Geocaching - the logs

Since I am stuck at home waiting for a friend to come and give me a lift to work (I have no keys to my own garage… Don’t ask), I decided to finally log my cache hunts this summer: LandMania and As pozas de Riocaldo.

Look for the log by gambuzino.

Journey of the Sorcerer across the Galaxy

As some of you may know by now I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams. In particular I like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy very much. Both the printed and the radio version. The TV version a bit less so.

I know the radio episodes of the first two series quite well as I sometimes listen to them on my car on the way home. Now I don’t actually know why , but I’ve always assumed the introduction music for the episodes was an original.

Cut to YAPC::Europe::2004 where a speaker (in a lightning talk, if I’m not mistaken) demonstrated a clever usage of Perl scripts for controlling it’s Xmms while listening to an Internet radio station.

The radio station the speaker used as an example was Radio Paradise. After the conference I’ve started listening to it out of curiosity and I actually ended up liking it quite a lot and I’ve been spending my days connected to it.

So now the funniest thing happens: I am working along, listening to the radio when suddenly I start to hear the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Or rather, the musical intro to it.

And then I find out that no, it isn’t actually the intro to another episode but rather a music by The Eagles which is called “Journey of the Sorcerer”. Complete with the high pitched ending of the chorus section and all, the one that sounds just like the eighties high tech type sound that fitted so well in the radio episodes.

Funny old world, isn’t it?

Velejar

Velejar não e tão fácil como parece.

Tive ontem a segunda aula de vela (a primeira foi há 15 dias e faltei à segunda por estar em Belfast nesse fim-de-semana na sequência do YAPC) e confirmei o que já tinha achado da primeira vez.

Não que tenha havido nada de particularmente desastroso desta vez (como na primeira aula em que adornei tanto logo na primeira viragem de bordo que meti água e só não nos virámos devido à rápida reacção de todo o resto da tripulação) mas desta vez fomos dar a volta ao farol do Bugio e já deu para sentir um bocado do que é a corrente brutal do estuário do Tejo e a ondulação do mar. Fomos sem a monitora (os dois monitores foram acompanhando de longe no barco de apoio) e foi realmente… emocionante!

Desta vez já sabia os termos e o que estava a fazer (contraste total com a primeira aula em que a monitora nos dizia para fazermos coisas que eu tinha ouvido pela primeira vez há umas horas e não conseguia obviamente lembrar o que eram - daí as emoções fortes).

Assim este dia já correu bem melhor, mesmo com a ondulação, corrente, vento um bocadito mais forte, etc. e foi bastante divertido.

Mas mesmo assim continuo a achar que a vela não é propriamente um desporto fácil. E ainda não estou convencido que o mar é realmente o meu ambiente…

O facto de este curso ser intensivo também não ajuda nada, a carga horária que devia ser dispersa por 10 semanas é condensada em 5, o que faz com que estejamos no mar das 9h30 às 16h00 —o que dá mais tempo para cada um de nós fazer de timoneiro— mas também faz com que apenas tenhamos efectivamente 5 saídas para a água.
A vantagem dos cursos normais é que, apesar de termos menos tempo em cada dia temos muitos mais dias de aulas, pelo que nos podemos ir adaptando melhor ao ambiente do mar.
Enfim, não se pode ter tudo…

E claro que depois de tanto tempo no mar, a dar no duro, com um almoço muito sumário (afinal podemos virar com muita facilidade) e um pequeno almoço quase inexistente chegamos a casa, tomamos um banho e comemos e estamos prontos para cair na cama. Só que isto são umas 18h00, não é propriamente hora de ir para a cama num sábado!
Por outro lado esta semana também foi mais puxada por ter voltado a ter a aulas de dança na sexta à noite… Mas por outro lado ainda, é assim que vai ser até ao final do curso…
Já não sou claramente o jovenzinho fogoso que fui em tempos.

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, The Tertiary Phase, Episode 1

In Real Audio, and WMP (5.1) or plain stereo. You’ll find it here.

Go get it soon, it will change next week.

Rant on the abuses of language

General practitioners’ style warning: this is a rant. A bad one, I’m in a bad mood today and I will vent in here about something totally weird. You may be offended by what I will say. But only if you are an idiot. :-)

Today I woke up in a bad mood. Sleeping too little does that to me. So maybe I shouldn’t have staid up so late watching Farscape episodes, but you know how it is in seasons transitions, it builds up and you can’t stop watching. And then the first episode of the new season comes along and boy is it anti-climatic! Anyway, I set myself up for that one as I know full well how that goes but hey, that’s life.

So, then, something happened this morning related to PDAs (more on that later on another post I’m letting mature in my head at this time) and it (combined with lack of sleep) got me in a bad mood. This in turn, combined with a really weird though association (you gotta love the human brain) turned my venting needs towards the topic which I will finally expose (to the two of you who made it this far).

So what’s this rant about after all? Let’s not start that way, let’s start with what it is not about: it is not about smokers. It may sound like it but it’s not. This is not about people how smoke in general, what it is about is people how smoke and don’t have the guts to admit it and abuse and distort words and language to hide that fact.

I could say that it is about stupid people. I could. But I won’t because I know an awful lot of people that do exactly what I’m on about and I don’t want to offend them so I’ll try and hold my tongue here… ;-)

Still a bit more of disclaimer to get things very clear: I’m not implying in any way that smokers are idiots or anything like that. Idiots exist everywhere and my problem is with them, not with smokers.

And so here it comes, hang on for the ride…

There are people who smoke. It’s their right (in some countries, anyway, but let’s not get sucked into that right now). There are people who have cut down on smoking. I know a lot of people who fall into this category. Good for them (or not, whatever). There are people who have quit smoking. They are close relatives to Sasquatch and probably live right up there with him. (Can you see where this is going yet?)

The above three-group category relates to the people I know myself and to my own experience. I know a lot of people who smoke, I know a lot of people who have cut down on their smoking and I don’t know a soul who has quit smoking.

Oh, I know a lot of people who claim they quit, yes, but I don’t know a single one who has actually done it. Sure, there are many reports of friends of cousins of colleague’s acquaintances who have quit smoking. Sometimes spectacularly so (from 20 packets a day to zero in one night) but just like Sasquatch everyone know of someone who knows of someone who has seen it, but no one has actually seen it themselves!

Now why does this bother me? Consider this example conversation which I have had or heard far too many times for my tastes:

[ Lots of irrelevant conversation about how this person doesn’t do this or that ]
- Who me? Oh no, I don’t smoke.
- Really? Well you could have fooled me… So what’s that burning cylinder in your hand then?
- What this? Oh no, this is not smoking, it’s just a one-time cig… You know for old times sake.
- So you’re telling me you don’t smoke while you puff away on a cigarette right in front of me?
- It’s not like that… See, I quit!
- You did, did you?
- Sure! back in the old days I used to smoke <insert absurd amount here> packets a day. Now that was smoking. This is just a loose cigarette I do once in a while.
- Once in a while? So this isn’t actually your first since you “quit”?
- Yes it is! Well… Actually no, I sometimes smoke one, but just when I’m at a party… Or out with my friends… But I never buy them anymore so it doesn’t count.

Excuse me?? You never buy it so it doesn’t count??

Now see, this just ticks me off! It is just plain abuse of the language.

Words are important. They have meanings which, while a bit flexible, are fixed and exist for good reason. So we can communicate. So when did “quit” become “quit more or less sometimes well you know what I mean”?

(This is going to embarrass me later but…) this kinda reminds me of the original Karate Kid movie when Mr. Miagi tells Daniel something along the lines of “You either karate do or you karate don’t, there is no karate so-so…”

And that is how it is with smoking you either smoke or you quit and now you don’t. The logic of the word “quit” is not fuzzy, it’s meaning is not unclear, it is very precise. If you quit you don’t smoke. Ever. Until you pick up a cigar again and then you smoke again, it’s that simple.

If you do smoke but only just a cigarette a month or so then congratulations, you’ve cut down on your smoking quite significantly. Maybe to the point when you are no longer loosing years of live every day (or something like that). Maybe even to the point when it stopped being harmful to you (though not to others).
Once again I say: congratulations, you’ve cut down. But you have not quit you have not stopped smoking! You didn’t!

And that’s OK, it’s your choice and I couldn’t care less but please, please don’t come on all high and mighty talking about how you used to be the biggest, baddest smoker this side of El-Paso and quit smoking just like that and all the other smokers are in for a lot of suffering if they ever try to quit and how strong willed you were and blady, blady, blah. You haven’t quit! And if you have to keep bringing up the issue and talking about it than maybe you are just not OK with it yourself, huh?

Anyway, maybe it is the geek in me that makes me this annoyed at it but I find it really stupid that people distort words to cover up for their lack of determination or for feeling like a looser for not being able to do something. It really does.
Like I said, words are important, they are the basis of human communication and it is incredibly stupid to abuse them to excuse and justify your own flaws.

Once again, maybe this is because I’m a geek and I’m going out on a limb here and exaggerate the heck out of this to make my point even more clear, but when I write this:

for $i in (0 to 9) {
    print "$i\n";
};

I don’t mean to write this:

for $i more-or-less-in (0 to 9) {
    print-something-approximately-like "$i\n";
};

And I certainly don’t expect the output to be something like this:

0
1
3
5
6
7
8

Why not? Because I was precise in my instructions and the one interpreting them was also precise in it.

But humans are not like computers, human language has lots of flexibility and nuances that make it very rich and very interesting and very powerful and very easy to be abused. All of these nuances and flexibility are explored in many wondrous and marvelous ways in fiction, poetry, plays, (intelligent) conversations and many other forms. But then all of these forms of exploration of the language have one thing in common: they respect the basic unit, they respect words and their meaning. The playing around is usually done by means of sentence structure, the choice of words to use, the choice of words not to use, even by using shady and often unused meanings of the words but not by outright misusing them and using to say something that is just not true.

Don’t this people have dictionaries? Or are they just so ashamed to be failing at what they set out to accomplish that they need to outright lie in order to feel good about themselves? And don’t they understand that either way other people usually just don’t care? I know I don’t. I really don’t, just as long as you don’t smoke in my face go ahead and smoke all you want but for heaven’s sake don’t lie about it and (more to the point) if you have to lie about it than just lie, don’t abuse words to do it for you!

See, I told this was a bad rant… ;-)

THE HITCHHICKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY on BBC Radio 4

It has started this week.

I don’t get the BBC Radio 4 here so I’ll just listen to the episodes on-line.

Now being the ever forgetful person I am I had to setup a reminder to go get each episode.

And while I was at it why not do it the right way and share it with people to boot?

Go get it —removed the old and out-dated feed— in ICS format. Leave the notifications on if you want to be reminded before the start of each episode and be aware of the 7-day download period for each episode.

Enjoy! :-)

Cleaned out my “later” bookmarks folder

Unbelievable! I’ve transfered all the bookmarks I had gathered in the “later” folder to del.icio.us and even after having cleaned-up some 20-30 bookmarks I still ended up with 121 items.

And that’s just the “later” folder!

Oh yes, the “later” folder is the folder where I bookmark everything that I find or I am pointed to which I find interesting enough to read, but not now.
I guess everybody has a way of dealing with these things. I just hated loosing track of them just because now was not a good time to go and see them but having gathered more than 100 items to look over in about a month or so is just ludicrous!

Lets see how I will fare with del.icio.us.

del.icio.us

Incredible as it may seem I’ve been totally unaware of del.icio.us until today.

Actually that’s not entirely true, I’ve been aware of it as I’ve seen it mentioned in several places but I never took the time to see just what it was and so I’ve never groked it until this afternoon when Melo showed it to me in all it’s glory.

I am mighty suspicious of everything that describes itself as “social something-or-other” and that’s probably the reason I’ve never felt the urge to look into it more seriously. People were talking about this new “social link software” and it drove me off but now that someone actually showed me what it does and how useful it may be I like it.

The concept of managing URLs in a browser-independent way is appealing to be sure but being tied to an external site with only HTTP access to it made me shy away from previous attempts at link- or bookmark-gathering sites.

In comes del.icio.us with it’s wonderful API, open to users since the beginning (or so I’m told) and which is even more wonderfully and conveniently wrapped in the Net-Delicious perl module distribution.
I may have found my link management solution.

The beauty of it derives almost entirely from it’s API, since it allows me to seamlessly integrate my links in my site and make the fact that I am using del.icio.us to manage them totally transparent.
If I ever want to change the way I’m doing it all I have to do is implement the link support some other way (or support it in some other service with an equivalent API) and the visitors to my site won’t be able to tell the difference.

What I gain out of using del.icio.us is something that resembles what I would like to have for bookmark management a whole lot better than any browser I know does (I just click on the “Post to Delicious” bookmarklet instead of clicking on the “Bookmark” button), a better search engine for my links/bookmarks, the tagging system for correlation of links and the added bonus of the information on link popularity (amusing if not all that important).

Just to get a taste of it I’ve added some links to my account and created a very small script that gathers my latest links hourly and displays them on my main page,
Things are looking good.

Gmail invitations

Maybe I should come by there more often… I’ve just noticed I have 6 invitations to Gmail piled up and most everyone I know who would like to have one already has it.

Any takers? It’s FIFO.

YAPC::EU::2004 so far

Well, so far a good conference all around.

Maybe not quite as good as last year, for me at least, due to less speakers (not as many “star speakers” as last year for sure and less speakers in general).

So far the organization is very good so no faults there at all.

Also a lot of repeated talks from last year, I’ve already taken a number of them so it was a bit easier to decide what to see…

Having a good time though.

Must go now, I’ll update it… sometime.

Comment Spam and other woes

More than forty (yes forty!!) spam comments on this weblog alone in the mere seven days I’ve been gone and off-line.
And I’m not an A-list blogger, far from it in fact.
Also the comments were posted all over the weblog, ranging from posts made more than two years ago to posts made last week.
I’d really hate to close the comments on old posts because sometimes (rarely, yes, but sometimes) I do get relevant comments in some of them, but this is getting ridiculous!
Maybe it’s time to investigate moderation for times when I’m away. Or even always. I’m not partial to a system like TypeKey which forces you to create an account elsewhere in order to post on my weblog but the mixed approach of Movabletype 3 (either authenticate via TypeKey or else get moderated) may be the way to go.
Maybe I have to think about upgrading my Movabletype installation a bit more seriously…

Oh, and I came back home to a powered-down server due to a prolonged power-failure that outlasted my puny UPS (the poor neighbors had to hear it beep to death…) and a deep-fried USB hub which means no goodies attached to the server (even the keyboard, mouse and UPS data connection have to multi-task now). That’s what you get with more than one year old or so PCs with only two USB ports.
Bah, humbug!

De férias

Voltei ontem a casa de uma semana no parque natural da Peneda-Gerês.
O Parque continua continua uma maravilha, como me lembrava após muitos anos sem lá ter voltado. Apenas tivemos azar com o tempo que não ajudou muito —todos os dias tivemos direito a, no mínimo, uns chuviscos ligeiros e no máximo chuva torrencial.
Terei fotos on-line brevemente, quando tiver paciência para o fazer.

Durante esta estadia pelo norte tive oportunidade de me estrear no geocaching e embora os resultados não se possam considerar brilhantes (encontrei uma em duas) valeu a pena.
Registos dos acontecimentos no geocaching.com, procurar pelo utilizador gambuzino (daqui a um dia ou dois, ainda não tenho lá nada…)

Hoje, e para dar boa continuação às férias, tive a primeira aula do curso de vela ligeira.
Para começar há que dizer que a barreira da linguagem é realmente elevada, dar-nos uma horita de nomenclatura totalmente estranha, meia dúzia de nós, procedimento para aparelhar um barco e mandar-nos para a água na esperança de que quando estamos já ao leme nos lembremos do que raio significa “orçar” ou “caçar a vela de estai” é um bocado puxado.
O resultado é que, pelo menos neste primeiro dia, foi só asneiras a bordo.
Mas não deixa de ser muito giro navegar à vela e só tenho pena de não poder estar cá no próximo sábado para a segunda aula.
Quanto tempo mais durará este balanço que sinto? Até que não sabe nada mal :-)

YAPC::Europe::2004

It’s in Belfast and I’m going to attend (again).

I’ve never been to Belfast before so it is nice that the stay will be extended until Sunday.
Also Tuxa is coming along for the ride, so it should be a great time.
Geeking (huh?) and traveling, my two favorite pastimes, together. Looks like a lot of fun.

GPS

I’ve finally decided to do something about getting my GPS (Garmin GPS III) to work with my iBook (in anticipation of my coming vacation when I’ll see if I finally go hunt some caches).

Of course I bought the compulsory Keyspan USB Serial adapter and it really works like a charm. It does give me one more item to lug around on my back-pack though so I’m guessing I’ll eventually end up buying a Bluetooth-enabled GPS and be done with it but for now it will do.

I also bought MacGPSPro and so far (although I’ve only done a few tests with it) it seems to be all I could want.