The Adventures of Eduardo Sousa at film school: The grades were published today, which means I am now officially on vacation. Oh, and they were good: Five 16s and one 14 (both out of twenty), the best average for any first year student. I really feel as if I was some sort of cinematic Marco van Basten. OK, time to get humble again, and enjoy my vacation.···

Watched A Clockwork Orange, finally! Sometimes there are classic movies everyone else has seen which by some odd reason seem to run away. Oh well, I'm a little bit disappointed indeed. I guess the fact that two friends of mine consider it The Greatest Film Ever has something to do with it, as my expectations were too high and I just thought it was different. Somehow I was expecting grim Orwellian sci-fi and I got more fi and less grim sci. Kubrik's directing is amazing as always, though, and there are some places — such as the milkbar and the record store that are absolutely perfect sets. Very good, but different from what I thought it would be like. Expectations are indeed evil in this movie business. ···

I thought this only happened in those sick grandma stories. Someone decided to try cat meat for a change. Uurgh, disgusting. But well, they do eat dogs in Asia, and my grandmother points out that in the old days people would eat cats trying to cure asthma. Yes, right here in Portugal, Europe. Hm, it is disgusting nevertheless, thinking that my pet could be food. Now I know how Indians feel about us eating cows. Oh well, can't be too depressed about that, as Mafalda would comment on cannibalism. Oh, what a sick world this is. (link via Anja) ···

So I spent most of my idle time (idle? make it 'total') reading a big book containing all Mafalda strips ever published. For those who don't know, Mafalda was some sort of Argentinian Peanuts published between the 60s and the 70s, which had a very heavy political and dissenting flavour, which became quite popular in Portugal in the 80s. It is saddening to think it is nice to see the world was already shite before I was born.···

What to do now? I'm giving Cafeína a big big renewal, and I am preparing The Big Website Mass Extintion, as many of my sites will disappear. Don't worry tho, their content will continue available in newer, more centralized websites (I just realized I had 3 different portfolios). In the new network there will be only Cafeína, Asseptic.org, IF THEN ELSE, the streaming video site, a portfolio and a lab. Much simpler. Right? ···

Stupid Eurekas! So yesterday I became a bit productive. New knowledge acquisitions: 1. How to call another computer using a modem and access its contents provided the destination computer is running some server (please, son't start laughing if you are a sysadmin or a network geek); 2. How to upload files to a computer via a webpage using PHP; 3. How to retrieve data from a database and generate an Acrobat/PDF document with PHP. Really, it was as exciting as when I managed to get my voice across to someone else's speakers while running MSN Messenger. "Look ma, I speak on this microphone and people will listen on the other side!" I'm easily amused, what can I say? ···

Ogg Vorbis 1.0 has been released! 2nd-generation free audio for the people! NO DRM! I only hope they don't go down the DivX path... ···

By now everyone has learned about the 100 Albums You Should Get Rid Of list. I only own a three of those (I'm not counting MP3s), the Beasties' Ill Communication and Hello Nasty, which I think are fine (I spent a whole summer some 3 or 4 years ago only listening to hip-hop and these were the only albums that I didn't start to loathe), and U2's Zooropa, which I bought when I was 14 or 15 years old and I didn't even remember I had it. There are few spot on criticisms in the list, I like the fact that Mogwai (one of my pet-loathings) got a bashing, but I can't understand how Sigur-Rós or Björk's latest got unharmed. Probably because these are too damn obvious. Like N'Sync. ···

Boo! ITE hasn't been updated since last Monday, which is perhaps the longest blogging hiatus in IF THEN ELSE's 15 month history. Blame typical summer laziness, this week I haven't done shit until yesterday.···

Ah, so now we can get rid of all electronic / idm musicians. Viragelic will replace them.···

Oh well, then again, we can always destroy the American, the Soviet, the Islamic, the French, the Spanish and the Limey civilizations all at once from the confort of our homes. FreeCiv 1.3 has been released. I hope this new version won't go for Civ III political correctness and doesn't go as far as making Joan D'Arc the French leader or Catherine II the Russian leader (other Civs had Napoleon and Stalin, although I'd go for Ivan in the Russians).···

The United States is the new Soviet Union. If this piece of news is true, then that 21st century Hoover, John Ashcroft, is planning to recruit 10 million american citizens as informants, a 24:1 ratio which means a police state bigger than The Mother of all Police States, Eastern Germany. Now join the fact that in some states 1/4 of all black men are in jail (which means for many black men life in the USA is similar to life under Stalin) and conservative law and school programs which urge kids to bully different kids and spy on their parents (again, like in USSR), and what do you have? The Union of American Capitalist Republics, where democracy is an unpopular concept and freedom of speech is on the death row. I'm glad I'm European, I only hope the EU doesn't take long to tell the US Government to fuck off. ACB···

Nielsen sez: Mac users are smarter. Or at least they are more 'web-savvy', more educated and make more money. Nooo shit! Jakob Nielsen's report is on the edge on redundancy, as the fact is that the average Mac is way more expensive than the average PC and consequentely only affordable by people who make more money, who will tend to have higher education and afford to spend more time online. And it took an 'Internet guru' to figure this out. Let's all bow and praise Nielsen for yet another study of unprecedented depth and thought.···

I need to post this now and then but... Mark Rosenfelder's Metaverse is perhaps the greatest personal homepage ever. Of course the fact the page deals a lot with linguistics helps a lot, since it is something which is as esoteric to me as the superstring theory. I wonder how come this guy doesn't do a weblog. Anyway, here's a rant on why AI could possibly exist, even though the Turing Test is rubbish (note: I don't think it is at all rubbish, non-human intelligence will have no clue about human experiences, so the fact an AI being couldn't calm a baby wouldn't at all mean it had no intelligence). Then there's the usual mind-blowing stuff: English in Chinese-like characters, Arabic and Ameridian words in the English language, and the history of Chemistry in Earth and a place called Almea, which is somewhat related to a a place called Verduria. Someone should get out more.···

By the way, I used to buy Shift but it was yet another one which disappeared from the Portuguese newsstands when distribution giants Electroliber went bust. Now there's Mute.···

Shift (the Wired for non-geeks) has an article about forthcoming digital dark ages. No, it is not an article about DRM and such, but instead about the future archeological problems related to the digitalization of our entire culture. We all have seen the movie studios that allow very old films to rot without doing anything because of hypotetical copyright problems. This is worse. Also on Shift, a rather biased article about Microsoft's Palladium project.···

Is Google down, or too slow? Use a mirror. memepool···

Next week: vacation. Hurrah. Anyway, sorry for the slow updates, but there's a lot of work to be done by next Thursday. Last weekend I went to Jazz no Parque (= 'Jazz in the Park', obviously) at the Serralves Museum, because even though I'm not at all into jazz there's just something about live concerts. Perhaps because you can't see the sax player turning red while listening to records. And I suspect the piano was broken. The band playing was Drew Gress' Quartet, which means as much to me as junior curling player. Please tell me if they are actually good. Ah well, where were we? Then I spent much of the weekend taking photographs, there are a few very good ones, which reminds me I ought to update Pixels Rising* fast. Today I supposedly woke up at 6AM to go film at Cabedelo (a very big beach nearby, at the mouth of the river Douro), but I got a message on my mobile saying it was postponed due to the rain the minute I was leaving home — That's an arts school for you, as yesterday our professor said something like "we'd do the film today even if it rained like in India". Yeah, right. So tomorrow we'll try again. Bummer.···

Oddly enough, now I seem to rent less movies since I got a DVD, perhaps because watching movies on my computer isn't as confortable as the living room. Yesterday however I rented Final Fantasy which I had skipped when it was on the theatres. The animation is definitely amazing (mainly Aki Ross' skin and hair — it seems that a lot more work was put into her than on other characters), but the narrative is a bit rubbish. The Gaia theory would surely allow for a good sci-fi/fantasy movie... but this? Oh well, FF:TSW is good for people who drool over 3D graphics, but for the rest of us it is bad sci-fi, sort of Starship Troopers meets Akira.···

There was a good comic relief moment at the draft however. After the first selection based on school degrees we were in a room listening to an officer explaining what was going to happen next, and all of a sudden someone's mobile starts ringing... with a national anthem ringtone. The fact that suddently the whole room bursted laughing (even the military officers) was nice.···

I went to the military service draft last Wednesday and as expected I wasn't approved fit, but even though I got a bit of a relief. I mean, doesn't the military service in European countries go against the Declaration of Human Rights by doing a distinction of gender? Then again, one could argue that in Israel men and women are born equal. Anyway, to hell with it, I'm out and I feel relieved.···

The Touchgraph Google Browser is the best piece of Internet cartography I have ever seen. Shame it requires the fat (8 megs) Sun Java plugin.···

There are bandwagons you just have to jump on. One of them is the permalink, that is, making one's blog other's blog-friendly. IF THEN ELSE now has permalinks and I made it without using Movable Shyte or anything. Just yet another tweak on my own very-elite CMS, which is, by the way, a heavily modified and sloppy version of NewsPro, a piece of software NOT really meant for weblogs. Amazing how it is incredibly crap compared to MT or Greymatter but somehow I managed to tweak it enough to keep up — I only miss one of those stylish calendars.···

There's a new gizmo on If Then Else today, if you look to the left side of the page you'll find a list of the last few MP3s I have been listening to. Courtesy of BlogAMP, which I have bastardized. I'm not that happy with it tho, I'd prefer a solid PHP include solution instead of relying on shaky Javascript. I'll work on that soon.···

Still thinking about that Times New Roman thing. I mean, it is the kind of thing I'd name my band after. Font names are indeed fine, but where do they come from? Times New Roman is pretty straight forward (a new Roman-type font designed for The Times), and so do Gill Sans (a sans-serif designed by a chap called Eric Gill) or Helvetica (which is from Switzerland). But what the hell is an Arial? Or a Meta? Or a Microgramma (another fine band name)? Or, for sake, Akidenzk-or-whatever Regular (Helvetica's first name)? I mean, getting good names for things is so hard, why are typographers so good at it?···