Recycle/Rehash/Reborn

Our life is comprised of cycles. Many, many cycles. Very often, when we think we're near the point of stagnation and we feel invincible, it's just when we find out we're nothing in this world. And now we must just start everything over. Like a sawtooth wave, like a rollercoaster, like a druid from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. You retain your memories and abilities, but you start from level 1 again.

And it is also a time for rediscovering ourselves. To rebuild, to recycle. To make things worth for once and stop just pushing our carts around. Over the last months, my life has been through a transition. Reconsidering, rethinking, learning, teaching, sharing experiences and just realizing I still have a long way to go.

So, what does it have to do with this blog? Well, I'm currently pulling its plug. It's part of life. Good things we loved doing, but that we just think they seriously need some remodeling.

But no matter how hard we try, in the end, we're always the same thing as ever.

Goodbye.

The Great Mistake

Note to self: Do not ever press "Enter" while typing the title of your next post.

So much for stupidity, now that totally broke my concentration and stole my inspiration. Back to the Dreamcast, off I go.

The

Thanks, thanks, thanks

"What would you think if I sang out of tune?
Would you stand up and walk out on me?"
(The Beatles - With a Little Help From My Friends)

I wish I could be in a better state...but all I can do now is say "thanks" to everybody.

Coincidences, coincidences.

Today, while coming back home after an intense duel with a rebel EJB (Enterprise Java Bean), for no apparent reason, I remembered a song from an old ad...maybe from 1992 or 1993. It was a sort of an electropop thingy, with lots of synthesizers and kinda danceable. That music got stuck in my mind until I got home.

Then, after having dinner and starting my daily routine of transferring my files from my old pc to the new mac little by little, I was bringing some of my Jean Michel Jarre songs to iTunes, when I checked the iTunes store to search for valuable info to complete the tags...so I ended up hitting the page for the album "Les Chants Magnetiques", and decided to listen the previews just to see if knew any songs from that album...much to my surprise, the song I was "listening" to in the bus was actually Jean Michel Jarre's "Les Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 2"...I hope this does happen again! hehe!

Short Notes:
1. Happy Belated Birthday, ia-chan! I know you'll never read this, but oh well...at least you can't say I did forget it (which is kinda impossible to do, considering the amount of visual reminders).

2. The built-in Mac Mini speakers low frequency response is so crappy that they can make even Jamiroquai's bass totally unaudible!

Current 10-song Random List:

1. Jimi Hendrix - Purple Haze
2. Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse Of The Heart (HAHAHAHA!)
3. Pearl Jam - Garden
4. James Brown - Papa's Got A Brand New Bag
5. Pato Fu - Água (Nóis mora aqui no puerão!!!)
6. Foo Fighters - Everlong
7. Bad Religion - All There Is
8. Bad Religion - We're Only Gonna Die (nothing unusual there, I think roughly 1/3 of my songs are now Bad Religion's)
9. The Police - Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
10. The Cranberries - Ridiculous Thoughts

Save it till the morning after

19 days. So much has passed in the meantime. New computer, new workplace, new routine, new additions to my modest videogame collection, new abilities, new victories and new defeats.

And it all happened so quickly that I could barely regroup them in small clusters and write appropriate posts, so I think I'll have to write them a later moment, if possible. Oh well, what a disgraceful blogger I am, right in the moment when something actually happens, I just don't post anything!

Anyway, here goes the current shuffled iTunes playlist: (yeah, another new stuff, I stopped using good ol' Winamp for good)

1. Duran Duran - Save a Prayer
2. Beach Boys - Surfin' Safari
3. The Cranberries - Ridiculous Thoughts
4. Duran Duran - A Matter Of Feeling
5. The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby
6. Bad Religion - Raise Your Voice
7. The Police - Spirits In The Material World
8. Ace Of Base - Living In Danger
9. 10,000 Maniacs - More Than This
10. Soundgarden - Blow Up The Outside World

Ja oder Nein? Warum?

Ummm...
I wonder why Blogger is now giving me messages in German AND English.

Ich kann schreiben nicht mehr...

Tschüss! (or whatever do you spell it)

Sim ou não? Por quê?

Já fazem quase vinte dias que eu não posto nada. Não é a primeira vez que isso acontece, mas talvez seja a primeira vez que eu não procurei uma desculpa pra me justificar perante a mim mesmo. As vezes é falta de inspiração, as vezes é cansaço, as vezes é falta de fontes ou então falta de tempo.
Mas agora, eu simplesmente não sinto necessidade de me justificar, ainda que tenha motivos para tal...

Opa, acabei me justificando mais uma vez.

The Chainbreaker

You probably received one already. Promises of a happy life, love, money and sometimes even God is involved in those nasty chain letters. Ya know, those mails you get from time to time asking you to forward it to a certain number of people or else your cat would die, you'll never get an erection again, you will lose your job, you'll find out your father is a drug dealer and you will be crushed by a baby blue '68 Ford Maverick GT V8 with 5 nuns inside.

But why do I hate that stuff so much? First, it is annoying. Many many people, for some reason send me that stuff. OK, I must admit I read some of them, and sometimes I even forward it to two or three people if it is something actually interesting (about only 0.001% of the time). But most of the time, I simply delete them, even though Gmail give me away more than 2 gigs so I don't need to delete all my crappy mail to receive actual e-mails (or more crappy chain mails), which leads to the second reason I don't like it, it's just a bandwidth waste.

You might think that a single e-mail wouldn't hurt that much, but consider this: You get a mail from someone. Then you forward it to ten other people. Each of those ten people forward to ten other people. Those people (who are now 100), send it again to more ten people, totaling 1,111 messages exchanged if it is propagated only three times. If that message were propagated seven times, there would be 1,111,111 people receiving the same stupid message. Let's say this message contains a small picture and some text, making it roughly 100KB in size. The total bandwidth spent would something like 105 GB, enough to clutter more than 50 Gmail mailboxes with all that crap.

And here comes the third and final reason: It's useless! I lost count of how many mails I got searching for that Maddie girl, and I probably bet people in Portugal and England get them on a daily basis. If it was so effective, people would probably have found her (or her body) by now.

Anyway, don't forget to not forward this to any person, or else your brother (or sister, father, mother or anyone else you care a lot (even yourself)) will lose his/her gallbladder, you might be attacked by a group of ferocious muay thai fighting ferrets, you just might get caught in the next Great Molasses Flood or maybe you'll just get hit by a random ICBM.

Arrivederci, Luciano!

"Dici che il fiume trova la via al mare
E come il fiume giungerai a me
Oltre i confini e le terre assetate
Dici che come fiume
Come fiume...
L'amore giunger
l'amore...
E non so più pregare
E nell'amore non so più sperare
E quell'amore non so più aspettare."
(U2 + Luciano Pavarotti - Miss Sarajevo)

I was never a fan of opera. But he's a guy I think I should at least dedicate a short post for (And I really can't think of anything to write, too).

Colocando os pingos nos is

De uns tempos pra cá, tenho percebido que a internet daqui de casa anda violentamente lenta. Então resolvi tentar entrar num desses sites que medem a velocidade de conexão.

Pois não é que demorou quase 2 minutos pra entrar na porcaria do site? Melhor benchmark que esse aí não existe.

(no title)

"I want to run
I want to hide
I wanna tear down the walls
That hold me inside"
(U2 - Where The Streets Have No Name)

Neither the streets nor the registries in the database I'm trying to retrieve data from have names. Isn't that beautiful? It's like when searching for criminals using nothing but a sketch... Isn't that beautiful?

超新星フラッシュマン

ちきゅうに　ピンチが　やって来る
でっかい　みらいが　危ないぜ！
ことくの　宇宙から　ＯＨ！今　こそ
かえって　来たぞ　ハガネの　たましい

おれたち　ハートは　いっしょさ　ＦＩＲＥ！
もやすぞ　いかりの
フ！フ！フ！
どうかせんっ

ＣＲＡＳＨ！ＣＲＡＳＨ！ＣＲＡＳＨ！ＣＲＡＳＨ！
きけんの　いみなんて
ＦＬＡＳＨ！ＦＬＡＳＨ！ＦＬＡＳＨ！ＦＬＡＳＨ！
忘れたの　さ
ＣＲＡＳＨ！ＣＲＡＳＨ！ＣＲＡＳＨ！ＣＲＡＳＨ！
何がを　言う　前に
ＦＬＡＳＨ！ＦＬＡＳＨ！ＦＬＡＳＨ！ＦＬＡＳＨ！
ぶつかるの　さ

かがやく　明日へ　ばくはつ　ＰＯＷＥＲ！
超新星フラッシマン！！