Keep on

The marathon of sensations kept on for the last two days. So many things that I have to sit down for a while to organise them inside my brain, and then write. Now, I'm off to China. To the real one. I will be crossing the border in two hours. On foot. Like I did from the US to Mexico.

Hong Kong, day 1

It's been one day in Hong Kong, and all I can say is I'm confused. Sizes, densities, faces, tastes, smells, paces... everything so different and yet so familiar at the same time. I'm too constrained by the jet lag. I need more time to get some conclusions about the overload of sensations and information I am getting.   

Falling asleep and the meaning of life

I am falling asleep, but i need to keep myself awake, so that i'll be really sleepy tomorrow, and when i get on the plane to china late at night, i'll finally fall asleep like a baby.
That reminds me of my childhood, when my cousin and I, before our yearly trip to the Alps, tried to keep ourselves awake so that we would be able to sleep on the car the day after, and therefore avoid the boredom of a seven hour car trip. Of course, we kept ourselves awake, but didn't manage to sleep a minute on the car the day after.
I guess I didn't learn anything from my childhood.

China

That's where I am heading off tomorrow. For the next three weeks, I'll be in China.
For the next three weeks, the fruitman chronicles will become the fluitman clonicles.  

Reading and sleeping late

I've been reading a lot lately to prepare for something BIG. Actually, I'm just trying to figure out what I am going to write for my thesis, how can I connect it with what i did, how can i connect it with the course i want to teach, and how can i, after all, connect it with a decent life. Man, i go to sleep.

Machado and the use of thirst

This is adapted from what I remember of a quote by Machado:
"Everybody knows that water's use is to calm your thirst down. But what is the use of thirst?"

Loft, feng shui, orchata, ping-pong

Today I visited my friend Al at his new appartment. It's a 40m2 loft
with a lot of light and a cute bar separating the kitchen from the
living-bed room. However, Al wants to separate the bedroom from
the dinning room, because it turns out that the "loft" concept is now
outdated. Nowadays, it turns out, you have to look for the feng shui
concept, and that implies capturing the "chi" around us. So, maybe
putting some curtains between the bed and the living room might achieve
a better chi balance. I don't know. Maybe he could check with these feng shui consultants.

After this loft-feng shui debate, we had a walk around the neighbourhood and drank an excellent orchata
at Sirvent, and then we started talking about how Al has been lately
playing games he hadn't played since childhood. I was happily surprised
by Al's confession, since lately I have also been playing lots of games
long forgotten since childhood. We didn't quite find a reason for this
common feeling of ours, and thus made an appointment to play ping-pong next week.

New tools

Following the steps of the wise Joaquin, I installed Mozilla Firefox (browser) and Mozilla Thunderbird (email client). To my dissapointment, I discovered that I cannot get my hotmail messages on Thunderbird, because they use "proprietary protocols"... This is quite terrible for me, since I like to have total power over my accounts with a single email client software... Let's see.
As for the rest, everything is perfect, though I still have the tendency to click on the "e" of internet explorer... How long will it last? How deep is microsoft rooted into my brain?
Another thing: these Mozilla guys make all the information about their products so easy to find... you feel as they were not hiding anything, as they wanted to make your life so much easier with tech stuff... is it that difficult for microsoft to understand that this is what users want? Why is it that a decentralised project like Mozilla gets such a good centralisation of all the necessary information? I guess these are the geeky questions that I need to ask myself every once in a while, just to feel that the masters degree in information systems actually taught me something...

Leaving

My friend Joaquin is leaving Berkeley right now. I know it since some days ago, but it wasn't until today, before having dinner, that a strange sadness penetrated every single muscle of my body. A part of myself is also leaving Berkeley. One day, on the hills, we had the bay at our feet. The grass was green, the soul was blue. You were holding a note book with your hands, and I was trying to read some political economy paper. But the bay was stronger. The bay, always the bay.

Names...

Following the wisdom of ethno-queer, I took a walk into the Ethnic Stud Name Generator. All this name means is: you go to this webpage, you introduce your name, and you get a sexy Spanish name in return... I tried "Fruitman" and got "Francisco Amante". I tried "Bonapster" and got "Beatriz Amante"... so you see, bonapster, we are brother and sister after all. And you're a woman.
p.s. trying "choche" gives you "Consuela Sanchez", for those of you who were wondering...
p.s. (II) there's also a japanese name generator... so Mr Fruitman in the island of Japan is known as "Saruwatari" (monkey on a crossing bridge) and Choche is known as "Sachiko" (child of fortune)... life is wonderful.

Merchandise

Reading Queerecology, I saw that Spencer has his own T-shirt designs, and bags and stuff. It's all made by an online third party, and if I'm not wrong anybody with a good (or bad) design can set up an e-commerce site selling her/his own designs. What about "fruitman t-shirts"? It should read "fc" on the front (heart height), and on the back it should say "I am a proud reader of the Fruitman Chronicles". Another t-shirt would read "I am not Choche, but I know him". What do you think, Bonapster?

Done!

Finally I finished my last (I hope) PhD course... I gave the presentation today and feel sooooooo free. Everything worked fine, now I just have to get an "official" stamp to convalidate my studies in the States. Bernie, you'll have to help me with that, pleaaaassee. Ah, whenever I finish some hard work, I feel like I don't want to sleep.

Brrrr

It's f 45 minutes I am trying to send out my presentation for tomorrow to my dear classmates... Hotmail does not want to work today. My other account does not want to work today. My other other account does not work either. All full of spam. All full of shit. I hate it, cause I can't even delete the stuff. Ay.

Finetech did what it had to

Yes they did. And fast. The comments are up and running again.

Flash game

If you have some 5 minutes to spare, check this flash game out.

I was there from 08/2001 to 06/2002

Isn't it nice? The background is so much like a film set... I just felt nostalgic once again when I looked at that picture. I wonder how long nostalgy for a place does remain within ourselves... As long as we are living alive, I suppose.

One more quote for the road by Jose Alfredo

My friend Jose Alfredo says this when writing about some piece of code he is developing: "No te preocupes por ellos si todo funciona; si hay algo que no va, entonces el error dirá qué es lo que falta."
... which should be something like this in English: "Do not worry about them if everything works fine. If something doesn't work, then the error will tell you what is lacking"
Ah, if we could always know what the "error" is! ...
Where is the "error" when I look for him/her? (interesting: is error male or female?)
And when I find him/her, why doesn't he/she seem to speak with clear, understandable words, or just speak at all?
Interesting thoughts attack my mind whenever I take a sentence out of its original context... You are very inspiring to me, Jose Alfredo! Yes you are!
**Free sponsoring space: Gata, the ultimate Linux websites generating tool, by Jose Alfredo Cañizo Rincon, a really smart guy** (I am so good at online marketing... **Pere Rovira Samblancat, online marketing expert, a really smart guy too, in a way**)

Paying the cost to be the boss

A song by BB King as the title of this post.
I finally did it. Lazyness and lack of time made me pay for the commenting system I had been using for free until some days ago. 21,57 euros go to Finitech Consultants. I hope this post will help me remember the day when I payed, so that next year they don't automatically bill me for one more year (in a year, I will surely have built a super blog with a super commenting system, everything with movable type or wp or whatever, but for free:) )
p.s. i also payed because, otherwise, I was going to loose all the comments that you my dear readers had been writing so patiently... the real raison d'etre of this blog... you see, at least i love you as much as 21,57 euros :)

Random stuff

Yes, it's more the title of a section than the title of a post, but it came out like this. I finally finished my PhD presentation for Thursday: "ICT and Sustainable Development". I am very proud of it, specially for the play on words I invented and put as a conclusion of the presentation: "from bytes to bites". It's true: we should move, many times, from bytes to bites. Reality bites.
(Nnow I wonder why I titled this post "random stuff", and then I remember what I wanted to write, and how just now I have censored myself because I don't want the things I was thinking to appear on this blog... yes, I wrote them and deleted them, and wrote this instead)

Mosquitos

They are coming. As i write this post, the light attracts them. One stops on the wall before me, just by the window. I catch a supermarket brochure to kill it, and he flies away, as it could hear me. I keep writing, more of them come.

No comments

It's confirmed: the commenting system doesn't work anymore. I have to pay 20 euros for it. Don't know what to do. The bastards didn't even send me an email to tell me about it. But I don't want to loose all the comments....