JumboDELIC by Mr. G
I shall believe by Safiry
The fun in dysfunctional by Stacy
HOPE - UNITY - TRUTH by Truth
The Story of Jae... by Julie
Med Feelings by Fittipaldi R.I.P.
alemao para principiantes by Guenther
*.* by Gunno R.I.P.
I just wanna have something to do by Ruivinha R.I.P.
*Toxic Girl by Ruivinha R.I.P.
The source of the stillness
Some Thursday weirdness
My research website
Sunday, November 30, 2003
I'm back home after an afternoon with Stacy in Tulsa. We finally watched Matrix Revolutions, then we went bowling. I'll regret this last idea in the morning, but so far I'm alright... I just want to see myself in front of the computer trying to type my paper and my arm and hand hurting from the game. Oh, well, "no pain, no gain", right? ;-)
About Matrix Revolutions, well, it could have been worse. I would have chosen another ending, especially from the end of the second part on, but I'm not the producer and I can't really say that he did a bad job. As I said, I have thought of too many worse endings for the trilogy (and that's what I love about movies that don't end because you can spend some time creating your endings and then, when the next part is out, you check if you had the same or better ideas than the director). I won't get into more details, because there is always going to be people that haven't watched the movie yet.
As for my program that I went to check as soon as I arrived in Stillwater, it just didn't work. I'm convinced that my proposed method works, but there are too many other factors that I haven't considered that I think I need to. It's hard when you are dealing with a hard problem (wow... Now that's intelligence! I'm proud of myself for having concluded this!).
Actually, just to talk a little bit more about Friday Five, there is one question that made me think a little: 4. Did you get an allowance as a child? How much was it?
I did get an allowance, but the amount changed so fast because of the wonderful inflation we had in Brazil at the time I was getting it that I really can't remember the numbers any more. Actually, most of the time I wouldn't receive in money but in choosing what I wanted to get because having cash was one of the worst things you could do back in those days.
Anyway, just because I'm posting and not working on my paper, I just would like to mention that I did finish Clarice Lispector's book this morning. I woke up pretty early today from a strange dream (combine research, projects and the beach - that was my dream!) and decided to finish the book. I had only 50 pages left (well, the book is 170 pages long, with large fonts). It is very interesting, indeed. Makes you think about what life really is, what should be your objectives. Not that I really agree with all her ideas, but I was delighted mostly by the way they were exposed. Anyway, I like books that are hard to read.
This was so strange... I was passing by Friday Five today (yes it is Sunday, so I didn't really tried to participate on this one) and got the link to this blog: Jenseits von Gut und Boese. The weird part was to read the questions in English and the answers in German. My brain just felt weird trying to remove the dust from all these synapses, but I can say I understood pretty much everything! I was impressed with myself! My German still survives! Don't ask me to write anything, but still being able to read is a good sign.
posted by Michel | 8:53 AMSaturday, November 29, 2003
One more day of work... The only thing inside of me that is complaining about all this are my allergies. I do have terrible allergies to dust. Dust and carpets are very good friends! I don't have carpets in my apartment, but I can't escape them in the office and the lab! Moreover, I don't have control over the cleaning of these places and just have to accept their very sparse cleaning schedule for these places. Result of this: my sinuses are just very "talkative" lately. I try to keep taking allergy medicine every day, but sometimes it just isn't effective enough, I guess.
Anyway, no more complaining... Let me talk a little about... The book I FINALLY finished reading! Yes! I did finish reading "Psychohistorical Crisis" by Donald Kingsbury. I really liked the book! It is a hard read, because he tries to really go into all the problems with psychohistory (well, if you haven't read Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, you must have no idea what it is about, so here is a little explanation - psychohistory is the ability to predict the future. It is a mathematical method created by "The Founder" and now the group that knows psychohistory - the psychohistorians - rule the universe). He does a good job most of the times, but sometimes it looks like he just gets a little too far on his inspiration, and not that far on his math. But it is a well thought book. With many references to historical and cultural details of this distant future.
It is a long book, very tiring to read, impossible for people that are not science fiction fans, but I really enjoyed having finished it. Even if it took me some months to ge through it. Well, I'm used to taking a long time to read a book. I have to read so many papers and books at work that when I get home (normally kind of late already) I just can't focus enough to read. Especially hard books, like the most books I like to read.
Right now I have started reading one of my birthday presents: Clarice Lispector's "A Paixão Segundo G.H." (translated to "The Passion According to G.H."). This is another very hard read. It's a psychological book about a woman (well, Clarice Lispector was well-known for focusing her work on women) that is confronted with something unexpected and has what she considers a "wild" response to it and this changes her life. More specifically, she goes to the bedroom of her ex-maid (that had just left her job) and meets a cockroach. She kills the cockroach and this simply generates a chain reaction in her mind to rethink her whole life. The whole text is based on her thoughts and is extremely complicated (grammatically speaking) but very fluid - as you would expect from someone trying to write down the "mental diarrhea" of a person that is going through a great mental change.
Anyway, I really recomend this book to people that can read Portuguese. There is a translation to English, but I've read that it is not very good on trying to convey the mental confusion. Well, there are some things that cannot be translated.
Alright, enought about books. Let me get back to writing the report for my final project. The last one of the semester! I'm still kind of far away from getting it done... But I've started it! Tomorrow I will be going to Tulsa to check on my sick girlfriend. I have to make sure that she is really getting better and not just saying that on the phone to make me worry a little less.
Yesterday I was reading an article on IEEE Spectrum about web logs written by Paul McFedries. First it makes you kind of depressed thinking that they estimate that there are approximately 3 million active blogs. I suddenly feel so... so... massified! Then he goes through a number of blog terms that I never heard before, such as kittyblogs, bloggerel, blogorrhea, blawg, bleg, photog, and moblog.
The whole point of the article is to show that blogging is an internet hype that looks like it's going to stay, unlike others. I think people inherently have this will of posting their ideas and just emptying their minds. Most enjoy the anonymity that the Internet provides them and the potential ability to reach someone that may even be interested in what you write.
If you ask me what was my reason to write a blog, I would answer that I did it mainly for my friends that are far away to know that I'm alive. At the same time they can still know what is going on in my head (not everything, of course, because you can't really write everything on a public medium, especially when you are not being anonymous).
Just one more thing: Wal-Mart yesterday! The most scary experience I ever had! The parking lot absurdly full and people leaving with piles of TV sets. I went to get food and I was walking on the food section being surrounded by TVs... That's all they wanted people to buy, I think. And they were buying! Later, on my dinner yesterday, someone gave me information that may explain this behavior. During new year's time, there are football games all around, more than this holiday. They have many simultaneous games running! So, the theory that make me a little less worried is: People buy many TVs right now so that they can follow all games during that day. Then, later, they return all these TV sets to Wal-Mart! I was worried about extreme brainless "consumism", but now everything is better in my mind.
Of course it still doesn't explain why people stay in lines outside the stores at 5 a.m... But I'm still working on my theory.
Friday, November 28, 2003
It is interesting the story of HIV-AIDS spread around the world. My experience here in the US is that people don't really think much about it, because they read the numbers that say that, although the disease is still on upsurge, it is more concentrated on homosexuals, black and hispanic population, and not that much on the rest. So they pretend they don't really care.
In Brazil I remember that, at least in the group I lived, people were always very concerned with this. There are lots of government-sponsored advertisement around, especially around Carnival, with even distribution of free condoms. Here? I may not be a big TV guy, but I never saw anything of the sort.
Why this came to my mind today? Actually it was yesterday when I heard the drama the Red Cross is going through right now. It actually scared me to hear about something this big! Not as much as when I saw the numbers in Africa for the first time, the life expectancy dropping absurdly in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana (check it yourself - click on "The impact of Aids" on the sidebar for more scary facts about the way things are in Africa).
I don't know why I'm in a mood thinking about social issues lately. Maybe I just want to keep my mind out of my research problems... Later I'll blog about my Wal-Mart experience this morning. I didn't want to take the focus out of this issue.
I think I just got a new entry on my TOP 5 most hideous musical projects on CD! Vienna Boys Choir Goes Pop. Ouch! And pay attention on the selection of songs. Nothing really could go right with this!
posted by Michel | 8:20 AMThursday, November 27, 2003
Oh, wow... Where to start? Today it is Thanksgiving day. A pretty interesting holiday in which people eat a lot and then get all depressed because they had to stand their family for a whole meal! I really don't quite understand what happens in this world with family problems. But I'm really not getting into it! Happy Thanksgiving for these people that may understand what these words mean.
Apart from that the day was pretty much dead. I worked, finished my second project and got stuck on my third project. So stuck that I decided to go back home and just take my mind out of it for a while. This was at around 6 p.m. (oh, well, one of the real reasons I went back home is because I had a chat with my parents at 6, but that's a minor detail.) And I tried to watch some TV, didn't find anything interesting on so I went to read some. I still haven't finished my book, but I'm almost there!
Another thing I did today is that I remembered a discussion I had the other day with the girlfriend of a friend of mine when I told her that in Brazil we bought milk that didn't require refrigeration when it wasn't open. She said it was impossible! Oh, well, so I did some quick research today and found out about it: UHT (Ultra High Temperature) Milk. It is ultrapasteurized at high temperatures and then stored in a sealed pack. It is even used by the US military, but it looks like it's not sold here. I read a message from an American woman that claimed that she imported UHT milk from Australia. Anyway, it can be kept with no refrigeration for about 10 weeks!
I'm NOT posting another long one, so I guess I'll stop here. There was a story I wanted to write here, but I'm not sure it is ready yet for posting. I'll revise it and post it some other day.
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Yes, the NSF ITR request for proposal is out! I don't know if I should be happy or sad about it. First deadline is January 14 and then the proposal deadline is February 24. I have gone through it and it is still applicable to my research, so I guess I will be working on this proposal for a while.
This morning I woke up from a dream that (I still don't quite understand how) made me spend the whole early morning (until I got to the office and got back to my good and old work) thinking about what will happen after I graduate. I always try to run away from this subject, and actually that's one of the reasons I ended up here in Stillwater, but today I just decided to think a little bit more.
The problem is that my conclusion is always the same: there isn't anything I really like seeing myself doing for the rest of my life. At the same time, there is nothing that I can really say: "I would never even think about doing this one day." Life becomes hard when you can't even decide by cutting out what you don't want to do.
Cutting out was the way I chose to go for Engineering in my undergrad. For those who are not familiar with the higher education system in Brazil, just a short explanation (that will be useful to understand the need of a choice): most universities have an entrance examination. For you to take this exam, you have to define what is the major your are interested so that you compete with people with the same objective for the limited number of available seats. Some details and weighting of the exam can also change depending on the major selected. For example, if you choose engineering in Fuvest (one of the most important entrance examinations), in the second part of the exam (it is divided into two groups of days - the first group, currently divided into two weekends, is a multiple choice type of exam that covers all main school subjects: Portuguese, English, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, History, and Geography; the second is divided into three or four days and contains essay-type questions) you take only Portuguese, Physics, Math, and Chemistry. If you choose history you have to take the Portuguese, History, and Geography exams. And so on.
For some majors there are some practical exams. For example, if you want to do your undergrad in Music you have to have an audition and take a music theory exam.
Anyway, this long explanation to talk about my choices when I was planning to go to college. In high-school I participated on a course (it was optional) to help deciding what I wanted to do. Everything was interesting because I love to study in general, but I had to start removing the things I didn't think I could do. Medicine was the first. My older sister was in med school and I saw how much she suffered memorizing all names and things like that. I couldn't see myself being able to memorize all this (my memory was always very bad - but this is a subject for another post). Because of memory issues I continued cutting out all subjects from humanities and biological sciences. I was left with Physics, Math and Engineering. The psychologist thought that I should go to physics. However, when my father (and electrical engineer) knew that I was thinking of going this way, he gathered his contacts and gave me a lecture showing that Physics in Brazil is not what I thought it was and that I would end up being a teacher (or not working with physics).
Being a teacher wasn't something I really thought I would be able to do. I always knew I had problems conveying the things I knew, and always thought I didn't know enough to teach people. This made me choose engineering. Inside engineering I ended up going to electrical engineering because of my fascination for computers (not something that my father was very happy about, because he always tried to convince me that computers were tools and not things to really specialize on - although his emphasis on his undergrad was computers and digital systems).
However, when I graduated I found out that, although I really liked computers, the only jobs I would ever find would be of programming. And I found it most of the times just plain boring... That's when this invitation to come to OSU came and I took it. It was something temporary again, and would give me time and more experience to think of what I really want to do for the rest of my life. And, well, I am getting to the decision point again. As time passes, decisions become more important, and much more difficult, in my opinion.
But, well, I wasn't going to post something this huge any more, I know... But I just felt like writing while I wait for my program to finish working on my homework. Today's plan is to finish this homework so that the only things I'll have left for the end of the semester (classes-wise) would be a final project and one final exam. Everything on track.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Sometimes TV can be really unpredictable! Today I was trying to watch something while I had my late dinner at 1:30 a.m. and what I did I find? The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I can't say I still remember much about it, and I watched only about 20 minutes of it while I had dinner, but I was shocked! And what really shocked me is that I never realized that Robin Williams was in it! Oh, well, maybe when I watched it I didn't even know who Robin Williams was, but that's a minor detail.
Anyway, I had to write this... And I also have to wait for some time for me to digest my dinner a little before I go to bed.
Some people remember those lonely guys at home playing with their "not completely legal" 3D rendering programs:.: Miss Digital World :.
posted by Michel | 5:19 PMJust to log a little bit about state-of-the-art technology here, for people outside of this world to understand how far we are from really getting there.
I was testing ANNIE today. It is a natural language processing (NLP) open-source software developed by the Natural Language Processing Research Group in the University of Sheffield. The demo you can run theoretically highlights the words of a given type. You can choose to highlight names, places, organizations, dates, address, money, and percent values in a given webpage.
I decided to run it on my blog, because it is kind of a diverse text that contains different instances of each of the first four elements. It did run pretty well with some exceptions. But some of these exceptions are pretty bad! If I had to do analysis of some text with this software I knew that I would have to read the whole text and make sure that it didn't make many very strange mistakes and left out some important elements. Some examples of mistakes is on the name Malcom Arnold. It only got the "Arnold" as the name. It skipped Pamie's name altogether. It thinks that "Director-" is a place, "Concert" is an organization (from "Concert Chorale") and "independent" too (this was very weird)!
Bottom line: we are still far away from a good NLP even though lots of people have been studying it for a long time already. Some pretty good people got in this field too, but I guess language is just too hard - why did our ancestors create such a complicated thing to use for communication?
Monday, November 24, 2003
Yes, most probably I'm deep into end-of-semester syndrome now. Two people already told me that I'm strange today and I just don't understand what is wrong with me. I am just tired and I need to work. I have to finish three reports this week and I'm still mid way through the first one! Because of this I think I am giving the idea to people that I want to be alone so that I can work more efficiently and this is making people think that I'm strange.
Oh, well, for you that read my blog and thought that I'm strange, maybe I'll be like this until the end of the semester. I will survive, just give me some time to let this craziness calm down. When I don't have thousands of projects due and a hundred more coming at any minute I'll try to be a "less strange" person. I hope this will happen after the end of this semester, but if it takes until I graduate, well...
As you must have imagined, I was a little busy this weekend to blog.
Saturday was a day of working at home: cleaning, ironing (well, I had to iron my shirt for the concert on Sunday)... I went to work to check my simulations, saw that nothing really worked, recalculated the time I would need to make anything work, got depressed about it and then Stacy arrived.
We had a good time, except the concert in which I'm sure she didn't have a good time at all. Alright, maybe she had some fun observing people on stage! We watched Stephen King's "Dreamcatcher" (very weird movie - in the beginning it looks like the movie is going to be about something, but then it changes completely the subject), and then the first part of Frank Herbert's "Children of Dune" (it's a 6-hour mini-series and we watched only the first two hours of it). Yes, in other words I made Stacy suffer a lot this weekend! I'm a bad boyfriend! Hwa hwa hwa!
Apart from that I don't have anything else to say! I'm ready for a couple of very long weeks ahead, but that's life in school at the end of the semester.
Friday, November 21, 2003
Not a whole lot to say after coming back from Ponca City. I had a good time as always, found out that I'll never understand Hebrew, also found out that languages are just crazy and they will always be crazy... As you can see, things never change!
My day before that wasn't the best I've had in my life, but it wasn't that bad. I went to a lecture on "Molecular Engineering" where a biologist made a very brief introduction of what it was about, mainly in the "Genetic Engineering" field focused on Engineering crowd. I learned some things, remembered others and continued wanting to buy this. Of course it is a kid's toy and I should be aiming for something more "professional", but, well, professional stuff are MUCH more expensive.
As I said, I don't have a whole lot to say, so I'll stop here. I think I'll read some now and then rest. I'm starting to see the end of my never-ending book, "Psychohistorical Crisis". Yes, I'm still reading it!
I was exposed to a very interesting story yesterday. First a little background on the main character of the story:
He arrived here at the same time I got here, so we met at orientation and around campus being lost. Nice fellow, a little crazy sometimes (during winter he would always walk on snow saying "I love to walk on snow!"), but nothing much. Then suddenly he dissappeared. He started working on 2 or 3 projects at the same time (he was working on his Ph.D. in photonics through the Physics point of view), in 3 different buildings and was always busy and running around.
Now comes the story: last winter break he went back home for a month. When he came back, he had changed his status (this means that he got married). I'm still not completely sure what happened, but, according to his story, he met a girl and three days later they were married! He said that it simply clicked on him that she was the one and it seems like the same thing clicked on her. They came back together, he stuggled one more semester thinking of his research and things like that, she got pragnant and this semester he decided that Photonics was not for him and that he wanted to be a High School Physics teacher! He switched to master's, is graduating this semester and it looks like he already got a job in Oklahoma City.
What a change in life, huh? His reason was: when it comes the right time, you will understand.
Well, maybe I'll never understand, but I envy his courage to change! Some things are difficult to relate simply because he has a completely different cultural background than I have, but there is always an universal idea behind all... The nature of the human being is always behind all cultures, and that's why intercultural analysis is so interesting.
Anyway, the other strange thing that happened last night is that more than one people there thought I was from Turkey. And I still have to learn to accept that, being the president of a student organization, I have to give in on talking in public even when I think my thoughts are not interesting enough. I'm not the person to judge this.
Thursday, November 20, 2003
Chaos is consuming me lately. I've been having trouble to really focus on the things I'm doing for many different reasons. The first, and easiest to understand is the "end-of-semester syndrome". Many projects, research deadlines, work deadlines, social deadlines, all converging to very nearby time positions. But this is the easiest one to deal with, actually, because they have a definite deadline. After December 12th everything will be over, independent of the results.
However, I'm really not recognizing myself lately. I've been paying attention to things I never cared before. I've been writing things that I've never thought I was going to write. And I am simply forgetting of my past. Really fast! For example, today I opened one of my email accounts and decided to open the "Sent" folder. Then I saw a "strange" message on the list and decided to open it to remember what it was about. It was a poem that I've written when I went to Brazil the first time after I was here, May 2001 (well, at least that's what it said on the email).
Two things amazed me: the first one is that I really don't have any recollection of writing that. Second and the most annoying one is that I don't remember the person to whom I sent the message! I have no idea who this person was! And it looked like, by the way I wrote the email, that she was a good friend of mine at that time! And it was about 2 1/2 years ago!
Well, if you go back to the past on my blog entries you can see how much everything changed around here. At first I thought I was becoming a better person, more experienced, with more defined goals. Lately I'm seeing that I'm actually loosing who I was. I'm becoming less and less attached emotionally to the world, and I think this is not a good thing.
Anyway, I think I just wrote all this because I didn't have anything else to talk about. Time for me to leave for the Interfaith Dialogue Student Association dinner and find out what it is about... It is an organization made mostly by Turkish Muslims (very nice guys), so I'll see what they have to say. I just know that they suddenly got lots of money to organize this dinner with formal invitation letters and everything.
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
The top 9 e-mail hoaxes: I have received some of them. I never fell for any, though. So sad... I'm sure some of them required lots of thinking by the guys that invented them! I was a bad hoax distributer. I should be banned from the internet... Hey, maybe that should be the next chain email! A powerful (but somehow friendly) virus is profiling everybody on the internet. If you don't forward this email to at least 10 people it will hunt you down and erase all the data in all machines you ever use to access the web and distribute your credit card and social security numbers to anybody that asks for it! =)
posted by Michel | 8:45 AMTuesday, November 18, 2003
This is a cool weblog: Who Would Buy That? (auction oddities from all over the web) Some people do have great ideas of what to put on a weblog.
posted by Michel | 9:54 PMAh, another night with a concert... This time was with the Concert Chorale, the highest-level large choir at OSU. They had a pretty interesting concert, where they tried to show the change in the way music is made in different styles, from the 15th or 17th century to today. I will skip the list of pieces for this concert, because there were too many and I've already posted too much lately. I'm probably scaring people away from my blog!
Anyway, exam tomorrow and I hope I'm ready for it. Tomorrow is also my long day with evening class... I'm starting to get scared by the thought that there are only 2 1/2 weeks left in the semester. The year is almost over and there are still so many things to do...
Well, Lori mentioned in her blog that she gave some grammar explanations to Pamie in her blog. If you don't want to follow all the links, I'll just tell you that the question was about the placement of "stuff" when you have quotation marks.
It seems like, in American English, it is a rule to put the commas and the periods inside the quotation marks, although logic would put them outside. This convention always intrigued me, especially when I was working on text parsing on the web. This discussion got me so intrigued that I decided to search about the reasons for it. Actually I found a couple of websites with explanations that made sense:
From Tina Blue: "Well, it seems to be the result of historical accident. When type was handset, a period or comma outside of quotation marks at the end of a sentence tended to get knocked out of position, so the printers tucked the little devils inside the quotation marks to keep them safe and out of trouble. But apparently only American printers were more attached to convenience than logic, since British printers continued to risk the misalignment of their periods and commas."
From Charles Darling: "There are peculiar typographical reasons why the period and comma go inside the quotation mark in the United States. The following explanation comes from the "Frequently Asked Questions" file of alt.english.usage: "In the days when printing used raised bits of metal, "." and "," were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a '"' on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using '."' and ',"' rather than '".' and '",', regardless of logic." This seems to be an argument to return to something more logical, but there is little impetus to do so within the United States."
The conclusion is that, similar to the use of the "Imperial" System of Measurements, it has a historical background. But unlike it, nobody is even thinking of changing back to the "logic" way of doing it, although we don't have the technical issues of printing with commas and periods that are not between two characters.
Oh, well, who will ever understand these Americans? ;-)
The globalization discussion
This is a response to Safiry's comment that was getting a little too long for a comment, so I decided to transform it into a post.
I think globalization is not only good to those that globalize... Take China, for my first example: less than 20 years ago, many Chinese living in big cities didn't have bathrooms in their own houses, they lived in the place where the government thought that they could live (people from the "party" had better living conditions, people that were land owners before the revolution lived in worse places). They had restrictions on what to eat, on heating, on even water! Didn't globalization help by forcing them to change? I couldn't find a Chinese that claims it didn't.
Second example: Brazil! Without the globalization "pressure" we would still be "enjoying" our really low-tech industry that we had in the 70s and 80s during the time that almost no high-tech product was allowed to be imported. I remember how amazed I was when my father would go back home after a trip to the US with gifts... How much better their toys were!
I'm not saying here that there are no problems with globalization. Companies have gone bankrupt, people are unemployed. The amount of pressure that it creates on developing economies to keep up with the level of investment and experience that exists in the developed countries is extremely unfair. It is indeed making life more difficult to the "ones that are globalized".
My conclusion is that globalization is a need, we cannot deny it. But it is a change. A drastic change sometimes. Changes are scary and dangerous. They cause pain, they may break a country. One solution would be to slow down the process. Give time to the local industries to adapt and then move forward. However, with the amazing speed that technical, industrial and technological innovation is being created, it is just impossible to slow down. So the only thing I can think of is for the government to stock on food, let the globalization come, take care of feeding the population while the transition is going, make sure that the education sector is being able to follow the transition, and when the shockwaves are gone, see what you can do.
I know it is not a very good idea. Hey, I'm an engineer, not an economist! I am just putting down some ideas, even silly ones, with the hope that someone would get enlightened by my ignorance and post something better.
Monday, November 17, 2003
Back to blogging...
It was an interesting day. I enjoyed the fact that I'm in a big university and decided to broaden my views a little, so I went to a "Global Briefing" sponsored by the School of International Studies with Sir Thomas Harris the UK Consul-General in New York and the Director-General of Trade & Investment in the USA. His talk was about globalization and if it was a threat.
To his point of view, and to the numbers he had, there was no sign of dispair. Jobs are disappearing because of the increase in the productivity in the manufacturing sector and not because lots of money is being invested in low-wage jobs. According to him, actually companies pay more for the people outside than inside the country. And most of the jobs that are being "outsorced" are high-tech jobs that are looking for talents and not really cost (not that cost is not important).
But in the cost side, seeing that most non-perishable products that are sold here in stores like Wal-Mart are made somewhere else, especially China, there must be something to this market. He compared it to Japan just after the war. Everybody got scared by the cheap products that started to export... Better cars... But now what do you have? A Japan that has increased its economic and social level and now is a great invester. Maybe it is good to keep on doing this to all countries and make them all increase their social and economical levels. This will certainly build a better future to all!
Bottom line is that the talk was very simple: globalization is good! And the US and UK are the best on that! Especially UK that has the lowest amount of restrictions to globalization in the world. Something like 3 times less than the US (whatever that really means).
Apart from this interesting talk, I didn't do much. I worked, had classes, studied for the exam I'm going to have on Wednesday, cooked dinner (it took me about 2 hours to make it, but it was pretty good) and tried to solve some weird problems with the Interfaith Council.
I was thinking of my week today... I'm busy all nights this week! Tomorrow there is a concert I want to go to, on Wednesday I have a class, on Thursday a dinner, on Friday Shabbat in Ponca City, on Saturday I have dress rehearsal for the concert on Sunday and on Sunday I have a chat with my parents. I'm tired already! :-)
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Today I learned an important lesson. See, another day learning something! That's what makes life worth living, right?
Anyway, I learned that I really like classical music and I was missing that in my life. I was missing the time sitting and listening to a good concert. But today I did just that! I went to the Oklahoma City Philharmonic concert here in Stillwater. A two-hour concert with a very interesting music selection, with not-overplayed pieces, most that I didn't actually know:
Malcom Arnold - Four English Dances - Second Set: Pretty uplifting dances, nothing extremely complex and deep (well, they are dances, right?), but well executed (with some exceptions). Good choice for an opening of a concert.
Edgar Meyer - Concerto in D Major for Double Bass: The composer was invited to play the double bass. He is an amazing musician, with a very interesting piece that sometimes seemed like he was playing the double bass like a rock guitarist. Great execution, great thing to hear for the first time.
Giovanni Bottesini - Gran Duo Concertante: With Edgar Meyer on the double bass and Felicia Moye on the violin as the soloists. Both played amazingly well! And the piece, another one I haven't heard before, is very interesting, full of little surprises. It was just different to listen to two solo instruments that were so far apart in range to be "conversing" on stage.
Richard Strauss - Don Quixote: Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character, Opus 35: The only piece I have heard before. In order for people to follow the story they gave a cheat sheet to everybody with the variations and the story behind each variation and they had a person on stage (actually two people) that changed a sign showing in which variation they were. A little distracting for a sort of complex piece, but it was a good idea for a performance in a university.
There is only one thing that made me a little sad about this concert. It kind of hurts me to see that the public was mainly Stillwater residents and professors. Not many students actually went to watch it. It is sad to see the reality of this generation.
Anyway, the rest of the day went uneventfully. I can't say I worked much today, but I left my program running a lot. There were too many details I had to take care of.
Every day I learn that teaching by example is not the best way to really make people learn. It gives people a better world to live, but that's all they feel about it, I guess.
Anyway, I did go to meet Stacy on Friday evening. We had a good time having dinner together but I was so tired that I can't say we did much more than that that night. Just too little sleep and lots of things going on in my mind. On Saturday morning we went out for breakfast (almost brunch) and then Stacy had to go do her mannequin and I came back to Stillwater to continue working.
I ended up not working until late, actually. I had to buy groceries, do laundry and have dinner and when I got ready to leave it was almost 9 p.m. already. And this is the time I had one of the creepiest experiences. I started walking to the office and there was a thick fog outside. This, by itself, is very unusual here. There was nobody walking around or driving. Then I started hearing some sirens from far... It sounded like ambulances. Then I started to hear bells tolling from the distance. I felt like it was somehow the end of the world there. Nobody, chaos, religion.
Of course the world didn't end, but it was surely, as a friend of mine put later, a great movie scene! It is amazing how the campus looks much nicer, and scarier, in a foggy cold (but not that cold) night.
Alright, time for me to go back to work here. Long day ahead still.
Saturday, November 15, 2003
This is something from people with nothing to do in their lives and with no sense of originality: PETA: The Meatrix. But, well, it's something to laugh about.
posted by Michel | 1:47 PMFriday, November 14, 2003
Just another day... Nothing really special about this one.
I was in the office last night until after almost everybody was gone. And I was back in the office today before almost everybody was here. Why the "almost"? Well, there is a person that had a seminar today and was preparing for it at the last minute. But now the seminar is gone and the person is gone too! Nobody is in the office or in the lab, and here I am... Waiting for some intermediary results before I can continue working on one of my final projects.
All this "lack of work" made me think. There is something wrong with the attitude of the people in this lab. The person that is mostly to blame for it is who takes care of the lab, our advisor. But I will never say that he is the sole reason. I'm still here, right? I think people lost appreciation to what research is, to what sitting down almost the whole day and reading and trying things really means, what is the joy it brings to people. I want to help, but I'm received with a "whatever", or with a lecture about how they don't know where to go, or how they feel that our advisor doesn't really want them to move on.
This last statement is very untrue. But the first statement is, unfortunately, true. We are in a confused lab. We have an advisor that tries to show us the need of graduating and writing papers, while around us there is nobody with this kind of pressure. And there is no threat! He never (for the best of my knowledge) kicked anybody out of the lab because they were not working. And one of the reasons for that is that he wouldn't be able to tell. As he has no idea of what each person is doing, he can't really say if this person is working or not. There are always some people that know how to "do meetings" and are able to convey some kind of impression that they worked during the week, while actually they didn't do anything. Moreover, there are some people that really work a lot during the week, but can't relay that to him. He has a "black" list of students in his mind, but the list is very wrong!
Oh, well, as I've lost "authority" a long time ago in this lab, I'll try to keep everything to myself and let them enjoy their lives the way they want. If they are having more fun than I am, and making more money than me, well, the world outside is unfair too! I'm getting experience on feelings I'll eventually go through anyway!
But tonight I'll try to forget all this. I'll finish my program here, let it run and go to Tulsa. I'll be back tomorrow morning/early-afternoon. I may even go to the Football game!
Oh, talking about football, I suddenly observed something very strange today. I was looking for the time of the game tomorrow, so I tried to access the athletic department homepage. The university's homepage is www.okstate.edu, right? The athletic department homepage is www.okstate.com! This explains everything about where they want their money "invested"! Yes, this is a "higher education" institution. I'm "officially" not enrolled in a sports club.
Thursday, November 13, 2003
On my way back home, after a long day of work, I spent my time (the 15 minutes it takes for me to walk from my office to my apartment) thinking of changes. I suddenly miss myself! It's a pretty weird feeling, but it's very true. I miss writing, composing, playing the clarinet, walking around just for the sake of walking, chatting, listening. Now I feel I don't have time for those things any more. More important than this, I don't really feel like doing most of these things, or I just don't know how to do them any more.
Take chatting for instance. I can't really sit down and spend some time chatting with people, getting to know what their problems are and playing of blind profiling. I easily get tired, bored, extremely boring, and start to feel bad about the time I'm spending doing this while I could be doing something more "productive".
I have an idea of what really happened for all this change. But it is just a simplified view of what really must have happened. I can't really say that my problem is that I have been studying too much and that made me boring, because I always studied a lot. I was always boring, but in the past I knew how to listen, how to not ask questions but answer questions in a way that would make the person in the other side happy with the answers. I was able to entertain people and make very good friends.
Another theory is that it was that suddenly I have a "real life" and I can't relate to the "virtual life" any more. But how real is my life? I keep fooling myself doing things I shouldn't be doing, I keep burrying myself in holes and just hoping that one day I may reach the other end of the holes, I keep doing things that won't really take me anywhere "real". Is this real life?
Maybe I'm just experimenting things. My "virtual life" was an experiment, now I'm into another experiment, and who knows what will come next... Maybe I'm just that deep into being a nerdy scientist. Probably, if this is the case, I should start working on building a network of friends in universities around, because this will be where I'll belong.
Well, I don't know. Maybe 15 minutes weren't enough to get anywhere. Maybe I should move to somewhere farther away so that I have more time to think while I'm walking back home or to my office.
I thought that only ICQ users worried about this, but today I received on my Yahoo Messenger offline messages a message saying to forward this to all your contacts so that Yahoo would know you are an active member and won't start to charge you. "Keep Yahoo Messenger Free"
One day I would like to meet the "genius" that first started distributing these messages, something very common in the past on ICQ (strange that it's been a LONG time I don't receive anything like that there).
Just wanted to log this oddity.
If you read what is on blogger's homepage you would have read this already. But as I know most people don't, here is an interesting article: Mom Finds Out About Blog.
Sometimes I worry about what I write too. It's not that easy to write what is on your mind and accept that anybody can read it without creating trouble.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
I have received complaints that I didn't post anything today (technically yesterday), so I decided to post something at least.
Here I am, another day is gone. I'm feeling better, but I'm still uncertain of my goals. I'm still kind of antisocial today and it's not that I'm really feeling bad about it. Maybe a little worried that people may think that I have something personal against them.
Anyway, the day went by without much change. I had my classes, was invited back to the choir I was kicked out of this semester (well, I had a class conflict), had my presentation that lasted longer than I had originally planned and rehearsed, and finished half of one of my final projects. The easy one!
I can't say I learned much of anything today, besides the fact that I already know that my undergrad was much better than any I've seen around so far. Many things that people learn in grad school, or never at all, I have learned before. I gave a lecture about software engineering today, for example. I wanted to go through the UML details, but my memory was failing me, so I decided to keep to the basics. Use cases, normal forms and some security concerns and that's it.
Oh, just two small things I heard from my agent in the Chinese network here: some Tibetean monks are here on campus and the Chinese students decided to go and stay around them to make sure that people knew that they were CHINESE! And a friend of mine had to write a letter to someone related to the administration of an university in China to testify that some friends of hers were NOT Falun Gong. Some countries are just too afraid!
I think that's all I had to mention today. I'll try to go to bed now! Lots of things to do today! Maybe even a basketball game to go to!
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Solitude... The word of the day.
Two main reasons why I'm thinking about this today. None of them are related to negative feelings about being alone, something I can't say I really am. The first reason is that I'm in a day of sensitive ears. Any kind of noise is really bothering me. I don't have a headache, but I think I didn't sleep very well this last night. Just as an idea of the magnitude of this, the noise of the air conditioning and the sound of myself typing this is bothering me now. I'm alone in the office right now, imagine how I was feeling when there were other people around.
The second point, and more important, is that I'm starting to worry about my role on trying to "educate" people around me. I've been hearing too many responses that really sound like the person is saying "whatever!". I interpret this as if I'm detaching myself from reality. I'm not being able to relate my ideas with whatever people think is right. This makes me scared. What actually scares me is that this kind of attitude doesn't really encourage me to correct it, it encourages me to stay away from people. Or maybe I'm just wrong... And too stubborn to admit it!
Maybe staying away is a good thing. May make your life productive. It is a way of having better control on your own priorities.
But can a social animal such as a human being be alone? The natural answer would be "no", but today I'm not sure... Maybe I just need to be able to sleep better.
Monday, November 10, 2003
This is a fun article: EFF: Federal Communications Commission Adopts Hollywood Tech Mandate. All about digital TVs that are coming pretty soon! And you won't only have to buy new TVs, but also new recording equipment to work with them. Moreover, you will only be able to record the programs that you can't buy! That's very controversial. Some people may claim that you pay for the digital TV provider, so you have the right to have what they show. But with digital quality you don't loose signal when you record, so the quality is the same as owning a new "tape". Very bad for the entertainment industry that relied on the fact that the quality of recorded stuff is always lower than the original one.
The only important thing is that now your TV provider will have to state in their contract that you are receiving streaming information and not the program itself. They have to make sure that they state this clearly so that it won't give more money to opportunist lawyers. (nothing against lawyers, everything against the kinds that try to find a breach in the system and capitalize on that and not on really defending the rights of the citizens)
One more weekend gone.
There aren't many noteworthy things that happened this weekend, though. Stacy came over to Stillwater (yes, it's been a long while that she hasn't been here) and we talked, had fun, played poker with some friends on Saturday, then Yahtzee (interesting to think the relationship of both games) on Sunday. She won both games... And I lost both games (for the case of Yatzee, as we were playing alone it's a redundant observation, but on the Poker we were in a group of 4 and I was the one with the least money by the end of the game).
We also decided to watch "The Ring" long after almost everybody I know. What I thought of the movie? It is a pretty bad movie! I wouldn't consider it as a comedy as a friend of mine put it, but it is pretty pathetic. I'm not talking about details here, because some rare people that haven't watched the movie before may read this. If you want to discuss anything in particular about the movie (yes, I know people that liked the movie, my roommate for example), feel free to send me an email. Just check my sidebar for the address.
I guess that's all I have to talk about. Back to work here.
Saturday, November 08, 2003
Uhm, there are more people than I thought that read my blog. I'm not mentioning names here, but welcome!
There is one small detail I forgot to mention about last night's dinner and lecture: if I wasn't invited, I would have to pay $75 for it! It was good, but not $75 good... But, well, in a way this money would go back to the library. It would be a sound investment. Better than going to a game and giving money to athletics!
Not that I'm against sports, don't get me wrong. I'm just against the high investment priorities given to sports around here. Sometimes it looks like the university exists in order to have a football and basketball team. Doesn't this sound just wrong to you?
Friday, November 07, 2003
Time to talk a little about my dinner tonight. Skipping the silliness, the high of the event was a talk by Ken Burns. Not being a person that is very into documentaries, he is a very good documentary maker, focusing on American history. His objective in life is to understand what Americans are by studying their past.
It is an interesting initiative. He uses what he calls a "bottom-up" approach to see the historical events. He goes to the details and tries to build something from that. It's kind of a dangerous way to procede because it may bias your vision to wherever you are, but it's is very important nevertheless.
His most famous documentaries are about the Civil War, Baseball and Jazz.
He talks very well, he is able to make people follow his line of thought, even this being kind of chaotic and moving from one place to the other. Well, he must have given this same speech a number of times, and this helps a little. He did loose me a couple of times when he was talking about important facts of the history of Baseball and the Civil War, but that was more than expected.
Overall, it was really a great experience. There are some things that I don't really agree with his line of thought, though. First, you cannot understand the uniqueness of the American society without studying other societies. Second, I really don't think that the current American society is still going by the same "laws" as the society during the civil war. You may think that a thread still remains, but just think about all the imigration that happened between that time and now, imagine the influx of culture that this country went through. You cannot disconsider this in any analysis you make to try to understand what the "real American" is.
History is extremely important for you to understand the present and the future, but it has to be taken with a grain of salt. Reality changes. Sometimes much faster and deeper than expected.
Ah... Proud of being Brazilian and having a president that doesn't know how to "behave" when going to other countries: Brazil's Lula commits gaffe in Namibia. Not that he is a person that doesn't commit any when he is at home. Lots of things he says makes lots of people scared in Brazil! It kind of makes me sad, because it proves the point that everybody had against him: he was not really prepared to be the president of Brazil.
posted by Michel | 2:29 PMThere are some people that amaze me with their ability to take pictures. Check out this collection:ode ao azul. Alright, the poems really make things much better and they are mostly in Portuguese, but you can enjoy the pictures. After you are done with them, take a look around Fotolog. Interesting that is has a huge amount of Brazilians. These people don't have memory and have to learn how to take pictures, is that it? ;-)
posted by Michel | 8:10 AMThis is a pretty weird initiative, but I decided to go for it today:
1. What food do you like that most people hate?
This question is really hard to answer, because I know people with the most weird tastes. But I'd mention pretty much any kind of vegetables and fish.
2. What food do you hate that most people love?
Well, I can't say I hate any kind of food, but I'm not a big fan of ice cream and sweets in general.
3. What famous person, whom many people may find attractive, is most unappealing to you?
Who is attractive?
4. What famous person, whom many people may find unappealing, do you find attractive?
Again, who really is attractive? Stacy and I were having a discussion about this the other day, actually.
5. What popular trend baffles you?
Which doesn't? Alright, alright, I kind of like the "blogging" trend.
First I think that fashion is completely overrated. There are some important things to worry about (like wearing matching socks), but some people just worry too much about it and end up loosing their personality in the process. Second would be flip-flops. Why would you wear them to classes, meetings, restaurants, etc.? I agree that they are great at the beach, because you can take them off and put them on really fast, and at home for the same reason. Third, non-children reading children's books (no need for more specific example). I can go on forever here, so I'll stop without touching on music, money use, sports, and many other things I could mention. In summary, the world is not going to a place I think may be uphill from where we are.
I know my answers weren't that great, but I just wanted to do something that looks that is in in this world of blogs.
Do you think you know enough about technology? Try to invest on Innovation Futures. It is a "game" created by MIT's Technology Review for trying to predict future outcomes in the technology field. So far it is a very small initiative, with not many things to bet on. I decided not to join this time, because none of the technologies that are there are on my area of expertise. It's free, so have fun if you have the time.
posted by Michel | 6:57 AMThursday, November 06, 2003
I'm not sure what to post now. I had a busy day, but not a very productive one. I spent most of my time trying to think what to do for my final project in one of my classes, and my presentation for Wednesday. It's hard when there are lots of things to talk about but you don't know how to cut out things and make it a 20-minute presentation. I can make a 1-hour presentation, or a 5-minute presentation. I'm not sure yet how to do something in between.
I had my first IFC meeting as the treasurer and everything went alright. I gave some ideas to people, just a seed for them to implement in the future, when I'm not there any more. It is going to be a good semester. People are interested, but I still sense that some don't really know how to listen to the others.
Alright, time to go to sleep now, then. No interesting observations to make. I was thinking of starting my profiling on the people in the IFC, but I'll leave that for when I have more contact with them. And, yes, that's the first thing I do whenever I meet someone, in real life or online. Perhaps I should look for a job in FBI... ;-)
Remember that some time ago I mentioned that I was checking a random blog and suddenly found that the person writing this blog was born and lived in Oklahoma? Well, now I have just read that she actually is married to a Jewish guy and decided to convert to Judaism. This is just too weird... ;-)
You may be asking yourself why do I still read her blog. Well, I saved it to my favorites to make sure that I was going to mention it when I had time to post (remember that the first coincidence happened on a Friday and I only had time to post it on Sunday). From time to time I go through the list of the blogs I have on my favorites and her blog happens to be on it. There are some interesting things there. I like the list that she has with the book she is reading now, what she read before, movies she watched and things like that. I will never do that simply because I wouldn't be able to update it often enough and I can't say I am finishing many books lately. I am reading something like 5 books at the same time, and with my lack of time it is difficult to finish any of them.
Anyway, I just wanted to log this. Now I have to go back to working on my presentation for this coming Wednesday.
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
This is an interesting article about how to be "depressed" about the technologies to come: Technology's Frontier Syndrome. If you are not a big connoisseur on the art of computing, you won't probably relate to the article, so I suggest you just to skip it. In a nutshell the author claims that we will never have a solution to all our computer problems. New solutions will only work while they are new solutions. Hackers, viruses, spam, will always find their way to work on this new "environment" eventually. Why should be bother, then?
posted by Michel | 5:57 AMTuesday, November 04, 2003
Today, after having fun taking the car around for a ride from mechanic to mechanic I got another theory that the belt simply destroyed itself so no alternator was touched. I did some research, homework and went home to watch "Nova: The Elegant Universe". Very nice show about superstring theory. Not at all in depth, of course left more questions than answers, but two things kept me amazed: the amount of computer graphics used and how little people know about the existence of superstring theory. I watched it with two other friends that are in the science area and none had any idea what it was about.
A long discussion about what some of the concepts put in the program followed. It was fun, but it was kind of disappointing sometimes how people can be very narrow-minded. Well, it's easy to have problems to accept superstring theory. It is, for my knowledge, the first theory in Physics that was created based on purely mathematical, or philosophical reasons. Someone thought that Relativity and Quantum Physics as separate beings were too cumbersome to work with. An easier underlying theory has to be created to make calculations easier. It's hard to accept something that is not really based on any every-day phenomenon.
Imagine two membranes colliding and causing the Big-Bang... Can you picture it? Imagine that each membrane is a 3-dimensional universe like ours. And this is one of the theories for the Big-Bang that is supported by an interpretation of the superstring theory. It is fun, but you can certainly go crazy trying to visualize all this.
Monday, November 03, 2003
Just three short things (yes, this time I won't write a huge post like earlier):
I forgot to mention that on Friday I had a great surprise when I realized, while walking to the office in the morning, that my proposed method for my research would never work. I have mentioned this to my advisor today but he sort of liked the idea (or just didn't understand anything but saw that I had some "pretty" graphs so asked me to continue working on what I was working).
The second thing is that I am home. My car is working alright. Just got back from Tulsa, then passing by my student's and then Wal-Mart.
At last, but not least, while on my way to Tulsa I was listening to the radio and, I don't remember exactly what they were talking about but it made me start thinking about what privacy really is and wondering if it is really a good thing. In my analysis, a person wants privacy for two reasons: to be able to break rules (tabus or laws) or to be able to make mistakes and correct them before anybody comes to laugh at your mistake.
It is natural to want to do things hidden from other people, but is this really a good thing? Should we really be working on ensuring that this is something everybody has? I am not that sure... Privacy may generate anonymity, and may cause people to feel alright about making mistakes and not really doing things that you were expected to do. It generates loneliness (because you can and it may be the lazy path towards something), it creates a "fake wall" that at first may be protecting you from the others, but it actually protecting you from yourself, it is just covering the mirrors.
I can go on with this forever, but I mentioned that this was going to be a short post so I'll stop here for now.
Just because I mentioned looking for "active" random blogs, here is a related piece of news from CNN.com: Internet littered with abandoned sites. Everybody that browses around on the web knows that, but I didn't know that a quarter of all blogs never get updated since Day One. Pretty sad, but understandable. How to deal with this is something that has to be addressed eventually one day. It's information, but it's not current information. It will slowly decay in the amount of references to it and disappear from the lists of search engines, but they still clog servers and domain names without any real need...
posted by Michel | 9:23 AMLONG POST AHEAD WARNING
The end of a very different weekend. I was hoping it was because of good different things, but not really.
Before I explain what happened this weekend, I just have to post this odd thing that happened to me on Friday. I was home waiting for Rustin to come and have his last Kiddush in Stillwater (if he follows his plans to leave to Ohio by the end of the week). I was thinking of what to post on my blog and opened the Blogger webpage. However, I had no idea what to post, so I decided to hit a random blog from their list of "Fresh Blogs". This list is always cool because you always end up going to an active blog, not a completely random blog that would most probably give you an abandoned one. This time I ended up going to E-Scout and what was the first post I read about? Bedlam! The OSU vs. OU game that was going to take place on Saturday. I randomly hit a "fellow" Oklahoman blog! That was a very strange coincidence!
If you are interested how the game went, well, OU crushed OSU with a 52-9 win! The score says everything.
Anyway, after that Rustin came, a couple of kids knocked at the door to get candy, but I think I took too long to go to my bedroom to get it that they thought that there was nobody there and left. I took him out for dinner to thank him for all the hard work he did for the club and that was pretty much it.
And now came Saturday, the wonderful day. I woke up early in the morning (actually later than I was planning to) to take my roommate to the airport. He was going to meet his mother in New Orleans. Everything was going fine, we left kind of early and were on our way to Tulsa. Suddenly, when I accelerated after passing by the tollgate my car's belts started making noise. I am kind of used to it right now so I ignored it for some time (about 30 seconds) and then the noise suddenly disappeared. So far it was still kind of normal. But the not so normal thing was the battery and break lights in the panel turned on. I was worried but not THAT worried because the car was still moving. I was paying attention to all indicators in the panel when I saw the temperature indicator way in the red. I stopped the car immediately at the shoulder (English is a funny language sometimes) and opened the hood to check what was going on. The coolant was boiling and I couldn't see much more.
It was a pretty cold morning, very humid. I called AAA to have my car towed somewhere. In order to know where I was I had to run for about half a mile up the road to check by which mile I was. Of course you always stop your car far away from any signs! This done I went back to the car to figure out what was going on. That's when I saw that the belt that connected to the alternator was gone! And later I learned that this same belt connects to the water pump. With no water circulating to cool down the engine, no wonder why the temperature sky-rocketed.
I called Stacy to come and take him to the airport and I went with the AAA guy to look for an open mechanic. Pretty hard to find one of those on a SATURDAY in Sand Springs, but we got there. After changing the belt the mechanic (very nice guy) let the car run to see if he could prove his theory that the alternator (something I changed a couple of months ago) locked and destroyed the belt. Lots of belt debris were at the alternator to reinforce his theory. But he wasn't able to see it happening again so he sent me out for my luck to go back home and take my car to the shop that changed my alternator and ask them to put a new one.
I was tired and very nervous, so I went to Stacy's place and spent the day there (as originally planned). We watched the game, went to a VERY TERRIBLE discount fair that was advertising Dell notebooks for $399. They didn't say that they were VERY OLD notebooks. Anyway, I wasn't very hopeful anyway. If they had good ones they would have been gone in the first 5 minutes. My plan was to go back home at around 10 a.m. so that I would be able to go tutoring, watch a very interesting concert that was going to happen here with the New York Philharmonic Soloists, do laundry and then work a little. But, at 10 a.m., when I was getting ready to leave, my student's mother called saying that she was out of town and her son was at a friend's place, so my tutoring was cancelled.
The result is that I ended up not doing anything that I had planned. We watched National Lampoon's European Vacation. It was a funny old movie full of stereotypes. Not something I would let a child with no ability to say "This is not the way all French/English/German/Italian are" watch this movie, but it was entertaining.
After this I don't have anything else to report. Today is going to be a long day. I decided to take the car to fix only tomorrow (I had lots of things to do this morning, including a long homework and preparation for my meeting with my advisor; and I have to find the warranty for the alternator. I think it is with my roommate, but I want to make sure of that), so I'll have "fun" driving it to Tulsa and back tonight again. It seemed very good yesterday, but I'll be careful and have my cellphone with me.
I learned two things with this. The first one is that I'm glad I had the idea two years ago to get a cellphone. I was afraid that exactly something like that would happen. It is very easy to be in the middle of nowhere when you are driving around in Oklahoma. The second one is that sometimes some mistakes are worth it. I got an invitation to join some kind of car group that would give discounts for repairs, help in knowing the right price for parts and services, and towing. I didn't want to continue with the service, but I called 1 week late so I had to accept it. It wasn't very inexpensive but just the towing paid the price of it (I have only the basic plan for AAA, so they only cover up to 5 miles).
