The Whitehawk

Today I went to the Rotary Funchal dinner-meeting and met an interesting person who happened to share many interests with me, in terms of technology and art. We talked about various things, from Technology to Politics, but, the most interesting thing he said, and taught me, was about our inability to separate our opinions from white and black.

He is a painter, and as one, he picked up the menu in front of him, pointed at a water-color drawing and said something like this:

(I hope he’ll excuse me for this not being the proper order of our conversation, but I think that the message will come through in the same way)

“You can not say if this drawing is good or bad (…) however, you can say that you like it, or you can say that you don’t like it.

I, however, as an artist, can say if it is, good or not. Because I have the proper formation, and knowledge to do so.”

Then he looked at his glass of wine and said:

“Because it’s not my area, I can’t say if this wine or good or bad.”

A bit further on the conversation he explained:

“We can’t teach people what is good or bad, we can only transmit to them our knowledge. They have to decide for themselves what they like or not. People shouldn’t brand things just as black or white, because there are various shades of gray in between them.”

And he’s completely right. Most people nowadays don’t bother to look at someone or something as something different from black or white. They follow a trend, or their personal opinion, and just brand it as such.

Why?

Well, perhaps because it’s easier that way. If the trend is to say bad things about Sony, or Microsoft, then they instantly brand them as “black”, but if a few weeks later they happen to release or announce a great product they instantly go back to being “white”, despite still having all the previous flaws.

If we want to be successful in life we have to learn to distinguish the various shades of gray between the two opposites. If we can’t manage to do that we’ll just be “another brick in the wall”.

Just another small lesson I picked up from an elder. I wish there were more people like him around.

Yep, that’s my bedroom right now, leaking. And yes, that is my PC hiding under the desk, hoping it will go away… Unfortunately, as long as rain keeps pouring, the water will keep coming… thank God I’m spending the night at my mother’s apartment.

*edit* – just to make it clear, water also leaked on my bed, I’m pretty sure I’ve gone past the diaper-period.

I met what I believe was the most annoying brat ever, and he isn’t much younger than me.

For three hours, me and two others tried to answer his questions and doubts, and instead of accepting our answers, even though we gave him facts, he questioned our words.

We told him that our college was in a difficult situation right now, and if the situation doesn’t change it could very well close it’s doors in a near future. Since he isn’t worried about it (because he self-proclaimed himself as intelligent and relatively wealthy) he started claiming that we were exaggerating things even though we gave him all the reasons we could.

And it got worse when he started contradicting himself. First he claimed that our college was not under a crisis, and that things are getting better, but later he acknowledged and spoke about a bunch of facts we are all aware of that confirm how bad the situation is.

Even though he claims to be successful in his classes, I’m terrified that there naive people, such as himself, acting as representatives. He has no problem in acknowledging facts, but he has trouble perceiving them as a whole and attributing a name to them.

Oh well, I guess that it’s normal that after a couple of hours of conversation with one of these persons is enough to bring even the strongest of minds down.

Today, when I was walking through town after my classes finished, I passed by the local Apple store and I noticed that they had replaced their old iPod billboard (which still featured one of the very first generation iPods) for a completely new one, featuring the new iPod Nanos and that image you’ve probably seen of them saying “Completely Remastered”, similar to this image:

So I walked inside, to have a look at them.

There were various colored Nanos on display, except for the black one (at least as far as I could tell), but the one that was immediately closest to me was the gray one. I looked at it slightly disappointed, as it isn’t as “shinny” as it appears to be on the Apple site. I took out my Black First Gen iPod Nano, put it besides the gray one and compared the two, then I put the gray one back on the shelve and started to walk slowly to the exit. As I was doing so, one of the employees there noticed me and said:

“I also prefer the old Nanos”

I chuckled and smiled back speechless, because those certainly weren’t the words I expected to hear from a sales person about their own product. But I guess this was a funny experience to have and share with everyone.

A few days ago, I bragged Sony’s Customer Service. The nice lady that attended my case was really nice and explained all the steps I needed to take in order to have my machine repaired.

However, when Sony sent the laptop back, they changed the one thing that was broken that I thought they didn’t cover, and didn’t replace the harddrive. They only replaced the small hook that keeps the lid of the laptop shut (even though I didn’t need it since the laptop had another).

So I had to send the laptop back again, and once again, the same lady stuck with me throughout it all. And I’ll be having my laptop back at the end of this week or at the beggining of the next one.

If you’re thinking about buying a Vaio computer, you need not worry about customer service, it’s great. Just be sure that when you send your machine for repairs (if needed, mine’s breakdown was an accident) that you make clear what needs to be repaired.

Two years ago I was convinced by a friend of mine to go to his girlfriend’s birthday party.

At first I didn’t feel like going because I only knew him from there but he managed to convince me by saying that he also didn’t know anyone from there.

Thank God I went…

During the party, a silly cousin of her girlfriend’s told me to go dance with a girl, though I didn’t want to, and he randomly grabbed a girl and brought her near me. Though me and her both agreed that he was dumb, she asked if I still wanted to dance and we began to.

And I don’t know if it was the air that night, or the moon, but it felt special, and right, to be holding her hand and waist and before we knew it, our lips were together and our hearts have been together ever since.

If it weren’t for, I honestly don’t think I’d be the same person. I think I’d be someone worse, or at least I wouldn’t have as much strength as I have to endure a few things. So I dedicate this post to her, and the two wonderful years we’ve spent together.

Hopefully there will be many more years like this one. But even if there aren’t I know for sure that these past two years have been the happiest of my life and I owe it all to her.

Thank you Cris, I love you dearly, and that feeling grows with each passing day.

My [tag]Windows[/tag] [tag]registry[/tag] went to crap while I was playing around with the Windows UI so I had to format it. Unfortunately, when I was re-installing Windows, I kept getting error messages saying that the installer was unable to find certain files. At first they were DLL files, which I started taking note of the names, so I could download them off the internet later, but they never stopped.

So, eventually, I gave up. And shut down the laptop. The next day (yesterday) I decided to format the drive again so it would be ready to install once a friend lent me a “fresh” copy of Windows, however, I brought back to the installation of Windows, so I figured I’d see through it, and when I did, it installed from scratch once again and presented none of the problems that it had before.

Which was, once again, weird. In any case, if you happen to own a Sony Vaio and need reinstall Windows, or install a different version of Windows on it you can check out this old article I wrote for ForeverGeek.

[tags]Windows Registry, Format HD, Reinstall Windows, Sony Vaio[/tags]

This is a bit curious. I’ve recently started to learn the strange language and one of the things I found out in one of the first classes is that Japanese people don’t have question marks in their symbols.

Instead, to demonstrate that the current phrase is a question they end the phrase with “ka”.

So if I say something like “Genki desu ka” I think it means something like “Feeling good?” but I’m still missing many parts of the construction of the phrase, so if you understand Japanese that might sound a bit primitive so gomen… (gomen meaning “sorry” by the way)

Oh well… fun days.

Well, the LAN party was two days ago, and it was great fun. Why am I only posting now? Well, because yesterday I was out with my girlfriend all day.

The games we played were, Quake 3, then Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires (for 3 bloody hours on one single match), Counter Strike, and finally Quake 3 again.

And I completely mopped the floor with everyone on Quake 3. I got everything from compliments by the second best player at it to people coming near me during the game to see how I did all those things.

It was great fun, I had tons of laughs and it helped boost my ego a bit. During the coming week I’ll create a new category and finally drive this blog somewhere, it will still talk about myself and my life, but I will dedicate a big slice of it to the human stupidity that I encounter frequently, so look forward to that.

Yep, I’ve been sick for the past couple of days, which happen to be the short days of vacation I have for Easter! Oh joy of joys…

Well, at least I have a LAN party planned on Thursday with a few friends, so I hope I’m fully recovered by then.