Reflective Surface
Still powered by a contradiction in terms
Archive for Uncategorized
July 28, 2003 at 6:51 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Last Friday I came home from work and my wife told me our phone was not working properly: we could make calls but not receive them. After some investigations, we found out that our phone number had mysteriously changed. As we hadn’t asked for such change, I called our phone operator to understand what had happened. They informed me that some woman called Marina had solicited the change. The problem is that I don’t know any Marinas.
After many phone calls to understand better what was going on, I also found out that (1) asking for any phone service is as easy as knowing the first three number of the personal ID of the line’s owner, (2) I couldn’t not recover my former number (it had already been transferred to another person), and (3) I will have to pay for the change. I can’t even prevent further changes to my phone number unless I personally go up to one of their offices to officially request that only the actual owner of the line be allowed to make service requests.
Now, it’s plain absurd that any John Doe with knowledge of your personal ID can make changes to your phone line. What if your documents are stolen, which is exactly what happened to me a few months ago? I don’t think that was what happened, since somebody wanting to cause me problems could simply have asked for something bigger, like a cancellation of the service.
I’m not sure of what I’m going to do know. I’m planning to notify some customer defense organizations and generally cause some problems for the phone company if I can. It’s simply unacceptable that a company operating across the whole country has such insecure service procedures. Anyway, anything I can do to prevent further “incidents” like that and help people to avoid them is worth trying.
October 5, 2002 at 11:45 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Tomorrow we will hold general elections. We will chose our president, governors, senators and deputies.
Brazilian elections are important to the world at large as Brazil is world’s eight economy and Latin America’s first. This year’s election is even more important because, for the first time, it seems the Workers Party’s candidate, Luis Ignácio “Lula” da Silva, is in a position to win the presidential election, after years trying to — and it seems he will win outright, without the usual runoff that happens every election. The simple prospect of his victory sent ripples through the whole world, affected our economy, and increased tension in the country in the last weeks.
I don’t believe he has the experience for such a daunting task as he never held a public position but a four-year term as a deputy and hasn’t had any other job ever since but being a leader of his party (a time he used to criticize the government without offering any help). I just hope that, if he wins, he can govern without hurting our country.
I can understand the reasons our people have to choose him as our president even if I don’t approve them. I pray that God may help him, and our people, if we wake Monday with him as our president.
October 3, 2002 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Cool tips, plugins, and hacks for MovableType users out there by Brad Choate. The site also contains pointers to other MovableType resources.
October 3, 2002 at 11:58 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Burningbird published a PHP cousin of the RDF Query-o-Matic. Nice!
October 1, 2002 at 10:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I was amused to see people complaining — some good-naturedly, other not so — about their page rankings in Google. To them I say: “Be happy, I don’t even appear in the Google index at all.”
October 1, 2002 at 5:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Mark Pilgrim: “One year ago today…”
It speaks by itself.
October 1, 2002 at 11:26 am · Filed under Uncategorized
After 1,757 days, the RC5-64 project from distributed.net was completed.
October 1, 2002 at 10:42 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Red Hat released version 8.0 of its flagship product. OSNews has a nice review with some screenshots showing the revamped GUI and the new features. I have Red Hat 7.2 installed in my computer at home (along with Mandrake 8.2 and Windows 2000), but I rarely use it as I prefer Mandrake. Anyway, I can always lose some time installing a new distro 
September 30, 2002 at 10:36 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Reading the news in my aggregator today, I found an article about the Landless Workers Movement, a Brazilian movement that aims to wrest idle land from landowners. As a Brazilian, I regularly follow the news about the MST, as it’s called in Portuguese, given its expressive participation in Brazil’s current political landscape.
The article attracted my attention because it represented a non-Brazilian point of view about the movement. Contrary to most of the propaganda I usually see, the article gave a good account of the issues involved, and if it was too favorable to MST, it also showed a different side of the movement.
Although I disagree with the way the MST works to accomplish its goals (sometimes it seems they think the ends justify the means), I must credit them with being one of the few active bodies working to create a better Brazil and provide dignity for countless Brazilians — a fact that the article stresses. I particularly liked the movement’s awareness about the need to create conscious citizens: people who understand their responsibilities to the society. Of course, there are some people inside the movement that see it as a way to achieve their own goals and will use any means to that. Unfortunately, in recent times, much of the MST activities have shown the hand of such kind of people, but I sincerely hope the movement as a body can live up to the beliefs expressed in the article.
To sum up my impressions, the article made me think and re-evaluate my views about the MST, and while I still have reservations about some of their beliefs and practices, I can now understand better what they say and do.
September 28, 2002 at 3:59 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I finally got the website configured with the helpful assistance of the folks at my ISP. Installing MovableType was an easy step as I had some prior practice in my Linux box. Finally I have my weblog up and running. It’s almost 4AM and I need to get some sleep.
« Previous entries
