Bleargh

On multinational marriages

2011-03-24T14:20:00.003Z

My significant other and I are of different nationalities, and a while ago we made the decision to tie the knot. It has been quite complicated to make many aspects of our relationship work given that our situation has usually consisted of us being foreigners in a third country. With me being Brazilian and my fiancée being Mexican, we thought marrying in one of our countries would be nice. Our plan for the Spring/Fall (in the southern hemisphere, where I'm from, seasons are in reverse) was for us to go to Brazil, where I expected to take a vacation, and get married there. It turns out, marrying in Latin countries is an exercise in patience with inane bureaucracy. In Brazil, you need to bring birth certificates and official statements that you are not married (like these documents are not easily forged). The stupidity of this is illustrated in the flowchart below:

If you are a foreigner, you need to "legalize" these documents in the main Brazilian consulate of your country of origin, so if you are not there when you decide to marry out of your own country, as must be the case for at least one participant in the process, good luck getting back to the old bureaucracy. Now it gets even more interesting, because in Mexico, prior to bringing these documents to the consulate, they require you to validate them in no less than three Mexican public offices, in two different cities. This is the pinnacle of stupidity. Just so you can appreciate the scale of the problem (locally), I illustrate a map of Mexico connecting the two states in question. You can see that they are fairly close, as far as Mexico is laid out, and yet, obtaining the documents and the rubber stamps to just get started, one is expected to travel more than one thousand kilometers, twice!

On the other hand, in the United States, the couple needs to come to the county building wielding passports, and swear that they are not drunk, closely related, and not currently married elsewhere. God bless America!
As I get more irritated with this situation, I might update this post with more diagrams.

Dirty Country

2011-03-09T02:30:00.022Z

I know it has been a while been a while since I last posted, given my current search for permanent faculty positions and drive to publish as much as humanly possible, I have not had a lot of time to write decently here. Nevertheless, today I felt inspired by a incredibly funny documentary about an American country singer that writes dirty songs. This guy is very good to take somebody out of the blues. Meet, Larry Pierce:

His exploits are chronicled in the documentary Dirty Country, the trailer is embedded below:

Netflix (correctly may I add) guessed that after watching the Winnebago Man documentary. That is another documentary I highly recommend.

This series of movies, believe me or not, is what makes me still believe in the future potential of America and Americans. If more people like the ones in these movies took an interest in steering this country, without the religious zealotry and the microcephalic politicking, they might have a shot at seeing the end of the 21st century as they were in the 40s.

My first official symposium

2010-11-16T05:28:00.008Z

The remainder of last week and one day of the weekend, I went to DC once again. This time, however, I went there to chair the first event organized primarily by myself and my colleague Jean. Although the whole affair was quite stressful up until this point, I do not think that main burden was the volume of work, but rather, the fact that I must have been on top of all the deadlines, get people to submit papers, get the program committee to review them, and then find and secure enough attendants both in terms of invited speakers and paper authors.

In this particular event, I also had to be on top of my game, as it was the one in which I proposed to my beloved Ana.

Intrepid NYC

2010-10-21T21:54:00.002Z

The final major destination that my brother and I decided to take was New York City. I have to confess that I am not as impressed by New York as I was with London. Naturally, my own preference for the British is probably going to place me in potential trouble in this country, but what the hell, NYC is a dirtier and less organized version of London. My digressive rants aside, the last time I went to New York did not allow me time to really plan and go to the places I thought would be cool, so this time, my brother and I managed to plan some really cool places to visit. One of the main ones was the USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier turned museum (since this is all carriers are condemned to be)

From USS Intrepid

The other interesting place we went was atop the Empire State Building, and I have to say that NYC looks a lot better at night and from a high altitude. We stayed with a friend of my brother's and my experience with NYC this time was a lot more interesting, since I managed to hook up with my project mates from CUNY, as well as visit the city with a lot more time.

From

Meeting Old Friends in DC

2010-10-19T21:45:00.005Z

My incursion to DC meant not only visiting old places like the White House, but also meeting friends that I have not met in over ten years. It does make me feel a little older, but at least it is nice to see that there is people that also shared my past in this country.

From White House

So, although I am not religiously inclined, I managed to find Viviane, a girl with whom my brother and I went to first communion with. At least one may say that the Catholic church serves not only to create scandals, but to connect people.

From White House

Washington DC

2010-10-18T21:25:00.000Z

After working hard for most of the year, my brother's visit to the United States provided me with an excuse to do some tourism within the country. After he was done visiting Pittsburgh, we headed to the nation's capital Washington DC. My personal goal in DC was to visit the main Smithsonian museums along the National Mall.

From Washington DC

On our first night in DC, however, we decided to take some night shots from the Capitol building. As this is the American counterpart of our own public whorehouse, I felt it deserved the night rather than the daylight like I did more than five years ago. To be honest, my own personal architectural appetite is more for the neoclassic than for the modernist, so I did not feel the need to mock the building as I have done back in Brazil, even though the level of shenanigans is about the same in both buildings (though thanks to Brazil's smaller profile and military, the tropical corruption has not killed millions of people, yet).

From National History Museum

The next day we dedicated entirely to museums, and though Ana did not want to follow us into the nerdvana of the Air and Space Museum, we thoroughly enjoyed seeing the best that the American technocracy of the 60s has brought about. It is indeed sad that the country that focused the technology to take a man to the moon is now subconsidering engineers so much. Of course, it was not the Americans who really invented the technology, since everything was based on research conducted by (and mostly implemented by) Germans plundered after the war (whose Nazi connections were providentially forgotten).

From Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival

2010-09-27T07:20:00.030Z

In a break from my recent intense work schedule I managed to visit the Renaissance Festival that has been organized in the Pittsburgh area. Organizing this outing was a gauntlet in itself, since it seems everybody wanted to go but nobody could agree on a date. In the end, only two people besides me and Ana ended up going (from a crowd of more than 10). In any event, I thought it would be interesting to see how an american version of this kind of event would look like, since I have attended a pretty elaborate one in my last days back in England.

From Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival

My feeling was that the american version was interesting and fun, but the feeling of artificiality was very hard to miss. Although some of the events in the Pittsburgh renaissance festival were genuinely fun like the fire eater (video below), and the wenches were really hilarious (image above), the actual renaissance/medieval activity was quite obviously staged. That was in stark contrast to the Joust I saw in London last year. For starters we had Fabio as the "King's Champion", followed by people jumping out of horses when struck by a lance that did not even splinter.

London, London

2010-09-23T02:50:00.000Z

From Back to London

After more than a year away, London has called me back. In fact, what called me to London was a conference, which I was more than glad to attend given how much I miss the greatest city in the world. I have missed not only the people and the sights of London, but also the smaller things, like my favourite shops and supermarkets, good tea and my beloved museums.
How sad is it that I now watch from Waterloo Bridge, with foreboding longing to be back to this city, the gleaming statue atop St Pauls, the dull colours of the British Parliament and its clock tower. Today is a perfect day to look at the sights provided by this bridge, as the often elusive sun shines on the water of the Thames and I watch and follow the bustle of people walking down Waterloo bridge.

From Back to London

Best Shill Review for a Book Ever

2010-09-16T08:34:00.002Z

While reading a book review that turned out to be total astroturfing I quickly followed other reviews of this book and found this masterpiece of irony:

Super Principia Mathematica was better than my wedding, better than watching my first son born, better than the time I had sexual intercourse with an entire college cheerleading squad while high on peyote.

Three Dee Wee

2010-09-06T21:47:00.001Z

With the relatively recent invasion of 3D video, gimmicky additions to silly videos have abounded. Even Youtube seems to have surrendered to it, giving one all sorts of options as to how you can watch a 3D video. And so I have tried, since I have recently got a pair of those glasses for free after visiting the Coca Cola Museum in Atlanta. As an aside about that museum, what a lame sample of Brazilian soft drinks in their museum. I mean, Iced Tea?! That is most definitely not the most Brazilian of drinks. Guaraná would have been a lot more Brazilian, but they chose to put is as a Paraguayan soft drink (which tastes exactly like the differently-named Coca-Cola branded guaraná they sell in Brazil, i.e. like crap).

From Atlanta

Of course, anything that is given for free must have some kind of limitation. And it turns out that the glasses they give at the Coke museum are of the cinema type, fancy, yet useless to watch the 3D from Youtube. And watching David Mitchell's podcast (or Youtube video) required me to have the less fancy ones. I might have to make my own glasses, crappy as they may turn out to be.

ACM Membership prices

2010-09-01T13:18:00.000Z

The time has approached for me to renew my ACM Membership, and you can imagine my surprise to see my fees double from one year to the next. So I decided to send them an email to let them know of my discontent

Dear Sir/Madam,

I was checking out the amount due to be paid for the renewal of my ACM membership and could not fail to notice that the price has *doubled* from what I paid last year. Although I do not question the value of an ACM membership, I think that ACM needs to provide some honest explanation as to why this extreme price hike, as I seriously doubt that ACM operational costs have doubled. Ever since I joined ACM for the first time 8 years ago I never considered not renewing my membership but I am now sadly inclined not to renew my membership. I understand that the final cost of my membership last year might have been slightly reduced due to my time as a member, but this discount (and absence thereof) is no justification for the prices applied this year, moreover if you have applied discount to old members, then you have created this expectation for me and I would like this to continue.

The issue of cost is now more relevant than ever, with universities cutting budgets, salaries and funding, and top conferences charging ever more exorbitant registration prices (and ACM membership no longer providing discounts to registration as it did when I joined in 2003). In particular, I find it outrageous that the online library is an optional item that costs the same as membership itself when this is one of the main reasons I am a member of the ACM, while the print version of CACM is obligatory (I would like to have the option of not having printed versions of the magazine for a discount).

I'm not sure what this pricing strategy intends to accomplish, but by doubling your prices ACM might get half the membership renewals and break even.

Regards,

Felipe Meneguzzi

Now, I did not expect a useful reply (they probably do not give a damn about their members with these prices). However what I got defies belief, the ACM person rudely sent me my previous invoices and said I was getting discounts for living in a developing country (apparently they consider Britain that?) with a big implied "screw you". She also politely offered me not to send the Communications of the ACM printed magazine, but without affecting price. Now I have always doubted ACM's true utility, since I pay for it and get nothing in return (it is primarily an American lobby group, I'm told), this just confirms my feeling.

Living with someone

2010-08-04T13:19:00.012Z

After having lived three years apart, my girlfriend is finally coming to live with me. It has not been easy to make this distance relationship work, but now it is the time to see if we can live together and not kill each other. I know I am quite a quirky fellow, so having to share my place (and bedroom) with somebody again might be quite a challenge.

From Pittsburgh and the Cathedral of Learning

Manhattan

2010-07-21T18:11:00.024Z

From Times Square

Last weekend I went to Manhattan with my friends from CMU, and although it was insanely hot in New York (even more so than in Pittsburgh), we got to see a lot of the Big Apple at the street level. I have to confess the the accommodation during my trip was something I have not experienced in a while, namely sleeping in couches/futons in friends places (who kindly ceded their space for us to go), interestingly enough, I slept in a couch that I only found out was convertible to a bed a few days later. It was indeed a very busy series of weekends, since the previous one I have been to a AAAI workshop in Atlanta to give an invited talk and stayed in a friend's place. I guess I am getting too old for this kind of travelling, but it was a lot of fun on both counts.
By the way, you might have noticed that the layout of my blog has changed. I decided to quit using the old tired layout from the original blogger, and switch to the new design features that have been advertized for a while in the main blogger pages. I still strive for a simple layout, but mine now has additional swanky sharing features (not that anybody would share a lot of the stuff I write here).

From Atlanta Aquarium

Peoples Natural Gas, seriously?

2010-06-24T13:54:00.000Z

I must be getting old, since I have not noticed the easily mocked name of my gas company. Yet, my office mate burst into laughter when she saw me writing the check to pay for this month's gas bill. When inquired she asked me "People's Natural Gas? Seriously?", which gave me the needed spark to wonder whether they actually collect people's natural gas to supply to western Pennsylvania. That would definitely be a very green move, and I support this idea in this country. So the message seems clear, Yinzers, you should start ramping up the beans and the chillies in order to secure future energy supplies.

(In)Appropriate Motel Façade

2010-06-05T23:05:00.000Z

Today I went to check out my brother's new apartment in Porto Alegre, where I have been for the last week or so to do exams and see if I get a permanent position after I finish my post-doc. And lo-and-behold whilst driving to his new place, the façade in the picture above. On my way back I had to take this picture. And about the exam, well, the picture is also representative of my status in it. I got the shaft big time, no use going to them again, I reckon.

On public jobs in Brazil

2010-06-04T17:00:00.029Z

This week I went to Brazil to do exams for the chance of getting what is almost the equivalent of a tenure in the near future. These exams comprise a written exam, a teaching exam, a CV check and a presentation of a research project. The written exam, for a "basic computer science" post seems awfully slanted to computer organization, which I nevertheless had to study on short notice. After a very tiresome week, I shall see if my having to fly to Brazil on such short notice without proper time to study will lead me to get this post, though I am not terribly confident in this, as successful candidates seem to need local provenance.

"Dual Boxing" Google's Pacman

2010-05-22T02:27:00.000Z

On a completely useless turn of events today, as Google marks the 30th anniversary of Pac Man, I somehow ended up trying to play Pac Man with Mrs. Pac Man dual handed in my keyboard. I understand that technically this is not dual boxing, but I like to think I did something analogous to that.

Invited paper

2010-05-01T19:30:00.014Z

Today was one of the best days of my academic career so far, aside the stress mode that has undertaken my side of the lab thanks to a demo which is due to the middle of the month. I have been invited to give a talk in the Workshop on Goal-Directed Autonomy at the next AAAI conference. At the moment, though, this is a mixed blessing, as I am almost completely occupied by said demo, papers for the next ACITA conference, and getting ready for the meetings with my research collaborators at AAMAS in the upcoming week.
This is being a hell of a month, but in a sense, it is good to feel that I am being incredibly productive in these last weeks, I just hope to be able to cope with the pressure that will be put on me as the month progresses.

Steel Panther

2010-04-19T00:43:00.000Z

In this past week I have finally decided to check out a band I have heard about from a friend of mine when I was in the UK called Steel Panther. Although I do enjoy metal every once on a while, it is not my main interest and so listening to this had to wait, but I was pleasantly surprised with how hilarious these guys are, taking a piss at every hair metal act from the eighties onwards. I post a video below with the proviso that it is definitely not safe for work both visually and aurally. Moreover, most of the songs are probably not safe to be listened to with your missus, since she might get the idea that you agree with practicing their lyrics.

Night at the opera

2010-04-11T20:36:00.001Z

Last night I was invited to attend a social function in my boss's house whereby performers from the Pittsburgh Opera did bits of various operas from the standard repertoire, to the often comical commentary of the pianist, in what was a sort of sampler platter of classical opera. It is quite impressive that my boss has the connections to arrange for the musicians and the musical director of the city's opera to play a private function in her home, but I am glad I have had the opportunity to watch that. Of course, I believe I was one of the lowest ranked people in the room, but it is alright, once day I will get to the top.

Now, the best opera I have found online is the classical masterpiece of italian tragedy, Le Wrath di Khan, which was rendered into a movie in the 80s, starring talented actor, William Shatner.

On Death and Taxes

2010-04-02T14:33:00.000Z

It is not the first time that I have ranted about american bureaucracy, and by looks of things, it probably won't be the last. Now this week I have spent quite a great deal of time trying to figure out what exactly need I fill in the US tax forms. I always thought that the bureaucracy in Brazil was bad, but it seems that in that respect, my home country is a mere follower of the United States, since taxes here are, by a long shot, much more complicated and byzantine than in Brazil. Not only does one have to deal with the complications of federal taxes, one also has to deal with state income tax, as well as local taxes, in my case, because I'm based in Pittsburgh. The interesting aspect of this system also includes the fact that, unless one wants to do your taxes by hand like the ancients, one must pay for the privilege to calculate one's own tax dues. This all adds up to a lot of stress when it comes to filling one's taxes since the IRS is famed for being ruthless in pursuing people with any suspicion of having made mistakes in the tax forms. At least in Brazil, for all the complications, the government does provide a software to help you do this, and for me, it has never been a completely daunting task, even when I had some (puny) property in the country.

Again in Mexico

2010-03-28T04:49:00.000Z

From Guadalajara

So it turns out that I went to Mexico again to visit my girl, this time, our rendezvous point was Guadalajara, moving my exploration further north than my previous explorations of Aztec territory. Still, I have not managed to get deep down into Maya territory, maybe next time I will manage to pull an Indiana Jones.

Vulva - Original

2010-03-12T14:46:00.003Z

I have always admired the resourcefulness of the Germans in creating breakthrough technology in engineering and television entertainment, but I have never expected what I saw today to have come from Germany (Japan, sure). And what am I talking about? I kid you not, vagina essence in a vial, not just any vagina smell, mind you, the "erotic intimate scent of a beautiful woman for your erotic pleasure". How do they make these claims, or how do they guarantee that the "slightly yellow, desirable substance" is indeed harvested from a hot blonde beauty is a mystery to me (as pointed out by my friend Jessica). That might as well be the same guarantee as they make for phone sex women (rumoured to be old ladies).

I am still unsure as to whether this is an elaborate spoof site or an actual product, albeit I have no doubt whatsoever that this is a product for which a demand (quite possibly huge) exists. If lonely, socially awkward, single men are willing to dish out five thousand greenbacks for an anatomically correct doll, surely complementing this expensive perversion for a mere 25 euros is peanuts. Now, on a more opinionated digression, one thing I noticed from the (presumably German) models is that they all sport "Hitler's moustache" pubic waxing, something I have imagined would be sort of a taboo in that country, but in this front, I can forgive them, it is indeed a fine waxing style.

Favourites in Pittsburgh, or shedding the winter lard

2010-02-21T05:40:00.002Z

While browsing my recommendations in Netflix, I am always amused to see what people around me in Pittsburgh are watching now, and in the last couple of weeks, the favorites (aside from Groundhog day three weeks ago) always include a bunch of workout videos. So I guess that the prediction of Punxsutawney Phil about the length of winter is not as reliable as the urge from local women to shed the extra fat layer accumulated for winter.

Valentine's Beans

2010-02-14T23:48:00.035Z

This sunday the Brazilians I met at CMU and I have organized a Brazilian day in a friend's house, which consisted of a Brazilian meal, with dessert included, and a movie afterwards. My reservations over the movie choice aside, I believe the whole thing was a success, since people did seem to have liked the food. The main meal consisted of my own rendition of a Feijoada, including something I definitely did not expect to find in the United States: couve, or as I discovered through the wikipedia, collard greens. The irony in here is that Feijoada, albeit the national dish, is not truly typical of the south where I come from, and we did have people from Rio and São Paulo in the house. I also baked the entrée, Pão de Queijo, which seemed to have gone remarkably fast, washed with Caipirinha. The only thing I was not the main cook was the Negrinho, or Brigadeiro for the northeners in the party. The only downside of the occasion is that I spent Valentine's day alone and uncertain about my own shit.

Snow Days

2010-02-10T05:12:00.000Z

From 30cm of snow

This week has had one of the worst weather in eastern United States for a very long time (apparently), and after Friday, many areas of Pittsburgh have become impassable, my street included and shown in the pic above. CMU has notified staff that it is not advisable to come to campus, and without public transportation for a good portion of Saturday, I have been effectively stranded at home for the past couple of days. Staying at home for the likes of me does not mean fun and games though, since I have been at work most of the time, besides trying to cope with the stress of other personal crap.

Also of note was the fact that I went out with my work colleagues on Friday night, only to find that after we were leaving the place, the bus system had stopped and the streets were covered in snow. Thankfully, the Russians came to the rescue, and we managed to pile up eight people in an SUV to take everybody home.

Right now, I remain in the blues as a combination of crappy developments and of being stranded at home.

Daki Makura

2010-01-20T15:34:00.000Z

I write this post to comment on another Nipponese novelty I discovered in the last days. Unsatisfied with used knickers sold in burusera shops by kagaseya, and with such jolly pranks such as kancho (immortalized below), and not content in engaging in omorashi (I will let you do the search on your own, not safe for work, by the way), our friends in the land of the rising sun have come up with another marvel for the lonely otaku: body pillows.

Not your average large-sized pillows, mind you, but Daki Makura: manga-themed ones at it, with large depictions of cartoonish sexiness, most of them much less well behaved than the one shown in the picture above. These guys never cease to surprise me.

Visiting the mountains in Rio Grande do Sul

2009-12-31T14:44:00.035Z

From Canela with Ana

After Christmas with my family and the obligatory foray into the beach (of which I don't particularly like in southern Brazil), I managed to take Ana to more touristic parts of Rio Grande do Sul, namely the mountainous region in the north of the state. This particular area, which contains plenty of whitewater rivers among the valleys is, in my opinion, is the nicest sightseeing place in the state. We tried to visit the Caracol park by the end of our only full day in the city of Canela, but it seems that the park administration was oblivious to the fact that night only falls at eight thirty during summer in the southern tip of Brazil, and the park closed at six in the afternoon.

Fortunately, we found out that following the dirt road that starts where the main paved road to the park ends it is possible to reach an eco-tourism park which has some of the most stunning vistas I have seen in my state, a sample of which you can check in the picture of this post.

Taking Ana to Porto Alegre

2009-12-25T02:49:00.004Z

So it finally came to pass that my girlfriend Ana came to Porto Alegre to meet my family and spend Christmas with us. To her the great novelty was that in the southern hemisphere December, and thus Christmas, is summer, so instead of snow our Christmases were marked by sunshine and the occasional heavy rain. And instead of seeing people laden with heavy winter coats, people are wearing shorts and t-shirts and complaining about the suffocating heat that sometimes curses these days. In my case, I had almost forgotten how unpleasant temperatures above 30 Celsius can become and how ill adapted I am to these weather conditions.

Anyhow, I would like to believe that Ana did indeed like the country and spending time with my family. She did compare my city with the one in which she grew up, Cuernavaca in Mexico (not that there are many cities with this name anywhere else), which I take it to be a good sign. The only bad thing is that given the harsh winter conditions in Mexico this year, she arrived with quite a strong cold, and this sort of killed the fun of the first few days. Now that Christmas is gone, we should do a little more traveling to the countryside.

Wing Commander Privateer and Open Source

2009-12-03T16:44:00.001Z

Given that last weekend was part of an extended holiday in the US, I found myself with some free time out of meat space (given that the gym I go to closed for the entire weekend) and I managed to pursue my traditional leisure activities. I initially spent some money on the second episode of the Penny Arcade Game, and thought that that was it for part of my weekend. It turned out that a friend of mine managed to find a "modern" remake of the Wing Commander Privateer.

I use quotation marks for modern because the graphics within the game my friend sent are entirely ASCII-based. Technically though, many of the characters used are not part of the 95 printable ASCII characters, but that would be just anal on my part. Moreover, certain elements in the graphics are not entirely based on a terminal layout, for example, the shots from the ships weapons do deviate in a way that would not be possible in a terminal window. In any case, those I believe, were necessary changes for usability, and ASCII Sector is a very promising game. You can see the difference in look between the same ship in ASCII (the first image in the post), and the 3D version of the same ship (the second image in the post).

Now, when writing this post, I tried to look for pictures of the original game, and found out that the idea of resuscitating this particular game is not unique to that guy, with at least two other games in the open source: Privateer Gemini Gold, and Wing Commander Universe, both of which are Source Forge projects (though the second project seems to be undergoing a major overhaul). These two graphics games seem to be more true to the game dynamics of the original game, but what really makes ASCII Sector stand out is that it allows one to interact with elements outside the ship flight simulator, allowing one to wander around space stations and talking to people, including person to person combat, which allows for all sorts of interesting extensions, like boarding a ship and capturing (or killing) its crew. So as far as depth goes, ASCII seems to win, but who knows that the source forge projects might evolve into.

Is twitter for twits?

2009-11-20T22:35:00.011Z

Now I finally surrendered to this (not so) latest Internet fad, and created me a twitter account. I have always thought that twitter was the pinnacle of an ADHD internet behavior, since it only allows very short (140 characters long) messages. Effectively being like blogging for people who cannot put together a coherent sentence, much less a paragraph. I can see how some organizations might use it as a type of news feed, for example, a university department, however for regular people, it strikes me as odd that some people would use it on its own just to say that they have just pooped or something.

I can see why this kind of thing could be used in social networking sites, as it was used initially by Facebook and then Orkut. Indeed, it would make sense now to centralize (if one feels the need) the posting of this minor life updates, which Facebook allows, but Orkut does not seem to. In any case, we shall see if I become a twit by using twitter.

Taxation without representation

2009-11-06T04:13:00.005Z

After starting my work in the US, and waiting for two full months to get a real salary with a discrimination of all the discounts I get from health insurance, other optional services and taxes. Now, my greatest disappointment here is that, since the American government provides almost no service to the population, or at least nothing even close to what the European welfare states provide, I expected to pay a lot less taxes here. It turns out that this is a naive expectation, since I ended up giving away about a quarter of my salary to the government, in return for pretty much nothing from the US government. The ethical implications of this are a bit jarring to me, since I am indirectly fueling two wars, one of which I completely disagree with.

TED Talks

2009-10-19T01:10:00.002Z

It has been a while since I have started watching the TED Talks, but only now it occurred to me to share this experience with whoever cares to read my blog. This particular talk, which I find particularly illuminating, talks about the many misconceptions many people have about so-called developing countries. The main one being that in rich countries people have small families and live longer, and in developing countries people live shorter lives in larger families. According to the data collected by this researcher (from very public sources), this conception is very wrong. It is amazing the insights that this guy puts based on hard data.

Today I wanted to cry

2009-10-02T20:42:00.002Z

Before you take me for a pussy, let me say in my defense that I have played every single Mechwarrior computer game to this date (including some of the crap SNES and Mega Drive ones), and the prospect of a new one is very exciting to me, even if my gaming days are pretty much over. This teaser video is especially exciting, and (and this is no spoiler for those who would care about it) follows the tradition of Mechwarrior introductions (save for Mechwarrior 3) whereby the narrator usually meets his demise at the end of the video.

Although I have heard rumours of a law suit from the owners of some of the early designs used in this franchise, I am quite hopeful that I will be able to play this game.

Land of the free (to pay)

2009-09-29T14:57:00.010Z

Don't trust this guy.

This week my anxiety generating problem has to do with the way utility companies do business in this part of the world. I always heard that American businesses are all customer centered, and that they treat the customer as king and whatnot, however this sounds like bullshit to me now that I am here. It seems that no company trusts their customers at all, especially the crappy utility companies, since they all demand very significant "security" deposits to start service with you. Moreover, since Americans still use very archaic banking practices (like paper cheques), by the time it is my turn to receive my deposit back, I will not even be in the country to cash the cheques they send me with the money I wasted on their deposits.

Any more blindly patriotic American reading this might get a fit for my rant, but I miss England so much, because for all people here like to criticize them, the British are, as Bertrand Russel once said, the only ones using common sense ever since it was invented by themselves. Actually John Locke is usually credited to have invented common sense in the 17th century, an Englishman, nonetheless.

Keep fucking that chicken

2009-09-21T19:04:00.002Z

Today I was catching up with The Daily Show after having traveled to Niagara Falls, Ontario, in what was my first tourism trip of the US season of Felipe's research tour, I was just pissing myself with laughter at a local broadcast from Fox (no less), in which an apparently famous news anchor banters to the weatherman to "Keep fucking that chicken", in the video you see above. As I mentioned earlier in the post, this was picked up by Jon Stewart in his daily show. This seems like the kind of thing that would slip out in the entire lifetime of an anchor, but this seems like just another day at the office for news anchor Ernie Anastos, which seems to have a small, and illustrious history in blooping on air.

At the end of the day, I always thought that it was me that was always thinking profanity while I carry out regular conversation, and hoping (though not most of the time), that my thoughts would not spill out at an important moment in my conversations. Luckily for me, my verbal misadventures have not been the subject of The New York Times.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Intro - Ernie Anastos' Catch Phrase

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

Open iTerm here

2009-09-13T22:17:00.004Z

As you probably know from my previous entries, I have upgraded to Snow Leopard, which, despite initial hurdles, led me to read and demand more of the operating system. Among the custom things that I missed from my old windows installation was a context menu allowing me to open a terminal window through an Explorer context menu pointed to a folder of interest. Recently I found the solution in another software developer's blog, which allows one to open a window of Terminal.app. I however, prefer the alternative (and open source) iTerm, and so I tried to simply change the name of the invocation within the code of the workflow I downloaded for the previous site. It turns out that it was not that simple, so ended up having to dig into a Mac hints forum to find the code that finally did what I wanted. And the result of that is my very own version of that script, which I call, Open iTerm Here. I do not guarantee it will work, even though it has worked in my Snow Leopard installation. It includes installation instructions, which are basically the following: open the zip file, go into the open-here folder, and copy Open iTerm Here.workflow to ~/Library/Services.

Turing gets apology, now missing a knighthood

2009-09-11T18:38:00.005Z

The father of the modern computer and all around scientific genius, Alan Turing, has finally received an apology from the British government over his treatment 55 years ago, which probably contributed to his untimely death, curtailing what could have been an even more brilliant scientific career.

The only thing missing now is his granting of a Knighthood by the very same monarch who could have done that when this man was still alive, and his contribution to the continued existence of the British royal family was even fresher.

Update on last post

2009-09-09T15:24:00.004Z

As an update, I found out how to solve this problem from this thread at the Apple support forums. Well, thank you very much for nothing Apple, since I had to figure out this crap on my own.

It is one of the weirdest bugs I've ever seen, but apparently, if you have multiple keyboard layouts set for your Mac, as I did using the US International layout to be able to type in diacriticals for latin languages, the dialog asking for your admin password would never come up.

This affected everything from program installations to unlocking certain preference panes.

So the only way to solve this was to remove all keyboards but the US one (I don't know if it happens for other keyboard types, since I have a US layout keyboard), and then add the other layouts back again.

Snow Leopard Installer.app Issues

2009-09-08T22:37:00.005Z

Even though I promised myself I would not be the type of overeager moron to adopt an operating system right after it was released, my faith in the reliability of Apple's software somehow led me to actually buy and install Snow Leopard in the hopes that it would be a smooth experience. At first, indeed, the upgrade process was relatively smooth, with only a couple of applications being removed due to their incompatibility with the new operating system. It was also cool to have about 5 Gigabytes freed up from printer drivers that were not really used.

Moreover, the claims about speed improvements for Snow Leopard are totally bogus, as far as I can tell, and counterclaims about the need for more hardware are equally worthless to me, especially since I have a 2.6 Gigahertz MacBook Pro and 4 Gigabytes of RAM (effectively a maxed out version of this laptop).

Now, what worried me more was the fact that pkg (and mpkg) installers from the Mac simply did not work anymore. The installation wizard would run up to when you had to click the install button, at which point the button simply did not work. When Mac OS X did not even ask for the Administrator password, I knew something was very wrong. To top it off, I managed to somehow delete my MacTex installation, and without it, I could do nothing paper related. Apple's own forums were as good as worthless to sort out my issue, which I doubt is unique to me.

After wasting practically the entire day trying to figure out what the hell happened to my beloved mac, I discovered that pkgs are installer by an application called Installer.app, which did not help a lot in sorting out my installation problem. Finally, I found out that the installer software also exists as a command line application in /usr/sbin/installer, which can be forced to run as an Administrator, and finally managed to install MacTex using this command sudo /usr/sbin/installer -pkg MacTeX-2008.mpkg -tgt / -verbose, which should work for installing other stuff under Snow Leopard.

This is far from a good solution, but at least is solves the problem until Apple decides to update this piece of beta software that they released. It seems that they have been learning with Bill's company on how to have unpaid beta testers.

Finally, thanks to Kristen for allowing me to use her picture of a sleeping Snow Leopard to poke fun at Apple.

American Problems

2009-09-03T13:47:00.007Z

As many of my friends are probably in the know, after having looked for a position in my home country for a while unsuccessfully, I was back again moving away from it. Thus, I have recently moved to Pittsburgh in the US to take up a Research position at Carnegie Mellon University.

Well, job details aside, it has been a bit of a hassle to get properly set up here. The first problem is that apartments are seldom rented furnished, so in order not to have my meals and my sleep on the floor (like real men!), I had to go and find me furniture. The solution was cheap furniture from the largest charity in the world: IKEA. Of course that was not a trivial pursuit, since IKEA is not close to the urban center of Pittsburgh and there was no way in hell that I would haul 50 kilos of furniture in public transportation. So I had to rent a UHaul van, and boy I did not remember how large these American trucks were. To top it off, UHaul, or at least the store I rented it from, had no option of a Satnav in the trucks, so I had to brave the highways and interstates of Pennsylvania with not much more than the instructions Google maps had for me, which, given my attempt at safe driving (and no paper reading in the middle of the interstate) invariably led to me doing many extra miles due to taking wrong exits and generally going in the wrong direction.

After the whole rigmarole of buying furniture and essential home items, I needed to do laundry after many days living out of a suitcase, which leads me to my other problem. The washing (and drying) machines are not only coin operated, but they accept only quarter dollar coins! Of course, I only realized I was short on quarters for drying my clothes, and did not have a drying rack at home. To improve things, the supermarket till attendant was also short on quarters, and a simple task such as doing laundry led me on a trek of spending little money just to collect these fucking coins!

How to deal with Zombies

2009-08-18T12:45:00.005Z

I was reading the BBC this morning and, I kid you not, I found a bit of news saying that some mathematicians have used a zombie infection as a model for a rapidly spreading infection. Now this might be a good candidate for the Ig Nobel award, were it not for the fact that a lot of people actually took this research seriously. I admit that I might be being a little cynical here, taking into consideration the content of my own blog, but are we scientists not supposed to at least pretend that our research has a tangible real-world result, even if we are only dealing with pet projects and blue sky ideas?
The world is moving forward faster than I can deal with it, and to honor that, I place a zombified image of me in this post.

All Set

2009-08-07T21:20:00.002Z

After having gone through the byzantine bureaucracy of the US and A, and finally having secured accommodation in my new foster country, I believe I am all set to start my new two-year research stint, away from my original shores. This ended up being the only concrete option I had after trying for six months in securing a firm position in Brazil, so it is with a bit of sadness that I need to be away from family and friends for more time. It is also sad that I ended up in yet another country, as I made excellent friends in the UK, and if it was up to me, I would have gone back to British shores.
At the end of the day, I am happy though, because I am going to one of the top universities in the United States. Now let us see if I am up to the standards of such a prestigious institution.

A tale of two winters

2009-07-03T13:31:00.001Z

After having returned to Brazil and sort of settled temporarily it dawned to me that moving to the southern hemisphere right at the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere means that I will be going through two winters in sequence. And what is more, if I move back north after a few months this will mean that I will be going through three winters in sequence! And before people start to think that moving south is all nice, fun, beaches (and bitches), check out the weather report from my iPod this morning. This is not fun at all, and I got no bitches as well, damn it!

Back to the old new World

2009-06-24T23:54:00.003Z

After nearly four years living in the UK, and having finished my PhD, I now return to the new world, my old home, and current base of operations. Celebrating this, I treat you to the official bird from the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the Southern Lapwing, photographed by me in the city of Gramado.
Given the uncertainties of a research career for a neophyte such as myself, I am not yet sure where I will be headed next, but hopefully something good.

As I arrive home, I will at least be able to catch up with some old friends, even from Europe, and hopefully that will offset the blues I get from going away from the place that has been such a welcoming home for me in the past years.

Last weeks in London

2009-06-11T23:01:00.002Z

From Tower of London

Yesterday I have cancelled my utilities here in London, thus marking the transition from a resident of London to a mere visitor. It felt slightly worse than I had anticipated, since it just sank into me that I am leaving this place, possibly never to come back again. The story between London and I is rather odd, or typical, who knows, but when I arrived here, I felt almost overwhelmed by the number of things that went on around me, given my ADHD. Then, when all of that became background noise, and I started learning about all the cool things that go on in this place, and fell in love with this place. Even the excuse that the things that I like from other countries and places does not hold here. Everything worth buying that exists somewhere can be bought in London. I finish my post with a quotation from Samuel Jonhson, and a picture of my transportation nemesis for these years in London.

"When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford."

Viva

2009-05-26T22:55:00.001Z

Today I finally reached the formal end of the road in my PhD, and sat the Viva Voce exam here at King's College. I have been told time and again that I should enjoy this process because it will probably the first and only time that people will actually read all my research in depth and are obliged to be concerned with it. And indeed it seems that my examiners Mark d'Inverno and Alexandra Coddington were concerned with my thesis and actually read it in its entirety, so the whole process was a tad harder than I initially anticipated. Ultimately though, the whole defense was uneventful, since I knew my stuff, and I was approved with minor corrections to the final volume of my thesis.

Oddly enough, I do not feel exhilarated about this whole thing, which brings me a sense of guilt about not feeling good about having accomplished this. I guess this whole last year has drained my expectations about everything, since it seems my degree is not getting me anywhere in the current economic climate. Well, that is me, an incurable optimist.

IMAX yesterday, Shit today and Mock Viva tomorrow

2009-05-20T14:32:00.002Z

On a slight follow-up of the last post, today my supervisor told me that I will have a "mock viva", which unlike the name may suggest, is not a PhD defense where people mock me, or where I practice my mocking skills, but rather, a preparation for the real deal viva voce next week. Oddly enough, I do not feel a thing about it, neither fear, nor excitement, nor apprehension, not even happiness that this whole PhD process is coming to an end. My supervisor thinks I may get cocky for the process and screw it up, but the truth of the matter is that I am completely apathetic to the viva itself. This is no bragging or anything, but I think that at this point, I need to put on a real effort to screw the pooch in my viva, since the combination of my supervisor's and my perfectionism meant that the thesis I submitted is unlikely to be rejected outright (otherwise I would not have submitted it, and my supervisor would not allow me to do so), and my obsessive behavior means that I will definitely read my thesis and flag it abundantly, regardless of how boring it is at this time.

My apathy in reading this stuff leads me to what I did yesterday, which was to finally watch Star Trek, on the IMAX. And my apathy is not really towards the movie, I thought it was a very good movie, and the IMAX screen made the viewing experience much more enjoyable. The only problem is that, since J.J. Abrams was trying to emulate the space shots from the Battlestar Galactica series, that is shaking the "camera" a lot during combat sequences, it was very disorienting to watch it in a cinema with a screen that covers all your field of view. I suppose that if my mind was not so screwed by all the shit that is going on (or not going on as I expected) in my life, I would have had more of a blast in the movie theater yesterday. But then again, who knows...

Back from AAMAS in Budapest

2009-05-17T22:57:00.004Z

From Budapest

So now I am back from my trip to Budapest where I attended the AAMAS conference to present a couple of my papers, as this year I was lucky to have gotten two papers in the main conference, and one in the Industry Track. Now I should be focusing on reading my thesis for my Viva next Tuesday, but somehow, given my current lack of destination, this thesis defense thing is not as exciting as I have been expecting to be for the last three years. I surely hope to feel something at the defense time, but this seems rather unlikely now, and my motivation to re-read my thesis gets smaller by the minute.

Too incompetent to see incompetence

2009-04-28T09:20:00.004Z

I have recently read a book called Bad Science, which talks about the current trend for many people to look for quack alternative medicine, like homeopathy, acupuncture and other less "mainstream" modalities of mumbo jumbo, and how this is partly to blame on journalists doing a terrible job in reporting science. Besides one interesting insight regarding people who took degrees in the humanities inability to understand science leading them to try to undermine science in their reporting, the author refers to and comments a very interesting paper about incompetence.

This paper is called Unskilled and Unaware of It: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments, by two psychologists from Cornell, and I even went to the trouble of downloading it and reading it all. It is indeed a treasure trove of interesting quotations and, I believe, spot on in its analysis of incompetent people. In a nutshell, the article investigates the hypothesis that incompetent people's lack of understanding of any given field not only causes them to do poorly in the area of their incompetence, but also robs them of the ability to notice that they are incompetent, leading them to inflate their assessment of how well they do in the area of their incompetence. This conclusion is also interesting to relate to the fact that most people believe in a logical fallacy, that they are above average in a given domain. If you have not realized what the fallacy is, I will be kind to point out that it is statistically impossible for most people to be above average in any given field. Although it does seem to be the case that most men truly believe that they are better drivers than the average man.

Uruguayan Food

2009-03-19T23:29:00.002Z

In my first days in Brazil, my brother and I went for some Uruguayan food, which, as one might expect, is meat heavy. And that is not only fine by me, it is indeed, great, as you can see from my joyful face.

Ig Nobel in the UK

2009-03-14T18:39:00.004Z

Last Thursday I went to a talk from the people who organize the Ig Nobel awards for Improbable Research, but here in the UK. One of the highlights for me in the event was from a Dutchman who first described Homosexual Necrophiliac Rape among Mallard Ducks, reported in the Rotterdam Museum of Natural History. There were, of course, other very interesting research results, including a comparison of the jumping performance of fleas from dogs and cats, and the mental reward for biting crisps.
After this interesting Thursday evening, I decided to close shop for the week to prepare to go to Brazil tomorrow morning. Let us hope everything goes well there and I do not forget to bring anything important in my luggage.

Submitted

2009-03-06T16:19:00.004Z

From Bleargh

Today I submitted my thesis, so it is all done and dusted, but the feeling is bittersweet, since I do not have a certain direction for the future. This situation makes this transition in my life a bit moot.

More Mexico: Zacatecas

2009-03-03T10:05:00.002Z

From Zacatecas

After our return from Mexico City to Aguascalientes, we chilled out for a while and then went back on the road, this time to a touristic town called Zacatecas, one of the major centers of silver mining in the new world by the Spanish conquistadors. It was a nice colonial town (the cathedral of which you can see in the picture at the top of the post), with deactivated silver mines open for visitation, and apparently some mines still producing. We headed into one such mine, where I got this nice picture below that may resemble something else.

From Zacatecas

XP-Dev

2009-03-02T10:47:00.006Z

With an abundance of free services of pretty much everything, I always wondered when would there be a free versioning service. Now I know that many people will tell me that this already existed for a long time first with Sourceforge, then with Google Code, but there is a catch, all projects there must be open source. This means that during all the development cycle, whatever you commit to the repository must be available at all times to anyone on the internet. I do not want to a target for a public lynching, so I need to clarify my position on this, I am all for open source, and I agree that one of the best ways to develop good software is through open collaboration.

However, in my position as a researcher, I do not use a versioning system just for code, I also use it as the means to collaborate in producing research documents as well, which for most academics in computer science is done using the TeX typesetting system, the files of which are, from a storage point of view, indistinguishable from programming code. In this task, the programming source code is a secondary product, and one which I honestly believe should be available at all times, since all help is appreciated in the underfunded and understaffed research projects that are the norm in academia. But the documents I write, that is, the research papers which are the main artifact of my productive process, although certainly produced for public (and free) dissemination, must not be distributed before publication, otherwise I risk being scooped by other, less morally upright, researchers. Of course it is not like my research is so cool that there are people queuing up to steal from me, but since a paper is the culmination of many months, maybe even years, of work, I like to not having to worry about this possibility.

So I was glad to have discovered yesterday this, relatively new, service called XP-Dev (linked below), which provides not only free subversion (SVN) hosting, but also a (yet to be tested by me) project management interface. The site developer says he will make money somehow without stealing code hosted in his service, and without ever charging for it (which is admirable), and I honestly hope he manages to do it. Right now I am test driving this to work collaboratively with a colleague from Aberdeen, let us see how it goes.

Mexico City - Part 4 (Adiós)

2009-03-01T10:15:00.000Z

From Mexico City

My final day in Mexico City was mainly one of strolling about the are near the hotel where we stayed. The area nearby, called Zona Rosa, or pink zone seems to be quite well maintained and occupied in the daytime with a nice street market and nice restaurants and shops. At night, the area name becomes more of a pun (probably not intended when the area was named), since the Zona Rosa is home to a multitude of gay bars and strip joints (tittie bars). The funniest thing being that my Ana would have me believe that Mexico is a very conservative country, but I would find it hard to believe it after looking at this area.

This area is also right beside Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma, with its monument to the independence of Mexico a few blocks away from where we were staying (and pictured above). Since it was close to Christmas Time, there were plenty of locally crafted nativity scenes along the avenue, as well as some interesting benches/works of modern art. One of which is the hands in the butt one shown below with Ana and myself seated on it.

From Mexico City

Mexico City - Part 3

2009-02-23T12:13:00.003Z

From Teotihuacán

On our third day of visitation to Mexico city, it seems our focus turned to religious monuments. We started the day visiting the ancient city of Teotihuacán, which seemed to be the religious center for a civilization that is still largely obscure, since everything I read lists a number of potential peoples who might have built the site. Contrary to what many people believe, Teotihuacán was already abandoned when the Spanish arrived, so at least they are not to blame for this genocide. After getting briefed about the site by our tour guide, Ana and I set out to climb the Pyramid of the Moon, which is the smallest one, behind me in the picture above. That climb was relatively easy, especially since, unlike the larger Pyramid of the Sun, this pyramid cannot be climbed to its top, due to its very poor state of repair after years of bungled archeological explorations. Atop this pyramid we found the expected complement of tourists, and some new age wackos with a fixation with crystals and pyramids.

From Teotihuacán

Next, we moved on to the larger, Sun Pyramid (shown in the picture above), a climb in which I went unaccompanied. This pyramid seems much steeper at points than the smaller Moon Pyramid, but the view from its top is really stunning, as one can check out from the picture below. The summit of this one was even more packed with people than the previous one, but given the crowd, I saw fewer pseudo-religious nuts there, for what I assume to be less than ideal meditation conditions. As stunning as the view is, this pyramid was supposed to be even higher, were it not for some greedy (and stupid) explorers who blew up the top part of this place, mistaking some golden shiny plaster for gold.

From Teotihuacán

Our final stop for the day was the basilica of Guadalupe, a conquest-era saint made by the Spanish to attract the worship of the native Mexicans thus supplanting their original cult of a certain local goddess. One interesting aspect of the original church, shown in the picture below, is that it is sinking along with the city, necessitating constant repair and concrete reinforcement in order to prevent the whole structure from collapsing. Within the small chapel built beside this church, one gets the notion the amount of money the conquistadors and the church have milked out of the Americas, as the chapel is decorated entirely with Silver.

From Basilica de Guadalupe

Mexico City - Part 2

2009-02-22T23:26:00.002Z

From Mexico City Zócalo

After a foray far outside Mexico city, we spent the next day mostly within the limits of the Mexican Federal District. We started the day with a visit to the National Palace, the seat of the Mexican government, the main attraction of which is a set of murals painted by a weird guy called Diego Rivera. The picture above is the inner courtyard within the national palace, which looked very nice under the light conditions we had in the morning. Now, one of the strangest requirements in visiting this place, is that they ban the entry of camera tripods (!?), duly searched for by a metal detector on you and by an airport style luggage scanner. I guess they thought I would be as deadly as Jason Bourne with it, but I bet that they did not realize that Bourne is specialized in fighting with literature and stationery.

From Museo Nacional de Antropología

Our next stop was the national museum of anthropology, which sports an outstanding collection of items from pretty much all pre-colombian civilizations dwelling in the Mexico region. Unfortunately, our tour only included the Aztec section of the museum, and for a relatively short period of time. I have to admit that it was a fine museum, well beyond my expectations, and I regret not being able to spend the same amount of time I would normally like to. The picture above is of Ana and I in front of the original Aztec calendar stone that was dug up from the city center, and subsequently shot at by the Americans invading Mexico (hence its pockmarks).

Next, we moved on to Xochimilco, a borough of Mexico City which contains a network of canals where little boats called Trajineras make food-fueled tours. Besides staying in the boat itself, we had plenty of other "modular" attractions, with all sorts of tradesmen floating about in their own boats offering from more food to on-the-spot music by Mariachis on boats. All boats seemed to have names, and ours was called Lupita, as you can see from the picture below.

From Xochimilco

Cuernavaca and Taxco

2009-02-15T17:09:00.003Z

From Cuernavaca

Our second day on tour in Mexico took us to the cities of Cuernavaca and afterwards to Taxco. The day started with a relatively long journey to the capital of Morelos state, the place which Hernán Cortés decided to build a castle and tentatively place the seat of power in recently conquered Mexico. Unfortunately, we spent very little time in this historic colonial city, with a snap of the picturesque architecture shown in the photograph above.

From Taxco

Our second, and longer stop was Taxco, a silver mining town in the state of Guerrero (which is Spanish for "warrior", but I digress). The picture above shows the main church in the city, which was apparently built with the money from a french miner. Despite the locals trying to impress you with all sort of lore about silver and trying to sell you large quantities of the stuff, there is a lot more to the city than that, including very picturesque views of the hills and the plaza in front of the church which is particularly lively. We had the opportunity to see a wedding taking place on the day we visited, and this was, at least to me, a grander attraction than all the silver sales.

From Taxco

Mexico City - Part 1

2009-02-08T19:52:00.004Z

After delaying these blog entries for more than a month, I finally got around to writing about my trip to Mexico. So after my Chicago/Dallas ordeal, I finally arrived in Aguascalientes, one day later I headed to Mexico City, to start my tour of Mexico. Ana and I decided for the budget travel option and went by bus (a very long journey indeed), and on the first day after arriving in Mexico, we just walked about to discover the local food (in the picture below), and views around the hotel. Our hotel was in the Zona Rosa, and close to the monument of the Angel of Independence (in reality a Winged Victory), shown at night in the picture above).

Craploads of Snow in London

2009-02-02T21:51:00.002Z

From Blizzard in London

After a night of heavy snowing, apparently the heaviest in 18 years for London, the entire neighborhood is covered in white. It has been quite a while since I last saw this much snow, and I never expected to see this kind of scene in London. My street, as the picture below shows, has been completely covered in the white thing.

From Blizzard in London

Another interesting sight was Camberwell, all snowy, as shown in the picture below.

From Blizzard in London

Final read before submission

2009-01-11T22:19:00.002Z

After re-reading my thesis the entire weekend, I only have these revisions to make to submit it. Of course, no major text edits, just typos and consistency checks for the many cross-references. Still it will be a pain in the ass this monday, when I will have to fix all of that. I wonder how many typos I left out, damn it!

Frigging Cold

2009-01-09T15:31:00.001Z

After returning from Mexico, which was relatively cold as the day started at 2 degrees some days, I had the unpleasant suprise of getting home to almost double digit negative temperatures in frigging London. One of the things that is puzzling me now, since checking the weather before leaving home is imperative in order not to get your nuts frozen, is that the temperature forecasts that my MacBook widget gives me are very (by more than 5 degrees) different than the ones given by my iPod (pictured), the iPod is clearly more pessimistic. Which one should I heed?

Picasa for the Mac!

2009-01-06T15:42:00.003Z

I knew this would happen! After languishing over the fact that all the photo library programs on the Mac suck and lamenting the absence of Picasa for the Mac, I ended up deciding on using iPhoto for my Pictures for no other reason than it is free and available for the Mac. Nevertheless, I always hated it because of its inflexibility. Now, of course after I invested a lot of time in organizing an iPhoto library, Google decides to release Picasa for the Mac! I guess better late than never. In any case, I am thrilled about this new piece of software.

Flying back to Britain tomorrow

2008-12-30T22:30:00.002Z

Today is my last full day in Mexico, and tomorrow I am flying on the new year back to Britain, and when there I will finally be able to organize my pictures and start posting about the places I visited in Mexico. I would have done that before, but thanks to the big crap that photo library programs are in the Mac, I still have not turned around to doing this.

United Airlines and Chicago

2008-12-17T15:56:00.003Z

Yesterday I started my journey to Mexico with United Airlines, but to my dismay, after some bad weather conditions in Chicago in the first leg of my journey, all my flights were disrupted. And to add injury to insult, the people from united just told me to sod off, since "it was not their fault" that the weather was shit in Chicago. Lucky me? Not only that, but when I got to Dallas, where I'm writing these lines after more than a day without sleep, I did not manage to find a hotel to spend the night, so I ended up sleeping rough in Fort Worth airport.

View Larger Map

Mac Software

2008-11-21T17:48:00.007Z

As part of my ongoing migration process to the Mac, I need to find software to replace the stuff I normally used in Windows, so I thought it would be interesting to log most of the software that I can remember I downloaded over the past week to give it a try.

Pictures - Aperture seems more than nice program for pictures. I am test driving it for a month to decide if its huge cost is worth of my uses for the program. It seems no more worth the cost than Adobe's Lightroom, though. I only wish I could keep on using Picasa in the Mac (Google do something!). Aperture has a plug-in to work with Picasa, but it is a paid piece of software, which is definitely not worth the 25 bucks they charge for it. If all else fails, I will be forced to use iPhoto, which is not even close to Picasa, or try to emulate it with Darwine, that is, if it works.

Video - You need loads of codecs, and I found that most of the stuff that I needed can be had in one package called Perian. Still, I am deeply disappointed with iTunes, since for all the boasts of Mac fanatics that a Mac just works I was sad to see that iTunes does not even support OGG audio files, not to mention Windows Media Audio and other Microsoft standards. My point here is not to make a judgment of value on their formats, they might as well be crap, but it turns out that I have media in that format, and I want to use it not only in the Mac, but in my iPod. Another sad point is that I found nothing like LameDrop (at least for free) for the Mac. Finally, if you can put up with using multiple programs for multiple codecs, there is always VLC media player, or worst of all Windows Media Player for the Mac.

Communication - Two programs are fundamental, Skype for VoIP, and Adium for instant messaging. I was pleased to see that Adium is the Mac equivalent of Pidgin, which I absolutely loved in Windows. I was not so pleased to see that Skype gives so little attention to its Mac user base, since the Mac version is still 2.7, whereas in Windows they are already beta testing Skype 4. Also on the subject of communication, there is CoRD, a remote Desktop Client for Windows that works pretty well, with occasional crashes when you have a shitty connection, like me with Virgin ADSL.

LaTeX - I was really really disappointed in finding out that Mac OS X has no native installation of LaTeX, so I went with the first one that Google told me about, MacTeX. On this front, I will have to confess that the Mac is all disappointment, and the Windows versions of this package is way superior. I am talking, of course of MikTex, which is vastly superior than the TeX distributions I saw for the Mac. The first thing you notice is that you have to download the entire thing in the Mac, one Gigabyte of packages that you might not necessarily (and probably do not) need, whereas MikTeX lets you download packages on demand, as you include them in your document. MacTeX has no update mechanism whatsoever, so if you want to update your TeX distribution, you better stick to the annual updates for the TeX live distribution. As far as IDEs go, it is also a disappointment, as there is nothing close to WinEdt by a long shot, and while MacTeX kindly guides you towards TeXShop, this program is nowhere near WinEdt, so I ended up using Parallels Desktop, which is a necessity if you, like me, find that there is some Windows software without equivalent in the Mac, and besides, since I paid for WinEdt, I want to use it. Finally, to manage BibTeX references, I can always rely on the faithful and Java-based JabRef, for which I have only praise.

Productivity - One software that I am still getting to grips with is Quicksilver, which essentially lets you work with the keyboard most of the time to do all sorts of commands over files and programs. My friend tells me this is the eighth wonder of the world, but I am still using it in a similar fashion as Spotlight.

Compression - Another front in which the Mac is a bit lacking is in decent interfaces for compressors and decompressors. Most compressed files will be invariably extracted to your hard drive if you double click them, which I personally find annoying, since I may not want to extract everything and their dog out of large compressed files. I have always been an avid RAR user, and have bought a license to WinRAR, but unfortunately, they only provide you the command line client for the Mac. So this license fee is gone for me, and now I am using SimplyRAR, which seems an outdated tool, but looks enough like WinRAR for me to get used to in the short term.

Internet - Safari is not bad, but I have been using Firefox since it was first release, I remain loyal to it, especially its customizations and its bookmarks synchronizer, which I have come to rely on. Besides that, to help manage downloads from your SSH connections, I highly recommend Filezilla, instead of having to rely on the command line, which is a pain in the ass.

I am an Apple convert

2008-11-11T23:58:00.000Z

As of today, it is official, I am a convert to the religion started by the deuce-ace of the Steves, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It should be some journey now for me to find all the programs that I need to do the same stuff I did under the company of the antichrist (this is, of course, a joke) with Windows. Luckily, for games, I can still use bootcamp with my old copy of XP and carry on. We shall see where my expensive adventure into the unknown will take me with this new computer.

Birthday BBQ

2008-11-09T23:08:00.000Z

Visit Pussy, France

2008-11-08T13:54:00.003Z

This post might be a little late in relation to the trip in which I discovered the place, but what the hell, only now the crystallized in head, or better still coagulated from a puddle of liquid diarrhea. But anyway, I am talking about a village in the Annecy area called Pussy (emphasis on the last syllable). This is a tiny village is located near Mont Bellachat, which for those who understand some French slang more than complements the name of the city. Tiny Pussy
is located near the French alps, and seems to be a rural village, so naturally, one will find many Hoes around town. Then again, if one is aware of Portuguese and its slang, one will notice that near Pussy we gave Necuday, so if you miss your target and do not hit pussy, Necuday is the result.

The Vasa

2008-10-31T13:57:00.003Z

Today's post, after a month hiatus is part anecdote, part Software Engineering advice, since I imagine a good part of my readership (if it indeed exists) must contain Computer Science people. The story is about a Swedish ship called Vasa, which sank 330 years ago. The story goes that during the ships construction, with the design already made, and most of the hull already laid down, king Gustavus Adolphus decided that just one gun deck was not enough, so he demanded two. At the time, Sweden was not yet renowned as the land of sexual liberation and safe cars, and since nobody had the guts to tell the king he was a dimwit regarding shipbuilding, his modifications were made. The result, the maiden voyage lasted about 20 minutes, and with first strong wind capsized the ship, resulting in it making water immediately and sinking within 7 minutes. At least, thanks to the bay of Stockholm, the ship has been preserved almost intact, including parts of the ship sails to this day.

From Stockholm

Smut is in the eye of the beholder

2008-09-26T10:27:00.004Z

I do not give a flying fuck to Diesel or its party, but the advertising company that created this video definitely deserves praise for making a hilarious video. It consists of footage from old porn flicks, but with key parts of the scene overlaid with crayon like images suggesting something completely different than the original film. Like, for example replacing the lower part of a woman receiving cunnilingus with an image of a harmonica. It just cracks me up every time!

Diesel SFW XXX - Watch more free videos

Welcome to Nollywood

2008-09-23T15:30:00.002Z

I have recently watched an interview with Fernando Meirelles, of The Constant Gardener fame, in which he mentioned that Nigeria has a film industry comparable, if not more prolific than, India. Even I, that pride myself in knowing many bits of random knowledge, was impressed by discovering this. It is pretty impressive especially because, if wikipedia is to be believed, they are making money making small budget films. This shows that there is a business model very different from Hollywood that can work, and generate affordable movies for the masses.

From the IMDB profile of Nigerian films, we can clearly see how prolific they are and the turnaround time for films are pretty quick, since there are movies which their part two are released the same year as the original, like 100% Husband one and two in 2005.

Quinoa dish

2008-09-17T22:00:00.000Z

As I was reading a science magazine one particular article caught my atention regarding this Andean grain called Quinoa, which is, apparently, a very healthy source of proteins. In order to make it more palatable to westerners, every single site I have seen says that quinoa is like rice, which is understandable, although it looks nothing like it. So, since I am now into healthy eating and shit, I decided to give it a try, and I ended up cooking Quinoa like rice and using it to complement my Shrimp Aglio e Olio, the results of which are shown in the picture above. I do not exactly understand the "nutty" flavor term they use to describe how quinoa tastes, but I understand it has slightly more taste than plain rice. My veredict is that it tastes a bit stronger than rice, and it is slightly trickier to cook because the grains are smaller, and you end up losing many of them in the process of rinsing and cooking quinoa, but the results are not bad.

Fucking Bus 176

2008-09-10T10:43:00.002Z

On a random London rant (it even rhymes almost Cockney way), I am getting increasingly irritated by the buses on route 176 from my home into work. My problem is that every single morning at rush hour around 8:30 in the morning, these buses decide to stop and wait for 5 to 10 minutes at Camberwell Green, and then again to change drivers a stop afterwards, wasting an additional 5 minutes. I am sensitive to the needs of bus drivers, since they are not machines and must rest, but come on, the rush hour is definitely not the right time to do rest stops, they could certainly do this rest say at 7, and then work till 9 just so that people who are in a hurry to get to work can actually take the bus without worrying.

Way too funny

2008-09-05T14:03:00.002Z

Probably the funniest video I watched for months, showing a TV interviewer getting completely fucked up laughing at the interviewee because of his voice. Even if you are compelled to be politically correct, it is impossible not to laugh (just try).

As a side remark, the comments in the video make it clear that this video is a fake program as part of another comedy sketch, so do not take it too seriously. In any case, a cheap and good laugh.

Sherlock Holmes and South London

2008-08-27T08:36:00.003Z

I have recently read a couple of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and was thrilled to know that some of them, at least all of the ones I read take place in south London, mere blocks away from where I live. For example, in A Study in Scarlet, a murder takes place in Brixton Road, with mentions of Camberwell (home of the Camberwell Carrot) and other locations, while in The Sign of Four also happens in a broadly similar location in south London.

This can be mainly attributed to Doyle's living in Norwood, which is further south in London. Now the ironic part is that these parts of London remain a bit lawless, and Brixton and Camberwell are definitely no strangers to murder and knife crime nowadays.

View Larger Map

English Language

2008-08-17T14:02:00.002Z

This morning I was assailed by a deep linguistic question: is there any Daughter of a Bitch? Thinking closely on the matter, it seems odd that one can use the offensive term Son of a Bitch, SOB and whatnot, but it seems English-speaking women are impervious to this offensive term. Can a woman be a son of a bitch? I mean, it would be linguistically wrong, as this noun should agree with the gender of the target, is it not?

The story behind today's epiphany is more or less the following. As I came back from the supermarket this morning, I was confronted with a local English girl, not one of the types who speak the Queen's English, mind you, but rather the one that would be called a Chav around these parts. This girl was rather unpleasant, and sported a T-Shirt with the message "If you think I'm a bitch, you should meet my mother". The shirt immediately made me think, is she a bitch, or a ... a ... a what?

Now, to further this discussion, I urge any reader to provide some insight to me.

NASA

2008-07-28T10:03:00.007Z

In these anti-American times, one American institution stands out almost untarnished by the reputation of other, less moral, north-American organizations. I must confess that, like many other people in the old continent, I am not a big fan of the United States of America, maybe because as a youngster, I believed all their bull about freedom and their definition of capitalism. But one of the things that certainly led me to perfect my English speaking skills was my admiration for the technological breakthroughs made by the Americans. At that time, Americans were big nerds, and some of the best engineers in the world were Americans, a legacy of their Apollo program. And NASA definitely represents some of the finest things America can do if it stop thinking about its interests overseas.

Unfortunately, like all great empires, for America is an empire in denial, it has gotten to the point where it wants to enjoy the fruits of its might. And this means that less and less Americans really want to go through the efforts that their 20th century generation went through to make sure they are at the forefront of technology and civilization. With this in mind, the taste of 50 year anniversary of NASA is bittersweet as less effort and money is being injected into this institution, so as fund doomed efforts to consolidate the empire.

Nevertheless, cheers for NASA. Let us all hope that more people share its old values.

Go

2008-07-24T13:07:00.003Z

It is now official, I started playing the ancient game of Go, though I got off to a rather slow start. My first 10 games were a fiasco, so if I take the Go proverb that says "Lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible", then I am doing pretty well. One puzzling thing in my start is that my friend Paulo, who introduced me to the game, sort of changed the proverb to lose your 100 games, which sort of indicates how much I suck at the game.

Nevertheless, it seems like a fun game to play (regardless of my losing streak), and I will try to convince myself to read strategy books on Go. The game is beautifully simple in terms of rules, but the tactical and strategic complexity from these simple rules is amazing. This complexity is such, that despite the existence of plenty of extremely good chess playing programs, very few good Go playing programs exist for any but the smallest board sizes.

Chaser's War on Everything

2008-06-29T10:55:00.003Z

After recently mulling over a job in Australia (which I am afraid I did not get), I checked out one of their comedy shows, and I have to say that the Australians really know how to make funny television. In particular, I loved this program called The Chaser's War on Everything. Their most widely known stunt was driving a motorcade right in front of the hotel where George W. Bush was with a guy dressed as Osama bin Laden, I shit you not, you can try to find this in YouTube, before they take it down, of course.

This video, which I doubt will be taken down, is of Osama thanking them for giving him a spot in the Australian ABC. I mean, this is real journalism, give everyone a fair chance of responding. The last YouTube copy and paste service I put in this post is one of their other hilarious pranks, which involves getting a guy with stockings in his head trying to buy stuff like a regular customer, I almost pissed myself watching this.

Documentaries of Nightmares and Self

2008-06-25T13:30:00.003Z

Over the last weeks I have been watching two series of documentaries created by a British filmmaker called Adam Curtis that are extremely good. So good, in fact, that I believe any person wanting to understand current western thought should be required to watch.

The first series of documentaries, is called The Century of Self, and talks about how the ideas of Freud, and of people in his family that followed him, have shaped the way in which western companies and politicians control the masses by appealing to our selfish irrational motivations.

The second series, called The Power of Nightmares, follows the parallel paths of American neo-conservatism and of radical Islam culminating with the politics of fear. It shows how these two groups of radicals have, at their core, very similar ideals, and how their actions have resulted, almost unintentionally, in the current situation regarding the war on terror.

These two are a must-see, and proves to me how Adam Curtis is an awesome filmmaker, especially through his usage of stock footage and music in a clever but not flashy or patronizing way.

Kazakh Vodka

2008-06-23T21:43:00.000Z

My flatmate has given me this vodka some time ago, but only now did I take the time to photograph to show to some friends. So now here it is, authentic Kazakh vodka, and the bottle is hands down one of the nicest bottles I have ever seen.

New Browser

2008-06-19T09:51:00.004Z

This week I did my part and participated in the Firefox download day, contributing to the statistics of over 300 thousand downloads in the UK alone. I would suggest the reader to download Firefox too, it is an awesome browser, and it looks slicker than the previous version, the download is a pitiful 7 Megabytes and it is spanking free!

London Naked Bike Ride

2008-06-17T08:22:00.004Z

This Saturday I spent the afternoon in Hyde Park to finally witness an event I wanted to see ever since I came to London, the Naked Bike Ride! As you can probably infer from the name, and deduce from the pictures I took, it is a bicycle ride, whose riders are stark naked, but unfortunately not all of them. The point of this ride is, of course, to stimulate people to curb car culture and remind us that if we do not stop using fossil fuels in favor of more green energy sources, global warming will make sure we all need to go around naked to stand the weather (this last point I made up, but it does make sense to me).

As you can see from my diverging attire, the temperature was not exactly ideal for a tropical guy like me to go around naked, so most of the people participating consisted of northern Europeans, or those who had come to be acclimatized in England. Some people might have been drawn to this event to see naked women, but I am sorry to inform that most people around this event were males, and the few women that came were either not completely naked or should not go around naked (yeah, I am not trying to be politically correct here). So the main point stands, it was more of a colorful protest than a show of fit physique.

Magic Day

2008-06-12T09:30:00.000Z

For many reasons, in particular because of a certain day in a certain Austrian castle.

Interesting music

2008-06-08T20:44:00.002Z

My girlfriend has recently recommended me to listen to this duo of Ireland-based Mexicans called Rodrigo y Grabiela. And I have to say I was pleasantly surprised, as I never imagined that two people with acoustic guitars could create such a rich sound. Their music, according to Last.FM, is hard to define, and I would agree, since they went into the old world bent on playing metal, but ended up using traditional Hispanic music tradition to create something which is very hard to pin down to any of the two categories. I definitely recommend for people who want to try something different and entirely original.

When your bank steals from you

2008-06-06T13:57:00.003Z

This week I have been unpleasantly surprised by a letter from the bank I have been using in Britain, HSBC, which indicated that I would be charged 25 quid for going overdraft about 25 pounds for 30 hours, because I forgot to transfer some money from my savings account to my current account during the weekend. Of course, I did not do this only this time, I have done about the same last February, which characterizes, according to the HSBC support person, being frequently overdraft. Strangely enough, I never had a definite definition for frequently, but the HSBC helper girl gladly informed me that twice in six months constitutes frequently.

Well, I actually do agree that some penalties are in order when someone goes overdraft, but clearly, a flat 25 pound fee is beyond any reasonable standards, since for the amount of money I have gone overdraft for, the penalty is much more than a loan shark would charge me for a 24 hour period.

Apparently, I am not the only disgruntled customer of the British banking system, as other people are bringing a test case against this type of theft, and the banks have lost in the first instance. Of course, the banks are appealing against this, but I am hopeful that this absurd charges will be outlawed.

Cien años de soledad

2008-06-04T08:39:00.002Z

I am proud to announce that I have finished reading my first full book in Spanish, and amazingly enough, I have started high, with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 years of solitude. It took me roughly a week to finish the book, and my verdict is that the book is good, but not as good as many people make it out to be. One may argue that my less than perfect knowledge of Spanish made me miss the poetic elements in it, but in all honesty, this is bullcrap. The story is interesting enough to keep me gripped, and the analogies with Latin American aesthetic and events is interesting, but it is not, as one person suggested, a book that should be compulsory reading for all humanity.

What amazed me was the way in which relationships are formed throughout the book. My girlfriend tells me that Hispanic America is very conservative, but Marquez clearly begs to differ, because his characters are specialists on incest and inbreeding like the inhabitants of a backwards Louisiana Swamp, as can be seen by the family tree of the main characters' family which I gracefully stole from the wikipedia.

Berries

2008-05-25T13:48:00.003Z

One way of thinking about spring is when certain flowers bloom, but that is generally more meaningful for people in the countryside. City people, like me, can only observe the seasonal appearance of certain local fruit, in the case of ye olde England, berries. The strawberries in the picture come from Hampshire, which reminded me of Southampton, my port of arrival in this land of Anglo-Saxon mystery, and gave me a sense of nostalgia. The blueberries, however, are Spanish, which makes my picture of English spring (above) somewhat farcical. But it is a pretty picture, is it not?

Computational Theology

2008-05-23T16:35:00.002Z

This week has been spent mostly looking for prospective jobs for when I finish my PhD, and one thought crossed my mind, that of trying to apply for a postdoc in a university in the Vatican. There are a number of universities supported by the holy see, so I wondered if the catholic church would be preoccupied with the virtual world as well as the spiritual one. But sadly, it turns out that the only university in the Vatican itself has a rather narrow range of departments, consisting only of Philosophy, Theology, Canon Law (nothing to do with firearms, I'm afraid), and Missiology (whatever the fuck that is).

What a disappointment.

Portugal and AAMAS

2008-05-23T11:09:00.002Z

I spent the whole of last week in Portugal, more precisely, in Estoril, where the 2008 edition of the conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems was held. A view from the conference hotel can be seen in the picture above, which instantly conveys the idea of what the place is, a beach resort. Unfortunately, despite weather forecasts to the contrary, I believe I managed to bring the notorious English weather with me, because it seemed to be rainy and overcast virtually every day (this picture was taken in one of the best days).
Tension was high for me, because not only did I have to give four talks about various papers on agents, one of my talks was essentially a summary of my thesis, the first presentation of it to an audience not consisting entirely of my supervisor. This time, the audience consisted of a designated mentor, and the chairs of the doctoral mentoring program. Luckily for me, my presentation was not a complete disaster, and although I might have said more than I should about some controversial topics, people generally felt my PhD was not a smoking pile of crap. Encouraged by that, I went on to present my other papers, but things of course never stay nice for long, and in one of them my laptop did not feel like working together with the projector which forced me to do half of the presentation without slides while trying to make an intelligible history out of the disordered thoughts I had at the time.
Now, going to the end of my thesis, I am looking at various possible positions, and who knows where I will end up.

Into the Real Wild and Lars

2008-05-01T12:54:00.006Z

Although this week I have been busy with preparations for AAMAS 2008, in which I am expected to give four different talks, I managed to relax a bit by watching some movies I have been recommended, namely Into the wild and Lars and the real girl. These are two wildly different films.

Into the wild is a movie about a moron who thinks he is accomplishing something while he kills himself of starvation in an abandoned bus in Alaska. It may sound mean to call a dead man an idiot, but the fact that many Americans formed a sort of a cult around this example of idiocy deserves strong words.

Smile idiot, smile.

This guy Christopher McCandles, self-styled survivalist (and self-pictured above), after falling out with his family, decides to vanish and try his luck surviving as a bum around cities, which is essentially possible thanks to human charity, and wilderness, his main mistake. In his last attempt at surviving in the wild, he went beyond what his meager knowledge of survival could keep him and could not find his way out of a trail that was good enough to take a whole bus into a certain spot. A very good comment about that was made by a park ranger, essentially saying that if he had a map of the area he would need to walk two miles into safety.

The second movie is more lighthearted, and tells the story of a socially inept man who finds the solution to the social pressures to get a girlfriend in a love doll. Not a crappy love doll, mind you, but a Real Doll, pictured below.

Oh Roxanne.

Of course, just buying such a doll would not suffice for a movie plot, and the movie is not about a man satisfying his masturbatory needs with an artificial person. Rather he pretends that the doll is an actual woman, bound to a wheelchair, which makes for very funny situations, as his entire town tries to play along because the main character is such a likable figure. This last movie is definitely recommended.

Of Munchkins and Blunders

2008-04-26T10:20:00.007Z

With almost a week having been gone since my return from Spain, and having loads of stuff to finish before I travel to AAMAS, things are not looking very good to me. My thesis work has officially started, and this week not only did I have to finishing reviewing papers for a Brazilian conference, I tried to start writing the introduction to my thesis. On a side note, I have read what was probably the worst paper I have ever seen in the process of reviewing papers for SBIA (their website looks a bit lame), since this is my first reviewing assignment, I fear for the worst in the future. But back to the thesis, it is proving incredibly hard to write an introduction and not starting it with something that sounds like bullshit, given that the remainder of the thesis must be strictly scientific. I wish I had the writing skills of Alan Turing, which I had the audacity of quoting in my proto-introduction, and be able to make interesting analogies, but then again, scientific writing nowadays is a bit different from 60 years ago.

On top of my difficulties at work, my home is now semi-occupied by the entire family of my flatmate, which means home privacy is a thing of the past. Every day some new thing hits my nerves making me feel like I am in a Chevy Chase movie! Luckily, so far I am avoiding being entirely like Clark Griswold and making an ass of myself, but there is still one and a half week to go, and I may end up slipping. In order to cope with this problem at home, I am spending increasing amounts of time hanging out at my friend Paulo's place after work, trying to arrive as late as possible in my flat. At these times, I indulge myself in some games from which I have been long apart, and spent some money buying the Munchkin card game, in particular the Cthulhu version of it, as fueled by my recent reading of Lovecraft. I am also about to start learning Go so as to add another level of chic to my nocturnal play sessions. Let's just hope I manage to survive these coming weeks and maintain my sanity for the conference I am about to go immediately afterwards.

Police Squad!

2008-04-24T11:33:00.002Z

Since my supervisor already caught me during my lunchtime entertainment moment, I feel more at ease in making comments about the crap I watch while I have lunch (just in case he pops by this blog). And this week, after returning from Barcelona, I re-discovered the series that led to the Naked Gun movies, namely, Police Squad!. The episodes of this series are actually perfect for my lunch break, since they are roughly 25 minutes in length, which does not allow time wasting after the food consumption part of the meal. One very funny part of these episodes is its introduction, usually with a celebrity guest that dies right at the end. Youtube, of course, has all episodes neatly divided into parts, which is quite handy, as you can check out below.

Pimientos de Padron

2008-04-20T13:01:00.004Z

Although I spent the past two weeks in Barcelona visiting my significant other, my work schedule was unchanged. So instead of enjoying the Mediterranean climate and dedicating myself to hedonism, I have spent most of my days trying to kick start the write up of my thesis. Moreover, I have spend half a week trying to come up with plans for further work on parts of my thesis, most of which will never be actually carried out. As you can imagine, this is very stimulating. Even if work is pressing, I needed to enjoy Barcelona, which is one of my favourite cities in Europe, so yesterday I went with Anita to the Mercat de la Boqueria The purpose was to get to know the place better, and although this market is significantly smaller the one in my hometown , it was really a feast for the senses. And I managed to get supplied with local delicacies. Among other things, I bought Pimientos del Padron, which were to be the entree for our lunch, since they are easily prepared, and eaten without the help of cutlery. If the local lore (and Wikipedia) is to be believed, about one in ten of those pimientos are supposed to be spicy, but I guess my luck defies this lore, you can call me lukcy if you are Mexican, or unlucky if you are Brazilian, because I managed to get almost all of them of the spicy kind. And by spicy I really mean it, since I felt the effects in my throat and stomach throughout the day, as well as today (on the way out).

Low Rider

2008-04-03T10:14:00.004Z

To try and kick start my writing up yesterday, I obtained the soundtrack from GTA: San Adreas, which so far has been my favorite game on the series, as well as the last one I managed to play for a long period of time, before my obligations overrode my desire to play games. In any case, this game has one of the best soundtracks ever, just because it consists mostly of a collage of great songs from various genres (of course, as far as original soundtracks go, nothing beats Mechwarrior 3). Among the tracks included in the Master Sounds radio is Low Rider, which is a song I always assumed was played by some Latino band, which clearly is not the case, as attested by this video I found in You Tube. The music always evokes in me memories of the famous Cheech and Chong movie, Up in Smoke, which I always assumed were the authors of the song, given these comedians' musical pieces. Well, I stand corrected.

My new career

2008-04-01T15:44:00.002Z

Now it's official, I have quit my position as PhD student to pursue my childhood dream of working in a rodeo. More specifically, I have decided to become a rodeo clown and got a position in a Texas rodeo, starting this summer. I understand the seriousness of my decision, but I figured I could not put this off for long in my life. To demonstrate how serious I am in my clown move, I have linked to this post a comic from the Perry Bible Fellowship, which is, by the way, on of the best webcomics I have ever seen on the internet, some of the strips are a bit cryptic, but the level of artistic finesse along with the witty humor make it for a great experience.

This being the first of April, it should take me some time to relocate to Texas and start posting again my experiences as rodeo clown.

Stories of the 1920s and 1930s

2008-03-29T16:37:00.001Z

In the past three months I have been reading the best of pulp fiction from the 1920s and 1930s from two of the most acclaimed writes of the time Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. The genres for which they became famous are remarkably different, with Lovecraft being hailed as the creator of modern horror and one of the precursors of science fiction, whereas Howard popularized fantasy fiction with his very own sword and sorcery type of story.

Dungeons and Dragons

2008-03-20T14:57:00.005Z

It has been a while since I last posted in this blog, which is probably due to my either not having enough PhD work to do, or too much to do that it is blocking my mind (that is for someone else to decide). Besides the PhD work and other existential decisions I need to decide in the next three months. Throughout these last weeks, however, I have been assailed with strange dreams where I find myself playing dungeons and dragons, with the dream usually ending with me trying to bluff the GM into letting me succeed a vital saving throw that I just failed. The interesting thing about the dreams is that I have not played DnD for almost ten years now, and not so coincidentally, Gary Gygax, the creator of this game has died quite recently. This seems to be the most plausible explanation for my dreams, unless some semi-psychic Internet dweller wants to offer me some more esoteric explanation. Or it could be that I am losing my mind as a result of my PhD work, in any case, this does not bode well for me (I guess).