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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Deathly Hallows

I've finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows last night (there are spoilers in this post; select the text to see them).

I dare say that it's the best of the seven books in the series. J. K. Rowling was able to fit everything together in a nice way and, most importantly, adding new elements only when necessary - mostly everything that solved the mystery was already in the previous books. It was also pretty good to see Dumbledore as a human being, who has made a lot of mistakes in life (like the friendship with Grindelwald and his search of the Deathly Hallows), as opposed to the perfect picture everyone had of him before.

It's a dark, captivating story. I could barely stop reading at all from the moment I started. I believe these characteristics of the book emanate primarily from the sensation of constant pursuit - there's hardly a moment of peace for Harry, Hermione and Ron. Also, the many deaths of well known characters make the reader want to keep going to see what's the outcome. The deaths of Mad-Eye Moody in the beginning and of Fred, Lupin and Tonks near the end are particularly shocking. Also, when a friend told me that Voldemort killed Harry and then Harry killed Voldemort, I was curious - I expected the fact to have something to do with that mirror from the first book and with that portal thing Sirius fell into, but the way it happens is way better - it seems the kind of stuff I'd come up with.

Anyway, I'm not particularly good at writing book reviews, so I'll stop here. There's only one more thing I'd like to say, and it's that I liked very much the outcome of the story. Mostly it's because it's pretty much what I would have done - J. K. Rowling's style pleased me very much because it's very similar to my own. I like to use several elements already present in the story to build the end - it's the best way to do it, because I see a story as a group of such elements whose purpose it just that: build the end of the story. The end of a story is the purpose of the whole thing, because it is what carries its true meaning.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Finally!

I finally convinced compiz that is would be a good idea if it worked here. Now it's doing great. There are a few more tweaks I want to make, like changing gdm's theme, adding a graphical interface to grub and a graphical progress bar for the boot, but the basics are covered.

Friday, September 21, 2007

A lot done.

Work. Work-work-work. A bit more of work.

That's what it took for me to get a decent desktop running. After a lot of things I had to go through, including a fresh install, a huge amount of bizarre errors, a reinstall, an upgrade to lenny, a driver compilation and lots and lots and lots of installed packages, I finally have a minimally decent desktop.

The best part is, it's Debian. This may seem a completely moot point, but I actually missed all the stuff I had to go through to get things begin to work the way I want them too.

It's not finished, yet. For example, I still wasn't able to make compiz work here. And I still haven't got my gnome configurations how they should be. But gnome settings are the last thing I'm worrying about right now; first I want everything just working. When I get that I'll worry about how I want everything to be.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Back to origins.

I've been using Ubuntu for some time, now. And, I must say, it is a good distribution. Works well, is easy to use, and all that.

But some things keep bugging me. For example, despite its big user base, it's not easy at all to get some answers sometimes. The usual things are very straightforward, like getting gstreamer codecs for proprietary formats, but others simply seem to be unanswerable. There are problems which do not seem to have solutions. And this is what really annoys me.

Originally I chose Ubuntu because it needed little or no effort to make things work. But I can't live with it anymore.

I'm moving back to Debian.

It was the first Linux distribution I used and experimented with - so there's an emotional side to this decision, too. I see this as a bit of a comeback - one I'm looking forward to.

Friday, September 14, 2007

365

Tomorrow we complete one year together.

It passed so quickly I almost didn't realize it. Almost.

Thinking back to one year ago, and remembering everything - the good and the bad - that I've been through since then, I'm truly happy to say I'm probably in one of the happiest moments I ever lived.

I guess there's little more I can say here. What really matters is to be said only to her.

Theo Jansen - Kinetic Sculptor

"The walls between engineering and art exist only in our minds"

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Selton

Monday, September 10, 2007

Jinxed

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm jinxed somehow.

Now seriously, I don't know what happens that something always goes wrong for me. Maybe I'm doing something the wrong way, or perhaps I'm failing to notice some obvious detail that makes everything go out of control.

The fact is, Murphy's Law seems to be stronger around me lately. A lot of things that shouldn't go wrong to terribly wrong.

This is not a kind of generic post - it's actually about something that happened to me very recently, although I'm keeping that to myself.

But what really bugs me is that, although everything is going to be alright, I'm still feeling a bit nervous about the whole thing. Something is out of place.

Besides that, there's a lot of things going on. Not only there are new and exciting experiments to run, but now I'm going to do some programming, too (electronic density maps, your time is about to come!). Also, I finally began to understand a lot of things about my work, and all of a sudden everything started to make much more sense.

There's nothing like following references...

Sunday, September 09, 2007

The Rain Song

This is the springtime of my loving-
the second season I am to know
You are the sunlight in my growing-
so little warmth I felt before.
It isn't hard to feel me glowing-
I watched the fire that grew so low.

It is the summer of my smiles-
flee from me Keepers of the Gloom.
Speak to me only with your eyes
It is to you I give this tune.
It isnt' hard to recognise-
these things are clear to all from
time to time.

Talk talk-
I felt the coldness of the winter
I never thought it would ever go
I cursed the gloom that set upon us
but I know that I love you so
but I know that I love you so.

These are the seasons of emotion
And like the winds they rise and fall
This is the wonder of devotion-
I see the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient-
Upon us all a little rain
must fall.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Changes

This template is about to change - just like the title just did.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

The Matrix Goggles

Russian artists from Moscow presented in London the totally useless but somehow cool device - goggles that you can put on and feel yourself like a robot from a Terminator movie or like somebody else from “the cyberspace”.

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