I had a great time watching this presentation. This article by Creating Passionate Users blog makes me wish I was a conference attendee to more conferences than those I attended in the last years (whose number is really close to zero and less than one).

I will be off to the seaside for the weekend. See you on Monday.

I was messing around at Technorati trying out new features and searching for statistics about my blog and I found a site linking to me: "Porkchop Sandwhices". This blog has captured my attention because in 2 very close posts I found 2 interesting info for me! The one about the opening URLs with middle-click made my day, because it was a feature I used a lot when it was a default. When I noticed it was gone I didn't anything to get it back and so I got used to live without it. But now it's back, yay! Digging deeper in the archives of the afore-mentioned blog I discover another sweet trick: I'll be I'll be using this soon. Exporting (on OldServer) svnadmin dump reponame | nc6 -x newserver 7676 Importing (on NewServer) svnadmin create reponame nc6 -x -l -p 7676 | svnadmin load reponame

I wonder how many other episodes like this one, featuring a US-authorized private agent specialized in online privacy data collection, are going unnoticed by the great public only because they have been filtered by TV and newspapers. Incidentally I found a bunch of interesting pages involving FBI and hackers. 

People I know are starting to suggest my laptop problem could be caused simply by a b0rked fan. This is certainly less scary than "broken hard disk" or "blown mobo" assumptions. I am going to an assistence center today and we will see. Now go to Google Maps, press the less/more zoom buttons and love the focus smooth change. If this is not enough, go with your cursor over the map and use the mousewheel. Touching.

Now that my laptop is out of order I can't code anymore. I have this other computer where I am typing from, but I can't develop from here for various reasons.  But I am feeling that fuzzy feeling on my fingertips, that inexplicable force inside to see "coded"  what I think. It must be pages like these that make this feeling grow inside. Give them a look. The first makes me wish I was writing a RESTful controller right now. The second makes me wish I was writing an app with roles just for the sake of using it. I think this is one of the greatest things the RubyOnRails movement is doing to the programming environment: increasing excitement about coding (even those parts that used to come directly from the Land of Boredom, like role-based authentication - can you even imagine writing a role-based authentication module in PHP?) and drawing attention to the theory of coding standards and practices. Its conventions bring culture in a world once invaded by PHP programmers that spread bad practices and bad products all over mainly because they were justified and helped by the close-to-flat PHP learning curve. Yay for Rails!

I am watching and loving this insightful video about the modern paradox of choice. It's a matter of fact that in the last decades our societies have seen an ever-growing increase of so-called freedom accompanied by an increase of the choices possible in most, if not all, the aspects of our life. There was once only only one phone company, now there are tens; there were once cell phones that just worked and made what they were built for - calling people -, now there are cell phones that have tons of options, apps and alikes; people older than me could surely continue this list easily. This fact poses serious questions about what is really freedom, which education is good for young people (that are now more busy than their parents deciding rather than doing).  Now I am back to watch the video, enjoy it!

I jumped and felt instantly dumb.

You believe hw failure will not affect you as long as you aren't affected by a hw failure. I don't believe anymore hw failure will not affect me, that is I got a hardware failure somewhere around my laptop hard disk or mother board. That is, great f####ing news. First thing after realized my pc wasn't working ok, I ran to this other pc and loaded up this lovely page and focused on the middle option. Then chatted with my personal Mac guru and fixed some other details. Then started planning. I'll see how long my laptop will rexist, I'll see if I can wait until Aug/Sept to get the Macbook with Leopard. We'll see. Cross finger for me.

“The ordinary man believes he is free when he is permitted to act arbitrarily, but in this very arbitrariness lies the fact that he is unfree,” Hegel wrote. “Negative infinity” was his term for how the man without a well-anchored sense of self would perceive the marketplace. "Can you have too many choices" from The New Yorker.