Reflective Surface
Still powered by a contradiction in terms
Archive for Geek Stuff
June 20, 2005 at 12:38 am · Filed under Geek Stuff
Sometime ago, I said I was impressed about the number of blogs Scoble read every day — at the time, more than 1400.
Now, I’m more and more impressed with the number of entries some bloggers can produce in the duration of a single day. If I stop reading the blogs to which I’m currently subscribe for a couple days, some exceed Bloglines’s limit of 200 saved entries per blog. And most are individual blogs, since I’m subscribed to just a couple of group blogs and newspaper feeds.
Apparently, some people are spending more time blogging than working. 
June 19, 2005 at 8:11 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
Laziness is one of the fundamental virtues of programming, together with impatience and hubris. Laziness to never solve manually something you can solve automatically. As you can see, nothing bad about it at all.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work all the time. In the next few weeks, I will have to edit almost 2000 PHP and HTML files manually, cleaning up garbage left by other programmers in countless implementations in many tools along various years. I can fully automate the task because each files is virtuall unique, and was modified to a state in which you can’t almost recognize any structure. There are areas in the content that look identical in the screen but whose code is uttely different from that in similar files in terms of formatting, case, and nesting.
Since I’m not doing this, I will have to pay somebody else to do it. Laziness. Laziness.
June 15, 2005 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
There’s nothing else less interesting to me in a game than final bosses. I think it’s quite anticlimactic to spend sixty hours in a game, raking your brains, just to end up in a closed room with a character that’s ten times more powerful than you and that you can only hope to win if you click fast enough. I would vote for the abolition of final bosses if I could.
June 14, 2005 at 11:24 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
I still can’t understand why the guy who sold me my current computer put a two-dollar mouse on a machine that was worthy almost six hundred times than when I bought it.
June 7, 2005 at 12:36 am · Filed under Geek Stuff
So it happened that I installed Ubuntu and forgot the installation CD on the drive. It happened as well that my sister-in-law, who was here today, needed to use the computer. It also happened that I was not home and that the installation CD automatically booted when the computer was turned on — as it should.
Now, take that fact that my sister-in-law can’t read a word of English and that the first option in the partitioning stage is meant to use the entire hard disk as the Ubuntu partition, and you can figure out what happened then.
This entry is brought to you via a Live CD, which is the only operating system now working at home. A good night for you, or a good morning, or whatever is the time in your timezone. Thanks.
June 4, 2005 at 11:23 am · Filed under Geek Stuff
This thing about degrees of separation is funny. I just found that I’m just two degrees of separation of Mel Gibson. I’m also just one degree of separation from Gilberto Gil, our musically expressive Minister of Culture. Not that it makes any difference, of course. But it’s still funny.
By the way, here in Belo Horizonte, sometimes I think everybody is just two degrees of separation of any other person in the city. For the third largest city in the country, that’s a scary fact.
June 2, 2005 at 12:11 am · Filed under Geek Stuff
Kev Spencer has passed me the musical baton. Here it goes:
Total Volume of Music On My Computer: a meager 1.99GB
The Last CD I Bought: Petra — Revival
Song Playing Right Now: Tears of the Dragon — Bruce Dickinson
Five Songs I Listen To A Lot:
- Petra — Song of Moses
- Legião Urbana — Ã?ndios
- Dire Straits — Sultans of Swing
- Sting — Fields of Gold
- The Alan Parsons Project — Days are Numbers
Five People To Whom I’m Passing the Baton:
(Let’s see how this meme fares in the Brazilian blogosphere.)
June 1, 2005 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
Finally! After two years trying to get the service from at least three companies, someone finally decided that the street in which I live, one of the largest in the neighborhood, was a suitable target for broadband Internet installations.
One of the cable companies here is offering the service, and I signed up for a 600Kbps package — the price difference to the 300Kbps package was sufficiently small to make a faster package more interesting.
The price is good but I will still have to pay for the TV subscription as well (I don’t even own a TV). Even so, I’m willing to go with it since I’ll finally be free from the abismal speeds I’m forced to use now, and I can always process the TV signal through the computer if I feel like it. And the cable modem is free — almost.
December 6, 2004 at 2:57 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
Thanks to everybody who wrote or commented here with good advice about buying a digital camera. I just bought a Canon A85, which I believe is perfectly adequate for my needs; it also was nicely priced too. Can’t wait to play with it — the manual is a very, very thick book.
December 2, 2004 at 12:34 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
I’m in the market for a digital camera, but I’m completely at loss about which to buy. My old camere is on its last legs, and I’d prefer to buy a digital camera this time. I read some reviews, looked at some models, but I’m still undecided since I never owned one of them.
There are many sites with good and detailed reviews of various models, recommending some models or brands, but there’s always something in the review that prevents me from making a decision. Also, since the models I can find here in Brazil are usually behind the models in North America or Europe, reviews about them are harder to find. The only thing I know so far is that I want optical zoom too and a video mode with sound support.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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