After updating wordpress to the latest version, some things stop working. Ok, just one thing: the LJ crossposter. When I installed WordPress, I thought about letting go LJ and I guess this is the time.
If you guys still want, you can track the posts with RSS and, as far as I know, all comments are open on WordPress (you just need to put your name and that's it).
One thing I always try to do is keep my mind open to new things. One way to do this is not fixing yourself on just one thing. Usually, when I work with some language, I try to play with another at home. I’ve gone into the “every language has it’s own ‘way-of-life’ methodology” that I think is pointless explain it again. Always running with two languages forces me to keep that in perspective.
And than you see an article like this. Is a view from a Applet Newton developer over the new Nokia N800. Believe, I’ve read the whole article and all I can say is: “this is article from someone that lost his perspective”. Ok, he raises some good points, but some are simply “I want it Apple and now a computer that 90% of everyone that have a computer uses”. In some point he mentions that is hard to understand some N800 icons but, just a few paragraphs later, it points an envelope is the routing action, which can send a document to another application. Now, for, say, 10 years already, the envelope is used to represent “email”: on a launcher, it’s the email client, on a program, it’s the “send by email”.
That’s the kind of “lost of perspective” I said. In one hand, an icon is a bad thing; one the other hand, the icon is perfectly used. Why? Because, in his “newton” perspective, what he have is perfect. Although faced with another thing, a chance to learn new things, this guy thinks what he had is perfect and didn’t let the new experience alter the old experiences.
Finally I managed to get a room. It’s in the middle of the suburbs or Paddington and Wollahra. There are two other guys there and it was a girls room, but she have some health problems and gonna be in the hospital for some months. So, while she stays there, I gonna stay in her room.
That appeared just after I called about 20 people asking for shared rooms, losing one room to a hot chick with a Russian name and have a list of 25+ places to call for a rent (full apartments and studios, not just a room). But, as the room is already furnished and there will be some people around (so I can practice my English, in a forced way), I thought it would be better.
Work
So, I’m finally getting a hang on work. The system is pretty huge, but I’m getting its weird ideas and such. Also, we are now getting meetings, as the release date is comming (I won’t tell you when, but I know when, yada yada yada). So far, I can say that it would be really cool, even without the “community” stuff on it.
Also related with work, Friday will be Australia Day here and Google will use an airplane to take high-res pictures of the city. On the page about the event, they are inviting Australian people to go outside and form some groups and do some formations or simply wave to the plane. So far, we are planing putting a big logo on the building and stay there while they take pictures. And I will be there too.
City
Last week I finally went to the city (what would be called “centre” or “downtown” in some other places). And, to say the least, it’s quite different from what I see on Bondi: Bondi is surely a beach city, but city is completely different place. It is more like New York (well, at least, from what I know from the pictures). On my own opinion, Bondi is way better.
Holiday
Ok, so Friday will be Australia Day and, so, we won’t work (it’s a holiday, for fucks sake!). As I said before, I’ll appear at work to help people with whatever they are doing. The plane should come somewhere between 9am and 9:30am. So, after the work, I plan to find a place to lunch and walk around the city (not the centre, but some other places), like seeing the Opera House and climb the Harbour Bridge.
Gadgets
Just to prove what the holiday is, I bought a brand new camera: A Canon Ixus 800IS (or something like that). 6 mega pixels, 4x optical zoom, optical image stabilizater. And small and cute too. This means that pics.slowhome.org will finally be populated again, after my screw up with directories and lack of coffee.
Update 2007.01.23, 22:01: Also, the more I read about, the more I want a Nokia N800. I can’t stop imagining a client for the product we are working and how many things I could write using PyGtk running on the damn thing. Too bad they are selling it only on USA right now and there are no words about it coming to Australia…
Well, that’s it for now. Later, when I finally find some time, I’ll post a review of “Deja Vu”, a movie I saw last weekend.
Indo para o banco, passei por um cara com a camiseta do Internacional (de Porto Alegre). Não comprimentei nem nada, vai que era brazuca…
Todo feliz por chegar no banco e conseguir falar, em inglês, sem pestanejar, que eu havia ativado meu cartão via telefone no sábado e que, no domingo, ao tentar fazer um saque, tinha recebido a mensagem que o PIN (senha) tava errado. “Agora to bem no inglês”, pensei. Ao falar com o antendente, ele me disse que era português e não falei mais inglês no banco.
Pra tua conta, tem três números: o BSB (agência), o número da conta e o número de acesso ao sistema por internet (NetBank), que não tem nenhuma relação com os dois anteriores (exceto que ambos mexem no mesmo volume de dinheiro). Para uso do cartão, tu tem uma senha; pra acesso ao NetBank, tu tem outra.
A struggling salesman (Will Smith) takes custody of his son (Jaden Smith) as he’s poised to begin a life-changing professional endeavor.
Lets start with the fun part: Jaden Smith, who plays Will Smith character in the movie, is his real life son. Amazing that they didn’t call Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith real life wife, to play the wife in the movie too.
Anyway, it is an amazing movie. I can’t say it is because it is well written or well directed, but because it is inspired by a real life story, although a movie inspired by a real life story that is badly directed or badly written will suck anyway. But it is quite amazing what the main character, a divorced jobless father does to find his own happiness while taking care of his single son. And that he never let himself fall into depression no matter how bad things are.
Will Smith did a pretty good job on this movie. Some of scenes he did an amazing job just by his looks than by his words. And I guess it was a something he would like to do, as he pointed once on the “Actor’s Studio” about his relationship with his father and one scene on “The Fresh Prince of Belair”, when Will (the character) has to fight a second loss of his father (and it was one of the most strong scenes on the subject I can recall). Jaden Smith, on the other hand, isn’t all good in the movie, and I can’t blame this eight year old boy in his first experience in front of the camera. To me, he spent almost 3/4 of the movie with a pretty strong stomach-ache.
Two scenes were pretty touching, in my opinion: the first is when, after some days sleeping on a homeless shelter, Chris (the father) is putting his kid to sleep when the son put his hand on his father face and says “You are a good papa”. It is easy to imagine what a father that had to face what he faced till that moment and hear that would feel. The second is in the end, when the Will Smith gets the answer about the job. He doesn’t say a word and, yet, you can imagine exactly what is going inside him.
My guess is that Will Smith will be nominated for an Oscar for this movie.
A farmer, a smuggler, and a syndicate of businessmen match wits over the possession of a priceless diamond.
Let’s talk honestly: if you are a guy, would you see a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, remembering his old movies? I wouldn’t, but there was nothing better to do, so I hit the cinema. And, oh boy, how wrong I was. He is not the “looking good boy” anymore and now looks like a real actor. I can’t point when that happened because I didn’t watch “The Departed”, but it looks like he finally managed to follow Bad Pitt steps and get away from that image.
Ok, so the movie is quite violent, but I guess it isn’t unrealistic: as far as we know from the news about Africa, things are pretty terrible there. And that’s the basic plot for the movie: the continual war between the people for money, the raise of cartels and guerrilas to “recruit” (actually, kidnap) people to work for them.
The story goes about those guerrilas kidnapping people to work in diamond extraction, a dad that is kidnapped, a son that is “recruited” to work as a fighter in the guerrila, the father going after his son when free and a diamond smuggler trying to get out of Africa while his boss wants more diamonds from the war zone. In the middle of that, there is a pink diamond, the “blood diamond”, that can free everyone.
The acting is good, but somewhat weird. DiCaprio is acting is pretty good, as I pointed before. Djimon Hounsou, playing again another slave black man (as he did in Amistad), is good, although I didn’t get his motives for fighting for a son when his two daughters and wife were ok (and together). Jennifer Connelly, playing a reporter doing a job on the subject of the war diamonds, is so and so. But the problem is that, although those main actors work is pretty good, they don’t seem to fit together.
I just think the producers tried to “play safe” on their recommendations: although the movie says, all the time, the countries that are in war because of the diamonds smuggle their production to “safe” countries, the end message say that you should never buy a diamond from the countries in war. They kill their own message by pointing that a big share of the diamonds from the safe countries come from countries in war. Lame.
The Sydney Morning Herald Blogs: Stay in Touch
Redheads beware! You may be headed the way of dodos, dinosaurs and Whitney Houston’s career. Britain’s Oxford Hair Foundation predicts that, by the end of the century, carrot-tops might have disappeared from the face of the Earth.
Jack owes an unpaid debt to Davy Jones and his army of sea-phantoms…his soul. Now, he must find a way to save himself from becoming one of them, and suffering forever.
The first movie of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” was somewhat good. Now, they thought: “Oh, you know. Maybe people think that isn’t enough brains in the story, so let’s add some twists”. And, in the end, the did a quite mess with the story, adding several different factions, each one fighting against each other, for something that you can’t even realize what the fuck is (and maybe not even the characters).
Johnny Deep character come from “crazy dude” to “gay dude”. His movements don’t look like someone that stayed under the hot sun for too long (as it was pointing in the first movie as the reason for him to walk like that), to someone that is simply that type of gay that have to act like little girls (and not all gays act like that). And the worst is that his character steals almost all the scenes, leaving the space for Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley characters. And the end is way terrible, in a sense that “there will be some sequel and you’ll have to watch it to understand why you lost two hours of your life watching this crap”.
Almost makes me want to download a botleg version and point that 1) it wasn’t worth waiting for a proper rip and 2) it was far away from worth going to the cinema.
Ethan Hunt comes face to face with a dangerous and sadistic arms dealer while trying to keep his identity secret in order to protect his girlfriend.
Oh, “Mission: Impossible”, the series, was pretty good. They did a lot of hard stuff and even sometimes you thought they were screwed up, but it was always part of the plan. Them, someone decided to do movies about the series and screwed everything up. In the first one, Brian de Palma did a pretty good job, bringing the series to the modern era, but still with a touch of the original series; in the second, John Woo added a lot of explosions and took away some pieces of the original series; now, in the third, J.J. Abrams managed to really screw up the series. There is nothing impossible anymore and the movie looks a lot like 007 on steroids: a lot of gadgets that can’t even exist in this reality coming from nowhere. Well, maybe there is some sort of “The Bourne Identity” on it (strong enemies, that can take a whole IMF team — and that’s why the original series was so good: one single agent was no match, but the whole team acted as one and could take anything).
“Mission: Impossible” is ruined as a silver screen production, unless someone put some brains in scripting and directing again. Right now, even “Die Hard” has less explosions and more brains.
A naive young woman comes to New York and scores a job as the assistant to one of the city’s biggest magazine editors, the ruthless and cynical Miranda Priestly.
A movie about the shallowness of the fashion industry, told in a shallow way. I mean, Anne Hathaway is doing the same role she did in both “The Princess Diaries”, except that from schoolgirl to princess she goes from normal woman to super model in just one talk. And the story doesn’t catch up, it is always just another round of models running in circles showing clothes and character development is pretty weak.
Even if you compare Meryl Streep from this movie with the Meryl Streep from The Bridges of Madison County you see how her acting is superb, but her character in this movie doesn’t have a reason to be that way (or maybe, again, it is just because of the poor charcter development).
Introduced to a volunteer opportunity with the Doctor’s Gift Program, Katie (Mika Boorem) signs up for a trip to China, where she meets Lin (Yi Ding), a girl with whom she shares a birthday. Lin has a facial deformity that discourages her from ever showing her face, but her friendship with Katie helps her start to see life in a new way.
You know that movies that you start watching for no good reason and simply can’t turn off? Well, that’s what happened with me with this movie.
At first, the movie shows two different families: the American one has a good life; the Chinese was pretty poor and the husband finds a little girl in some bushes (probably rejected by her mum). The American girl is a rela in the butt, she doesn’t respect anyone and abuse her parents; the Chinese girl is shy, does a lot of hard work and is always trying to help her foster-father. While the American girl have everything, she acts like she hate her life; the Chinese girl, although living with a deformity, seems happy to be alive.
One of the scenes that impressed me the most is when the American girl start working in the Chinese hospital. She goes to the little kids ward, where they take care of little kids with deformities. And she just breaks apart. I guess it shown exactly how we are not ready to think that not everyone lives a “perfect life”.
My guess is that this is a movie to help teenagers to understand how big this world is, that there are people living with way less than them and still feeling fine. Or maybe it was just a try to make more teenagers engage on charity work around the world.
It was a nice waste of time, but I wouldn’t look for the next session (but would definitely watch it again if I couldn’t find anything else to watch).
Finally, I managed to complete another step on GUP: it can now save the album list in a local cache, so it won’t download the album list over and over again. The update is in the GUP page.
Amazing! I just managed to delete all pictures in pics.slowhome.org. And I guess the only pictures I had backup were the ones of the trip to Europe (but I can re-upload that, as the backup is still in Brazil).
And the fun fact now is that I wanted to clean up the things to make it easier to start making backups of the DreamHost hosted data…
PS: You know what? There was something bugging me about Gallery that I couldn’t “tag” images and put them in different categories at the same time. Another itch to scratch or you guys know something that allow me to do that?
I said I was going to watch more TV. And I did. And today, for some reason, it seemed easy to understand the people around (I still have troubles trying to speak, but I guess I’m getting better). I had some introduction to the system and I could get around 99% Damien (the other serverdev guy) told us (it was me and Simon, a new guy, in this “class”).
Also, about the work. I said I was going to draw the ER diagram, but I didn’t. I spent the whole night playing Dungeon Siege with Julio. But, today, I managed to find where one bug was hidden (it is the best description for a bug I found by accident — and that I realized where it was after trying three different tests) inside the code and also managed to close another one. So my first bug took a full week, the second two days and the third just a matter of hours. Made me feel nice after realizing that.
I guess that’s something my psychologist was trying to say when we were talking about “aggressiveness”. It is not what most people think (brute force, that kind of stuff), but what you do when you get angry. The good thing is that I managed to put it to work to me.
For some time already, I have this Subversion repository open for my projects. So far, http://svn.slowhome.org hadn’t a pretty face and people had to know the projects repositories to be able to see the sources. But not anymore!
I installed ViewSVN and now people can see the projects. And I guess it is a good start to the projects page I was planing.
If I still used the old LJ format, I would put my current mood as “pissed off”.
Today I schedule an inspection of another studio. I received the email three days later, as the state agent just answered my request (sent last Thursday today), about the studio right in front of the workplace. First of all, I tried to contact the agent three times before I finally could hear her voice, and all I wanted to say was to confirm that I would be there by 5pm.
When it was 5pm, I went to the building and waited. And waited. And waited. Then I tried to call the agent again, without results. Another try, five minutes later, and I managed to talk to her again. I identified myself and when I was about to confirm the address (’cause I didn’t saw her anywhere), she said something so fast I couldn’t understand a word. So, I politely said “I’m sorry, but there is too much noise here, can you speak a little bit slower?”. That’s when she said something else, still pretty fast and hung up in my face.
That’s when I got pissed off. If she was really interested in renting the place, I hope she would, at least, try to contact me again, something that never happened. She could, at least, talk slower when I asked her to do so. But, after some time, I got pissed off about myself. Language still is a barrier to me here, no matter what. I can’t follow a conversation with my co-workers ’cause, when I finally got what they meant, the conversation moved further and whatever I had to add, is now lost in the time.
Then, at work, I got pissed off with myself again. It’s a week that I’m working and I still have problems trying to follow the logic used in the system I’m working on. And I won’t accept the “oh, it’s only a week” excuse I’m giving to myself.
I guess the old me would get depressed about that, but not now. It’s time to fight against those problems.
So, what I would do: first of all, I’ll watch Australia TV. Yeah, TV. I guess continual hearing of the Australian accent will help me tune my ears to the language. Second, I will finally write that E.R. diagram of the code I’m planing since I was in Brazil. This will force me to look at every single file and read every single line of code and understand where the things fit.
Now, it just just sad to see how much power over anything Brazilian personalities have. It is just amazing that, just because Cicarelli is a celebrity, her process managed to get a result so fast. People kill someone else and the deceased’s family have to wait for years till the murdered is finally convicted.
Just do yourself a favor and, if you can’t access YouTube for any reason, start a mass action suit again your ISP. Do not let them take away your freedom.
Job
I’m working since 2nd of January. So far, I managed to complete the first task I had. It wasn’t that hard, but I really got frustrated that it took me a whole week to complete. I mean, it wasn’t the “change three lines and that’s it”, but I really expected more from me. I hope it is just a thing that happened due my inexperience with the system.
Money
So far, I’m still tracking every single money I spend. I still didn’t get a payment, since I just opened my bank account here yesterday (fun fact: now I can say I have a foreign bank account no matter if I come back to Brazil or stay here).
Phone
I just bought a cell phone to me. It’s a Samsung X660. Nice looking, but has this weird habit of taking pictures of my pocket. I’m still trying to take the pictures out of it (fun fact: it has an infrared port, but my computer doesn’t have one; my palm has an infrared port and can connect to the internet without the need to pay for it — you do the math).
A place to stay
Since yesterday (when I bought the cell phone), I started looking for places to rent. So far, I found two places, but just one returned my request for inspection. This place is two blocks away from Julio’s house (which means it is just four blocks away from work). It is a studio (something Brazilian people know as “JK”), but, unlike its Brazilian counterpart, it is actually part of a bigger block. This place seems to have a small kitchen, a bathroom and a room/bedroom and the building is attached to a bigger place, with a larger kitchen and a laundry. I just hope it is still available. Also, it seems to be furnished already (so it would be a thing less to worry).
The other place I was looking was half block away from work, but all I know about is the front of the building. There are no pictures of the inside, no information if is furnished already or not and the contractors didn’t contact me.
Well, that’s it. I work from nine to five, but I’m too fucking tired these days.
If you guys have any questions, don’t forget to drop me a note.
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