What if you had only 5 minutes to post a blog entry? What would you write? How many errors would you make? What would you talk about? Life? Tech? Threads? :-)
Portugal won against England: Incredible shit by Ricardo on defending those penalties and by Ricardo Carvalho on defense.
I wanted to write something about the reasons on why buddishm continues to attract so many people but the time is out.. maybe next time.
Next July 22 and 23 OpenBSD .PT will be holding its 6th meeting in Coimbra. It’s fantastic how I’ve started this group and it has envolved into something much bigger than I and my ambition to be a
hacker.
Last meeting we had developer Pedro Martelletto joining us and this time its Marc Balmer (covered in Kerneltrap) that will be comming all the way from Basel, Switzerland. I first meet Marc in WTH and if you know him you certainly agree he is a great guy. There will be technical presentations and general slacking. Everyone is welcome to come.
http://www.openbsd-pt.com/eventos/coimbra06/
It’s been a while since I’ve write anything here. A lot has happen since my last post, most significantly my grandmother passed away.
About a year ago, she and my grandfather were preparing to leave to Lisbon for a few weeks. As they were leaving the house, she suddenly lost strength in her legs and fell to the ground. She never walked again since.
She had a treatment for a cancer twenty years ago but it got worse and caused pressure on the medula that didn’t allow the commands from the brain to go through anymore. She did a whole year and a few weeks without leaving the bed, depending on the good faith and love of family, friends and doctors, prior to succumbing to the illness. Her last hours were of agony and pain.
But life isn’t about your last year is it? Everyone who have seen my grandparents together knows they were pretty close. I’m know they lived great moments of happiness and had a wonderful life trip together.
Inevitably, death brings back that life is temporary. Something we know but tend to ignore most of the time. As for me, I tryed as much as I could to be like a lotus flower – in the water but yet untouched by it. Right or wrong, the choice was mine and I take full responsability for it.
Life is of wonderful magic, uniqueness and beauty.
There is so far no evidence for life now or in the past on any of the
planets on our solar system. Structures have been found occasionally on
extraterrestrial rocks that look somewhat like small versions of
microorganism fossils but certain about these having to do with life or
being formed by ordinary precipitation of minerals doesn’t exist.
That’s why I think, and today it really striked me, that life is the
greatest gift anyone could ever gave me. And even more, the sole
experience of contemplation that it offers is enough reason to live
happy, and perphaps even, to die happy.
I know I still have much to discover and unveil but now all is
different. Like Osho says: “Life is more of a mystery to be lived than
an enigma to be solved”.
Think of people alone and interacting with each other. Think of birds,
the sea, the planet and the universe. Every thing you do, hear, smell,
watch is a unique moment of complexity and simplicity alltogether that
science will never be able to predict but simply watch as it unfolds.
Its sad that some people because of poverty or diseases, etc.. cannot
joyfully experience life as others can. If that is so, maybe our mission
is to join some global humanitarian organization that can help some of
these people to live better and help them. Or perphaps donate part of
our income to those global organizations. I don’t know.
Even so, exciting new adventure: Life.
Credit where credit is due. TJ introduced me to Pandora.com, an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by The Music Genome Project and also the best freakin’ web-based application I’ve seen in ages.
The idea behind it is to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes like rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies or displayed instrumental proficiency to describe songs. You start by firing away your favorite band and Pandora will stream a song from that band and then follow with songs that match the attributes of your favorite band. The funky shit is that its works! It catched my ear since the first minute and I listened to it all day.
There are so many things I would like to say about this I don’t know where to start.
1. Pandora doesn’t require Login/Register/Sign-Up to begin using the application. You can have several previews first which makes all sense. First you see the real value of what you will be using, then you register. Not the other way around.
2. Can you imagine the amount of songs they index and have information about? It blows my mind thinking of it.
3. There’s an article on Pandora by Fast Company magazine called “Algorhythm and Blues” that gives an overview on the history of this application and the Oakland small company behind it.
4. For those of you who read Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start”, you may like to know the company behind Pandora nailed down a $1.5 million round of angel funding – including a sizable chunk from Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com, back in late 1999. No doubt well invested money, this is now definitely a million-dollar company (not that I would know).
Oh well, that’s it. Enjoy and relax. After all… “music calms even the savage beast”.