It was August and all Europe was going through an extremely hot summer. Even so, from above, the country looked like it had a recent flooding – there was water all over it! The canals, the famous dutch canals, were everywhere, not allowing anyone to forget that a big part of the country was bellow sea level. Airport included. It’s name, Schiphol, meant ship hell (or ship hole) because 400 years ago, there was a bloody ship battle fought in the water above the airport region. And that’s where lil’P landed. In the airport, not the water.

Bikes, bikes, and… more bikes. Believe me, there isn’t enough bikes on this paragraph to describe how many bikes that bike country had on the bike paths, on bike parking lots and on bike shops. Specially on the bottom of the cities main canals.
Lil’P first contacts with the dutch bikes was not a very pacific thing. On the very first walks around, he quickly learned to pay more attention to his back while wondering on the streets: there were killer bikes on the loose, and any absent minded foreigner could easily turn into an hit-and-cycle victim. And the bikes were nothing like his old green bicycle that had two tiny wheels, being the front one, a even smaller wheel; the typical dutch bike was designed for the tallest people on the world, the dutch.
Everyone rode a bike. Everyone. Kids going to school, old ladies going shopping, mothers taken their children to the kindergarten, even the executive guy with suite and tie would ride a bike to go to work. How women drove their bikes with mini-skirts was a mistery to lil’P.
As it was the dominant mode of transportation, there were bike paths everywhere, and of course, bikes had their own stoplight signs where always growing swarms of bikers waited patently for the green. There was no way lil’P would wonder around on that country without a bike, so, he went shopping for one.

Technically, it was a female bike since it had no frame, but cycling it, was like driving a very thin harley due to it’s high steering fork. Didn’t had a bell, but had some nifty misterious breaks and gears hidden inside the axis that worked flawlessly. Fifty euros, the guy said. It seemed like a good price so lil’P took it. Driving the first ride home, was an adventure – after the first 100 meters, every pedal started to produce a loud crank noise that called everyone’s attention and every stop to fix it, only made it sound louder. Eventually, lil’P got home and after a few adjustments, that never annoyed him again. On the other hand, he found out that a bell was a very useful thing to have but he learned with the dutch that if yelled loud enough dling! dling! dling! it would have nearly the same effect and that way, he could avoid some crashes.

Lil’P was told that he should spend at least the same amount of money on locks as he would spend on the bike. And the reason was obvious around the city: right after the drug smuggling, there was the bike contraband. Anyone walking around the city center without a bike would quickly be approached by weird blokes wispering fiets koop, eh?. Sometimes, trying to sell the bikes they were riding, but usually, they just asked five minutes to get it.
One effective technique to prevent this, was to paint the bike in such horrible colors and patterns that no one would ever buy such a thing. Pretty effective, it seemed. Still, the locks were necessary. At least two of them. One for the main frame and another for the front wheel, to make sure the bike would still be complete when it was necessary.

(to be continued)


Did you got mad at your hair or what?! Not really. But that was the barber reaction, when I asked to shave my hair off. I wonder what he would say if he saw me a few hours before, when I had a huge beard covering the rest. You sure? I was.
After a few months letting my beard grow, I decided that this time of the year would be the best time to shave it. And why stick with the beard? The hair went off as well and now my head looks like a ball. :)
And what’s the people reaction? Oh well, it varies. From Oh my god! and a grin, to uncontrollable laugh… What seems to be common is the question: don’t you have cold? sure I do – now I look scarfs in a completely different way while I’m reinventing the headscarf concept. :D


Eighteen. Eighteen years is the amount of time I watched teachers pouring concepts into black or white boards. Along the way, I had the chance to meet a wide range of this specimens and even had close contact with some of them. The boring breed usually is the most easily forgotten, unless they were excruciatingly boring which gives them the power to teleport themselves into our summer nightmares. On the other hand, there is another variety of teachers that is extremely interesting to listen to: either because they really like the subject they are teaching about or because they are complete lunatics and like to speak about the more exquisite things one can think about. Nonetheless, they all have a very important effect on what we are and the least one can expect from them, is to give their best to teach.

Today I had my last university classes. Although there is no one around to celebrate it with, this is a very important day to me, as well was the week. Last wednesday I was the speaker on a meeting between my classmates and the set of teachers that is responsible for making everything work as it should during our 5 year graduation. Why me? Well, I’m not even a good speaker but someone had to do it, I was too tired of complaints and no action. Among several problems that we pinpointed, the hot topic was some of the lousy teachers that we had during the way. From a teacher that falls asleep during classes, presentations and even exams, to one that doesn’t even know very well what he is teaching about on classes, we said everything we thought about them. Will it have any real effect? Dunno, I hope so. But I sure needed to do this before saying goodbye – pedagogical quality is a feature that should be present on a teacher and that is not arguable for me.

So what doest the future hold for me now? Well, a project, a couple of assignments and 6 exams will keep be busy for the next 2 months. A six month internship is also required for me to graduate and plans are cooking for that. A master is not on my plans for the moment, but who knows? Life is long.


Her name was Katia. She was Italian and her portuguese was almost as bad as her english. When sometimes they ran out of reasonable ways to explain something, that was when strange analogies would come into play. That would either get the message through or make them laugh. Nonetheless, they managed to understand each other. One of lil’P first mistakes, was to tell her that is was very likely to keep raining for the next months. She wasn’t expecting that and it took the smile out of her face. But that was nothing, compared with her astonishment about the pastas served in the few italian restaurants she had found: ma che c’è? cosa è questo?. She wasn’t happy about that at all.
Lil’P was Katia’s erasmus mentor. He applied for being a mentor as soon as he first heard about it. He needed to have a close look on how was to be an erasmus student. To be on your own, away from the home country facing the daily problems, the joys, the spirit, the sacrifices. On his mind, someone on this condition ought to be crying for help. He couldn’t be more mistaken. Learning to face the problems alone was part of the erasmus package and it wasn’t a sacrifice at all – it was one of the main goals. Another good thing about being a mentor, was that he had the chance to get the answers to all sort of questions about the too far away countries that he couldn’t find anywhere else. It was more clear what different people really meant and that, was just too appealing to be ignored. Lil’P new dream was starting to form on his mind.
So one night, after an yoga class, he and C. sat down and chatted for two hours about her 9 month experience (no, she haven’t been pregnant, she had been an erasmus student). By the end, lil’P smile couldn’t be any bigger. He decided that night. He was going for it.
Plans started to go bigger and bigger. Picking the destiny was like picking an ice cream out of a menu of a brand you don’t know very well. Despite all of them being sweet, you still try to pick the one you think you’ll like the best, but you always end up with a big set of them anyway.
Lil’P needed a 2nd opinion about the ice creams so he started to contact students from his university that were or had been studying abroad and poke the good and the bads about it. Eventually he started to trim down his ice cream list and it was time for lil’P to take the hardest step: to tell his parents about his intentions. At first, his parents didn’t knew anything about it. Despite all the hurdles he had to face on his own, it was hard for him to tell them about his decision to go to a too far away country. Sure, it wasn’t really too far away. Sure, it was only for 6 months. And sure, it was very important to him. But it was way too expensive for them.
So, what was the solution? A trade-off. Lil’P sold some his stuff like his scooter, the one that eventually replaced his green bicycle and was parked most of the time anyway. He also pruned his ice cream list and he finally decided which was the most yummy one. A place where everybody would be at least 25cm taller than him, and whose main language he didn’t knew a word of. It was perfect.
The green light from lil’P parents arrived only after he received the results of his application, but that didn’t stop him in the meanwhile. Besides all the fuss with the academic and bureaucratic details there were like a million things to take care of being one of them to buy plane tickets. It would be lil’P first plane ride.
In the last night, he almost didn’t sleep. His mind was wired to a different voltage already and all he could think were the next 6 months. From the inside, a plane didn’t looked that much. Just like a big BUS with wings attached to it, he thought. The take off was very early in the morning and when the pilot delayed it, even until then, lil’P was afraid his dream wouldn’t come true. The pilot claimed it was foggy in the destination – for lil’P, that could very well be part of some secret plan to finally call everything off and forbid him to reach too far away countries.
A couple of hours later he said on the speakers they were allowed to take off. The big BUS finally started to move to the runway. The moment the engines got full trust that’s when lil’P understood that that was no big BUS after all and that there was no going back. He was flying to his dream. Next stop: Utrecht, The Netherlands.

(to be continued)


Once upon a time, in a kingdom not so far away, there was this little kid with dark eyes and pink cheeks called lil’P. Lil’P lived with his parents in a small village where everybody was grown up, so most of his time was spent playing alone with his lego sets and making complex plans to build huts from old sheets, blankets and wood sticks. By then, his dream was to have a swing in his backyard.
Lil’P was told that the world was a big big place with lots of other countries with different people. When he asked how one goes to those countries, he got told that they were too far away. Dazzled with such answer, lil’P made extensive mental calculations about how long would he had to travel to reach too far away. Traveling, in lil’P case, was measured in riding time in the fastest transportation device he owned, his green bicycle. Soon he came to the understanding that those other countries ought to be really too far away ‘coz he got pretty convinced that if he tried to cycle there, there wasn’t even the smallest chance of being back on time for supper.
His parents weren’t much of travelers, not even on their own country. So lil’P grew up under the shadow of the too far away countries curse. He got older, got into school and got to understand better a few things by then. He learned that, for instance, where the too far away countries were, what the grown ups meant with different people, and that Santa Claus didn’t exist.
He soon realized that computers were his life. Anything that he came across related to those mysterious boxes received extra attention from him, it was vital information that he absorbed instantly. Having a computer was his new dream – he never got the swing.
He did get the computer, though. And some years later he got something that would change his life: an internet connection. Lil’P – who wasn’t that little by then – was wired to the world. Above all, he got connected to all those countries that suddenly weren’t too far away anymore. His bedroom now had two windows – one looking into a vineyard and another upon the world. Sure, it wasn’t the same thing as actually going there but it was enough to make him spend most of his time enraptured in tons of information available on his fingertips. And besides, he had realized long time ago that his green bicycle wasn’t going to do the job.
The first love lil’P had was for a song lyric – perhaps due to such uncommon fondness, and unlike anyone on his family, he wanted to go to the university. There was just too much to learn out there and he needed a bigger bootstrap than his parents had planned for him.
And so he did. The subject of study was obvious to him by then and it wasn’t hard to pick a university either. Living outside his parents home did scare him a bit at the beginning but it was just too exciting to be a real problem.
Not long after he joined the university he heard about this european program that allowed students to do exchange periods at universities in too far away countries. It even offered mobility grants. It was too good to be true. Or so he thought for a while.

(to be continued)


As my geek side wouldn’t allow me to do any different, this site is hosted in my own server, located at a tiny storage room in my flat. Besides hosting this site and being a test bed for my nerd ideas, it does lot’s of irrelevant things and one of them is to collect dust in it’s bowels. A lot of it. 24 over 7. Thus, besides all the tweaking and maintenance that I must (and love) to do as the server administrator, it also requires me to do a not so usual maintenance action: to vacuum clean it.
For most people that have a website, renting an hosting service is the way to go. And when the site is offline, it means something like an hardware or software upgrade, perhaps even restoring backups due to a cracker attack. With me, usually it means I’m vacuum cleaning it. At least, that is usually the case, but not the last time.
No, I wasn’t hacked. Nor had an hardware failure. Just when I was planning to vacuum clean it, I got into a bigger problem than dust and mites: my home electricity has been cut off (due to some mix up with the billing). That’s the reason this site has been offline the past 24 hours.
Sure, I know that I wouldn’t have this problem if my hosting option would be a more classic one. I could go on an on about the advantages and disadvantages of it – I won’t. I’m not even reconsidering it, I still think this is the best choice for me.
What caught my attention was if people ever thought about where their site sites. Physically that is. Usually their only clue is about the country, sometimes just the continent where it’s located. I guess that for most people this detail is completely irrelevant and the only reason this is interesting for me it’s due do my server being located just next to my kitchen.
Still, last night during the blackout, with not much to do, I wondered about this for a while. It’s easy (for me) to picture how and where (ideally) a big hosting company have their storage servers. That’s not what intrigues me – the competition on this area is quite big and there are loads of small to medium hosting companies located who knows where and how.
I’m aware that some of this small hosting companies have well seasoned administrators that do things the right way. But what about all the others? The ones that improvise along the way doing implementations that aren’t that different from mine. Pictures like this or this always make me smile. The location of the servers can be peculiar has well – most of the maintenance can be done remotely therefore any cheap rented room will do. As long the connection can get there, some good options are those rooms that no one rents. For instance, rooms above loud places like bars or discos, or at some bad neighborhood having at next door someone called Lolita and across the hall a terrorist making plans. But this isn’t the weirdest solution I can think of. I’m sure some of those hosting solutions around are located in attics, or creepy cellars, the kind of places no one goes- not even to vacuum clean them. Now excuse me, I’ve to do some server maintenance.


Once I posted about biro-web, a website made with drawings made with just trivial pens and imagination. Now, it’s author Jon Burgerman is drawing them for BBC Comedy cartoon section. Doesn’t please all tastes but it’s certainly different.

I wonder if in the future, light anti-depressives will be something like this. It sure made me laugh.


At elementary school there weren’t many things I liked to do. Besides being a very quite child, I was very tall for my age and therefore had too clumsy movements to join most of other kids plays. Although I was a good student, I was always being humiliated by the teacher about my bad handwriting. Anyhow, there was one thing I really loved to do: paper folding (aka origami). It was _the_ thing that pulled me from the almost zombie state and got me wired. Occasionally we had classes to do only paper folding where I learned models at first sight and repeated them till perfection. But eventually my teacher didn’t had more models to teach and I was bored again.

Fifteen years later, over a dinner at Mr. Jacks with some foreign friends, I’ve come to realize that my keenness for paper folding wasn’t just an hobbie of only a few or a kids play. Paper folding (origami) plays a really big part in the culture and tradition of Asian countries, specially in Japan and Korea. The fact that amazed me most was a Korean tradition that involved paper cranes – the model I enjoy most folding.

This tradition is still popular today and used widely in Korea. It says that if you fold 1000 paper cranes and give them to the one you love, your wishes of love will come true. Yes, 1000. Still not very impressed? Then, first do some math: I take between 5 to 10 minutes to fold the Korean paper crane version (which isn’t very different from the one I’ve learned in elementary school but slightly more complex, providing a more elegant and robust model) from a square extracted from a A4 paper sheet. Assuming one would take 5 minutes on average, he would be occupied for more than 83 hours. Seems a lot? Right, but it’s still not hard enough so why don’t we save some trees and use instead of A4 paper sheets, 5cmx5cm ones – the most common size for the 1000 paper crane folding? I never tried folding this size but I’m sure it’s a pretty hard task.

If you got interested in the paper crane model, you can try it yourself by following this animated instructions. But if what really catchs your eye is the 1000 paper tradition, you might want to know that it’s possible to buy kits online with 1000 paper sheets and even glass bowls to put them. Right, what I shouldn’t be telling you is that if you are lazy, it’s possible for about 40 euros to buy packages of already folded paper cranes. But of course you wouldn’t cheat on such a thing, am I right?

Special thanks to my friend, D. Y., for all the helpful info on the subject and also for the company at that dinner. :)


I received today my first book from bookcrossing. It came from Greece in a neat brown package and I’m just thrilled with the idea that bookcrossing actually works.

For the ones who might not know bookcrossing yet, the main idea is quite simple: people start by registering books they have at bookcrossing.com and tag them with a number and some instructions. Then, they release it and that’s when the real book crossing starts. There are several methods for doing it and I think I still don’t know them all. The classic one is to release it into the wild by leaving it at some place where it can be found by someone else. Although it sounds nice, this method has proved to get many books lost. Alternatively, one of the most used methods are book rings where the book travels around the people that have subscribe to it and in the end the book returns to it’s original owner. Book rays, same as the previous, but the book keeps traveling ad infinitum. And, of course, simply borrowing it to anyone interested. Oh, yes, there are also RABCK (Random Acts of Bookcrossing Kindness) where someone wants to send a book to someone else randomly, who then reads it and sends it to someone else they randomly find on the site.
It’s possible to check at anytime who first registered a book, where it has been and who has it at the moment through journal entries that each registered book has.
I’m aware that this idea doesn’t attract everyone and even myself only got really interested now, although I heard about it sometime ago. In what comes to books, I hardly read one twice and, unless it’s not mine, why not allow someone else to read it? Most books are too precious to keep in a bookshelf for years IMHO, plus, this way books come with bonus stories about the traveling they already made meeting different places and readers. It’s something like free software meeting project Gutenberg meeting interactive global library. :-)


Ok. So, you are an IT bloke, and you know that if you wanna succeed, you should at least be up to date. Plus, you need to be able to predict things so that you’re not behind when they happen. What do you?

a) make random guesses
b) go to the closest witch and ask her to look into her crystal ball for you
c) take the red pill and go ask Oracle

Seriously, how often do you think about what the future holds in terms of technology? Our parents have witnessed some of the biggest inventions ever, should we expect something of the same magnitude? According to this BBC article, inventions in the future will have a much smaller impact in our lives than the ones in the past.
The article reminded me of a BT Exact white paper I read some time ago. It’s authors, Ian Pearson and Ian Neild, have compiled a technology timeline (link to pdf) to provide BT researchers and managers a way to foresee what the future holds when they have to make products or services. The document is quite easy to read and doesn’t focus only on technology itself but also in areas like education, demographics, transport and others and deserves a quick browse. It started in 1991 and has been updated every two or three years, learning from it’s own mistakes, and adding new predictions every edition. I’ve emailed Ian Pearson asking if there will be a new version since the latest dates from 2001 and it’s scheduled for next spring. Meanwhile, here are some handpicked predictions for the future from that document.

Loneliness in aged population greatly reduced by network communities 2010
Most software written by machine 2011
Orgasmatron 2012
Space hotel for 350 guests, using recycled Shuttle fuel tanks 2015
Need to book time slots to use some key roads 2020
Computer enhanced dreaming 2020
Deep underground cities in Japan 2020
Emotion control devices 2025
More robots than people in developed countries 2025
Emotion control chips used to control criminals 2030
Use of human hibernation in space travel 2030
Dream link technology 2030
Brain ‘add-ons’ 2033
Moon base the size of small village 2040


And if for some reason you don’t find this enough to make the future sound interesting, try this technology timeline and poke into future millennia. Satisfaction garanteed or your money returned. Maybe.

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