Category: Poison

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#Rockland’s original form is… Torn!

I’ve been jogging to and from work everyday, averaging 75 minutes on two near 4 Km daily journeys always on sidewalks and zebra crossings.

After 3 weeks I noticed my absolutely fabulously comfortable Rockland sandals were both torn in the same spot,  symmetrically.

I went back to the store and they were very nice and replaced them with another pair.

Today, I used the new pair for the first time and as I got home I noticed that, again and yes again on the very same fucking spot one of them is already torn and the other one shows clear signs that tomorrow it won’t last the morning jog before being torn as well.

There is a coloration deformity that promises that will happen, for sure.

72 fucking minutes of jog!

Now… Some of you, dear readers, may think sandals are not made for that. You’re wrong. These ones are for that. Read on:

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«made of high resilient elastomer material that is the quality that has the material to return to it’s original form for each second during outdoor sporting activities (…) recommended for athletes»

Well, I guess Rockland means torn sandals soles, by that.

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They’ve got some explaining to do…

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Obras que irritam

Em Portugal há uma espécie de mania de nunca acabar as obras.

1. Uma secção do passeio

O passeio no meu bloco de prédios estava francamente deteriorado por causa das raízes das árvores, pequenos afundamentos devido ao fluxo de águas por debaixo do empedrado, etc. É natural que aconteça com o tempo.

O que já não acho natural é que:

  1. tenham feito obras apenas num espaço de cerca de 20 metros cobrindo parte da fachada do meu prédio e parte da fachada do prédio seguinte (pelo menos aí ficou “harmonioso”)
  2. tenham ignorado os restantes 75% do passeio, nas áreas após esses 20 metros
  3. tenham deixado a área intervida toda cheia de terra por cima do empedrado, terra esta que nem a chuva a leva, e que entra pelo calçado, mesmo em sapatos fechados, de quem passa
  4. e isto foi há uns meses… finalmente liberto isto que tinha preso na garganta…

Não sei se foi a Junta de Freguesia de Benfica que fez esta obra mas tenho sérias dúvidas que tenha sido encomendada pela empresa que tem as portas para esta badalhoquice (Vision Lab). Muito infeliz deve estar por ter este lindo cenário terceiro-mundista mesmo à porta.

2. A caixa de eletricidade

De manhã estavam a fazer obras na caixa de eletricidade à porta do prédio e fiquei contente pois a caixa que lá estava tinha um ar pouco saudável e já era bastante antiga; tendo tido alguma obra paga pelo prédio para arranjar o chão à sua volta, que estava meio afundado e a permitir grandes infiltrações de água nas arrecadações adjacentes.

Claro que quando regresso ao fim do dia vejo que deixaram o chão todo partido, com blocos de cimento partidos do suporte da antiga caixa e… uma caixa novinha em folha.

Vá, se calhar não tiveram tempo… mas pelos vistos uma semana não chegou, pois uma semana depois… estava igual…

Semana esta com chuvas, e mais ainda devem aparecer, logo daqui a pouco há inundações novamente, sem dúvida.

Pergunto-me quem pagará os danos causados, a EDP? Pois… claro…

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Recycling is good, but you’re doing it wrong

So the City Hall of Lisboa decided to dedicate some days of the week to pick up different kinds of trash. Two days it’s plastic, once a week it’s paper, and three times it’s common garbage. Glass is still deposited on the street containers, but the rest is on dedicated baskets per building.

In our’s, on the 3rd sub level, are two baskets. One for paper and one for plastics. As I went there this morning to put some papers in its basket I saw this deplorable scene, showing that one neighbor in particular is very disrespectful not only of his neighbors, but also of the poor guy who has to take the baskets out.

PANO_20131215_121100 PANO_20131215_121129 SAMSUNGI scrubbed the card boxes until I found two with the address of the culprit, wrote him a message and placed it in his inbox, falling out for all to see.

The messages goes like this:

Like it? Neither do we!

Garbage in volume is picked at no cost by the city hall! 217706030

Meanwhile, use your basement storeroom or your house to store the crap you made on -3

SAMSUNGSAMSUNG

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Which of these two can make calls?

So, can you guess which of the following two phones, a Tizen dev phone and an Openmoko Neo Freerunner (in practice a dev phone too) can make and receive calls?

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The one on the right has been able to make calls since I received it in 2008 (albeit without buzz only after one year after a hardware patch performed by my heroes at TuxBrain at DebConf 9), while the one on the left, doesn’t even detect the SIM card.

The one on the left is made by a very successful phone maker with deep pockets, Samsung, while the one on the right was made in 2008 by a small company that had more will than capacity to do a great phone, OpenMoko, and still today carries my personal SIM with which I call and get calls from people, using a truly community built distribution based on OpenEmbedded called SHR.

This was my first #facepalm moment with this device with which I was very excited and had lots of expectations.

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Why I’m not buying the Raspberry Pi

Some people will claim it’s “pragmatic” to accept proprietary firmware in order to get your fabulous 3D and 2D acceleration out of your graphics card.

So what has been the result of accepting that so called “pragmatism”?

Now you can’t even boot a computer because they put the 1st stage bootloader in the GPU firmware…

Is there a GPU binary?
Yes. The GPU binary also contains the first stage bootloader.

This is fishy, and it may be a first attempt at trying to circunvent software freedom, after all, if you accepted the firmware for the graphics card, surely you’ll accept the firmware to boot.

Sure you can probably boot any OS from the SD card, but it may very well be running under an hypervisor… you may be in your own little VM and someday, that might bite you when you least expect it.

Maybe this doomsday scenario is not happenening with the Raspberry Pi, but it seems, to me, like the proverbial slippery slope in action. You ceded, now you have to cede a bit more, and when you notice, you can’t go back up again.

This is why I won’t buy a Raspberry Pi.

This so called “pragmatism” has resulted in an even worse situation than before and I won’t support that, no matter how cheap the device is.

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Ai pombinha…

Sra. Maria Henriques que anda por aí a denegrir o meu bom nome…

Está a ser cúmplice de um ato de mancha do bom nome mas que não me belisca.

Você e os seus cúmplices cúmplices fingem que respondem com surpresa a palavras e expressões que nunca foram ditas por mim. Estão com isso a indiretamente “colocar palavras na minha boca” sugerindo um diálogo que não existe nem nunca existiu, onde as suas respostas e as dos seus cúmplices parecem demonstrar surpresa com alegadas declarações minhas que nunca existiram exceto no vosso plano.

A única coisa que vos salva de um processo crime é que eu defendo a liberdade de expressão, preferindo por isso acusá-la aqui de demonstrada má fé.

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Poison

I’m a Portuguese blogger who usually writes in Portuguese. However, I’ve come to feel the need to vent out some latent poison, and this need is international :). I really try to contain it, but sometimes I don’t vent out soon enough and then it happens in places where more restraint would prove to have been better.

As such, I’m dedicating a Category on this blog, where I will vent out my worst angers, and I do fore warn you, dear reader:

  • it may taste like the sour poison it is,
  • it may make a tourette syndrome victim blush,
  • it may even perchance make you hate me…

…but that is your prerogative. This is my space, not yours. You can turn away, you can even ignore this Category on your blog subscription, just add “&cat=-36” from the feed URL, or click here to update your subscription (note: apparently it isn’t working, so I’m using the advanced category excluder extension to prevent it from going into the feed reader unexpectedly).

Don’t take the contents personally. If you do, please analyze why you did so. Did you lack restraint yourself when referring to me? Would it not have been saner if you hadn’t, and had instead chosen another path?

Anyway, be warned. Read at your own discretion. I promise to have a softer approach in the first paragraph just before the “More” meta-tag, maybe that’ll give time to skip to the next item on your feed reader.

I need this venting out.