in a World of shit  

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Não sou freira nem sou puta

Porque nem toda a feiticeira é crocunda

Maria Rita – Pagu

Just a small update, because I’m prolly going to get stupid busy during the upcoming week.

I’ve installed Leopard 10.5.1 running the original Apple kernel (yay EFI).

The wallpaper is really a running application called EarthDesk (runs in both Windows and MAC) that features real-time clouds, and it looks really cool! This app though, does not come for free (it costs 23.95$ USD), so if you are not running Leopard (but are running Tiger), then give OSXplanet a try! Besides EarthDesk’s features, it also shows you live data about volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.

Now… Back to me.

I’ve updated this blog’s theme (as you’ve probably noticed by now) because it has 3 columns that I can now use to have more widgets. I know there are still some bugs in it (scroll all the way down, and you’ll know what I mean), but it fits the bill nicely for now.Busy wise… I’m having 2 exams next week, and besides that, at work, I’ve been assigned to another project related to the Galileo positioning system (without leaving the other one, so I am now in two), and my first task is to review a Detailed Design Document (it has 300+ pages IIRC).On top of that, I’m also going to show case my Chat application to the Innovation Board (or some fancy name like that) over at Critical Software by the end of the week (which is an exam day).

So yeah…. lol. It’s 11:20 by now, so I’m going to have a shower, shave, have lunch, go to the gym, and study/review document/code/fiddle (I’m a fiddler, I need to fiddle), so don’t whine about it.

OH OH OH OH And I’m also going to Jayme’s place (it’s his birthday today! YAY!) on Saturday afternoon, so I’ll have to make up for that as well.

I just wish Marisa had invited me to go to Lisbon this afternoon. It would’ve been good for me to gather some strength to face this troublesome period.

Popularity: 45% [?]

meh… So excited about the photos that I forgot about the recommended music for this week

Motörhead – Ace of Spades

Ennio Morricone – A Silhoutte of Doom

Beastie Boys – Intergalactic

Metallica – Fuel

Hooverphonic – Pink Fluffy Dinosaurs

Hoobastank – Don’t Tell Me

Devendra Banhart – Chinese Children

Rage Against the Machine – Degeneration X

She Wants Revenge – Monologue

Junior Boys – The Equalizer

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Release my whole desire,
Undenied,
Totally.

Portishead – Undenied

Today I’ve received a really awesome gift! Jayme Bulhões, got me two photos of me on his wedding (1st of May of 2007)!

On this first one, you can see the gang!

They were all my colleagues when I entered Critical Software, almost 3 years ago. From the left to the right:

Inês Melo, Bruno Ramos, Marília Bulhões Campos, Jayme Bulhões, Ana Luísa, ME, Marta Umbelino and André Barbosa.

Inês Melo is in human resources, Bruno Ramos is still on the edgeBOX, Jayme Bulhões is also still on the edgeBOX, Ana Luísa is still a secretary, ME, well…. I’ve moved a lot, and now I’m on the Embedded and Real Time business unit, Marta Umbelino, whom I think used to be on the Dependability business unit, but has moved a long time ago to a bank in Lisbon (she has a math degree), and André Barbosa (he dates Marta Umbelino), the guy who seated in front of me (although he entered Critical about month later I think), and is still on the edgeBOX. Good memories come from the gang, but not from the project, as far as I’m concerned

This next photo is prolly the one that best describes Jayme Bulhões! A funny guy altogether

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there’s still a little bit of you laced with my doubt
it’s still a little hard to say what’s going on

Damien Rice – Canonball

- Hi everybody!
- Hi Dr. Nick!

So.. Yes… No updates *shrug*

Updated my computer, so now I am tri-booting Windows, Linux and Mac OS (Tiger, waiting for Leopard to get stable). And boy oh boy, does Tiger fly with a Core 2 Duo E6600 *nods* . Here’s a shot for the suspicious:

Let’s see… I’ve received the photo manipulation I’ve ordered from deviantart.com. The author is Marisa Duque:

So you can see how big it really is. No… Dad and Auntie T, she is not my girlfriend.

And tomorrow I’m having Software Quality Assurance training over at work, so hopefuly tomorrow I will become a Software Quality Assurance Engineer *shrug*

bye

Popularity: 22% [?]

You should be making it easy on yourself
Cause you and I know,
It’s all over the front page, you give me road rage

Catatonia – Roadrage

Look what I found while I was cleaning up my room:

Apparently I demonstrated I had qualities to become a potential military parachutist! At the age of 5! lol

Since I have now been ripping my CD collection so that I can carry them on my iPod, I took the time to also check my mom’s CDs, AND LO AND BEHOLD! I’ve found Madredeus album Electronico that has remixes from really cool bands, such as Télépopmusik! They get to remix one of the hits from Madredeus, Oxalá! w00t!

Read more…

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Will fail me in my negligence
To arrest, oh yes
This crazy part of me?

Jamiroquai – Hot Tequila Brown

THIS ENTRY IS VIDEO INTENSIVE (movies by Stanley Kubrick), SO TO WATCH THE WHOLE ENTRY HIT “Continue Reading”

Read more…

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Why do you leave me wanting more?
Why do all the things I say
Sound like the stupid things I’ve said before?

Madonna – Skin

Yes… I do listen to Madonna, and I have a perfectly good reason for it. When I read the 3 books of Lord of The Rings, a colleague had borrowed me Ray of Light by Madonna, and besides being a good album (really different from anything else she has done), I always link the musics from this album to passages of the LOTR book, which feels kind of magical to me.

I know I have been quiet for a while, so now I am going to give you a BIG entry (will talk about work, some stuff I bought, music, new albums coming out, gymnasium, and I think that’s about it). Not some usual rant, just some facts. It’s lots of stuff, so bear with me.

This first item, is about my job. I didn’t want to put this news in here, because it will become public eventually (perhaps in December?). Like, I’d say, many of you already know, me and my work colleagues get evaluated twice a year by someone who out ranks us. This year I got two good news!

• got EXCEPTIONAL on my evaluation
• I am going to be promoted in January (IIRC) to Project Manager

Though I was already wondering that my promotion was due, I wasn’t really expecting that grade on my evaluation, because I think I would’ve deserved it much more on the previous evaluation, but no harm, no foul! Of course now I am proud of this achievement, and want everyone to call me André Ventura EXCEPTIONAL Lemos, but I don’t think that will work. I am also really very glad that on “technical skillz” I got EXCEPTIONAL, with a remark saying that this is my strongest point! *YAY*

The EXCEPTIONAL (yes… upper case all the way), means that I’m receiving a fatter bonus, and everyone at Critical will know that I got this grade.

The promotion, well… It means a salary increase and a very nice word for my curriculum vitae.

Oh… I also got my new cell phone from work. I chose a Nokia E50, that I am loving so far! PHONE LIKE FORM FACTOR (how unusual these days), very small, very light, Symbian OS, really huge battery life, so I’m happy). I know that E51 is out, but I don’t care.

See how thin it is (no, it’s not my hand):

So… More news.. Let’s see….

Today I have bought the whole Zero 7 discography. I was at FNAC just browsing along when I noticed the The Garden album that looks real pretty! And I’ve thought to myself, well, I already have this album, I’ve downloaded it from the Internet, but I like Zero 7 so much, that I should really support them! So I went and bought their 3 albums:

• Simple Things
• When it Falls
• The Garden

I honestly think they deserve my money because I love all of their albums, and I’ll be doing this for other artists (not the whole discography of course), like Charlotte Gainsbourg (I have already bought 5:55, but it was a gift for my Auntie T), Natalie Walker, etc.

I also advise you to buy the DVD set Völkerball by Rammstein. I think I’ll get it myself. It has all the songs I love from Rammstein, on a live concert.

While at FNAC, I’ve decided to also buy some new headphones, because I honestly think that the ones that come with the iPod just don’t cut it! Since I already knew which ones to buy, I went straight for the kill, and bought me these Sennheiser CX 300 headphones:

I already knew what to buy, because I have read so many good stuff about them in so many places, specially because of their ear-canal design (that’s why they look funny).

What are in-ear-canal headphones? Unlike standard headphones, which use relatively large drivers (speakers) and fit on top of or around your ears, or earbuds, which use fairly small drivers and sit loosely in your outer ears, in-ear-canal headphones use very small drivers and actually fit inside your ear canals (thus the name canalphones). In fact, using either rubber eartips in various sizes, or foam eartips that expand to fit any size ear canal, canalphones are designed to seal your ear canals closed, blocking external noise—much like a pair of earplugs. In fact, many canalphones look and fit just like earplugs.

Taken from playlistmag.com

Couldn’t have described them better. You can see on the above photo 4 more rubber pieces. Those are used the replace the ones already on the headphone’s tips so they can fit comfortably inside your ear-canal.

Advantages:

• really great sound quality
• music doesn’t have to be so loud
• very comfortable, and won’t fall off easily

Disadvantages:

• since all the outside is so isolated, you can even hear anything rubbing on the headphones cable if you’re concentrated
• you feel like your ear is being anal probed when you put them (though after it’s really comfortable)
• I might fall asleep with them because I can lie in bed with my cheek on the pillow without them hurting me (thanks DAD for the DNA)

You can see things this way: Regular headphones are like a person shouting to you from a distance, while in-ear-canal headphones are like a person whispering to you in your ear. Well… Sort of…

So after I got home with my new headphones, and three new albums, I’ve decided to rip them so I could store them with a much better quality, and so I could listen to them on my iPod.

Better quality… So what do I mean by that? Should I rip the albums with a lossless format? Nah.. That would be just a bit too much, and then I wouldn’t be able to hear the musics on the iPod, so I’ve ripped them using LAME with a VBR and Joint Stereo.

What does that mean? Well… If you’re not in the mood to follow the links and read up, I’ll try to explain this real simple.

VBR: Your MP3 has a bit rate (128 kbps, 190 kbps, etc…), which define the quality of the sound, and of course, the space it will occupy on your hard drive. With VBR, instead of having ONE bit rate for an entire track, you’ll have a variable bit rate throughout the track, depending on weather the sound being played benefits from it, or not. So better, will sound better, and worst won’t try to sound like it is better. Got it? *shrug* The process is really cool. While LAME rips the track, you can see a bar chart showing you what’s the rate being used on that particular frame of the track, so it was really cool to watch the ripping process of Radio-Activity by Kraftwerk. I really felt geeky! Long story short, I had some frames going all the way to 320 kbps (crazy sound quality, I don’t think a human can tell a difference that high), and 32 kbps (prolly during sound gaps).

Joint Stereo: When your LEFT channel and RIGHT channel have exactly the same sound, they get mixed together, so that the same sound can be reproduced with less information (and less space).

there.

So after doing that, I started ripping all of my CDs collection using the same standard (The Fat of The Land by The Prodigy is being ripped as we speak).

OH OH OH OH And FYI, She Wants Revenge have a new album called This Is Forever! OH OH OH OH And FYI, Goldfrapp are going to release a new album on the 25th of February called Seventh Tree.

So… What else can I talk to you about… (you got THIS far? If you have, put a comment below, because else I won’t believe you ).

School is doing fine, but if I fail my exams, I’ll just run away and start a new life in Holland or Mozambique, or whatever. Useless crap. I learn more in 5 minutes at work, than in 24 hours of school. *SIGH*

Oh… And went to the gymnasium today, and rowed for 2 Km with a difficulty level of 8 (the maximum is 10, and to simulate a rowing boat, it would be a 2/3), biked for 15 minutes (about 5Km IIRC), and did some push ups on the machines, as well as some abs work.

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