O Marco Fortes é o máior (sim, leva assento no ‘a’, é mesmo assim).

Senão vejamos o que disse este nosso possante atleta de alta competição após a sua brilhante prova nos jogos olímpicos: “Ah e tal, isto correu mal porque era muito cedo, eu de manhã estou bem é na caminha”.
Ah grande homem! Desculpem, “Ah Grande Homem!”, assim é que está bem.
Aliás, eu também acho, de manhã está-se bem é na caminha.
Esta coisa de ir até ao outro lado do mundo em representação de Portugal, porque os ditos portugueses acharam que ele é tão bom atleta que vai dar o seu melhor e conseguir uma prestação minimamente condigna, e ainda por cima fazerem-nos saltar da cama cedo para ir atirar o raio dos pesos campo fora é vergonhosa!! Um abuso!!
Estão loucos ou quê? Atleta que é atleta faz as coisas ao seu tempo, no seu ritmo, ao seu bel-prazer!
‘tugal esteve bem aqui. Sinto-me orgulhoso de ser representado de forma tão condigna por este belo espécimen. Obrigado, pá!

Aliás, vamos lá registar aqui algumas das pérolas que este iluminado decidiu partilhar com o mundo:

“Já tenho uma experiência dos Campeonatos do Mundo de pista coberta, em que comecei muito bem, mas cheguei à prova e deixei-me deslumbrar por aquela atmosfera e esqueci-me do que é que lá fui fazer.”

(Isto prometia, já sabíamos que tinhamos aqui potencial para uma boa representação. No mínimo para uma representação do papel de bôbo, mas adiante, que o melhor ainda está para vir…)

[Disse o Marco que] o seu maior desejo é que os atletas com “melhores marcas estejam de rastos e que não possam com o peso na sexta-feira, que durmam mal, comam qualquer coisa que lhes faça mal, que não queiram ir para a pista, coisas assim”.

(Snif! Desculpem-me, mas este espírito desportivo —especialmente nas olimpiadas— deixa-me sempre emocionado.)

“Cheguei à conclusão que de manhã só estou bem na “caminha”. Lançar a esta hora foi muito complicado. Apesar de ter entrado bem na prova, com dois lançamentos longos com mais de 19 metros, no último lançamento as pernas queriam era estar esticadas na cama”, disse o atleta, em declarações à RTP.

(Tá tudo dito. Tuga Powa!)

Mas (e há sempre um mas) nem tudo na nossa representação nos jogos olímpicos corre bem, infelizmente para nós, desgraçadinhos.

E a culpa é de quem?
Bom, a culpa é de pessoas como a Vanessa Fernandes que, imagine-se, fala antes da prova de forma comedida e, até, com sensatez e depois, para cúmulo da desgraça, ainda ganha uma medalha.
Uma medalha!! Como foi ela capaz de tamanha ousadia? Uma atleta que demonstra humildade e inteligência? Uma atleta que se esforça, que dá o seu melhor quando lhe pedem para o fazer, não quando lhe apetece e ainda por cima ganha algo?!?
Que é lá isto? Quem se julga essa mulher para tentar arruinar a imagem que o seu colega tão árduamente trabalhou para conseguir? Que coisa pretende ela afinal? Demonstrar que em Portugal existem atletas com cabeça? Pessoas com noção da responsabilidade? Pessoas com carácter? Pessoas que se esforçam?
Corram já com ela, digo eu! Não pode ser, o mundo ainda pode pensar que valorizamos pessoas dessas. É uma vergonha. Proponho a abertura da caça à bruxa Vanessa e seus semelhantes. Queremos mais Marcos Fortes. Eu, enquanto contribuinte e financiador da nossa comitiva olímpica assim o exijo!

Quem faz o favor de criar para aí um daqueles abaixo-assinados da Internet para começarmos a fazer pressão?
Eu não posso que estou um bocado cansado. É que isto logo depois do almoço não pode ser, hein? Depois do almoço é mais dormir a sesta (aliás já fui ali dizer ao chefe que eu agora vou é esticar os neurónios para a caminha e talvez volte mais tarde ao trabalho, se me apetecer). Mas se alguém quiser fazê-lo eu até fecho os olhos ao esforço desmesurado que dispenderam e assino a coisa. Ah e obrigadinho!

Treze meses depois de ter comprado a minha casa actual fiz uma asneira de todo o tamanho: Fui ao meu home banking e pedi um extracto, filtrado apenas pelas prestações da casa.

E depois vi a evolução da dita prestação com a subida constante das taxas de juro.

Não sei o que raio é que me deu para fazer tal coisa. Que grande estupidez!

Não que eu seja totalmente irresponsável, eu sei bem o quanto pago pelo crédito, mas ver aquilo assim, tão linear (ou será exponencial??), tão organizadinho, sempre a subir, todos os meses…

Aaaaargh!

The new iPod is in da house!

I finally made up my mind for the 160GB classic. It was a no-brainer, really, as my music collection alone was more than the 60GB of the old one and on this one I will also carry my photos, videoblogs and so on and so forth.

It is slim, grey, heavy and has a nice engraving on the back with a line from one of my favourite songs (it actually took me a while to decide what I wanted engraved in it, you know?)

So the advantages of the new iPod are:

• My car supports it (haven’t tested it yet, but it should) so now I can operate it using the standard car-stereo controls, which is way nicer (not to mention safer);
• My music collection can continue to grow at it’s own pace without me being in constant need of deleting and moving stuff around to make it fit into the iPod.

Soooo, I now have an old 60GB iPod Photo (third generation, if I’m not mistaken) with heavy, heavy use, which is still in perfect working condition (appart from the scroll-wheel which sometimes stops responding and requires a locking and unlocking sequence to start working again).
This baby has been with me through thick and thin and I was considering keeping it for the sentimental value (of which it has a lot), but then I realized how silly that would, so now I have to find a good home for it.

Can’t wait for the new one to synch up so I can start testing it! (It will take a while yet, that’s for sure…)

The Kings Of Convenience concert was very good indeed. I didn’t know their songs (heard them once on my friend’s iPod and that’s it) but I am now a convert of (at the very least) their live performances.
As I already suspected, this is a friend whose musical tastes I definitely have to keep an eager eye on, she knows her stuff! ;-)

Then the Lisbon Calling show was also very, very fun. Marillion was nothing special (they’ve lost me after Fish left anyway), but they play a good, tight show. The Stranglers are still as powerful now as they ever were and they rocked the house.
And then came the B52s. Now I am known for dancing whenever I like the music, sometimes even enthusiastically, but these guys got me dancing and jumping around like a maniac. Definitely the concert of the evening!
Meat Loaf, on the other hand was… Meh… The guy can’t sing anymore (but then again, could he ever really sing? And the show was more eye-candy than good rock, even if there were a couple-three good songs (mostly due to the band who are —for the most part— really good musicians).

Then yesterday, I had the best day of beach I had in two whole years! And in Guincho of all places!
We got there in the afternoon and there was not a breeze. None. In Guincho!
And to top it off, I spent an inordinate amount of time jumping around and body-surfing on the waves. With no wet-suit. In Guincho!!
When we left, at around 19h30, there were some ugly clouds coming in, but until then, what an amazing day at the beach.

Last week things weren’t going so great (and I wasn’t doing anything much with my time anyway) so I decided to cut my vacations short and went back to work on Wednesday. It actually felt good to come back after a week (and change) away, I felt a whole lot more relaxed about work and things felt into place much easier, their relative importance much clearer in my mind.
It turns out I really needed that vacation, even if I did fill it with music and other tiresome activities. Tired body, much more relaxed mind.

Last night I finally went to the Meninos Do Rio bar, near Cais do Sodré. Didn’t stay long because I desperately needed to eat something before going to the club and they didn’t serve food at that late hour (huge mistake, I think, but they should know better than me, I guess), but even in the short time I was there I really liked the atmosphere. Also it is open in the afternoon, so it may be a good spot to stop by on the way home and lounge a bit, maybe even eat a burger when I can’t be bothered to cook. (Which is something I hardly do at all these days —at home, at least— given that I eat out almost every single week-day. It’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to miss cooking a little.)

Sadly I must report that after having been to Nr. II and trying out the ponchas, it didn’t do much for me. (Neither the ponchas nor the bar, but it was just a time-killer on the way to the club I was going to, so the bar part was not so bad)
I tried three different ponchas and didn’t particularly like any of them. After having been told so many times how great they were I was rather anticipating it, but in the end it just didn’t taste all that good to me. Sorry Under and Lua, I know you’ll be disappointed. ;-)
But then it turns out I’ll be heading out to Madeira for some vacation time in September, so maybe if I try them out right there in their natural habitat things will turn out differently.

The music school closed down for the summer, so yesterday was the last class of the year. Let’s see if I can keep the study-plan going strong until September, for the beginning of classes. If I do there’s a good chance that I’ll jump ahead by a level or two which would rock. So now it’s all up to my will power.
Oh dear…

This week I’ll attend both the Kings of Convenience concert on Thursday and the Lisbon Calling mega 80s concert on saturday.
I also plan to stop by Ondajazz on tuesday for the Big Band Reunion concert. I’m assuming they’ll close up shop (the band, not Ondajazz) during August, as they did last year, so I want to be sure to check out their show one last time before that.
Should be an interesting week ahead…

And now, after a thoroughly miserable day, the sun seems to be breaking out a bit, so I’ll leave the laptop and head out to the beach to see if I can at least get a decent sunset (which is still a couple of hours away, anyway).

So now that the season for the music festivals is over (for me, at least, because there’s still plenty out there to be enjoyed by those who can. The bastards!) ;-) here are my notes on it.

I attended both the second part of the Super Bock Super Rock festival (the part in Lisbon) and the Optimus Alive!08 festival. One particular evening I attended both of them. The stupidity of scheduling them both in Lisbon and on the same dates hasn’t yet ceased to amaze me (yes, I now all about the commercial interests at stake but no one can convince me that the pie wouldn’t be bigger for both of them if they did it in another way).

Anyway, on the 10th of July I went to the Alive! festival in the afternoon and stuck around until after the Rage Against the Machine concert and then took off to Super Bock Super Rock, where I still got to listen to Digitalism for some half-hour and then caught Tiesto’s full set (my main goal for going there).

Other than that anomaly, everything went really smoothly. I was devastated that Nouvelle Vague canceled (it’s the freaking third time I fail to see them live. Come on! Someone’s got it in for me for sure. A friend of mine told never to try and go to a Nouvelle Vague concert with her again because she would really like to see them and it seems it is impossible to do so when I’m around. It broke my heart!) ;-) but as far as Cansei de Ser Sexy is concerned I couldn’t care less that they didn’t do the show.

In the end, then, this is what I took from the festivals.

What I liked (and already knew I did)

• Iron Maiden - UP THE IRONS! (not much else to say, read it here);

• Vampire Weekend - They sound just as good on stage as they do on record and they put on a decent show. Can’t wait for their second album to either fall completely in love with them or to forget them;

• Rage Against The Machine - You want to know what dynamite is? This is it!

• The Gossip - What can I say? I liked them last year and I loved them this year. For this I was definitely front-and-center, where the action was;

• Ben Harper - I’m a fan, so there’s not much I can tell that won’t sound like fanboy-ish praise. It was good. As it should be and it always is (this was my third concert). Dig it;

What I discovered and was a good surprise

• Hercules and Love Affair - Good beats, very interesting sound. A friend-of-a-friend told me they sound even better with Anthony (of the “Anthony and the Johnsons” fame), but they were not with him there and I still liked them. A must-check, for sure;

• Tiesto - voted best DJ in the world six years in a row…
  Well, I don’t know about that (I was really expecting something outstanding because of this factoid —what, I don’t really know), it didn’t blow me away all that much but it was still a very good set, it kept me dancing until the very end.
  But that ending was really weird, I guess he either had to stop because it was time (he stopped at 05h30 which was the time he was supposed to, but he began an hour later than scheduled) or else something went wrong, but either way that ending didn’t feel natural at all.
  Maybe electronic dance music really isn’t my strong suit. I liked it a lot, mind you, but this guy, being “the best in the world” left me wondering how bad the others can be… :-)

• John Butler Trio - A great surprise indeed. I didn’t know these guys at all but they played an extra-long concert (to make up for part of Nouvelle Vague’s absence) and I was left with the will to go and check out more of their stuff on record;

• Xavier Rudd - Another total stranger to me, I loved his music from the first moment. It is nothing short of amazing how he can transmit such calm and serenity with all of his songs, even the ones which have really high rhythmic beats.
  Very tribal in it’s essence, very “balanced”, very good;

• Róisín Murphy - I never knew Moloko to begin with, so the description I was given (“she was Moloko’s singer”) didn’t tell me much at all.
  Well, it turns out this lady is amazing on stage. She sings and dances like nobody’s business.
  Left me breathless —and that’s from all the jumping and dancing, it had nothing to do with the t-shirt. OK, almost nothing. Well…

• Donavon Frankenreiter - I already expected it to be a good concert, given the descriptions of his music I’d heard and read, but I’d never really listened to this guy. Turns out it was indeed a good concert with some very nice and smooth music;

What I didn’t particularly like

• Gogol Bordello - They might be dynamite on stage, but I just can’t bring myself to enjoy the music enough to get up there, front and center and get into the mood to jump around like a madman to their songs. “This is not about you, it’s just me”;

• Neil Young - I really tried to like his concert but I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. It wasn’t at all like Bob Dylan, mind you (read below), and he did end up with an amazing version of the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life” (which I would love to get my hands on a recording of), but in general the show just didn’t do anything for me;

What really sucked

• Nouvelle Vague canceled;

• The amazing whirlwinds of dust through almost all of the Alive! left all of us with sand and dust ingrained into our hair and clothes;

• Bob Dylan - I’m so sorry, but I can’t be charitable here. Such a great artist as him (in his day) should get a clue and stop milking it when it gets as depressing as this.

Porque é adequado. Porque tem de ser. Porque ainda dói (e já não devia).

E… E porque sim.

Mas isto é para apreciar com toda a teatralidade, o dramatismo e o “flair” do Freddie, nada das versões dos Platters ou Roy Orbison ou afins, hein!

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Pretending I’m doing well
My need is such I pretend too much
I’m lonely but no one can tell

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Adrift in a world of my own
I play the game but to my real shame
You’ve left me to dream all alone

Too real is this feeling of make believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Ooh ooh yes I’m the great pretender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not (you see)
I’m wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you’re still around

Yeah
Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not you see
I’m wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you’re
Pretending that you’re still around

These last few days I’ve been on vacation and I stayed home getting ready for the summer concerts and getting some beach and pool time in.

• Friday evening I went to Plateau with a bunch of friends. Amazingly enough (given my dancing music tastes) I’d never been there before. I don’t know how I can love dancing to 80’s rock music and never having been to Plateau but well, that’s taken care of now. Anyway, my friends tell me that the songs they played were more or less the usual stuff for the place and as far as I’m concerned they could ditch the disco stuff and stick to the rock and pop but, well, I can’t bring back the thursday (or was it friday?) nights at Coconuts with Miguel Simões pumping out rock’n’roll like there was no tomorrow now, can I?

• Saturday I went with a couple of friends on a lighthouse-seeking quest near where I live. It was fun and the Farol de Sta. Marta in Cascais, near the marina (the one in second life) has an interesting museum. You can not (yet) visit the lighthouse itself, but apparently that will change in the near future.
  Unfortunately I didn’t know that Cabo d Roca’s lighthouse was being renovated so that was the main disillusion of the day…

• After our little lighthouse-hunting excursion we went to Sintra to the Fire & Ice “and friends” concert. I didn’t know any of the bands and went there on my friend’s Marcos suggestion.
  My take on it is that Àrnica sucked, Barditus did an excellent job supporting the other two artists and they, in turn were quite good. Orplid put on a great and powerful show (it made me really sorry that I don’t understand german, but most of it you could understand perfectly just from his small —english-spoken— intros and the way he sang it).
  As for Fire & Ice, well, there was a gentleman who really knows how to move an audience. I loved his songs with Barditus and also liked very much the two traditional folk songs he did on his own during the encore (when Barditus decided that they’d had enough). I think the best way to describe his voice is haunting.

• Meanwhile I’ve been to Lisbon a couple of times this week and ended up visiting Louie Louie’s Chiado store, again on a recommendation from a friend. So I came away with a few LPs under my arm and I’ve been listening to them over and over. There’s no scrobbling for vinyl, but I really don’t care, what I found there were some real gems. I even bought my very first vinyl copy of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (yes, I know, I’m unbelievably late to the party, sue me). ;-)

• And just yesterday the festivals started, with Super Bock Super Rocks’s second act. I skipped all the other bands and went there just for the Iron Maiden show.
  What a show! As expected, of course. These guys are so great, even after all these years, it’s eery! An excellent concert, appart from a time in the middle of it when the usual stupidity set in and they stepped the volume up so loud that the bass and the guitars started sounding all distorted. Can you imagine Maiden with a crappy bass?? Urgh! Fortunately they decided that it was best to turn the volume down a bit and have decent sound (it still left my ears ringing, mind you, as any such concert should).
  A friend I met there told me the line-up for this concert was exactly like the on all their latest shows and DVD and I can see why. It really, really works. Both the main show and the encore (surely one of the most powerful I’ve ever seen).
  Amazing show, filled with only the classics —the Bruce Dickinson songs mostly— that everyone knew by heart (I surely did and I screamed like a madman through it all.)
  UPDATE: See another wildly emotional review of this concert (in Portuguese) here.

Now I have to go rest by the pool to get my throat back in shape for this evening at the first day of the Optimus Alive! festival. It’s tough being on vacation during the festival season… :-)

• easy_install rocks. Yes, I’m still at that stage in my python dwellings. In fact I still have some trouble deciding when to use list comprehensions or plain-old loops when doing something more complex than scanning or filtering elements on a list. Baby steps…

• When it rains it pours. I just found myself wanting to attend two concerts on the same day, and I’m not talking about the overlap between Super Bock Super Rock and Optimus Alive! (which did not take a great deal of thinking to decide go the Alive! way), but rather I’m going to the Fire & Ice concert in Sintra with some friends and just today (late, very late), I found out that António Pinho Vargas is doing a concert at CCB, related to the release of his new CD. The concert will be a solo piano recital of new versions of his songs from his jazz days, long ago —my favorite period. Oh well… Fire & Ice came first.

• Last friday (June 20th) I went and got my braces installed (I am so sure this is not the right word!) on my upper teeth. The lower teeth will follow in a few months. This is something I’ve been putting off for some 18 years or so (that’s when I started the treatment and took out some teeth in preparation for the braces). So now I have two years to look forward to eating at snail’s pace and spending an inordinate amount of time cleaning my teeth every day. Should have done it already but I obviously let it slide until the “it’s now or never” time. Typical.
  The worst part, so far, is that I had to leave the sax lessons. I still had some hope I’d be able to cope (and some people actually do it), but it only took me the upper brace to realise that I don’t want to go through that kind of pain, especially when I have multiple other means of enjoying and making music. I’m just not a sufferer.
  So next week I’ll start with the music theory classes and I hope to be able to get into composition (my main goal) in a few months. As for playing music, I just had the piano tuned last week so (again) neighbors beware!

• Luckily the braces don’t affect me much in my everyday life (i.e. so far they don’t actually hurt —much), so this has been one really good weekend, with beach, running and swimming pool all combined to optimize chill-out and relaxing. Summer started yesterday and the days are going to get smaller and smaller, so now is the time to make the most of it;

• And running has really been very good; not only do I feel better running for greater distances (even with increased heat), but I am also getting much more flexible when I do the post-run stretches. For someone who was always as stiff as a board (even when I practised yoga), this is a very welcome novelty. The feel-good endorphins that running stimulate are not all bad either.
  Now that the weather is finally good, I also started swimming a bit after running (at weekends), mostly arms, as the legs are already being well exercised. If I could actually turn this into a weekend-routine it would be really great and I’m sure I’d be in tip-top shape by the end of the summer. Then again I know me pretty well and the lazy-ass in me is going to come out sooner or later, so I’m not pinning my hopes on that happening…
  I have been keeping my run-logs at runner+, but I’ve never been very parcial to having my content (especially written) kept outside my domain and my server, so I’ll start copying them to my weblog. Must do a service to diffuse them to both sites.

Lots of things, none of it important… Let’s see:

• Traded in my trusty old Ford Focus CMAX.
  Every 4-years (or so) I switch cars (company car) and this time I must say that even though I love my new wheels, the CMAX was one great ride!
  I loved that car (even if I had to choose the gas version over the diesel at the time). It was reliable, sturdy and saw me through some very nice times and adventures. Good bye old friend, I’ll miss you! (insert suitable mellow music here);

• The drobo I’ve been raving about is really a nice piece of hardware.
  Alas, with my physical setup —which does not allow for decent ventilation for something as heat-generating as this—, the disk fans are always stuck in full throttle, giving my living-room the ambient noise of an airport (even using the cooler —pun intended— Western Digital disks).
  I definitely have to get my act together and do the renovations I need to do in the kitchen in order to stuff the disks, home server and modem in there;

• Just spent a really nice weekend up north, playing baby sitter to Melo’s kids.
  I can totally see why he gave up living in “the big city” and moved to the country. I actually got to sleep a whole night through until late in the morning (around nine-ish!)
  Also, I think I’ve gained a new fan, who wanted “uncle Nuno” to stick around for longer. Good times! :-)

• I am not getting in line to buy an iPhone. Sorry, I just can’t get excited enough, not without MMS, a decent camera and a few other tidbits.
  I’ll just wait for someone else to get one, let them use it for a few weeks and then I’ll try it out and talk to the users. That’s when I’ll make my decision about the new phone which I am now entitled to get, even though my Sony Ericsson K750i still rocks and I would really like to keep it for a bit more (although, of course, being 2-years old, it has decided to start acting up this very weekend! sigh…).
  Oh and I do know that the camera on the K750i is a 2mpx one, just like the one on the iPhone. And of course I also know that not all mpx where created the same and the K750i has one fantastic camera which blows away all others in it’s range. Sorry, that’s just the way it is;

• I’ve been running more and more lately and I’m starting to really get into it.
  This is something both new and unexpected. I’ve never liked collective sports, but even on the solo ones I’ve always preferred swimming or mountain-biking to running. Still, after I’ve lost some serious weight a while back, running became possible (without the almost certain prospect of some serious back injury) and now I find myself actually doing it with real pleasure.
  Up to now, though, I run with the bare minimum of stuff with me, the only gadget I take with me is a tiny (and ultra-light) iPod shuffle. But now I am starting to be lured into the realms of the social running sites (stuff like runnerplus.com) and so I have a decision to make: either I give in to the gadget- and stats-geek in me and get me something to monitor and report on my runs (I run with Nike+ shoes, so an iPod nano would do, but I could also go with myriad other solutions); or I just stick to the basics and track my runs by hand, with approximate values for length and duration.
  Knowing me, if I start to feed the geek, I’ll end up not feeling good about running “light” and I’ll have to take all the gadgets with me every single time I run (“gah! I missed one run, the stats will all be skewed from now on!”), but I just love feeling totally light and gadget-free while running (especially in the rain) so… I don’t know, I hope I can resist the temptation of geeking-up my exercise because there’s nothing that compares to the sense of freedom I get while doing it “light” (at least for now, that getting back to sailing is kind of out of the question;)

• I’ll also be trying to be a more social-geek (now there’s an oxymoron, if I ever heard one!) and start to be around other “people like me”. To that effect I’m planning on going to the second edition of Twittlis —the informal gathering of twitters in Lisbon. Anyone else planing to go? I hope this time I’ll be able to, honest!

So there you go, that’s my last few weeks in a nutshell. OK, a tiny, tiny nutshell. I’ll try to blog more often (and also about some more geeky-meety-stuff). But I’ll obviously fail. :-)

Today, due to the massive problems that Twitter has been facing for quite some time now —which got really worse in the last couple of days—, lots of people in the “portuguese geek scene” went over to Jaiku to check out the service.

Now, I’ve been using Jaiku for quite some time now and I know it is far from perfect, but given Twitter’s latest trend of (at least partial) unavailability, I think Jaiku may look like a viable alternative to some people at least.

I don’t believe that people will actually flee in droves to Jaiku and the most probable outcome of all of this is that when (if??) Twitter deals with it’s load issues (and they should be more than on the ball on this one, especially now that they’ve got the funding to do it), everyone will just come back “home” and twitter away to their heart’s content, their Jaiku accounts soon forgotten.

But in the off-chance that the people at the big G do try to grab some serious market-share at this time, here is my (very personal and off-the-cuff) wishlist for nifty Jaiku features:

• Let us choose which if our contacts we want to receive notifications on our mobile devices from and which ones we just want to see updated on the web. (Twitter does this);

• Let us group our contacts and give us a nice and easy interface to turn on mobile notifications for those groups of contacts. An (admittedly esoteric) extension of the above feature which I would find most useful;

• Remove the spurious characters we get when we receive an update via SMS which is actually a comment on some message. What’s the point of those characters anyway (am I just being dense and not getting it, I wonder…);

• Am I missing something or is there no direct messaging capability? If it really isn’t there, do add it;

• Stability, stability, stability;

• Speed (but only after stability);

• Design it to scale, please, while you still can! Hurry up moving it to the App Engine.

More things are sure to come into my mind, I’ll update the list if/when they do.

Well, with the amount of rain that we had today my hopes of spending the holiday basking in the sun were shot to high-hell, so I had to improvise…

Got a few KMs in this morning, running in Estoril. Nice weather for that, at least, as people tended to stay at home or at the mall and weren’t inclined to go near the beaches. Also not too hot. I feel like I’m getting back in shape, which is nice.

Then I came home and finally put a new episode of the Undercover Songs podcast on-line. I had recorded it a couple of days ago, actually, but hadn’t taken the time to grab all the links and note the starting times of each song…

Yesterday I just lost patience with my storage woes at home and ordered myself a drobo. Hope that takes care of my current and middle-term storage needs.

And now, since it’s still pouring out there, back to my “Anthology at the End of the Universe” and a cup of tea.

Youth without youth (the newest film by Coppola) is weird —almost (but not quite) as in David Lynch weird— but very interesting. Can’t explain exactly why, but I liked it a lot.
Yes, weird.

My external hard drive — the one where I keep my backups and my mp3 collection at home— seems to have gone meet the great HD in the sky.
I do have backups of the stuff I keep there (for the most part, at least), but it will be a pain to recover everything.
I’ve been meaning to get a full RAID solution for this stuff, but never quite liked what I found out there in the stores. Also, I want a stand-alone, one-box kind of thing. Which cannot be too noisy. (Oh and the RAID is meant to be for redundancy, not for extra capacity, this is a backup solution at heart, not a mega-disposable-disk, so RAID-0 solutions are not an option).
So now I’ll have to look at what’s available on the shelves and then carry on the recovery of my old stuff. Sucks!

The pre-wazup Google App Engine app is coming along nicely. I already have user management, along with user preferences storage and I hammered the python-twitter API in order to be able to call it from within the App Engine sandbox. This would be much faster for me, would I be able to do it in Perl, but still Python is proving to be… interesting.

Got a new Undercover Songs episode ready to post but haven’t gotten around to fetching all the links to all the bands and stuff. It will be posted soon, though. At least I hope so, the mp3 disk crash isn’t making this very easy… :-/

The summer concerts’ line-ups are beginning to stabilize. Apparently Paredes de Coura will be the place to be this year.
“And you’re so far away from me…” :-)

In preparation for tackling Wazup, I started learning a little bit about Python (I know many people have said this already, but Dive Into Python is a really good book!) and I decided to try out a much smaller (and hopefully easier) app to begin with.
So I began coding a little toy that does some stuff with my twitter friends list.

I’m using python-twitter and the app is coming along nicely, except…

Well, like I said earlier, I’m something of an old-hand at programming and my first instinct when learning a new language or tackling a new kind of problem is to first get it working on the command-line and then get the code to work on the web (or whatever happens to be my intended platform). Yes, and my IDE is vim OK?

So what’s the big deal, you may ask?

When I ported my app, which was running perfectly on the command-line, into the App Engine development platform it started bombing, complaining about not being able to get the current user.

Say what?? Well, one thing I’m more than used to is to debug stuff, even in languages I don’t master. And this was very easy to do actually, so I got to the point really fast: python-twitter assumes you’re running on a real machine and implements a caching mechanism that assumes you have such things as a tmp dir where you can store your temporary files.
The code was trying to determine who I was in order to find out where it should store it’s temporary cache files.

Of course in a sandboxed environment such as the App Engine, there is no such thing as disk-based storage (or even system users for that matter), so it was failing miserably.

Turns out that someone else had already been there and the way to work around this is to modify python-twitter and make it use App Engine’s own datastore for the caching. That is if I do think it needs caching at all, I’m still not too sure about that.

Oh well, my first project to “ease” myself \into the language and already I’m making changes to other people’s code…

It’s been fun, though, I must admit to that!