Surprise!

I guess there's a first time for everything.

Today, for the first time, I got a surprise birthday party. Somehow in the past 25 years, when someone tried to arrange that I ended up being in the wrong place in the wrong time, and caught them. This time, though, it was they who caught me. The funny part is, I did get them when my girlfriend called Daniel - but she was clever and gave me a false clue, getting me totally off-guard today (my b-day is tomorrow, which is when I expected something was going to happen).

I am very glad this has happened. I think everyone should get a surprise party sometime. It feels really good - and I'm glad it happened to me.

Thanks everyone - I loved it.

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Long time, huh?

Yeah, I know. It's always the same thing. I try to keep up with this blog, but end up posting only sporadically and people stop visiting. In fact I'm even used to it.

The point is, I often forget to post here. There are thing's I'd like to talk about, but I just don't have the time or patience to do it.

And then I make a post like this. Probably posts where I talk about the lack of posts in the blog are the most common here...

Anyway. Recently I've been thinking of trying to get my PhD in Europe. But I don't know where to start or get information about it. To be honest, I'm much more worried about my project, which is beginning to get to its final stage already - and I still don't have much to show.

Hopefully things will work out in the next few months and I'll get a lot more done.

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I love you.

She's got a smile that it seems to me
Reminds me of childhood memories
Where everything
Was as fresh as the bright blue sky
Now and then when I see her face
She takes me away to that special place
And if I'd stare too long
I'd probably break down and cry


Sweet child o' mine
Sweet love of mine


She's got eyes of the bluest skies
As if they thought of rain
I hate to look into those eyes
And see an ounce of pain
Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place
Where as a child I'd hide
And pray for the thunder
And the rain
To quietly pass me by


Sweet child o' mine
Sweet love of mine


Where do we go
Where do we go now
Where do we go
Sweet child o' mine

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Hello All

Hello everyone,

sorry for the lack of updates here in the past few days. It's been quite busy here. I left for the beach on last saturday, and returned only yesterday. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures to show: I don't have a camera. Well, I do have one, but it's an old one, it needs film to work. And I don't like to use it, mostly because I prefer digital pictures.

The next few days are going to be... interesting. I've got a lot of experiments to run and almost no time to analyze data, because my report has to be ready in the next six days. Oh boy.

Finally the year is going to begin. In this damned country, nothing really works until after the carnival...

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One more.

Proceeding with the series "cute nerd jokes", here's another one, taken from today's issue of phdcomics:



As usual, previous knowledge is needed to fully understand it. I won't explain it, though. I hate to explain jokes.

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Ice cream!

There was something I wanted to write about today, but I ended up forgetting what it was during the day. Good thing is that I could retrieve my samples from the Chemistry Institute today, and already scheduled the equipment for my experiments next week.

Also, there's a wonderfully cute comic strip I took from XKCD a few days ago:


It's the first time I've seen physics being used in such a nice way for romance. I loved it.



That's it for today. See ya people.

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Mentiras

É impressionante. Ninguém consegue uma informação decente nessa merda de país. Em todo lugar que eu perguntei, o tempo de bloqueio do FGTS quando se pede demissão era de 3 anos.

Pois bem. Fui no banco hoje pra resgatar a grana, da qual preciso para quitar dívidas e voltar a ser um homem livre. E descobri que a coisa não é bem assim. Só se pode dar entrada do FGTS no seu mês de aniversário. O que significa que, se uma pessoa é suficientemente azarada, ela tem que esperar QUATRO anos ao invés de TRÊS. É um absurdo. Nunca fiquei tão feliz de fazer aniversário em março, mas continuo revoltado.

Fico me perguntando se em países sérios a coisa é assim, tosca.

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Frustration

One of the worst things a person can do to me is to build up my expectations and then just don't do anything about them.

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They will dominate the world

Google is going to dominate the world. That's the truth. They're gonna buy everything and rule everyone.

Well, to be honest, I don't know about the world, but their share on the internet is really going to grow for a long time, I think. That's quite deserved, in fact. They are quite ingenious in what they do.

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Going Hybrid

Hello everyone. I'd like to say that I like the fact that people from other countries occasionally visit my blog, and I thank everyone for that.

However, sometimes I feel more comfortable writing my posts in portuguese. The reason for that is simple: it's my mother language, so I'm much more used to expressing myself in portuguese than I'm to doing so in english. Also, I'm very aware of the fact that my english is far from what I would consider satisfatory, especially when it comes to vocabulary. So, I'd like to ask everyone who visits here to please be patient, because a few posts from now on will be in portuguese. I will try to keep writing most of them in english, because it's a good way of practicing my written english.

That'll be all for now. B seein ya!

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A7V600-X, R.I.P.

My motherboard has died, but I feel fine. And that's... odd. The usual reaction would be not to stop yelling for a few weeks.

I think maybe I've changed more than I thought, because not only don't I feel upset, but neither do I feel the urge to fix it. Eventually I will buy another mobo to replace the dead one, but that's not one of the first items on my to-do list.

To be honest, it's quite relieving. I don't like being upset like I used to be about things like this. As everything in my life goes forward, I am acquiring new interests and more important things to worry about - things that I believe deserve my attention much more than a computer.

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So what?

There's a lot going on, actually.

I just don't feel compelled to write about it.

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Happy New Year!

Ok, so here we are. Tomorrow is New Year's Eve!

Last year I was on the beach for the new year. It was fantastic; the place is wonderful (Pitangueiras beach in Guarujá). That night I didn't make any new year resolutions: I delayed that until the next day, when I made three promises. Learn to drive, exercise my own patience and not to spend the next new year's eve alone.

Number one was the one I managed to avoid the whole year: I had the chance, more than once, during 2006 of doing it. And yet, I did not. Shame on me, 'nuff said.

Number two was the subjective one; I'm not sure how much I accomplished in doing what I proposed to myself: patience was just a word I used for many things, including patience itself, tolerance and so on. Virtues I am aware I lack, at least a bit.

Number three was the one I wasn't sure I was going to fulfill. And yet, it is just another example of how our expectations are mistaken sometimes. The first one, learning to drive, was the one I was completely sure I was going to get done. Oh well. I can't say I was actually alone, of course. Not last year, and not now. I mean alone in another sense; without a girlfriend. There, I said it. This time, Sam is with me, in thought. She's very far away, visiting her mother for the holidays. I can't wait to see her again, I miss her very much. Anyway, before I get too far away from my point here, I just want to say that life has much more significance when one has someone like I have Sam. There are a lot of words I'd like to use to describe her and what I feel when I'm with her, but I don't feel comfortable talking about that like this. So, I'm gonna end this post right here.

Happy New Year.

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Oh well.

Sometimes I catch myself wondering if I say too much in posts like the last one.

I think it cannot be helped. Sometimes we just have a lot to say, and not necessarily we know the best way to say it. So we say it anyway, as best as we can.

The last post was something like that. I began writing about something and moved on to another subject almost without noticing. Sometimes it happens - I just keep writing, and whatever comes to mind ends up being transferred to the keyboard. This time, I'm keeping track of what I write, mostly because my main impulse was to write about a few things I said in the last post, which didn't turn out the way I thought they would, mostly because I didn't think very hard about what I was writing. Am I making any sense here? Oh well. My point is, sometimes I wish I could do more. I am very afraid of being mediocre, so I try to justify everything I do, regardless of necessity. However, and I just thought of that, I am glad I'm not perfect. Actually, I'm pretty far from that, which makes it even better, because that means I can get better in a lot of ways.

In other news, I'm happy. 2006 was a fantastic year for me. More on that later on, in the "happe new year post". See ya.

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Merry Christmas

Thanks to Daniel I decided to post something here. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and I think it would be nice to have some message here.

Sometimes I am truly amazed with how people are so driven to always be successful in everything they do. I know success is important. But hey, what good would be light if there wasn't the dark? A life based on success is, in my point of view, meaningless. If there's nothing you can't do, then why bother? We should always have something we are not able to accomplish, at least at first. That makes the taste of victory even better.

I know that from personal experience. In the last years I've been through a lot, achieved many victories and had many failures. Yeah, I'm not afraid of saying it. I failed. Thank god, I'm still human!

I have already posted a comment in your blog, Daniel. And I say it again: Success is a journey, not a destination. So stop running. I have to be honest: I got my BS, but I am quite aware that I don't know or understand a lot of what I should have learned during my undergraduate times. It bothers me a lot more than I let show. Every now and then I wonder if I am going in the right direction, if I'm truly satisfied with the path I've been trailing. My conclusion is that, even if there were a few bad moments, weakness moments, there were also good moments, times when I was stronger than everything that worked against me and moved on. I persisted. I may not be the best of the best. But I do everything I can, I give my best because I like the sensation of accomplished work. Even if my best is not enough, I'm proud of it because it is my best.

I'm well aware of all my mistakes, and of all my vices. They are part of who I am, as much as my accomplishments and my virtues. It's not settling for mediocrity. It's accepting myself.

I could go on and on here, ranting and ranting, explaining myself until I went green. But I'd rather stop here, while I'm still making any sense.

So, it's Christmas again. I still can't believe a year has already passed since last year's tumultuous ending - not the holidays, but the end of that semester, which almost beat me. I still find myself sometimes wondering how I didn't go crazy with all the pressure and stress I went through those weeks. The good thing is, I did, and I graduated, and here I am, on to a next step. The bad thing is that, obviously, The pressure and stress didn't go away - they just changed faces a bit. I have to say, though, that I deserve that. It's been almost eight years since freshman and I still didn't learn to organize myself to avoid getting myself in trouble in the end of semester. Until now, I maganed to escape. I just hope I learn my lesson before it's too late.

Oh well. I went through a lot this year. But it's still not the time for that - there's a week left. I'll work on a nice retrospective post about everything that happened this year...

Last, but not least, I finally would like to post a few words here about christmas, since this is my last post before Dec 25. I do not see this date as the mystic moment when God's Son was born unto this Earth to save all of mankind, even if I believe that Jesus existed sometime in the past and was probably a very charismatic and intelligent (and maybe wise) man. I do celebrate christmas, though, in my own way. even if this date begun as a religious celebration, I think its significance is much more important: it's the moment in the year when people remind themselves (or at least *should*) that they are not alone in this rock and that maybe they have something to do with it. That, even if we are just the result of evolutionary probability, here we are. We happened to achieve a state of awareness no other being in this planet was able to. We may not be the smartest of species, but intelligence is not the only pre-requisite for being human.

My message, though, is not the usual one. I do not think that people should get all together and be happy ever after. I don't believe in fairy tales - I'm much more practical. I believe we are what we are today because of evolution - we followed the course of natural evolution, within certain boundaries, established by our environment and by a few random variables. Homo sapiens has a very distinguished state of awareness and sentience. Mankind, on the other hand, does not. It is the mixture of all human beings, and as such, it is just like other mixtures. People are very different, even if we are the same species. It's just like adding up a lot of different musical instruments. Without a maestro, there's no chance a music will come up from the mess. That's mankind: an orchestra that tries to play a song without a maestro. Well, maybe not completely without one: our environment is a kind of maestro. We play what we see and hear and feel.

Every single person is an instrument. And every instrument has a defined role in an orchestra. I doubt everyone has ever seen the violinist trying to tell the pianist how to play his piano; we're just the same. These days, people are so concerned about the others that they forget themselves; they become lost in collectivity and forget individuality.

If every person took more care about her own life, the world would be a better place. I'm not saying we should simply ignore other people. I'm saying the exact opposite of that: our maestro is what surrounds us. People should pay attention to everyone around them. It's through seeing what happens around us that we trace our own road to the future.

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It's Dec 17... wow!

It's been a while again, I know. Probably no one even comes here anymore. But I intend to keep this anyway. I like to read things I wrote in the past; that gives me a sense os continuity, and shows me the differences between what I have been and what I am.

One thing that never ceases to astonish me is how I become a lot more "present", in a way, when things go wrong. It seems that there's a lot to write about. Or, to be honest, rant about. I guess I just don't have what it takes to comment about good things that happen to me. I've always been like that, often ranting about anything and not talking about other things.

Anyway, let me try to make a "short version" of what has happened since Nov 20, the date of my last post here.

First of all, my semester is over. Well, not quite, since there's an itsy bitsy report waiting to be written... anyway, it's not that urgent, so I consider my semester finished. I think I've done good enough, and my grades are undoubtedly better than last semester's.

It's been three months with Sam now. The best three months of the year, I should say. I expect (or rather want) this relationship to last a long time. I never know how to talk about people I like this much, things I like in her, and that stuff. I fail to comprehend completely why I fell for her, but the point is, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that a care about her a lot (love is a big word, but it's been around for some time now).

The year is nearing its end, and I can barely believe that 2006 is almost done. It seemed like yesterday that I was in my first class, freshman year. Boy, it's been a long time...

Well, I think that's it. Obviously it's not, but anyway, I wouldn't remember everything or, even if I did, I wouldn't have the patience to write about everything. I just hope I can update this a little more often than I did in the last two or three months.

See ya.

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It's been a while.

It's been a quite long time since my last post. Unfortunately, the end of the semester is beginning to show its effects on me, as usual. My free time grows thinner and thinner.

Thanks to Yoshi I had a glance at GHII last thursday. Dude, it rocks. I can't wait until I get the chance to play with it a bit more. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to check out the ending song to the game (Freebird)... from what I've seen on youtube, it's gonna be hell. But it's gonna be good... =)

I just hope my stipend comes along some time soon... =S

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Never let anyone fool you: grad school is nowhere near a joyride. That's what I believed when I got my bachelors; not anymore. Now I realised that my undergrad days were, in factm quite easygoing, so to speak. Now I have no less work than I had when all I had to worry about was reports and exams.

Today, there is a lot more in question: for starters, my whole project, and my thesis. Obviously I don't know exactly how to handle everything - what questions I have to pay attention for, what pieces of the whole thing demand more work, and so on. I;m not complaining - that's the whole point of a grad course, I think. Gradually I am realising a broader view of my work and of what I have to do. I think that's the most important thing to learn when in grad school: how to work by yourself, without leaving other people out.

Unfortunately, on a more practical approach, I'm quite behind the schedule. Gotta work on that...

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Good bye tagboard.

The tagboard have been bugging me for a long time, and it became evident that no one was giving a shit about it - me included. So, I removed it.

I have also updated my picture, take a look on the left. Sam is in it with me.

Everything seems to be finally getting to the right places.

Everything seems to be going in a good direction - although I had to drop Statistical Mechanics, at least my advisor's course is going well. What worries me now is the seminar I'm supposed to present next month...

Apart from that, I have been quite absent from the internet these days. I'm completely disappeared from all the forums I am a member of, became only a casual player on online games, even in the instant messaging it's unusual for me to be online. It's expected, to be honest, since I'm adapting myself to what matters to me. Needless to say, the thing that matters the most has a name, and she's in the picture up there on the left.

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Right then.

Okay, so it's been ten days since my last post - which by the way wasn't exactly long...

I'm still not sure about what to write here. But I try.

Well, there's the setlist for Guitar Hero II. It seems cool, although I don't know many of the songs in it. And I'm pretty pissed due to the fact that it does not include a single song from Led Zeppelin. Pathetic. I don't care whose fault it is, this should not have happened. There are some pretty cool songs, though. YYZ (Rush), Monkey Wrench (Foo Fighters), Sweet Child o'Mine from (Guns), among others. And, of course, Freebird (Lynyrd Skynyrd). I knew it wasn't just a lame joke... =P

In other news, she is far away. I confess that I don't think about her all the time. But when I do, I just can't stand waiting until sunday, when we're going to see each other again. I'm so happy with her I can't express it in words. A lot of thoughts cross my mind these days, many of them about the future. I try not to worry too much about it, but sometimes I just can't help it, and the reason is simple. I'm falling for her.

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