saintcahier

"There are three things upon this world,
Whose taste don't satiate :
Water, Bread, and the name of Maria."

I am a big fan of Maria biscuits, big plain round biscuits somewhat akin to Tea biscuits, but until today I was under the impression they were a Brazilian local product, for I had never seen them in the shelves of supermarkets in any country I've visited.

Therefore, I was surprised to find out they are an English invention, and that they have an international market. I was amused to find  a review pages of the product: the Queen of All Cookies page. The humble biscuit was put down in the Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down site, but the comments came in its defense.

I can't believe it !

(On the other hand, the FN is still scary...)

When printing a single copy of the 33rd page of a PDF, be careful to type the number 33 in the page field, not in the number of copies field. Otherwise, you'll get two reams of draft paper, emptying both trays of the printer shared by the whole floor, which will beep incessantly, annoying the hell out of your colleagues until you discover the problem. You'll become the laughing stock of the department. #LFMF

Apparently, 9gaggers think that Eduardo matches well with moustaches and seriousness. Who am I to disagree ?

Interesting NYTimes opinion page: 

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000. Today’s generation is literally going nowhere. This is the Occupy movement we should really be worried about.

For about $200, young Nevadans who face a statewide 13 percent jobless rate can hop a Greyhound bus to North Dakota, where they’ll find a welcome sign and a 3.3 percent rate. Why are young people not crossing borders? (...)

The anamnesis seems to me believable, and I agree, up to some point, with the diagnostics:

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother. The Great Recession and the still weak economy make the trend toward risk aversion worse. (...)

Notice how popular the word “random” has become among young people. (...) Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive.

Yet, the prescription is incredibly naïve:

(...) We need to reward and encourage forward movement, not slouching. That may sound harsh, but do we really want to turn into a country where young Americans can’t even recognize the courage of Tom Joad?

Maybe it’s time to yank out the power cords, pump up the flat bicycle tires or even reopen Route 66 — whatever it takes to get our kids back on the road.

It seems to me that "yanking the power cords" to get the "kids moving" in order to "save the economy" is a tremendous inversion of causality, and a particularly cynical one, given the authors own analysis. In order to get the kids less risk averse, and moving again, the economy will have to be fixed first: at the very least, in what concerns the sharing of its fruits and risks. The current model of shared risks and private profits more than justifies the perception that luck is more important than effort. And when luck is so more important than effort, why bother ?

Laziness as the ultimate social protest: who would imagine ?

Passion and action are etymological antonyms.

So, I was browsing Google Images in search of the perfect haircut for men with thinning hair, and I stumble upon this guy:


Immediate pang of envy. "If only I still had so much hair ! This is the perfect haircut !"

I click on the image to see the page. It was a list of the 5 worst haircuts in sports coaches. Oops.

I need to watch more TV.

Good: Playing Dance Central in my boxer briefs, all by myself.

Bad: Having a short movie of the improvisation session played back to me every time. Tell me about sudden painful self consciousness.

(Maybe that's why they allow you to disable it in Dance Central 2).

I have finally activated the iPhone 4S I have bought a little intempestively in Atlanta. So far, I am less than enchanted.

After much research, I have found out that Apple IDs are bound to countries and that my original id has been attached to the States, making it impossible to enter correctly my Brazilian credit card billing address. I think the prudent think to do would be creating another ID from scratch, before I get too much content attached to this one.

I hate Apple viscerally. I wish for its prompt demise, clearly caused by its own greedy policies, as happened more than once in the past. I rejoice that the open Android platform has quickly put iOS to the second place.

But at once, I want simple things, that work: my hacker days are over. I want to open the box and start playing, no hassles.

It's like having a boyfriend who beats me once in a while, but who otherwise serves me well and is very low maintenance. The beatings are sparse, and calculate that I'm better with him. I still feel morally urged to end the relationship, though.

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I am also disappointed by the killer applications I had for the phone. Scruff is a nightmare to setup, and once it reset my profile after I was almost finishing filling all the required fields, I decided to postpone to another day, lest I would break a brand new phone. Growlr is simple to set up, but then it just freezes. 

* * *

I should had bought a Samsung. It might have been just as bad, but it would have cost half the price.