Release

Certain emotions seem to release from their emitter only when they are accepted by their target. It's nice to feel this non-tension.

Gl kjd .dot ps, ijalid d.dlk kjak altsld flhdo;kalh; ,jak Gm ;atglu jdod

hfoglu kjd ldbk 2 hat; alh ros.d; gkw kjak rdo;sl ,gpp nd jalh;smdpt od,aohdhw ;spdml rosmg;d

Blogger Secrets

Many natural processes are bursty, Christos said in his 15-826 class. Or something similar. I perceive that now, as I for some reason want to keep on writing stuff and stuff and more stuff. I just wrote about my dreams last night, and now I just want to write about how can I let out all of these little annoying secrets that I'm holding up inside. I have promised not to tell ANYONE about at least one of them, but I wonder... my parents have pretty much nothing to do with her.

A list of the secrets I hold:
Leaving the IMO 2000 test on the first day, so early...
Making out with my sister on that Winter of 2005-2006
Having had my cousin's daughter as my girlfriend for a few weeks
Making and holding a close friendship and sex relationship with *, my former coworker at Reddwerks.
Through this relationship, I contracted genital herpes. Or something similar, that apparently does not show up on tests.
Leila's "boyfriend" is actually a girl.

How much I trust the secrecy of Blogger...
I'd like to be free again.

I just have the feeling that much of fear and shame comes from secrets... not from the actual actions that secrets keep hidden, but mostly from having kept the secrets so long. I don't want to keep any more secrets. I do not tell the IMO secret because of intense shame, I don't tell about my sister because of fear she would mind, I don't tell of my cousin because of fear that she would mind, I don't tell of * because she doesn't want me to, I don't tell of my STD because it... has not come up in conversation. And it would be kinda weird if people were disgusted by it or by me... they know me now... would it be that different later on? And Leila's secret... I just promised. If I had not promised it'd be so out there... but I was entrusted with secrecy and I shall keep it... until my obligation ends.

Mac dislikes

Reasons for which I am not entirely satisfied with my Macbook Pro 13.3":

• Right click incompetence. The right-click is a widely accepted standard, but besides attaching an external mouse to one of the ports, all the right-click "workarounds" that the Macbook provides are either slow, awkward, or inconvenient (or any combination of the above). No, clicking the Control button AND clicking the trackpad is not convenient for the user. No, having to click a small invisible rectangle boundary in the bottom right corner of the trackpad is not intuitive, and makes it very easy for clicks to be confused as what it was not supposed to be. And no, double tapping the trackpad is not easy either. Double-tapping is not reliably recognized on the trackpad, and even if it were, the time it waits to make sure the user is not going to drag his fingers around is way longer than I am willing to wait for a single right click.
• While we're on the input matter, I'd like to point out its Caps Lock incompetence. Yes, I know a lot of people will say "just use the Shift key!" Well, it is NOT the same as using the Shift key! If it is to capitalize a sentence, then sure, but when I want to write a LONG STRING OF CAPITALIZED LETTERS, I'd much rather enable Caps Lock. So you might ask "what is wrong with Caps Lock?" Slow activation. Say I'm writing my password, which is all caps, so I start typing, in this order: "Caps Lock", "p", "r"... you know what I get on my screen? "pR", or sometimes "pr", and if I'm REALLY slow, "PR". Very unreliable. If I press the Caps Lock key BEFORE a letter, I expect the key to BE capitalized, not only the letters after it. Annoying detail.
• No Home/End/Delete keys! (Yes, I realize I'm highly biased because my main background comes from typing on standard IBM 101 keyboards, but since I'm ranting, I might as well). When doing quick & dirty text editing, we need quick & dirty shortcuts to get around the text... quickly. And the lack of these keys can make some tasks significantly slower.
• No hardware audio control. I didn't mind this much until just a few days ago. I was in class and I heard some technical term that I can't remember now... say it was "digamma distribution". I wanted to know more about it, so I took out my laptop to google it, right? I open it up and press the power button... the screen lights up... APPLE CHIME AT LOUDEST VOLUME! The whole class turns to look at me, I look down at my keyboard and almost implode with an apologetic feeling of "oops...". Now see, first of all, that starting chime is unnecessary. It's a nice touch sometimes, but what do you do if you want to open the computer discretely? It's midnight and you want to check your email but don't want to wake up nearby people - what do you do? So, like with other laptops, I thought if I connected some earphones to the computer, the audio will be routed through them and the noise will be much softer, right? WRONG! It doesn't route! The audio output detection must happen sometime after that initial chime, because even with earphones connected, the chime is output through the speakers. And not having control over whether your computer makes a very loud noise when you turn it on can be very annoying.
• Inability to close the lid without the laptop going to sleep! Now this is a very big turnoff. Just because I want to go the bathroom and I want some screen privacy while I'm gone doesn't mean that my code should stop compiling, or my programs stop running, or that my files should stop downloading! I understand that it's not a good idea to keep the hard disk rotating if you're packing it up to go somewhere, but shouldn't the option at least be available for someone who knows what he's doing? I'm sure it can't be THAT hard to keep programs running if the lid is closed...
• This one may sound super picky, but it still annoys me. The keys are too far away from each other. This is an advantage for some, a disadvantage for me. Tactile feedback and shortcuts are very important for a typer, and spreading out the keys hinders both of them. On my other laptop, keys touch each other, so when I want to type two keys that happen to be adjacent to each other (say, D and E), it is very easy to immediately feel the other keys around my finger and, while typing D, simply "scroll" the typing finger to the front to type two keys with one single thrust. This is not as doable on the Macbook, as the keys are spread too far apart to feel several of them at once while typing. It's cumbersome and requires much intentional effort to type on the Macbook, that's all.
• Only two USB ports... I'm used to at least three. Not a killer, but slightly annoying. No, Apple Inc, Firewire is not a replacement for USB.
• HUGE trackpad. So now I can't type without risking accidentally clicking or dragging the cursor unless my arms approach the keyboard at a wide angle. Initially irrelevant, but eventually uncomfortable.
• Moving on... file management. Why the heck can't we delete files on a single step?? I always have to move my unnecessary files into the trash bin FIRST, and only THEN can I go ahead and do an inconvenient RIGHT-CLICK on the trash bin, and then CONFIRM my decision on the annoying slow dialog that appears. WTH, Apple people? Give us a Shift-Delete!
• No NTFS write support (No, I don't trust third-party software with my hard drives' souls). It really should NOT be that hard to enable NTFS support. I know, I know, you want your dear HFS+ to become more widely used. Standards war, I understand. But it sucks... if I have both a Windows laptop and a Macbook and a couple of backup external hard drives I connect to both of them, which file system am I supposed to format them as? If I make them HFS, my Lenovo won't read them. If I make them NTFS, my Mac won't write them! But it can still read them, so I'm using NTFS anyway. So there.
• .DS_Store. Huh? Hidden files that are hard to get to see on the GUI, and when you do find the option to see them and enable it, they're annoying because they're EVERYWHERE. Everywhere, I don't know what's it for, but they can be quite annoying. I want to rmdir a directory... "Directory not empty". Dang it, I go into it and list the files... nothing. And THEN I remember... ahhh... .DS_Store. So I have to manually say "rm .DS_Store" or do a full "rm -r" on the directory, in which case I risk deleting something important I had left in the folder. Or say I'm doing a full big folder backup or duplicate from my PC to my Mac. So after the couple of hours it took to move the files, with possibly a few unplanned interruptions, I want to check if the backup was made correctly. So I compare the folder sizes. If the number of bytes matches, I'm done. But I check and... the duplicate folder on the Mac is BIGGER? A few moments later I remember "ohhh... .DS_Store", and now I have no reliable, easy way of knowing whether the backup was performed perfectly or not. (Yes, small files matter to me too).
• I have to BUY a video output adapter? $29.00?? The manufacturing cost of those things shouldn't be more than $5 a piece! Yes, compared to the actual laptop the price is quite low, but it's still a rip-off. Now that I think of it though, it does reduce the amount of laptop area it needs for the port. However, they should be nice and include the adapter (or a coupon to get the exact one you need) with the purchase of the laptop. That courtesy alone would win them more favorable opinions. Mine, at least.

This entry is about dislikes, but to be fair, I'll post the things I like about it too:

• Webcam! The webcam is awesome: unnoticeable, adds no volume to the laptop, and has excellent resolution and image quality. 5/5, and it would get a 6 if only it also had an infrared mode. 7 for a Kirlian mode too. 8 if it were detachable and usable as a regular hand-held camera. 9 if it folded my laundry too.
• Audio input is ALSO excellent. I don't know about audio technicalities, but the recordings sound great.
• The power cord is pretty cool. I like the extensible option (although I never retract it to the shorter length), and being able to detach the magnetically-attached power cord from any direction feels pretty nice. I also like the orange/green indicator of whether the battery's fully charged or not.
• Outer smoothness. If I want to slide it quickly into my backpack... *slide*, and done! It has no bumps or pointy edges it can get stuck with the backpack or the other things inside it on. The feel of the aluminum material is nice too, although it can get pretty cold if you just walked with it outside in a chilly winter morning.
• Bash shell. YEAH!!! I honestly don't use its full capabilities that much, but I know some of the power of Bash. And respect it.

I guess that's it.

Running

I ran 9 miles alongside with Rob and some of his running buddies today. It was tiring but satisfying. We first ran from point C to A, then back to point B, at which point my legs gave in (after having climbed the steepest hill on the path), and I began walking to point A.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=E+Carson+St&daddr=Bates+St+to:5000+Forbes+Ave,+Pittsburgh,+Pennsylvania+15213&hl=en&geocode=FR1faAIdGzo8-w%3BFXYPaQIdGAY8-w%3B&mra=ls&dirflg=w&sll=40.442113,-79.940343&sspn=0.016167,0.038581&ie=UTF8&ll=40.420161,-79.925537&spn=0.06469,0.154324&t=h&z=13

Dissipating Dreams

Dreams have a tendency to disappear from memory so quickly... I can barely remember anything from last night.

I do notice that my dreams have been a bit more vivid recently - especially during these last two nights. When I wake up, I am a bit more hesitant to recognize, to accept, that everything that had happened was indeed a dream, and the context-switching necessary to immerse myself back into this more persistent (hence "more real") reality takes much longer. Say up to 2 or 3 minutes? A bit less, maybe, stumbling around my apartment, with goals from my dream still unachieved in the back of my head, desirous to perform actions and say things that matter and exist even less the more time transcurs.

Like last night, I woke up a little frantic, furiously thinking how to escape terrorist killers trying to get into the office where I was with another student, inside some kind of super fancy high school, magnificent, with domes, columns and sculptures present in every building, all of them painted in white, located somewhere in California.

As I have to finish up something before 11AM (and it is 8:14AM now), I will not go too much into details. But in summary, I remember the following:

I was in some kind of jungle, where dirt roads connected many small places (hmmm, like the Geogame?), in one of which my brother (Marcos) and one of his friends where busy looking at and talking about cars. Somehow the dream changed focus into me driving my car around, and its brakes beginning to fail badly, as in sometimes not responding at all (very probably induced by my small car collision incident yesterday (GMB6041)). As I drove around a city later on (which reminded me of the Panorama city area in San Cristobal), I almost collided into a few people crossing the street and some cars, which made me want to not drive after I reached a small house where some of my siblings were (I only clearly remember Marcos). This small house was, in my mind, located where Burger King in San Cristobal is.

Afterwards, since I didn't want to drive, I walked a few blocks around and got to this magnificent white high school, where I walked past by a few groups of students. First I saw a group of male students talking about which girls did they like in their classes, and their recent courting accomplishments with them. I walked some more, and I found a group of female students talking about the same thing. After they finished talking, for some reason I started talking to one of the girls, and we walked around the high school for a while. The place made me think of some kind of Greek classical school, where perfect students performed perfect work inside perfect classrooms and libraries, always striving to achieve perfection.

We walked around the place for a while, me admiring the marble staircases and wide columns, and my companion just walking with me just because. After sitting on some kind of weird big throne-like chair in which we posed in different weird manners, we went to his office (for some reason she had become a he by that time - or maybe I also met him along the way or something), and he began working on something that looked with research, with code and graphs and stuff. Then for some reason, armed terrorists began taking over the high school, and I heard one of them say "let's kill the boldest ones first, so then the others will offer no resistance!", and I knew they were talking about us. (I remember that one of the "bold" groups was France, and I knew I was part of it. Don't know why). So I immediately went ahead to try to close the heavy wooden office door (like the one in my actual office), and shut it down right over a terrorist's incoming pistol. I wasn't strong enough to push the office door shut against the terrorist's strength, so I asked the other guy in the office for help. He seemed a little reluctant to get away from his work, but then agreed, and we managed to shut the door. Then we were thinking about how to escape the terrorists, our window being high up in the building and with no other visible escape route, and that's when I woke up.

Now I gotta continue working... on my work. If terrorists come I'll be sure to get my priorities straight.

Remaining Reminiscenses

of my (presumably) Rapid eye movement sleep stages last night:

Some being, like a killer or Satan, or something/someone, threatened to kill me (or to do something very bad to me) if I did not provide him/it with some kind of information or solve some kind of riddle for him (with the duration restriction of a day, I believe). However, I could not look it up (and I think that implied looking it up on the Internet). So I went and snuck inside a library with a nameless friend during the night (I really have no idea who that friend was), and we found a book with what we were looking for. For some reason we did not get the book at that time, but we returned next morning, when I talked to the lady librarian, and begged her for help. She misunderstood me and thought I was asking for money, and was already saying no, when I told her that I just wanted permission to borrow one or two books from the library. After hearing that, she agreed, and we proceeded to get the books.

As I got the book and walked with the librarian, she began talking to me a lot. You know, like the old ladies that like to talk a lot to anyone they encounter. She was very nice and sweet, and I remember then reading some comments about her somewhere (the internet, maybe?) saying that that particular librarian was "very sweet!", and "a strawberry companion!", referring to her very sweet personality. She started talking something about the next day, saying that the next day - March 21st (or 23rd?), 2010, aliens would come to Earth and break, or bend, her kneecaps. I remember her saying "oh yes, that'll be great!". I thought "weird", but was quite skeptical about the aliens coming to Earth and bending the lady's kneecaps. I imagined her kneecaps bending in the opposite angle, like cricket legs' do, and I wondered whether the aliens would do that with all people's kneecaps. I remember there was some kind of criteria that determined whether a person would get his or her kneecaps broken/bent, but I can't remember what it was. I just remember I did not meet these criteria, and I was happy.

That night, the aliens indeed came, and I was on the aisle right next to the librarian when I heard her scream, having her kneecaps just broken/bent by the alien, and then hearing her moan happily, and laugh in alleviating pain. I then followed the aliens, trying to find out more about them, and was able to hail them and tell them to stop before they went back into their ship and flew away. I started talking to one of the aliens, who looked pretty much like a pretty middle-aged woman, with blond hair and fair skin. We sat next to a stone wall, midway up a cliff, and talked about our cultures and what each of them knew how to do.

She drew something on the stone wall when explaining one of these things - something like a flow chart, and some of the text inside the rectangles she drew, I saw, changed by themselves from one state to the other, as if they were GIFs with 2 alternating static images. I wondered how she had done that, and she explained that she simply had drawn one of the images, and then magically made "this dot join up with this one, and this other one disappear" every time. She explained it very naturally, very simply, as if her drawing was something intrinsic in her nature, hardly requiring any mention at all. I wondered, and asked her more about it, and when she seemed slightly confused by why did that wonder me so much, I explained how did we people rendered images. "If we want to draw something, we think 'ok, here is this point. Which color should it be? It can be brown, orange, green, or red, let's say it's brown.' So now this point, we can also put another color in it... but only one. And then we do that for all points in the painting, and we get our image". I explained it almost apologetically, ashamed at explaining such a static, primitive concept of painting to someone who most certainly knew a much better, and simpler, manner of doing it. She listened to my explanation, and when she was done, she said "Well, that's not very mathematical..."... "Right!", I said, and tried to ask her how had she painted magically as she had, but for some reason I either didn't ask or she didn't answer, and then we joined some other people to go show the aliens the topmost of our technology...

So we went out into the street, for we knew that there was a big shuttle launch going on. We stood at a street intersection, and soon, sure enough, shuttles began launching all around us. Gray spaceships, of various shapes and sizes, dotted with blue and red lights, began rising up in the sky all around us. Rockets, huge starships, medium-sized freighters - they all rose up in the sky one after the other. It was a very futuristic view. I liked it.

Then, as we were either returning to our cliff or to their ship or somewhere, for some reason, I went into a side-door in the street, and entered into the second story of a room over a basement with dozens other people who looked very glum, filthily clothed, and plainly miserable. For some reason I did not go out immediately, but stayed, and tried to figure out what was going on. I figured out that all these people were trapped, being held captive by some other people. The guard saw me as a "new guy", and went ahead and trapped me too, registered me, and put me in with the other prisoners. I then found that the prisoners were being taken, one by one, and having one or another part of their body amputated. Mostly probably limbs. Then they released them into the streets, where they made a living through either begging or something else, I don't know. I think it was a very long time since they were captured until they were amputated and released.

I, of course, wanted to escape, so in some manner or another, I made it outside of the inner prison door, and found myself in a maze of hallways and offices of the company that ran this strange prison. As I ducked and hid behind desks and walls, I felt like the guy from District 9 running away from the lab he was being kept in, or like the girl trying to escape in Portal. And then, as I wondered how had the alien "magically" draw on that stone wall? Could I do that too? How? And then something woke me up...

And I clumsily stood up over my bed, kept my balance by leaning against the wall, still in a haze from having just woken up. I staggered to the laundry room, and when I opened the door to it, I saw my landlady getting her clothes out of the washer, and now watching me shirtless in my sweatpants. It was excellent timing, because she needed to use the dryer, inside which I had left my wet clothes all night.

(Notice how that initial being/Satan did not kill me after all...)

*UPDATE 2010/03/18 9:50AM - I think that initial being was a dragon!!! (From Ring Pass Not?)*

Surrealistic motivation

After having seen Alice in Wonderland 3D during the weekend (and visual effects aside, imo it was quite boring) and having had quite unusual, illogical conversations with Min about my alligator's alligator, his god, his dog, both of their tails (or were they tales?), an impromptu Myers-Brigg personality test I was subjected to (after which I was deemed an IFTP (or something like that) by Min), sentences we said which did not follow each other's previous propositions, and considering the necessity of immediate recursiveness in conversation inside this hardly-followable exchange of words, I had a slight stroke of considering that I was indeed in a dream, or at least kind of thinking in a surreal manner... like the melting clocks or the flying lion on one of those paintings I don't know the name to.

Anyway, that is not my motivation to write right now. It was a startup point, sure, but not my real reason to write. Why am I writing? I'm not entirely sure. I have feelings which I wish I could dismiss with a flick of my mind, but have not been able up until now.

*Interrupted by leaving the office and going home last night a few hours after midnight*

Ring Pass Not

I hope I don't get addicted to this game again...

14 minutes to bus

Quick entry:

I am totally ready to go to Austin!! Jerol will pick me up at the airport, we'll be thrilled to see each other, and we'll spend a few days and nights happily together until Tuesday. :D It's 8:47AM right now and the bus leaves the stop at 9:00AM, so I better hurry some. Bye!

Jeff's view on sex

What made me laugh the most tonight:

Sex can be very stressful for men! You judge us on, on technique, sensitivity, and stamina! We're just happy if you're naked... half-naked!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFpGEhmkJXM&NR=1 (4:20 - 4:34)

Blog dating test

Blogger has been acting weirdly. I had a few drafts that I planned not to publish until a later date, and the expected behavior (the one I had previously observed) was for the blog timestamp to remain as the one at which the blog was created, not the time at which it is published. And now that timestamp is being overridden by the published date! And that sucks! It gets them out of order!

Which is why I'm writing this post. It is a test to figure out if I can make this NOT happen anymore. I have a bunch of other drafts which I would like to keep in cronological order. So, for reference, I created this blog post on March the 3rd, 5:39AM (PST), and it is now March the 3rd, 5:48 (PST), and I am just about to publish...

**TEST PART I SUCCESSFUL**

Using the old editor (which I changed in the Blogger settings), I saved this older post as a draft and then re-published it, and it successfully maintained its created timestamp instead of overriding it with the published date. I have now changed the settings back to using the "new" editor, and will try to publish and see what happens... Publishing at: 8:54AM EST (5:54 PST)...:

Blog dating test, Part II - The Sequel

For the test I mentioned in my previous post, I am now publishing a second post, created on March the 3rd at 5:49AM (PST), but published at March the 3rd at 5:50AM (PST):

**TEST PART II REALIZED**:

And discovered... that... new editor sucks.

At least in that aspect. I knew there was something funny going on when the editor font got a bit weirder and a lot more buttons with lots of little options appeared on the top. Well, luckily for me, I don't use right-to-left languages or other fancy blogging options, so I will opt to keep using the old editor. I like its font much better anyway...

Cool! For future reference then:
New editor sets the blog post timestamp every time it publishes.
Old editor does not do this. By keeping the created timestamp, it keeps the blog posts in chronological order. Yay!

Identity

Is a person anything else than himself? It is a basic question to ask whether a person is defined by the choices he makes and the values he possesses, or whether these are the necessary consequences of the Life he is living. For it is not entirely certain - are we only the collection of our past experiences and memories? Are we fully defined by the unique circumstances in which we have lived our lives, or does each person have something else inside him that defines him? A soul, perhaps? A unique, irreplaceable identity that no other being could possibly make up for? If I had been born in your stead, would I have the same Life you did, or would I have lived it in "my own" style?

It is very easy to assign unique identities to people, such as by judging others' actions. To think "I would've done a much better job", or "I would never do what he did! It was so obviously stupid!" somehow implies that we're all different, that we all have some kind of differentiating factor outside of our lives. But what is that? What unique feature distinguishes us from other human beings?

Pick a person who you think should've made better choices in Life. Imagine yourself having lived his complete life - since the beginning of his existence until this very moment. Do you think you would've made choices any better than him? Would you have attained better results? How would you have known the choices you were making were right, if not for the experiences you had lived before? Do you know something you have not learned in Life? What do we know, except for what Life has shown us and taught us?

The widely-accepted thought that all people are somehow different arises very naturally in our minds. As we have experienced everything only through ourselves, we become attached and identified to our lives. And then it is most common to see other people as entirely different beings.

It may seem incorrect, and even offensive to many people, that our consciences are as replaceable as eggs in a basket. But if you consider the idea, you can begin to realize that feelings such as blame, guilt, shame, and pride are nothing but illusions in a world of puppets in which each puppet believes his own fabric to be somehow unique. You begin to see that all people are simply other "you's" with different priors. Then the feeling of individual achievement and failure begins to seem less important, and a need, a desire for collective symmetry arises. And when you feel this way, it is wonderfully easy to perceive help between people as a most natural thing to do.

Aliam vitam, alio mores

Communication

The difference between saying something and not doing so is diffused through the rest of the world.