My friend Rafael George made this post some days ago.

While I mostly agree with him on his points, i’m not exactly sure about point #1

Read a technical book each week (Yes a week and yes a technical book)

Yes, reading a technical book sometime is… interesting. But is reading a technical book just for reading a technical book really worth it?

Technical books are boring most of the time, they tend to draw on endlessly on stuff that doesn’t really matter when you get down to apply it to real life. What use is reading a book on “Administering <Insert new technology here> on <Insert linux flavor of the week>” when you don’t really need to do anything serious related to it?

My point is that you will be missing out on most of what the book has to offer for you, since you have a high probability of just forgetting everything you read on it before you have a real practical use for it.

In my opinion, technical books are best used as reference material while you are developing something that uses the technology described in the book, but are great paper weights while not in use. Reading one of them once a week will probably result in you losing your time.

(Not that there aren’t any technical books that you shouldn’t read, like anything talking about data structures and algorythms… those are a must)

This is probably a week’s old news: I finally managed it! Got a new car.

Me gots a new 2003 Subaru Impreza GX (WRX has yellow rims, and a blue i don’t like)

Here are some pictures of the new Panzer:

This was taken yesterday while giving it the trial-by-fire it had to go thru in order to belong to the family: Road-trip to Moca, visiting some family we have over there.

• Total Trip: ~322km, including some running around in town and getting in/out of Santo Domingo.
• Average MPG: 322km/6.6 gallons of gas (~RD$ 1,100 @ RD$ 165/g) = 48.78KM/g = ~30.49MPG
• A/C was online for the whole trip.
• AVG Highway Speed: 130km/h

Now, why do I insist on calling this new car Panzer, even if this car is Japanese, not German?

1. I’m used to it. (My other car is an ‘89 Jetta: strong ol’ war machine)
2. Japanese where part of the Axis during WWII, so they had some kind of relationship with the germans.
3. It’s a lean, mean and sexy killing machine.
4. I like the name.

For Ivan/Green: No, I’m not posting a picture of me licking my car.

Edit: Corrected some of the numbers.

I haven’t made a post for such a long time that i almost went into a wild quest to kill the dude who was stealing my ideas and my nickname on this site… until i found him

Things have gotten pretty interesting since last time: my department on the company i worked was closed, then i moved into another department (which was fun) and just recently moved to a new company altogether to continue my habit of torturing machines with code looking for new challenges.

The changes have been pretty refreshing so far,  and i’ve been in a very good mood these days: no recent ideas involving the destruction of mankind or part of, which is always nice when you see it in hindsight. I even have almost/just barely/gotten over my habit of refering to us humans as ‘monkeys’.

I have also been reading a lot of good SF (Charless Stross, John Scalzi, etc), i may or may not write about some of the recent books i have read in a near future.

So, WaRCHieFX is back, let’s see how it goes from here.

I woke up this morning, and while completing my booting process (takes around 5 mins, average) started to think in what would be the biggest prank ever, something so complex, so crazy, so… interesting, that the moment the punchline arrives, i wouldn’t be there since a long long time.

Things are always misinterpreted when they are taken out of context. Now, while you ponder this simple truth, you might also think about archeology. Archeologists look for the remains of civilizations that have been dead for quite some time now. They discover objects, places, customs, whatever they can find about them in a neverending quest to discover things we may have forgotten. The problem I see with it is that those objects, places, customs are to be seen without their acompanying context, since we cannot always be 100% sure they mean whatever we think they mean, unless we get to do some time traveling to confirm, but that would take about half of the fun about it and implementation is left as an exercise to the reader.

Taking this into account: what’s to stop me from writing some scrolls (or other high durability media, digital formats suck at this) and leave them hidden as a message to future alcheologists to discover? What if i write into it something in the lines of “The Cult of the Black Screen of Death”? What if said scrolls generates some kind of new religion in the future based on the age-old premise of “going back to the old ways”? Raw, Unadulterated Madness… me says.

This, of couse, assumes that something not entirely unlike World War III will eventually happen… and that in happening, will cause such a collapse on civilization as we know it, so as for we to go back into some kind of dark ages? (a “Mad Max”-esque situation, if you are so inclined).

The problem with this dependency, is that if you check, you will a dangerous trend into which our weapons technology level keeps rising, but our common sense stays constant or goes down (i’m looking at you: US of A). Thus, the more time it takes for WW3 to come, the greater the disaster will be, unless the common sense rating starts going up again, but that never happens. It looks like us humans haven’t separated that much from monkeys, and we still have that pesky tendency of always looking for a better club with which to hit some other monkey’s head.

Forget about the better mouse trap, the club is what this is all about.

DISCLAIMER: This is a product of my deranged imagination and I admit that my coffee tasted funny this morning.

Do you have any other similar, crazy ideas?

So, I was having a happy day today: woke up late since both my cell phone and palm failed to wake me up (yes, i chain them with a 7 minutes difference between them, 2 alarms on the cell phone spread with t – 15 mins and t + 5 mins, where t is the time i want to wake up at minus 10 minutes), got late to work, played sudoku on my trusty ol’ palm, did some regression testing on Google Reader and was blasting away with some nice Heavy Metal music on my trusty ol’ phone (SE K750i, with 2gb storage, if you care) and eventually something not entirely unlike work appeared near 11am. I attribute this happiness to the fact that i didn’t read any news during the weekend, so my faith in Humanity didn’t drop too much, which gets me down sometimes. I tell you, Humanity never fails to surprise me.

I go out to eat with Karen and Mae to Taco Bell (yeah, not real mexican food, but it’s near work). We do a very long line and order our food. Mae gets to scout out a table and promptly snatches one. We get our food and start eating. So far so good, right? WRONG! About 5-10 minutes into the Nutrient Adquisition Proccess, a dude and a dudette sit in the table near us. Nothing bad there, they are waiting for their order # to get served in order to… eat it.

It seems they are cow-orkers or something and the dude is looking for some way to stop the ackward moment full of silence. He looks into his invoice and sees (i suspect) that he ordered a ‘Burrito’. The guy starts singing this x-mas song: “Con mi burrito sabanero, voy camino de belen…”. I, on the other side, feel a spike on my weird-o-meter and promptly reboot into single user mode. The poor Mae, was not so lucky. Karen says something, but i can’t hear her (i’m in safe mode).

After i though it was safe, i got back and saw that the guy had left to pick his order up. I think the dudette wanted to kill herself. That has to be the worst way of breaking the ice i have ever… not heard. I didn’t even dare to look at the dude after he got back (i have a rule of not looking at people before killing them), but man… this was worse than ridiculous… it was pathetic.

Before he got back, we were into staying and have a little rest and not go back to work so early. We ran like hell when we saw him walking back.

Total Loss: 5% of my remaining faith in our future as a species. This dude will eventually get some girl (not the one in the story, i bet) and reproduce like rabits. And remember… those kids will be the future. I’m feeling depressed again…

I have created a new section on this site for things/experiences that i have done/experienced/seen/hear about/hurt while doing something else that i feel that people should be warned about.

This idea came to me while looking for something to watch on TV. My father offered me a ‘Pera Criolla’ for me to taste them (evil grin on his face)… now that’s what i call a wicked taste. At the same time, they began showing an old Michael Jackson movie on TV… The Dude must have something against me, i tell you.

Anyways, feel free to provide any additions to the list in the comments section of said page.

Simply Awesome

I finally received my new digitizer from pdaparts.com, and went on to replace my trusty Palm TX’s digitizer that was failing in very bad ways. I don’t have pictures of the procedure, since I was very busy sweating and being overall worried about my beloved Palm.

But here she is, fully recovered:

The glass digitizer that i bought is actually better than the one that came with the palm from the factory (which was plastic, the new one is glass baby), i can now use the Notepad app and have my terrible handwriting somewhat easier to understand:

Many of you will ask:

1. “Why didn’t you take it somewhere to get it repaired?”
2. “Did you lose your warranty?”
3. “Are you crazy?”

Of course, the answer to number 3 is: “YES!”, number 2 is: “What warranty? Do people in DR understand such a concept?” and number 1 can be answered as:

Do you really think i’m gonna place my favorite gadget in the hands of a monkey from some repairing place in order for him to charge me a whole lot of money and not solve my problem or make it worse??

Taking important stuff to a repairshop in this country is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle with a hammer… you can try, but it’s not very efficient and you can destroy the puzzle if you do it wrong. They don’t even bother disassembling the device to actually check what’s wrong, they just name the same problem you told them you have and charge you. Then they tell you to leave the device and come back in 1-2 weeks.

You wait the 2 weeks, and then call. They tell you that Pedrito (the technician) is not there and will not be there until [insert hour of the day after 6pm], and that you will need to wait for tomorrow. You say “ok”, and then wait another long day. Rinse and repeat for 2-3 times, depending on the person. When you finally manage to hunt Pedrito down, he will tell you that he hasn’t been able to look at the problem yet, but that he is “working hard” on resolving it.

Now you have 2 choices:

1. You blow up and take your device from the store, pay any charges for [null] work. Then repeat the process at another repairshop.
2. You wait until Pedrito decides to solve your problem.

Now, if your problem is simple enough, Pedrito may be able to solve it. He may replace some pieces of the thing you are fixing. Don’t ever ask to see the original pieces he replaced. It will piss Pedrito off and will likely keep you waiting some more hours while Pedrito dissassembles another machine in order to show you how bad the pieces were (he probably took out some other perfectly working pieces of your device without telling you, in order to scam another customer).

Now you pay [insert a huge undeserved amount of money] and get out for the store. Your device may work for more than a week, or… not. Then you repeat the cycle again and again, and again… until you buy another device and it breaks down again.

THAT is why you never see me going to repairshops or the like. This turns me into a DIY kind of guy, since i prefer to do these kinds of things myself or ask my father for help, as he has a similar obsession. I have never had a problem or new expensive paperweights so far.

For good measure, here is my Palm doing what you Zune users should have been able to do a long, long time ago and me playing Bejeweled2 (great game):

Check this comic out… so true that it’s funny, so funny that it’s sad.

I know this is a bit late but… what in hell is happening over there in the US of A?

People are actually defending that thing about teaching children that Creationism is some kind of science and that Evolution is just theory?

Watch this, discuss. Also, check this one.