A little bit about everything...

Have you seem the bridge?

Wednesday, 20. August 2008, 09:49:48

What the frack, I sure haven't.
This morning's news paper had one piece of news I didn't expect at all.
LeRoi Moore died.

I have been a really die hard fan of Dave Matthews Band for years, I just can't help it.
I was a bit annoyed by the band's last album, which I am not so fond of, and ended up not following things so closely as usual for the last few months.
By chance yesterday I found out they will be holding three concerts in Brazil. But as usual (Murphy you bastard!!!) when something you have longed for years finally comes to pass you are not there to see... I live in gloomy Netherlands now, don't I?
Well, after the news about the concert what comes next? Surely not what I found this morning...
But he really died... I must confess I only truly believed when I saw it at their official site (
http://www.davematthewsband.com/news/).

Now that I come to think of it, I don't know how I could ever attend to the (long expected) concert without him on stage... It is as if there was something missing.
It would be weird, if you know what I mean. It will take some getting used to.

Anyway, he will be missed, not only by his family and friends but also by a legion of fans, who like me really believed he was Le Roi when he played.

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There and back again 2.0 - part 1 .................. (maybe I should call it 2.0.1 )

Tuesday, 19. August 2008, 09:23:07

Yep, that is it I am going to the far end of the ocean again. All the way to China.
At least this time I am closer, from Netherlands it is just a 10-hour flight or something like that.

The weather here is weird... But that is Netherlands, right?
The thing is my neck hurts as if there was no tomorrow, I travel in 4 days and I have to prepare a presentation I am REALLY uninspired to give.

Allow me to elaborate the picture...
Monday morning my boss pops up on g-talk:
boss: Hi Luana, you got the lucky number your talk will be the first and maximal 30 min
me: you call that lucky?
boss: shure come on
me: no comments

Now, a few more details really add to the drama... I will arrive at Beijing on sunday, after a night at the plane, with a 6-hour jet-lag, with a bunch of crazy dutch who will give no importance to rest (no offense, the dutch are brilliant, but they are in fact crazy and that is probably why I find them brilliant). We get the NIGHT train to Shenyang on the next day, arriving there around 6 in the MORNING, and my presentation is first on the workshop that starts at a quarter to nine of THE SAME DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, I am sorry baas, but I do NOT call that lucky.
I would call that:

Murphy you bastard!

Never mind...

It seems to be a rule, last time I did such a long journey (to Japan) I had a presentation on the next morning with 12-hour jet-lag hangover, at which (Murphy you bastard!!!) a very grumpy russian was not so amused about.

Oh well, at least I will be able to do some bargain therapy (which is far better than retail therapy, believe me)... Specially when that involves silk, jade, pearls, coral, woolen scarves...

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Sunset

Saturday, 15. March 2008, 22:00:32

It is curious how after such a sad and gray day nature, in a brief moment, has a way of compensating it all:

And, suddenly words are unecessary...

Hey, I am italian, I am entitled to be dramatic every now and then.

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The catch on writing a thesis.

Wednesday, 27. February 2008, 16:56:18

Finally!
The thesis is out. All seven copies were delivered, not exactly on schedule, but they are out of my hands, and that's the important part.

There is something funny about writing a thesis that you really cannot predict.
I could write 60-pages reports in a couple days, no stress. So, writing the thesis should be a piece of cake right?
Not really...
You begin thinking it will be a piece of cake, then, after the first couple pages you realize you can't remember half the stuff you did 4 years ago... Naturally.
Well, a week going through old notebooks and graphs and you are finally good to go.
And it does.
For a week you write something like 80 pages... Wonderfull progress although you are completely exhausted. Except, you need to fill in a few gaps here and there... Shouldn't be too hard.
But those few gaps can take months to fill in... Nobody really told you about it, right?

It took me around 3 months to fill in the here and there gaps. A nightmare.
And you never really finish writing, you simply give up correcting it. If there is something you missed the guys on your promotion committee will certainly find it and let you know in a usually unpleasant way.
But hey, never forget, that is their job!

There is also another piece of advice, given to me by Karl Gschneidner himself (he is something of a legend in my area, take a look at Ames lab website). We were at the dinner party after a conference and he asked me how my PhD was going and everything else. I told him I was almost done, and then he gave me one of the most important pieces of advice ever: You are the specialist on what you did. Nobody, no matter who is in your committee, knows more about what you did, than you.

And this is mine: if you screw up, so what? Science is about making mistakes and correcting them! And you must have the guts to do so!

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Thesis hell??? Hell yeah!

Sunday, 17. February 2008, 18:17:18

Have you ever felt you need a reboot so that your random access memory can be cleaned and put back to work??? That is exactly how I fell... It is just a shame that people are not as easy to reboot as computers.

Writing a thesis proved to be more challenging than I would like to. Not because of the subject itself, I mean, I spent the last 6 years studying this stuff (2 years undergrad + 4 years grad) therefore, that is hardly the problem. But, by the time you actually get to the writing part you are soooo fed up with this stuff and sooooo stressed out due to the worries of a pos-doc and other bureaucratic stuff that you simply can't take it anymore.

And having the italian workhololic gene doesn't help either.
What the hell does this gene do?
Well, easy piece.
Do you know that point when you are kinda tired and feeling like a 15-minute chill out in front of the television? Well, that's when the gene kicks in. Quietly in the background it keeps reminding you that there is a job to be finished...
That gene is a bitch, I can tell you that.

As a result I have become addicted to green tea (which contains tons of caffeine) and have been eating much more chocolate than I should... For obvious reasons.

Well, on march this will be over, one way or the other.

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Because I am a nerd and geek...

Wednesday, 6. February 2008, 16:07:53

I know this is geekish, but it is so Cool!!!!

It is simply a non-newtonian fluid with very, very high surface tension... I would love to have a swimming pool filled with that yucky stuff.

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The beginning of a journey.

Wednesday, 23. January 2008, 14:24:48

This is an old post, of an old blog which I translated from portuguese.
This was written one and a half years ago, just before my trip to Japan and expresses the feelings and impressions of being on the verge of such a journey. It was the first time I travelled by myself and planed a trip from beginning to end.
Later I would find out that this experience would change the way I see the world not only completely but definitively. And, as my father says the journey begins in your mind, much before you take the first step.

Agust 15, 2006

As my dad would say, the journey has already begun... Quite a while ago, by the way.
The amount of preparations necessary to such journey are simply overwhelming. It is a short trip, a little over 3 weeks, but it will take me to the other side of the world, no kidding, from São Paulo to Tokyo.

This friday it begins, and I am more scared of the american paranoia (or estado unidense as the mexicans say, perfect definition by the way*) when I stop in New York than of Japan itself.

Matter of fact I still can't believe I am really going, inspite of the half-packed suitcase on my bedroom's floor and the passport on the desk... I think it will only seem real once I step in Tokyo, forced to quickly decide if I go to Kyoto by air or train. Weird anagram... Which takes me back to a bus stop and a cultural moment by Saa: Tokyo is an anagram of Kyoto, which means something like capital city, very useful information isn't it?

Anyway Kyoto. I found out that the ICM** was going to be held in Kyoto 3 years ago, after long time crying because the previous one took place in Roma and there was no way I could have attended 'cause I was just an undergrad at the time... Bad timing.
Back then I was simply attracted to the fact that I would have a chance to see the other side of the planet! But after having the patience to read the one book which is a match to São Paulo's yellow pages, it became something of a dream. In case you are wondering what is the name of this miraculous book, it is Musashi. And it's uses are many, other than reading, of course. To name a few: hold the door open or the other books in place and knock someone out, literally. Although I can think of more efficient artifacts, as our beloved democracy. Democracy is a baseball bat, named this way in explicit analogy to the way the north-american democracy was enforced on latin american countries not so long ago... Something out of RPG players twisted minds who named a student’s house after Khazad Dum (amongst which I am included). We also had the solution, a winchester 32 gun, but enough of this.

Musashi takes place during the time when Kyoto was still the Empire's capital city and Tokyo (known as Edo back then) was flourishing. His descriptions of the many temples that this Samurai visits are something out of an awake dream.
Anyway, Musashi’s Kyoto is simply beautiful, and will completely blow my camera’s memory stick. Thankfully I will be in Japan, where even dog houses are computer-controlled and is the home of Sony. Which happens to build cybernetic dogs… Go figure. I cannot understand this thing japanese people have for machines... And on the other hand keep the most ancient traditions. Puzzling, I would say.

Well, back to the last minute problems like printing the poster I have to present, the only thing which justifies all the money I am being allowed to spend… Thank you Fapesp!***
And to the fact that my supervisor has (again) vanished on thin air.

*Why estado unidense is a great definition to those born in the United States?
Very simple, american defines the citizenship of an entire continent. Those born in the United States claim that citizenship exclusively for themselves and in that misuse take alway from us (all other americans) our birth right. Therefore this definition is simply perfect.
**ICM stands for International Conference on Magnetism, and is held every 3 years. I would have posted the link here, but I just (sadly) found out that the website no longer exists.
***Fapesp is the funding agency which paid for this little extravagance.

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Just another clean up, right?

Monday, 21. January 2008, 12:19:47

Well, inspired by these guys clean up I had to write my on feelings and experiences on the matter.

This requires a little background description first. I am a 4th year PhD student at Unicamp, applied physics division. My lab is a mess of paperwork, funny equipments and dangerous samples.
We have one big lab full of furnaces (something quite nice during the winter but somewhat complicated during the summer... which comprehends most of the time in Brazil) and a mezanine on top, where we students stay.
This is what my desk looked like around a week before I decided to clean it... At the time I was leaving to the Sincrotron Lab near Unicamp, thus the bag.

Following the lead from the original post, here is what I found:
- name cards (or dog colars, as I like to call them) for a 2002 internal student's conference
- someonelse's quantum mechanics test (???)
- my old list of really stupid things students write on their lab reports
(I shall post these, although they are in portuguese)
- some LaFeSi samples which were not exactly mine, but belonged to the guy on the left (of whom you can see a right shoe)
- a few paper-eater bugs that seemed to be specially fond of some abstract books
- some of Daniel's porn dvds, this is still the right-shoe guy
(why do I deserve this is yet unclear)
- a couple of squid straws I had been trying to find for around two years (no I don't have a squid on a tank which I feed through a straw as some kind of experiment, take a look on wikipedia's article about it) it is just an ordinary straw for holding samples
- a Laue backscattering pattern from undergrad's XRD practice lab
- my physics grad student's association tea mug that was so far behind a drawer I thought I had lost it(coffee is one those things at which taste and smell don't agree, it smeells heavenly but the taste is disgusting)
- an empty box of chocolates

- pieces of an old keyboard
- page markers with funny Einstein's pictures

- and finally my most astonishing finding: an ant colony... I know this doesn't sound so extraordinary, but let me tell you where the colony was... They were living on my samples drawer, actually walking over my samples. Now, they are harmless to my samples but my samples are harmfull to any living creature. They contain things like arsenic and phosphorus, that after reacted are perfectly safe as long as you don't try to eat them... What I am sure they tried.

** Any remains of petrified food was removed long before, when I still thought the ants were there for something ants normally eat.

Well, in the end I binned loads of paperwork, burned the quantum mechanics test, killed the bugs, demanded Daniel to remove the DVDs as I refused to touch them (I prefer to remain ignorant on what he used to do while watching them in between squid measurements), and seriously considered capturing some of the ants and take them to the Biology Institute so that they could identify this newly-evolved arsenic-resistant species of ants, or at least putting together and ant farm.

As I said, it is weird, isn't it?

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On why I was atracted to Opera.

Sunday, 20. January 2008, 23:24:01

Well, as a newbie this seems like the natural starting post.
As a long time lover of all-in-one (e-mail + browser) applications, such as netscape and then mozilla, which eventually evolved (or so they claim to) into Seamonkey, I have been desperatly seeking (no, not Susan) for a stable ever evolving all-in-one application.
Several bugs and crashes forced me to abandon Mozila's all-in-one application, and since they seem to have concentrated all their effort (and marketing) into firefox, I had to settle for two applications, namely thunderbird and firefox. I am still quite disappointed that they simply seem to have forgotten about their own other projects...
I have known about the existence of Opera for a few years, but my first run of it was somewhat traumatic... It was the very first time I encountered a gmail-like interface to organize my e-mails.
It took me gmail (obviously) to get used to it... Afterall who on earth could turn down 1GB email storage??? Well, at the time this seemed quite amazing, but google keeps growing and growing, doesn't it?
That's why in the end I turned to Opera. Currently I am running 3 applications simultaneously as I have not yet abandoned firefox and thunderbird. This should take a little longer.
Opera lacks some of firefox features I have grown to like, such as add-ons (I love eye-candy, although I don't own a mac) and I hope they will be included in future releases.
One thing surprised me, though. The My Opera comunity. I think firefox lacks this kind of relationship with the users and for this I can do no more than to congratulate Opera's team.
That's all folks!

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