the fire to get more water.
So, am I angry? Disappointed? Afraid that one day this neighbor might cause a fire in the whole apartment complex? Not at all... It was just funny! I felt like watching a badly produced comedy. It was missing the soundtrack in the background. :-)
It's not wrong to use water to put out fire on paper. There are two things that are wrong with it. First: why is there a box on fire? Second: a cup of water? Can't you just use a pan, or, if you want to bed fancy, a bucket?
Sure, there right now there is no fire any more. He is still going in and out of his apartment to dump water on the walkway where the box was burning, trying to cover what happened.
What would I do? Usually the easiest way that I know to put out fire is not really using water (especially on small fires), but by starving the fire of air. Get another piece of cardboard and just use it to remove the air from the place on fire. It's easy, safe (again, only for small fires) and doesn't really require you to turn your back to the fire to get more water.
So, am I angry? Disappointed? Afraid that one day this neighbor might cause a fire in the whole apartment complex? Not at all... It was just funny! I felt like watching a badly produced comedy. It was missing the soundtrack in the background. :-)
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
So much life out there
We are living in a world of change. We plan our lives around change. We challenge and fight sameness. Interestingly, this is something quite new in human civilization. Surely the world always changed, but some time ago, we thought it was good if we found a "career" and just followed it. People would be working in the same company for decades and not really consider themselves sad.
We could ask ourselves many questions: what has changed? How has it changed? Is it actually a good thing for the human society in general? But I prefer the simpler question: why has it changed?
Humans are one of the most adaptive races out there. Our very big and expensive brain allows us to plan and execute very complex tasks that protect us from very adverse and sudden conditions. We are not the fastest or strongest. We don't have the longest lifespan. But we are one of the best survivors.
I think that this change is more of a realignment to our basal sense of adaptation. We were built for it, and not really to be inside a house, with a family and an 8-10 job (all normal jobs are 8-10, right?). So suddenly technology advances allowed us to recover this missing drive for adaptation. It is amazing how powerful it can be to our whole body. Think of the experience of starting a new job, or moving to a new house, to buying a new car...
On the other hand, sometimes the stress of "unplanned" (but potentially forecastable) changes is a little too unhealthy. And that's when changes erode our self, that's when it's always just better to go back to your cocoon and hide there for some time.
We could ask ourselves many questions: what has changed? How has it changed? Is it actually a good thing for the human society in general? But I prefer the simpler question: why has it changed?
Humans are one of the most adaptive races out there. Our very big and expensive brain allows us to plan and execute very complex tasks that protect us from very adverse and sudden conditions. We are not the fastest or strongest. We don't have the longest lifespan. But we are one of the best survivors.
I think that this change is more of a realignment to our basal sense of adaptation. We were built for it, and not really to be inside a house, with a family and an 8-10 job (all normal jobs are 8-10, right?). So suddenly technology advances allowed us to recover this missing drive for adaptation. It is amazing how powerful it can be to our whole body. Think of the experience of starting a new job, or moving to a new house, to buying a new car...
On the other hand, sometimes the stress of "unplanned" (but potentially forecastable) changes is a little too unhealthy. And that's when changes erode our self, that's when it's always just better to go back to your cocoon and hide there for some time.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
New layout
So you might be thinking why I've changed my layout... Well, sometimes it's time to do some moving around. Hope you enjoy it a little.
Being political, but tired
Sometimes you just have to accept some things and try to swallow as much anger as possible. There is nothing to do when somebody is just frustrated at you, because of incompetence of the people around them. At times like this you have two options:
1) Just blame it on them and start a war
2) Swallow the blame and try to work things out
Number 1 generates a war that could have repercussions that is difficult to forecast. Especially when you don't quite know the strength of your enemies. However, number 2 keeps everything on your side of the court. You can't sleep, you just let people slap you around and convince themselves that you can be their scapegoat for all their ailments. Soon enough you will continue receiving angry emails with lots of capital letters and you life will just collapse in unfinished business.
Anyway, that's my disappointment of the day. I'm tired, I have to start thinking about moving (yes, I'm moving to Seattle - no, I don't quite live in Seattle right now, more like Bellevue), I have some very busy and important last couple of days at work, and things don't look like they will get any better anytime soon. Sometimes I wished I could just have a weekend.
At times like this, my usual solution is to just alienate myself from the world and listen to some Steve Reich. It's like listening to noise, but mathematically beautiful musical noise.
By the way, talking about music, I've finished a book that I had on my list of "to read" for some time: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
, by Dan Levitin
Interesting book, if you survive past the first chapter. Dan needs a better editor that will fix all the wrong and missing information on his introduction to music theory. He should have discussed well-tempered instruments. He should not have mentioned that multiplying the frequency of the pitch by 2, 3, 4, etc. causes us to think it's the same pitch (although an octave up). Instead he should have said that it's the factor of 2 that matter (2, 4, 8, etc).
After this painful chapter, the book gets quite intriguing. Nothing really shocking if you have read another very interesting book about brains: On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.
These books make me hope that we are getting somewhere closer to understanding the brain. At least I can say I'm a little closer.
1) Just blame it on them and start a war
2) Swallow the blame and try to work things out
Number 1 generates a war that could have repercussions that is difficult to forecast. Especially when you don't quite know the strength of your enemies. However, number 2 keeps everything on your side of the court. You can't sleep, you just let people slap you around and convince themselves that you can be their scapegoat for all their ailments. Soon enough you will continue receiving angry emails with lots of capital letters and you life will just collapse in unfinished business.
Anyway, that's my disappointment of the day. I'm tired, I have to start thinking about moving (yes, I'm moving to Seattle - no, I don't quite live in Seattle right now, more like Bellevue), I have some very busy and important last couple of days at work, and things don't look like they will get any better anytime soon. Sometimes I wished I could just have a weekend.
At times like this, my usual solution is to just alienate myself from the world and listen to some Steve Reich. It's like listening to noise, but mathematically beautiful musical noise.
By the way, talking about music, I've finished a book that I had on my list of "to read" for some time: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
, by Dan LevitinInteresting book, if you survive past the first chapter. Dan needs a better editor that will fix all the wrong and missing information on his introduction to music theory. He should have discussed well-tempered instruments. He should not have mentioned that multiplying the frequency of the pitch by 2, 3, 4, etc. causes us to think it's the same pitch (although an octave up). Instead he should have said that it's the factor of 2 that matter (2, 4, 8, etc).
After this painful chapter, the book gets quite intriguing. Nothing really shocking if you have read another very interesting book about brains: On Intelligence
, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.These books make me hope that we are getting somewhere closer to understanding the brain. At least I can say I'm a little closer.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
A whole lot of things
Lots of things to say and it's already almost 1:30 AM, so I'll try to just do a brain dump and maybe one day I might go into more details:
- Yom Kippur is over. It wasn't a very easy one, because my sinusitis decided to keep it more interesting. But I've survived the VERY LONG service (like last year, it started at 8:25am and ended at 7:40pm with no breaks and very little sitting time). I really like Yom Kippur, not only because of the concept of starting over, but because people take it seriously. You can see people getting into it. I even saw one thing I've heard about but don't remember having seen until last Monday: during the reader's confession, the cantor started crying... Sobbing... And still tried to go through the whole confession. Very interesting.
- I'm trying to decide if I should stay here or move on to a different place that has less carpet. Moving is a big pain, especially when you have a good amount of furniture; very heavy furniture! I'm trying to decide by this weekend, but I'll see if I'll be able to.
- I've finished Book 10 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Crossroads of Twilight. Robert Jordan likes to write a lot... It's LONG, but there are some exciting things that happen throughout the book. However, the ending was... grrr... It just hooked you to read the next book (Knife of Dreams - a book I already have, but I'm trying to convince myself to move to something else before)
- Real estate in downtown Bellevue is just crazy. Somebody told me that they were playing "count the cranes" last time they visited this area and they've counted 10! Another source told me that they just don't have more simply because there are none left! And prices are also great! Some townhouses that they are building just across the street from where I live were first advertised as "Starting in the 500s". They took that sign out and now it says: "Starting in the 700s"! They have started this in less than 4 months ago and already added a 40% price hike. Wünderbar.
- Gotta love emails... And new management... And reorgs
- The elections in Brazil were quite interesting. Not that I think that there is a chance that Lula will lose, but at least there is some negative feeling about it all. I just hope that this doesn't cause the same clean division of society that happened during the last elections here in the US. Actually, I've even seen a diagram where they divided the states into who had the majority in one candidate or the other (weirdly the colors were also red and blue)! And this doesn't quite make that much sense for Brazil, because votes are aggregated federally, and not by state.
- If things happen the way I fear they might happen, I fear I can't fear enough.
Ok. I should give up on trying to dump thoughts and go to bed. Long day ahead!
- Yom Kippur is over. It wasn't a very easy one, because my sinusitis decided to keep it more interesting. But I've survived the VERY LONG service (like last year, it started at 8:25am and ended at 7:40pm with no breaks and very little sitting time). I really like Yom Kippur, not only because of the concept of starting over, but because people take it seriously. You can see people getting into it. I even saw one thing I've heard about but don't remember having seen until last Monday: during the reader's confession, the cantor started crying... Sobbing... And still tried to go through the whole confession. Very interesting.
- I'm trying to decide if I should stay here or move on to a different place that has less carpet. Moving is a big pain, especially when you have a good amount of furniture; very heavy furniture! I'm trying to decide by this weekend, but I'll see if I'll be able to.
- I've finished Book 10 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Crossroads of Twilight. Robert Jordan likes to write a lot... It's LONG, but there are some exciting things that happen throughout the book. However, the ending was... grrr... It just hooked you to read the next book (Knife of Dreams - a book I already have, but I'm trying to convince myself to move to something else before)
- Real estate in downtown Bellevue is just crazy. Somebody told me that they were playing "count the cranes" last time they visited this area and they've counted 10! Another source told me that they just don't have more simply because there are none left! And prices are also great! Some townhouses that they are building just across the street from where I live were first advertised as "Starting in the 500s". They took that sign out and now it says: "Starting in the 700s"! They have started this in less than 4 months ago and already added a 40% price hike. Wünderbar.
- Gotta love emails... And new management... And reorgs
- The elections in Brazil were quite interesting. Not that I think that there is a chance that Lula will lose, but at least there is some negative feeling about it all. I just hope that this doesn't cause the same clean division of society that happened during the last elections here in the US. Actually, I've even seen a diagram where they divided the states into who had the majority in one candidate or the other (weirdly the colors were also red and blue)! And this doesn't quite make that much sense for Brazil, because votes are aggregated federally, and not by state.
- If things happen the way I fear they might happen, I fear I can't fear enough.
Ok. I should give up on trying to dump thoughts and go to bed. Long day ahead!
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Talk about frustrations
So here are my frustrations for the day (in no particular order):
1) Character encoding, especially in PHP. Let's say that I basically had for some reason I don't quite remember (and hopefully won't bite me in the near future), some piece that did an encode(x,"UTF-8") ... then another piece that did a decode(y,"UTF-8) ... so you would expect that everything will go back to the way it was, right? Of course not! Everything except some characters, like long dashes worked fine. Others simply became "?"!
And character encoding always is painful on text documents, for example. The problem is that you never know what the encoding is and will be. For example, I had a document in UTF-8 and then I pasted some text from word. Suddenly my document had characters in UTF-8 and other characters in ISO-8859-1. A huge mess to fix it (because I also don't know any easy programs that just change the encoding).
In the Javaserver Faces world, the same thing is happening. At work we've tried to start working on some Japanese things on an interface that was supposed to be all UTF-8 and suddenly all our Japanese characters became HTML-escaped (&#xxxx) and would appear all garbled on text boxes! Yes, it just gets worse if you tag XML escaping or HTML escaping to it. There is something really wrong about all this, but I won't really spend my time thinking on it. I have more frustrations for the day.
2) Private communications becoming public. So, first it started with choir things. I've sent a message to a selected set of people about why I was not going to join the choir this year. One of these people replied to the message with a "life advice" type of email and decided that other people might benefit from reading it. However, it also meant that other people suddenly received my "private" email.
Now today it happened again. I've sent a very short and semi-out-of-context email to some people about a product they wanted me to have a look and analyze and suddenly I receive back an email from the Customer Rep from the company that works with the product replying to what I've said about their product.
3) Seattle residents and this weather fear... Some weeks ago, just after I came back from Brazil, the weather wasn't very good. Raining and a little cold. So everybody was in this gloom state saying "oh... Summer is over... We will only see rain from now on". However, last weekend everything changed and we are having really dry sunny days, in the 70s and even it supposed to get to the 80s today and what are people saying? "Oh... This is not going to last... Next week it is going to start raining and the summer will be over... We will only see rain from then on."
I should send an email to somebody like Paul Allen to stop investing on his "Brain Atlas" and invest on a group therapy for everybody here to stop fearing and being so negative about the weather. Weather is Seattle is great! Not perfect, but FAR from anything to be negative about.
1) Character encoding, especially in PHP. Let's say that I basically had for some reason I don't quite remember (and hopefully won't bite me in the near future), some piece that did an encode(x,"UTF-8") ... then another piece that did a decode(y,"UTF-8) ... so you would expect that everything will go back to the way it was, right? Of course not! Everything except some characters, like long dashes worked fine. Others simply became "?"!
And character encoding always is painful on text documents, for example. The problem is that you never know what the encoding is and will be. For example, I had a document in UTF-8 and then I pasted some text from word. Suddenly my document had characters in UTF-8 and other characters in ISO-8859-1. A huge mess to fix it (because I also don't know any easy programs that just change the encoding).
In the Javaserver Faces world, the same thing is happening. At work we've tried to start working on some Japanese things on an interface that was supposed to be all UTF-8 and suddenly all our Japanese characters became HTML-escaped (&#xxxx) and would appear all garbled on text boxes! Yes, it just gets worse if you tag XML escaping or HTML escaping to it. There is something really wrong about all this, but I won't really spend my time thinking on it. I have more frustrations for the day.
2) Private communications becoming public. So, first it started with choir things. I've sent a message to a selected set of people about why I was not going to join the choir this year. One of these people replied to the message with a "life advice" type of email and decided that other people might benefit from reading it. However, it also meant that other people suddenly received my "private" email.
Now today it happened again. I've sent a very short and semi-out-of-context email to some people about a product they wanted me to have a look and analyze and suddenly I receive back an email from the Customer Rep from the company that works with the product replying to what I've said about their product.
3) Seattle residents and this weather fear... Some weeks ago, just after I came back from Brazil, the weather wasn't very good. Raining and a little cold. So everybody was in this gloom state saying "oh... Summer is over... We will only see rain from now on". However, last weekend everything changed and we are having really dry sunny days, in the 70s and even it supposed to get to the 80s today and what are people saying? "Oh... This is not going to last... Next week it is going to start raining and the summer will be over... We will only see rain from then on."
I should send an email to somebody like Paul Allen to stop investing on his "Brain Atlas" and invest on a group therapy for everybody here to stop fearing and being so negative about the weather. Weather is Seattle is great! Not perfect, but FAR from anything to be negative about.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Getting deeper
Some things just don't want to die. Most of them are things that I knew that they wouldn't die when I first said "yes" to them.
One of them is the great email system for B'nai B'rith Brasil. So it looks like it still has some issues, but might go finally online for the first time tomorrow. Still using my server to send out emails. It looks like their server is not very happy about being used to send mass quantities of emails. Anyway, what it all meant is that I still have to do PHP programming in my near future.
The next thing that doesn't really die is my wish to sing in a choir. However, I did miss the opportunity this year (meaning until next September) because I didn't act quickly enough to participate on any auditions. Surely the fact that I was in Brazil when most of them were taking place was a part of the reason. The other reason is that my bad experience with my previous choir kind of turned me off a little.
It's not that I didn't like singing there. Not at all! They are a great group of people, with a very detail-oriented conductor (something that I have been known to always look for in a conductor). However, there were two main issues: (1) I felt a little too young in that choir. It was a little hard to relate to people that are in yet another walk of life. (2) The publicity work having to deal with people that had very little time to devote to it having little time myself was just killing my perfectionist side and making me depressed.
So now I have to find a new way to get my mind off work (as if this is possible right now). Maybe I'll finally finish my recipe reader. I just have to do some electronics work rereuting the touch screen to use the laptop battery. My issue right now is that I just don't have the equipment to do electronics work (yes, I'm an electrical engineer, I know...). And I was just postponing spending money.
Ok, it's getting late and I'm really getting tired. It's been a common theme lately. Not a good sign thinking that next Monday is Yom Kippur: the time that I get to the synagogue at 8:30 am and only leave at 7:30 pm to finally go and eat and drink something. This is tiring!
One of them is the great email system for B'nai B'rith Brasil. So it looks like it still has some issues, but might go finally online for the first time tomorrow. Still using my server to send out emails. It looks like their server is not very happy about being used to send mass quantities of emails. Anyway, what it all meant is that I still have to do PHP programming in my near future.
The next thing that doesn't really die is my wish to sing in a choir. However, I did miss the opportunity this year (meaning until next September) because I didn't act quickly enough to participate on any auditions. Surely the fact that I was in Brazil when most of them were taking place was a part of the reason. The other reason is that my bad experience with my previous choir kind of turned me off a little.
It's not that I didn't like singing there. Not at all! They are a great group of people, with a very detail-oriented conductor (something that I have been known to always look for in a conductor). However, there were two main issues: (1) I felt a little too young in that choir. It was a little hard to relate to people that are in yet another walk of life. (2) The publicity work having to deal with people that had very little time to devote to it having little time myself was just killing my perfectionist side and making me depressed.
So now I have to find a new way to get my mind off work (as if this is possible right now). Maybe I'll finally finish my recipe reader. I just have to do some electronics work rereuting the touch screen to use the laptop battery. My issue right now is that I just don't have the equipment to do electronics work (yes, I'm an electrical engineer, I know...). And I was just postponing spending money.
Ok, it's getting late and I'm really getting tired. It's been a common theme lately. Not a good sign thinking that next Monday is Yom Kippur: the time that I get to the synagogue at 8:30 am and only leave at 7:30 pm to finally go and eat and drink something. This is tiring!
Friday, September 22, 2006
The last day of the year
Today is the last day of the year, and I'm still far behind on the things I had planned to do this year. It's kind of distressing how fast this year went by and how much changed, without really things changing much. Anyway, I'll at least still get around to sending all the "Shana Tovah" messages to people that are expecting to receive them this weekend. So, if you haven't received yours yet, just wait a little longer.
Shana Tovah to everybody! Let 5767 be a good year all of us. A year of change, but maybe this time with things actually changing.
Shana Tovah to everybody! Let 5767 be a good year all of us. A year of change, but maybe this time with things actually changing.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
A day of random thoughts
Today was one of those days that was difficult to concentrate on one thing. But instead of just getting confused I guess my brain decided to go wild and just spew crazy ideas everywhere. No, nothing really useful, but some interesting flashbacks. Here are some examples:
1) The food that brings me the most memories (not in quality, though) is fried eggs (sunny side up, if you want details). Why the memories? Well, I did eat it a lot my whole life, it was my father's "dish to cook", and it was a great way to gross out Stacy.
2) The food that brings me the best memories? That's tough, but today I will have to say "chocolate cake with catchup". No, I've never had it... And I'm funnier than Fernando's fingertip, or something like that.
3) This is not really a thought, just a link: Web 2.0 Winners and Losers. It is interesting to see that Friendster is there as a loser simply because they weren't able to scale exponentially like their client base and everybody escaped to MySpace (although that's another loser). However, Orkut had also very big problems with scalability and still survived. Surely it has mostly only those crazy Brazilians that have this tendency of being very accepting of errors, but it was ridiculous how many times I got the message "No donut for you"
I was actually impressed that I've heard of all the sites and accessed most of them before reading the article. Maybe I'm more mainstream than I have thought.
4) The Jewish High Holidays start soon. Soon I'll become that silly thoughtful person that keeps apologizing to people for simple things. Good that most of the High Holidays are during the weekend this year!
Alright. Time to get ready to go to sleep. I finally went to the gym today, do you believe in that? It's probably been about 2 months that I haven't set foot on that place, and before that another month or so! And things were still the same. The people seemed different, though.
1) The food that brings me the most memories (not in quality, though) is fried eggs (sunny side up, if you want details). Why the memories? Well, I did eat it a lot my whole life, it was my father's "dish to cook", and it was a great way to gross out Stacy.
2) The food that brings me the best memories? That's tough, but today I will have to say "chocolate cake with catchup". No, I've never had it... And I'm funnier than Fernando's fingertip, or something like that.
3) This is not really a thought, just a link: Web 2.0 Winners and Losers. It is interesting to see that Friendster is there as a loser simply because they weren't able to scale exponentially like their client base and everybody escaped to MySpace (although that's another loser). However, Orkut had also very big problems with scalability and still survived. Surely it has mostly only those crazy Brazilians that have this tendency of being very accepting of errors, but it was ridiculous how many times I got the message "No donut for you"
I was actually impressed that I've heard of all the sites and accessed most of them before reading the article. Maybe I'm more mainstream than I have thought.
4) The Jewish High Holidays start soon. Soon I'll become that silly thoughtful person that keeps apologizing to people for simple things. Good that most of the High Holidays are during the weekend this year!
Alright. Time to get ready to go to sleep. I finally went to the gym today, do you believe in that? It's probably been about 2 months that I haven't set foot on that place, and before that another month or so! And things were still the same. The people seemed different, though.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Back to Seattle
I know I've been here since last Tuesday afternoon, but today is the first day that I can really say that I'm enjoying being back. I've imported an annoying cold from Brazil (probably the same one that first went through my sisters, then my mother) that even made me get out of work earlier on Thursday. But I feel much better now!
So, what is going on here? Well, not that much, I guess. This trip was actually longer than usual and I did spend some time confused about where I was (probably allied to my sickness). I still have dreams about being in Brazil going to weddings! But it was a great time!
This weekend has been focused on helping Amy move in and cleaning (besides making sure I don't do too much as I'm not yet 100%). I've found out that I've gained about 3 lbs (1.5 kg) on my trip to Brazil, so I have to plan on getting healthier again.
I guess that's it. Time to start thinking about dinner. Oh, today I finally remembered to have a look at GameTap and was shocked by their game selection. There were too many "weird" ones to write here, but I'll give you a short list from memory (yes, I'm talking about my memory, i.e., if I can get 5 I'll be amazed):
- Pitfall (yes the old Atari one)
- Planetfall (probably you've never heard of it, but I've spent MANY days trying to solve it on my 8086 days)
- Ultima I-V (if I'm not mistaken - a classic)
- Shinobi (another game I was addicted to some time ago)
- Golden Axe
Alright, enough about picking my memory. Dinner thinking time.
So, what is going on here? Well, not that much, I guess. This trip was actually longer than usual and I did spend some time confused about where I was (probably allied to my sickness). I still have dreams about being in Brazil going to weddings! But it was a great time!
This weekend has been focused on helping Amy move in and cleaning (besides making sure I don't do too much as I'm not yet 100%). I've found out that I've gained about 3 lbs (1.5 kg) on my trip to Brazil, so I have to plan on getting healthier again.
I guess that's it. Time to start thinking about dinner. Oh, today I finally remembered to have a look at GameTap and was shocked by their game selection. There were too many "weird" ones to write here, but I'll give you a short list from memory (yes, I'm talking about my memory, i.e., if I can get 5 I'll be amazed):
- Pitfall (yes the old Atari one)
- Planetfall (probably you've never heard of it, but I've spent MANY days trying to solve it on my 8086 days)
- Ultima I-V (if I'm not mistaken - a classic)
- Shinobi (another game I was addicted to some time ago)
- Golden Axe
Alright, enough about picking my memory. Dinner thinking time.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Splogs, where the money spills
So, I've read the now-popular Wired article:
Spam + Blogs = Trouble
and was shocked by one single number: "Between August and October of 2005, they made at least $71,136.89." Every time people discuss revenue from ads on the web I am taken aback. Maybe it's just that I'm not an ad-clicker, but where does this money come from? Why would you go to a website that only has gibberish and click on the ads on that page? I wouldn't, but it looks like $23+K worth of people do that every month only for these splogs from these BYU guys. Maybe not only on clicks, but also on impressions, but you have to have A LOT of trafic to make money out of ad impressions.
So, where is this money coming from? How can they maintain such a leak of excess money to bogus people? Only Google knows...
Spam + Blogs = Trouble
and was shocked by one single number: "Between August and October of 2005, they made at least $71,136.89." Every time people discuss revenue from ads on the web I am taken aback. Maybe it's just that I'm not an ad-clicker, but where does this money come from? Why would you go to a website that only has gibberish and click on the ads on that page? I wouldn't, but it looks like $23+K worth of people do that every month only for these splogs from these BYU guys. Maybe not only on clicks, but also on impressions, but you have to have A LOT of trafic to make money out of ad impressions.
So, where is this money coming from? How can they maintain such a leak of excess money to bogus people? Only Google knows...
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Part 2: the dog down the tube
Just to tell one more story, so I've mentioned that on Sunday I went to the farm. On this trip, we took my sister's dog, a very small furry dog. She loves running around in the grass there and barking at the other dogs (much bigger than her, but well restrained). Also she runs away from you in an amazing speed evey time you try to catch her.
Well, my father, about 15 minutes before we had to leave, decided to try to catch her. She ran really fast, turned and banged her head on the side of a water drainage tube. Suddenly she disappeared! I don't know for what reason, but she suddenly decided to enter this tube!
Luckily it was the exit of the water drainage system, so the tube only went up. Also it was quite big, not enough to fit a person, but enough for her not to get stuck there. But I think she got scared and just froze in the middle of this tube, about 10 meters (~30 feet) from the entrance. She just wouldn't leave, even calling her name, offering food, anything. After about 20 minutes of calling her, we've decided to start dumping water on the other side of the tube hoping that the water going down would scare her enough to make her get out.
10 more minutes passed of us throwing water down the tube and she finally left, all dirty and wet! It took us another 20 minutes to clean and dry her enough so that she could enter the car. Result: my parents were very late to an event they were going to attend and had to call and tell people that they weren't going to make it. I was a little late to a dinner with some friends. But the dog is alright.
What a trip! But I took a lot of pictures. Not of the dog in the tube, because I didn't want to scare her even more, but of interesting fruit trees, birds, and other animals. It was fun. I'm labeling the pictures right now and will eventually post a link to them here.
Well, my father, about 15 minutes before we had to leave, decided to try to catch her. She ran really fast, turned and banged her head on the side of a water drainage tube. Suddenly she disappeared! I don't know for what reason, but she suddenly decided to enter this tube!
Luckily it was the exit of the water drainage system, so the tube only went up. Also it was quite big, not enough to fit a person, but enough for her not to get stuck there. But I think she got scared and just froze in the middle of this tube, about 10 meters (~30 feet) from the entrance. She just wouldn't leave, even calling her name, offering food, anything. After about 20 minutes of calling her, we've decided to start dumping water on the other side of the tube hoping that the water going down would scare her enough to make her get out.
10 more minutes passed of us throwing water down the tube and she finally left, all dirty and wet! It took us another 20 minutes to clean and dry her enough so that she could enter the car. Result: my parents were very late to an event they were going to attend and had to call and tell people that they weren't going to make it. I was a little late to a dinner with some friends. But the dog is alright.
What a trip! But I took a lot of pictures. Not of the dog in the tube, because I didn't want to scare her even more, but of interesting fruit trees, birds, and other animals. It was fun. I'm labeling the pictures right now and will eventually post a link to them here.
Yes, I am alive - Part 1: the day of the weddings
So, I'm back after some time without writing much. I've been pretty busy here in Brazil. I'm not completely sure I won't be more tired when I get back than I was when I got here, but we'll see... For you to have an idea of how tiring it's been, I'll give you the example of Saturday, the day I had two weddings.
Well, but I can't start it, without mentioning that on Friday evening I got a message from one of my best friends, another best man of the Saturday evening wedding, saying that they were going out on a bachelor party. So there I went... We got to his place at 11pm, he wasn't ready yet... We left at about 11:30 pm and... well, I can't really tell you what we did. What happened that evening will stay between the people that were involved in the evening. The only thing I'll mention is that I arrived back home at about 4 am and then went to bed.
At 8:30 I woke up to get ready for my sister's civil wedding. It was an interesting wedding with about 25 people. I was one of the witnesses (out of 5), so I had to do something besides just staying there (I had to sign my name once). It was a quick event and then we went back to my grandmother's place for lunch. Very good food!
I arrived back home at about 4pm. 6:15 I'd have to leave to go to the other wedding, so there I went to change into the best men's clothes and wait (my younger sister's boyfriend was taking me there and I was first told that we were going to his place so that he would change before going to the wedding, but then my sister decided that she wasn't feeling very well and was not going - both my sisters have a cold right now). At about 6:15pm I went to the wedding.
It was a wonderful wedding, but I won't get into the details. Lots of fun, dancing, talking, enjoying seeing my friends and their families very happy. Also I was able to meet some old friends and to see people from their families that I've met last about 8 years ago. Some were VERY difficult to recognize, especially the younger ones (that are not that young any more).
But the result of it is that we've left at 5am and I got home at about 5:15am. Went to sleep, but at 10am I was up again to go with my parents to the farm. Not a lot of sleep again. I went to sleep at about 3 am and woke up again at 9 the next day (a lot of sleep comparatively). Went to sleep at about 2 am this morning and, for some reason I don't quite understand, I woke up at 6:30.
Oh, well... What else can happen? Wedding tomorrow and then traveling to Rio early afternoon on Thursday? Nah...
Well, but I can't start it, without mentioning that on Friday evening I got a message from one of my best friends, another best man of the Saturday evening wedding, saying that they were going out on a bachelor party. So there I went... We got to his place at 11pm, he wasn't ready yet... We left at about 11:30 pm and... well, I can't really tell you what we did. What happened that evening will stay between the people that were involved in the evening. The only thing I'll mention is that I arrived back home at about 4 am and then went to bed.
At 8:30 I woke up to get ready for my sister's civil wedding. It was an interesting wedding with about 25 people. I was one of the witnesses (out of 5), so I had to do something besides just staying there (I had to sign my name once). It was a quick event and then we went back to my grandmother's place for lunch. Very good food!
I arrived back home at about 4pm. 6:15 I'd have to leave to go to the other wedding, so there I went to change into the best men's clothes and wait (my younger sister's boyfriend was taking me there and I was first told that we were going to his place so that he would change before going to the wedding, but then my sister decided that she wasn't feeling very well and was not going - both my sisters have a cold right now). At about 6:15pm I went to the wedding.
It was a wonderful wedding, but I won't get into the details. Lots of fun, dancing, talking, enjoying seeing my friends and their families very happy. Also I was able to meet some old friends and to see people from their families that I've met last about 8 years ago. Some were VERY difficult to recognize, especially the younger ones (that are not that young any more).
But the result of it is that we've left at 5am and I got home at about 5:15am. Went to sleep, but at 10am I was up again to go with my parents to the farm. Not a lot of sleep again. I went to sleep at about 3 am and woke up again at 9 the next day (a lot of sleep comparatively). Went to sleep at about 2 am this morning and, for some reason I don't quite understand, I woke up at 6:30.
Oh, well... What else can happen? Wedding tomorrow and then traveling to Rio early afternoon on Thursday? Nah...
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Weird NGO
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.
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.
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.
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