Lack of planning

I hate it when people do not plan ahead.

My PIXE studies for my masters are linked to other studies by other people with other objectives. A scientific initiation student from the Chemistry Institute, is one of them.

She's planning on attending a congress on thermal analysis in september, and the abstract submission deadline is May 5.

The problem: she only called me to ask for PIXE results last friday.

I have to say, that's not how it works. I didn't know she would need those data. That's because she didn't bother explaining that to me. I actually never had any idea about what the hell she wanted with my data - only that she and her advisor kept bugging me about them. For all I knew, I was going to be the only one directly using those data.

What really ticks me off is that her lack of planning is causing me stress, because that's the way I react to that sort of things. From where I stand, she's likely to miss the deadline. And that's a VERY frustrating perspective.

I can't say I don't care about her work, but if something goes wrong and she misses the deadline, I will not be upset.

This time, the noob was not me.

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Happy, but a bit frustrated

As previously mentioned, I passed the theoretical examination last thursday.

No surprises there. As predicted, it was pathetic. The only question (out of thirty) I missed concerned knowing by heart the seriousness of "not updating the register of vehicle or driver's license". Honestly, how would that be useful in traffic?

Certainly it's desirable to know of such things, but I don't think it's essential to becoming a good driver. Actually, I think that, being quite permissive, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many questions on that examination in fact evaluated anything.

But that's not what scares me the most. What really freaks me out is the driver of the van that took us to the Transit Department committing countless infractions (including overloading the vehicle). It's a guy who's only taking the time to go through the habilitation process because he needs the license to get a job (he's been driving a motorbike for more than six months). It's a guy who hopes "this time he's gonna get through" (and who apparently has never seen a woman before). Being aware that people like that are going eventually to be on the streets (if they aren't already) is what freaks me out, because that means that, even if I'm careful enough, they certainly won't be, and they will cause trouble (perhaps that's why traffic is so chaotic around here).

Anyway, now I'm having driving classes - the real ones. For starters, I can say I like driving. Which is good and bad at the same time. On one hand, driving can be a pleasant experience. On the other hand, however, I have frustrating times ahead of me, because I'm switching from not-driving-because-I-don't-have-a-license to I-have-a-license-but-I-can't-drive-anyway.

But I don't think that really matters anyway. Eventually I will get a car and will be subject to the stressful activity of driving (?) in the increasingly problematic traffic jams that so well characterize the city of São Paulo.

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Old dog, new tricks.

Quinta-feira faço meu exame teórico para obtenção da carteira de motorista.

A princípio, nada demais, todo mundo passa por isso. O que realmente me incomoda é a sensação de esse exame ser meio inútil, porque a menos que todo mundo com quem conversei a respeito tenha combinado de me enganar, o exame parece ser coisa de imbecil - só mesmo um analfabeto ou um completo sem noção pra não passar nessa prova.

O que, de certa forma, não é de todo surpreendente, considerando o país onde eu vivo. Mas o que realmente me deixa puto é o fato de que o exame prático não parece ser muito melhor. Pelo que vejo, tenho três opções: dar (muita) sorte e pegar um examinador rigoroso, que fique pentelhando com cada detalhe, ou cair em um de dois desdobramentos indesejáveis: aceitar ou não a oferta de "comprar" o exame. Se eu aceitar, eu passo mesmo que não saiba nem onde fica o acelerador; se eu não aceitar, não passo nem por decreto.

Isso tudo preocupa bastante, porque eu certamente não vou dar nenhum centavo pra examinador corrupto. Tenho destinos mais honrosos pro meu dinheiro - que não vem fácil.

Mas, de um jeito ou de outro, estou ansioso para começar logo as aulas práticas. Aprender a dirigir é algo que venho adiando há quase dez anos, e hoje em dia me arrependo de não ter aproveitado a chance quando pude. De qualquer maneira, não adianta chorar sobre o leite derramado, e é melhor fazer isso logo de uma vez - quanto antes, melhor.

De fato, 2008 tem sido o ano em que tenho posto em dia velhos desejos do passado. Um deles é aprender a dirigir. O outro é ter finalmente um instrumento e aprender a utilizá-lo.

Por sinal, agora minha Les Paul tem nome: Darlene. A referência eu não explico - acho mais divertido ver as pessoas tentando adivinhar. Se bem que A essa altura do campeonato bastante gente já deve saber de onde vem, porque a Quel fez o favor de spoilar tudo. Bad, bad Quel.

Comecei as aulas de guitarra ontem, e o professor me passou uma montanha de exercícios. O bom é que fazer esses exercícios já melhorou sensivelmente meu desempenho. Sim, isso mesmo: de ontem pra hoje já deu pra perceber a diferença. Claro que entusiasmo conta muito nessas horas, mas é muito gratificante ver que estou progredindo em coisas como trocar acordes e dedilhado. Estou bem animado pra ver quando sai a primeira música inteira.

Eu só queria poder voltar a sentir esse tipo de entusiasmo com minha dissertação.

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Now she needs a name

For once, things in my life seem to be going well. In a way, they always have, actually, but this time everything seems to be turning out ok without too much trouble.

My work is almost finished, and I think I'll be able to defend by the end of July. I'm still a bit worried about certain (theoretical) aspects, but I believe it's going to be alright.

That being said, I finally, after many years of hesitation, acquired an instrument: an Epiphone Les Paul Special.

Now I'm in the process of choosing a name for her. I know this may seem like an irrelevant thing, but I assure you it is not. And since I am taking it seriously, it is a tough decision. Until now, three "candidates" have been brought up by friends of mine: "Gud", "Ungoliant" and "Pandora". I haven't decided yet because there's another possibility I'm playing with, which is choosing a name related to Led Zeppelin, since it's my favorite band.

Even though this is not the most exciting subject in the planet, nor is it very important (except to me), I thought I should share it here. After all, it's been a long time since I blog'n posted.

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Fooling around with The GIMP

It's been quite some time since I fiddled with The GIMP. I used to do all kinds of stuff using it, but for some reason I stopped doing that. For the last years I've been essentially using it for preparing images for posters, presentations and the like.

Today I decided to do something different. And, taking advantage of my "starbucksy" mood, I managed to take this:

and make it look like this:

and then like this:
I realize this is not much, but at least I managed to remember a few basic stuff about image manipulation. The result is kinda cool, but I'm not sure yet if I'll end up using it somewhere or not.

Explaining the "starbucksy" mood: today I received my MASP City Mug. For those of you wondering, MASP stands for "Museu de Arte de São Paulo", a museum located here in São Paulo.

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Human-cyborg relations

Anthony Daniels is in Brazil. I went to see him in a local book store:
Taken with a cellphone camera, because everyone forgot their cameras.

Now I am the proud owner of a signed copy of "The Hero With a Thousand Faces", by Joseph Campbell.

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Not... screwed?

Ok, I may have overreacted in my last post. Turns out, I'm not as screwed as I thought I was. Electron density mapping is a very complicated thing to do, and my advisor decided to leave it out of the work for now.

But she did want to do it when we first talked about it... oh well.

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Oh fuck.

I'm screwed. Big time.

I had MONTHS do to something, and I didn't. The only excuse I have is that I don't even know where to begin to do something like what I had to do.

Anyway, I'm screwed. Big time.

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Throwing away some garbage

I decided to throw away some things that have been taking up space in my room and haven't been useful in a long time.

Although this is not the first time I do that, this time it was inspired by a friend's parents, whose... strong opinions in these matters have been quite insightful. There's a load of paper and other stuff that I gathered along the past few years, and I haven't used most of it for almost anything.

The largest of them is a metal shelf I've had with me for a long time. It used to hold my books and CD's a few years ago, but since moving to the place I'm living in now, it's been put aside, literally rotting away. I have already offered if for free to a couple people (1, 2), who showed some interest in it, but to be honest, I'm tired of waiting. It's going away.

Actually, I'm using the shelf as an excuse to throw some other stuff away, too. But most of it has just been taking up space, really, and I want to free up some space around here.

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More useless statistics

Today I received my shinystat weekly report. It's amazing how every now and then it gets to surprise me.

Today, I noticed a pretty cool feature: it shows me, regarding hits on the blog coming from search engines, the search keywords that caused Stairway to Geekiness to show up in the results. What took me by surprise is that, for every single month since July 2007, except for October 2007, the #1 search people made and followed to my blog was "copy pasta". No kidding.

When I trace the visits, they all were to a post in June 2007, when I incidentally used the term to talk about an ethically questionable individual from my Institute.

The second most followed search keyword is linux spdif. This one actually makes me happy. Some time ago I made a post about how to make S/PDIF output work under linux, in hopes it would help somebody else. Apparently, it did.

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Six more months

I have received an extension in my funding. I am in the process of renewing it until the end of July.

I can't say this is what I've been hoping for. I actually would prefer receiving word about my PhD - I need to be sure it is going to happen. This actually worries me a lot, because that's my only chance of getting to keep working in the academic environment for now. I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I don't get the funding.

I won't say I'm not happy about the renewal - I welcome it with wide open arms. It's just that, although nothing is certain about my PhD yet, I was kind of counting on having a bigger stipend beginning sometime around the middle of this year. I'm finally getting rid of all my financial problems and I wanted to have some more breathing room for using the extra money I would get to start building up my future. This sounds cheesy at best, but I don't really have other way of saying it.

The fact is, I'm almost 27 years old and all I own is in my bedroom (which is not actually mine). This is not even close to where I wanted to be ten years ago.

Come to think of it, ten years ago I was entering my final year in high school, and preparing myself to enter college. My expectations were completely different then. I had a clear path ahead of me, I knew exactly what I wanted. Looking back at the plans I made then I can't help but feel a bit guilty of failing to live up to those expectations. In high school I was a good student, my grades were great and I basically could do anything I wanted. That certainly changed a lot once I got into college. My grades were never the same, I took longer - way longer - than I expected to graduate and I ended up in an area I would never imagine I would have any interest in. Not that I dislike what I do now, mind you, I'm just saying that ten years ago I wouldn't even have considered working with crystallography and applied physics.

I admit I learned a lot in the past ten years. Not only in physics, but as a person as well. Not that it's an unexpected thing, I believe everyone really finishes growing up during this period in their lives. However, I wish I was more mature when I began than I was. It would have saved me a lot of trouble and would have made my life a lot easier. And, although I did graduate, I can't help but feel a bit troubled by the fact that my knowledge of physics is not as extensive as I think it should be. Although I passed all the needed courses during my graduation, I fail to recollect the knowledge I allegedly acquired during those courses, with a few exceptions. Surely I can explain the basics of the inner workings of the atomic nucleus, or how Maxwell's equations give rise to the wave equation of electromagnetic radiation. But I would have serious problems trying to explain those things in detail, or more advanced topics - although I supposedly studied them. Then, of course, all of this rambling might just be completely pointless, since I haven't reviewed those topics in a while and I'm just being neurotic about it - this certainly wouldn't be unheard of.

All in all, I honestly believe everyone asks themselves whether or not their own ten-year-youger-selves would approve of them now. I do have a lot of concerns about my future, and I have no idea where I'm going to be ten years from now, but worrying too much about those concerns will only make them become reality. The best I can do is aim for the best.

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Yada, yada, yada

Despite the huge amount of things that happened the past couple weeks, I did not post anything here because, to be honest, I didn't really care. 

Among other things, I've been working a lot. My work is - hopefully - reaching its end.

Anyway, I'm not really in the mood for reporting everything that has happened to me since the beginning of the year. 

I leave you with this piece of crappy translation:

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Learn less, do more

I don't really have an idea for this post. I suppose this time of the year it should be about evaluating the year, pondering good and bad things that happened.

I made a lot of progress with my work. Not the amount I would consider ideal, though - I've procrastinated an awful lot this year. I'm also running late with my dissertation - I should have it almost complete by now if I had really begun writing it several months ago, like I was telling myself over and over.

I also made a lot of mistakes. I do not complain about them, though, because I tend to see mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow. But I really wish I could "learn" a bit less in 2008...

I failed (again) to begin some serious running. I also failed to get my driver's license.

However, despite this year's less than satisfying progress, I am satisfied with other things I accomplished this year. The first and foremost is swimming. I finally overcame years and years of apathy and learned how to swim with a minimal level of decency.

All in all, I don't think 2007 has been too kind to me. I had a LOT of problems with banks. I procrastinated too much. I failed to exercise my discipline.

Looking at the bright side, when I look back there's a lot of good results to gather, and it actually looks like I've been produtive this year. I just wish I were more efficient.

For 2008, there's a lot to be done. For starters, my dissertation and defense, which I want to happen before April. I need to get a PhD going, after that. I want to get my driver's license. I also want to be able to show my friends how much I appreciate them.

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Serious people are rare around here.

Today's distance: 0 meters.
Yesterday's distance: 0 meters.

Yesterday the heavens fell apart, and it rained all the day. It wasn't even nearly possible to swim, so I didn't go.

Today, with an awful lot of stuff to do, I didn't go either. Although I'm thinking about going later, since my work for the day is done, I'll post 0 meters now since I have the tendency to postpone everything.

A piece of advice to you kids: never depend on people you don't trust if you want to work near the holidays. Especially around here, where everyone goes to incredible lengths to avoid working. I was supposed to still have a lot of work to do today, but I'll have to do it tomorrow because someone decided it was a good moment to party.

Parties are strange things around here. With all the bickering that goes on between the six departments on the Institute, each one traditionally decides to make its own end-of-the-year party - the direction of the institute, of course, obliviously arranges for a general party as well. As a result, everyone attends two parties: one on each department and another for the whole Institute.

The serious people keep working. But, I'm sad to say, they are few.

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Following Dory's advice

Today's distance: 1500 meters.

I decided several days ago to write here the distance I swam in the day. Obviously, I failed to do that until now.

Also, I am aware that this may not be the perfect time to begin doing this, since I'm only going to be able to swim until next friday - after that, I leave for the holidays and come back only in january. Still, it's better to begin at all than continue to endlessly postpone this.

I'm still convinced that this will also help me maintain a higher frequency of posts here, even if they are not very enlightening.

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VT8233 on Linux - making S/PDIF work

I'm making this post hoping it might be useful in case someone googles for something related.

A long time ago when I bought the parts for my current desktop at home I chose Asus' excellent A7V600-X motherboard. It comes with a fancy S/PDIF output RCA jack, and I thought to myself, 'sometime I should get this thing working'. I never got around to it because I didn't have access to a decoder which would be able to process the signal.

Recently Daniel brought the old home theater from his home, and so I get the opportunity. I bought the cables today and set out to the task.

The good thing is that the chipset which comes onboard is supported by Debian GNU/Linux out-of-the-box. I suppose that remains true for other distributions, since it's really a matter of ALSA and kernel compatibility, which is reasonably homogeneous.

Anyway, after a lot of searching (and very few useful answers from almost everywhere, including Alsa's own wiki), I found out that all you have to do is (assuming you run GNOME):

1. In Volume Control, under Edit/Preferences, check 'IEC958 Output' and 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA'.
2. In the Switches tab, check 'IEC958 Output'
3. Back in the Playback tab, set the slider for 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA' to ZERO.
4. That's it, you're done.

This is actually quite strange, since I don't have any kind of control over S/PDIF's volume output this way; anything different than zero simply kills any sound coming from the home theater set.

I hope this helps anyone who happens to stumble with this post.

Next step: to make my FX 5200's S-Video output talk to the television set.

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Stairway to Heaven

Had I been there yesterday, I don't know what could have happened. One thing is certain: there were no other place I'd rather be.

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Contradiction or hyprocrisy?

Interesting thing I saw on the way home: some guy to whom a mohawk is not enough. He decided to make dreadlocks on it, too. What can I say? He was the ugliest thing I've seen these days. I do not argue with taste, though. With 6 billion people in the planet, there's a taste for every thing - and bad taste for even more.

He didn't stop there, though. What really caught my eye was his t-shirt: "No more torture - boycott to everything from animal exploration". So far, so good. That's the guy's point of view, and I respect that. And then I saw his wallet, which was visible in the pocket of his pants. A leather wallet...

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Briefly brief briefing.

This is not going to be a real update. This is going to be a shamelessly brief account of what happened in the last 43 days.

I'm doing good in swimming. Although there are a lot of ways I can improve, things are going ok; 2000 meters and counting. Maybe I'll begin to post here how long I swim every day.

My advisor got promoted. I'm not sure what's the english word for it, but she's now a titular professor in my department.

I'm beginning to get paranoid with my dissertation. It's about time, since I have to admit I'm far (too far) from finishing it.

Christmas is getting close - OMG it's that time of the year already?!?!

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Update.

This is not really an update, but a manifestation of my acknowledgement of the fact that it's been 43 days since my last post.

So many things have happened during this time that is seems a lot longer. Hopefully later this weekend I'll manage to write something about it.

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