“When I say I’m alright don’t look into my eyes, ’cause you’ll see I’m not alright”
Picture from: https://www.depressioncomix.com/posts/005/
Lyrics: “I’m not alright” by Storm & her Dirty Mouth. Listen here: https://www.stormlargedownloads.com/storm-hdm-misc.htm
A nice talk about common mental traps: Survival Heuristics: My Favorite Techniques for Avoiding Intelligence Traps – SANS CTI Summit 2018
From there, the Cynefin framework.
Some days all I want to do is smash a hard drive to pieces and pour them into a roaring fire.
Once upon a time a wise man said:
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be a more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
And much to my sorrow, Uruguay and Paraguay look more and more like a suitable ship to board.
The other day we had a Christmas dinner mostly like every previous years.
I’m not very much into receiving physical gifts but sometimes a little thing with a lot of thought can change everything. Long ago a couple of friends collaborated on an anthology of poems and the last weekend it arrived after a convoluted trip from Uruguay.
The result of their hard work is called “¡Dale Hermano! 20 Poetas del Río de La Plata”.
After the traditional toast I drove my grandma home and then went to say hi to a couple of friends.
The night was unusually quiet. After wandering without a clear intention for a while I parked at Parque San Martín and started to read.
The poems did not have the author with them but while reading I could imagine some of my friends reciting those and, upon looking at the index, I was most of the times correct in my guesses.
Thanks Mar and Pachi for such a great night.
(Well almost).
Today after 15 years I finished the last course of the Electronic Engineering career at Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
For the next year I only have to do a supervised work experience and a final project.
I know that today is a big day. But still it feels like every other one.
While I was waiting for the tiles to dry a bit before cleaning I decided to put some dabs and stringers.
Cast iron is not very nice to weld with a stick but suffices to practice and improve my technique, specially with my right hand.
This machine has a bit of trouble lighting up 6010s but if I run them a bit hot I can get a sustained arc.
The other day I had a strange dream.
I was at a lounge talking with a waitress and we were doodling nonsense on a napkin. My drawings slowly morphed into something that was a lot like a Hilbert curve but not quite.
Our talk drifted into space filling curves and I kept trying to draw it but even tough I knew how it should look I always managed to draw something like a very simplified sandcastle.
This year I haven’t read as many books as others at this point.
My list so far has:
And on the queue:
After a long hiatus one of the best funk bands from La Plata, Chavannes, is back!
I missed their return last year but this one I managed to catch them as a birthday gift for myself.
The sound and crowd were great. The food too.
While walking to the car I spotted a cat on the street. I whistled and without hesitation she came to me:
Quite a while ago (in the last century nonetheless) my idea of a productive day entailed writing a lot of code, measured by size in any suitable metric.
Lately I’ve been writing less in volume but I realize that I spend a greater time thinking about the problem at hand as a whole and that it happens mostly in the background while I’m doing something else. By the time I’m again at the workstation everything falls into place.
Also, when stepping aside and contemplating whatever I engineered I can’t help to feel anything but pride. Perhaps except for the documentation I build things from the get go thinking of what I would like to have were I a library user, on terms of building blocks.
During the last two weeks I built a library to parse a protocol called LX200 used to control telescopes and I can’t be happier with the result (for now it’s at https://github.com/telescopio-montemayor/python-lx200 ). The first one was a roller coaster, due to some other issues I went back to a night owl schedule and I can’t remember when was the last time I had such prolonged and intense periods of flow. I also taught myself asyncio.
It’s terse, concise, and (mostly) well structured. My former self would’ve made a mess of a state machine tied together with pages of if statements that worked, for sure, but was a pain to extend or correct. Of course looking down the path and leveraging years of experience this things seem obvious now.
Coincidentally, the other day Eric wrote about the advantage of declarative/table driven approaches.
It’s been quite a long time since I last posed as a photographic model.
Yesterday I saw that Violet Fawkes asked on her instagram for pictures of male buttocks. I sent her one took when I was distracted on a session a couple of years ago, looks so natural and suggestive without being vulgar. She liked it and posted with bit of blur that made it even better.
Jump ahead if you’re into some nudesToday I asked a married girl on the street if she would like to cycle with me and see the sunrise on the countryside.
And she agreed.
That shed I was cleaning needed one thing really bad, a decent floor. It was already made of concrete but with the years it broke down, revealing the soil and gravel underneath. And also wasn’t level.
So for the last couple of weeks we (my dad and I) worked together and made a new one. The next step is adding some tiles on top of that.
