Monday, October 01, 2007

The power of Google

Some days ago I was remembering, not for the first time, some friends I had a long time ago. Friends that, for reasons that don't belong here, I lost. And I thought to myself "Let's see what Google can find of them" and googled their names. It is amazing the results I got back. Even data that should be protected!

Sometimes the "power" of Google frightens me. At least my intentions were honourable.

Long story short. I found a piece of text I believe my friend wrote. I read it and was struck by it's profoundness and by how close it struck, from afar. It is lost in the immensity of the cyberspace and, in all honesty, it does it no justice.

So, even if not many people read this personal blog, I will reproduce it for its own merits which are not mine and I'll honour this discovery to it's own author (Translation mistakes are my own. It's originally written in Spanish):

Discovery



Discoveries are born on the threshold of exhaustion, on the most depressing tiredness, lies and a flavour of vinegar. We discover this new element and we quickly tell everyone, proud and blessed by the mysterious saint of happiness. We bore all known and unknown with the details of our fortuitous encounter with truth, we smile proudly at our own sapiency and, why not, our luck. And we flirt with the beauty of the eternal. Then comes the phase where we investigate this discovery, we understand its inner workings and discover all its mechanisms and nooks and crannies. We analyze, experiment, evaluate, compare and, in a word, we submit it to a cruel and desperate measure in our effort to prove we are the unique, inimitable and perfect discoverers. We lose track of time and space. We don't eat nor sleep and if we sleep, we do it keeping an eye open and our brain overchurning ideas and concepts related to our undefined marvel, both complex and irrational. We dream of our discovery and intimately tie ourselves to it. We are obsessed by it. Until one day, without warning, our discovery is stolen. Someone better, more intelligent, powerful. Someone who has something we don't have even though we may not admit it. So we fight to preserve our patent. Just to keep enjoying the pure and simple investigation, to stay in science's insanity. We fail. And our heart seeks another discovery. One for a lifetime, if possible.

David

Friday, September 28, 2007

Work is not life... right?

I have a good steady cushy job, mainly. It pays well and it's not hard.

Having said that, that also means it's often uninteresting.

The workload has the habit of going from 0 to 100 and then back to 0 on minutes. The best attitude, I've learned, is not to care too much about any particular project. If it comes out, it comes out. If it don't, it don't. Sometimes I forget that and get terribly frustrated and angry at the red tape.

And sometimes the 0 is around a little too long. I try to fill the gaps with things I like to do. I've long lost the appetite to learn new programming languages, new algorythms, new applications,...

I have some benefits, too. Which is a deffinite bonus. Benefits I wouldn't have in a different job, and would deffinitely affect my life if I was to switch jobs.

In any case, jobs are meant to be a means to an end, right?

Well... Yes... and no.

We spend 8 hours a day at our worklaces (ok, some more, some less, details...). In short, 1/3 of 5 days a week. A large lump of our lives.

So, every so often I stop and these thoughts spring up onto me, make me question many things. And it's obviously frustrating.

But eventually, that goes away. I have a good job that pays well, it allows me to do things I like to do, it's not too demanding most of the time. I am very lucky in so many ways.

... but sometimes... just sometimes...

Friday, September 07, 2007

Misused word

Here's a word I had completely wrong in my mind...

...and something that struck near home...

Procrastination



... we live and learn...

The Cube



I imagine you all know the movie "The Cube", a 1997 film in which a man wakes up trapped in a cubic room. The story is all about his attempt at exiting the cube.

Original as the movie and the argument are, I found out yesterday it was not that original. The original version, also called "the cube" is a 1969 TV play written by Jim Henson (the creator of the Muppets) and Jerry Juhl. This play carries all the undertones of the great sci-fi classics such as the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury or Larry Niven's Ringworld.

Having seen both versions and differences notwithstanding, I consider this black and white verion the better (and the most disturbing) one of the two.

Thanks to the technological magic of Stage6, you can now enjoy this play (which would otherwise be impossible to get) whenever you want.

HERE IS THE LINK to watch the movie. Enjoy!

Thursday, September 06, 2007

New Deviance

The other day, at home, we looked out the window and there was the best full moon I've seen in ages (which actually explained my mood, too...). We rapidly took out our camera and took a series of pictures of it.

I've hung one of them as a deviance, this one



But there were more. I couldn't actually decide which one I liked best, so I chose just the one for DeviantArt and here are the rest: