Summer Vacations, (almost) alone @ the Gold
coast7th August
Woke up really late, after a crazy festival, where I got to
meet and interview some interesting people like PJ Harvey,
Brian Molko or Sarah Bettens. Here comes a list (I really
*LOVE* making lists of the most stupid things :)) of the
cds I brought to my summer vacations:
<music zone>
- My Bloody Valentine - Isn't anything
&& Loveless - My favourite group band, for
all moods...
- Jeff Buckley - Mistery White Boy -
Sooner or later, I *KNOW* I'm gonna have this inner need to
listen to it... So, it's packed.
- K's Choice - Paradise in me && Cocoon
Crash - I just can't stop hearing this two records
now! They remind me of a certain girl :)
- Dave Navarro - Rexall - To listen
better to it... At the first hear it sounded kinda cool,
but anyway... I really hated 2 songs and loved one there.
- Dimmu Borgir - Enthrone Darkness
Triumphant - I really won't listen to it... but,
last time I stole it from the shelf, I really felt great
listening to it. It's really weird for a indie kid like me,
but I am currently listening to some metal cd's, and
feeling fine. I can't really explain this but... maybe it's
kind of changing stuff for a while, after 10 years of indie
pop/rock!
- Stratovarius - Infinite - The
explanations are above so as for:
- Persuader - The Hunter - and
- Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time
- The velvet underground - The banana
Album - I can't really live without it by my side,
although I hardly listen to it. Go figure.
- Fiona Apple - When the Pawn - Some
Jazz like for Jazz like moods
- My Vitriol - Finelines - Although it
hurts to say it, but they're now on the place where Ash
were before. Indie enough to enjoy, rock enough to rock the
world!
- two mix tapes - Cause my Discman
doesn't fit in my coat. Accidentely saving the
world has the classical indie hymns, like Gold
Soundz by Pavement, Hotellounge by dEUS, Guy who... and
accidentely saved the world by Flaming Lips, Oh Yeah by
Ash, Say it ain't so by Weezer and some stuff of the kind.
The other is Church Organs==Star fuckers!
(what a dumbest name for a mix tape) and is basically
ambient sounds, like Mogway, Sigur Rós, Tortoise, Arkham Hi-
Fi, Stealing Orchestra and stuff of the kind. There's two
things I love about all this: I love organizing my cd
colection, rearranging it for hours by musical styles and
recording mix tapes. But, ahead...
</music zone>
Started working after lunch, reading Python documentation.
Me and Baggio arranged to create a mIRC'like script for
xChat, so, I started studying the language. My parents are
on a vacation to the Bahamas that I skipped in order to be
alone some days in our holiday house, only with my laptop
and good music. After lunch I started reading ""Python
Tutorial" and "Python Library Reference" by Guido van
Rossum. Python is simple to use, but it is a real
programming language, offering much more structure and
support for large programs than the shell has. On the
other hand, it also offers much more error checking than C,
and, being a very-high-level language, it has high-level
data types built in, such as flexible arrays and
dictionaries that would cost you days to implement
efficiently in C. Because of its more general data types
Python is applicable to a much larger problem domain than
Awk or even Perl, yet many things are at least as easy in
Python as in those languages. Started enjoying it a lot.
It's really practical, and not so complicated to learn.
After 5 hours of Python I got a little fed up of it, so,
seeked in my resources for something else to mess with, and
found the Ruby Language Reference Manual by Yukihiro
Matsumoto, and thought it was a somewhat interesting
language to learn a little more about. Ruby is the
interpreted scripting language for quick and
easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to
process text files and to do system management tasks (as in
Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, and extensible.
Read and took notes about it for a couple of hours. It's
not really elegant, but it's pretty straight-forward. Had a
quick dinner. Been listening to a lot of Stratovarius and
K's Choice. In the meantime of coding, I managed to
organize my entire disk, coded a pretty php page for my http://linuxbox.mi
rah.com/~buckley for faster resource finding and took
some snapshots to the two window managers I am currently
using. When just coding I use Window Maker, with a Pinky
theme that I got together. It's really fast and the icons
help to quickly change from the Documentation to the
Terminals that are running the interpreters. Also, it has a
cool, user-friendly xmms icon. When in _relaxed_ state, I'm
using gnome. I just love the transparencies on my terminals
and using Nautilus, a project in which I participated, and
that is more useful than I initially thought. After dinner
I had kind of a phone conversation with Tatiana by the sea
and we watched the sunset together, although we're 300 km
far from each other.
be seeing you
buckley
8th August
Woke up late, as usual. After all, it's vacations. Started
coding Python and got so enthusiastic with it that I forgot
about having lunch. After all, three friends are comind to
pass a few days with me and arrive today. There goes my
coding... :) So, I read a little more during the afternoon
and I also started reading "Haskell Tutorial" by José
Bernardo Barros and José João Almeida && "Haskell's
school of expression" by Paul Hudak and "Gentle
introduction to Haskell" by Paul Hudak and a couple ppl
more. Listened all day to Jeff Buckley. Eventually they
arrived (they brought a guitar. I promised I wouldn't touch
a guitar this vacations. I was wrong.) We all had dinner at
the local McDonald's and spend the evening writing a
song, cause B. also plays, and is in a fantastic band.
Tatiana sent a couple of pretty sweet messages, and I
received them around 4 am, when everyone went to sleep and
I went to code a little more of Python, and played Pingus.
I have a couple of new hobbies. One is trying to finish the
levels on Pingus that are not ment to finish. I actually
made to pass 2 of them, and got to be sure that 3 of them
are really impossible. Other "hobby" is
reboot, a cartoon on TV2, tech related and
with some beautiful graphics. It's all computer made and
it's awesome. Today, around 1am, we saw this amazing 2nd
and last episode of a series called "The Reign" (the
original title is actually in German). It envolved and
hospital, a lot of weirdos, spirits,... It is amazing!
Directly to my top 5 of films, although is not really a
movie (Top 5 of movies: 1-Dead Poet's Society, 2-The
Talented Mr Ripley, 3-The Neverending Story, 4-The Reign, 5-
Matrix). Fell asleep after reading a little bit of "The
Process", by Franz Kafka. Before I went here, I got some
money together and bought 5 books by Kafka, as I felt I was
needing it. My dad offered me the english version of "The
Hobbit" and the portuguese "The adventures of Tom Bombadill
and other stories" by JRR Tolkien and my mother got me an
autographed "Contos de Solidão" by Urbano Tavares
Rodrigues, my favourite writer (Top 5 of books: 1) "Contos
de Solidão", Urbano Tavares Rodrigues 2)"The Process",
Franz Kafka 3) "Silmarillion", JRR Tolkien 4) "The Lesson",
Eugéne Ionesco 5) "The adventures of Mordoror"). Talking
about autographed stuff, I got my K's Choice cd's
autographed and a brand new "4 track demos", with an inlay
inscription "harmony is the keyword, dear Miguel! A kiss
from Polly Jean", and we actually got to cumpliment with a
kiss on the cheek... I was almost passing out :) She's
so ... Spectacular! (Top 5 of Favourite PJ Harvey's cd's -
1) 4 Track Demos 2)Dry 3)Black Sessions 4)Stories from the
city, stories from the sea 5)Dance Hall at the Louse Point).
be seeing you
buckley
<hr>
9th August
Woke up with a Tati's message and B playing the song I had
written last night to Gina and Yara. It was kind of strange
to listen to it... but anyway. We all got to talk about how
we had change (I knew we would talk about that!) in the
last year. I didn't say a word. After lunch, they went to
the beach and me and Yara stayed at home, me sitting in the
bed, with my laptop, changing and rechanging colors and
background images to my gnome look, cause I wanted the
transparencies on my terminals, but wasn't being able to
read correctly the words in dark blue. By the way, I
haven't got a clue if a new kernel has been released since
1st August, and I am still using 2.4.8. I wonder how many
patches will I have to compile once I reach home. Btw, I
had to install Mandrake 8.0 on my laptop three days ago,
cause my Debian's file system got *really* fucked up, as my
laptop has a special kind of A.I... it turns on without an
apparent reason when is rechargind and shutdown. I got to
find a way to fix that. After all, gotcha didn't say
anything or appeared by the festival for me to borrow him
my laptop... Where were we going? Oh, yeah... I was putting
my desktop pretty and at the same time got my literature
discussions with Yara in day, cause she spent some amazing
3 and a half hours sitting on the bottom of my bed,
talking. Coded a lot of Ruby and a little bit of Haskell. I
really hate that language! Maybe it's because is the only
one I currently need for my degree... After that, me and
Yara went shopping! We love it :) I bought myself a jeans'
jacket and a Burberry's classic blue coath, and also a pair
of trousers, brownish. She bought a whole bunch of nonsense
stuff... I loved the pink top she bought :) We went home.
They eventually arrived, we had dinner. Went to see the
sunset to the beach, again, together with Tati. It's really
wonderful to be near a beach, at 20, when noone's around
and it's getting dark. Got out to a local bar, and me and B
had to play a little. Had a really nice _msg talk_ with
Tatiana. We went home at 1:30 pm. Fell asleep coding
Haskell...
be seeing you
buckley
<hr>
10th August
Today I went on finding myself. Woke up to the sound of
Pavement, although it was B playing... Today is the last
day they're here. They're leaving tomorrow after dinner. Oh
me! Pavement! I haven't heard Pavement for ages. Scanned
desperately the mp3 cd's that I brought with me for the one
that had the Pavement's cds and put playing "Silence kit"
*REAL* loud! Do you know that something that is inside of
you, and lights when this happens... You know... I'm just
an ordinary indie kid. I've had my time of metal and
grunge, that continue to be kewl for specific times, but,
d'you know... "Julie Christie, the rumors are truth! As the
pages turn, my heart sees blue..." (Yo la tengo, "Tom
Courtenay"). Seeked furiouly some mp3 albuns that I just
LOVE! and don't listen to for ages, like Elastica's
selftitled, Mojave 3 - Excuses for travellers and Hefner,
passing by some late time bands, like Modest Mouse and, yes
it's true, Radiohead. Found somewhere between my docs a
page that I saved for Canned Applause's Blog and started
reading to it. It's about indie music, books and stuff like
that, and I knew where I belonged. "A puta da
subjectividade" is called. With all this excitment I had
lunch and started coding. I still have to prepare Haskell
for the exam. But it's so God Damn Boring! Well, I wandered
a little through it until I couldn't stand it anymore. It's
all that stuff about abstraction! But well, whatever. Read
a document of PHP by <u>Dragon</u>? in order to learn something new, but
only learned that it had a lot of mispellings and basic,
*really!* basic language learning, but found also a "PHP
meets PostgreSQL" doc that really caught my interest. Spent
all the afternoon around it, having some temporary
delusions when came the time to Gomez's Tijuana Lady.
Thought a little bit about the relation that I put some
girls into with some songs... Some personal delusion: 5
examples:
- Kenny G.'s "got you under my skin" - Liliana
- Gomez's "Tijuana Lady" && Leonard
Cohen's "Suzanne" - Susana
- Jeff Buckley's "Lover, you should've come over" and
Sandy's "Show the world!" - Inês
- Nirvana's "Smells like teen spirit" - IHARAh
- Teenage Fanclub's "Mellow Doubt" - Gina
- K's choice's "20.000 seconds" and Radiohead's "Creep" -
Tatiana
Saw the sunset sitting alone, completely alone, in the
beach, and sharing it with Tatiana. We all had icecream for
dinner and ended up playing Pavement's "cut your hair" and
singing real loud, the four of us (five best songs to play
with indie ppl around:
- Pavement's Cut Your Hair
- Lemonheads' Into your arms
- Weezer's Say it ain't so
- Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson
- Suzanne Vega's Luka
. We all went to bed early as we're going shopping tomorrow
morning. Used this fact to code a little bit of Ruby for
the first time, and examined the Python's scripts for xChat
that comes with it, at the sound of Modest Mouse. I must
remember to ask for one band that Baggio once showed me
called _Sunny Day Real Estate_. I loved it at first hear.
be seeing you,
buckley
11th August
All of the code I made today was some hacking on phpwiki.
I'm going to put my personal page down, which was based on
phpnuke, but wasn't the script for the job. I want
something somewhat simpler and more minimalist. So, added a
PHP based hand made Guestbook and Counter. I was thinking
in developing a users system, but not today. My folks left
a while ago, and we passed an excellent day. We went
shopping in the morning, and I bought the latest Grandaddy
and Hefner's cd's. Had lunch at the local McDonald's. We
spent a quiet day, talked a lot and made a
splendid "Spaghetti a balognesa" for dinner. After that
they left and I went to see the sea at night. Have you ever
noticed how things are prettier when there's not a carriage
of people in the scene, and you think better when you're
alone and listening to My Bloody Valentine? (5 best cd's to
listen alone on a thinkful mood:
- My Bloody Valentine's Loveless (for
angry/strong thinking moods) or Isn't anything (to
temporary delusions) (they really count only as one)
- Beth Orton's Central Reservation
- Radiohead's Kid A
- Mogway's Come on die young
- Tortoise's TNT
So... no interesting tech questions to manage here. Oh! I
read the "Occasionaly Asked Questions" by Telsa, and got to
laugh a lot. She must be an excellent person. No coding
night, sorry :) Tonight, is straight sleep, and a very long
one, I presume.
be seeing you
buckley
12th August
No coding again. I'm really getting lazy... Woke up at
lunch time, and had a couple of fruit pieces for it. Spent
the first part of the afternoon getting dumb: just watching
tv, listening to Mojave 3 and Radiohead and playing chess
against the computer. At late afternoon I was challenged to
play Beach Volei with a Brazilian guy against 2 germans.
Quite tall, really stupid. They lost 15-4. Big us! :) At
night, went with some new friends to play a couple of songs
with them and have some longandboringconversations about
nothing. And had a *long* and interesting chat with a local
friend: Graça who has this beautiful voice and whose
favourite band is Soundgarden. (List of my 5 female
favourite singers (may change by mood): 1) PJ Harvey 2)
Chan Mitchell 3) Sarah Bettens 4) Beth Orton 5) Axelle
Reed) Shared a couple of beautiful messages with Natasha,
and dedicated her a song at a local bar, that I wrote last
week, named "Lose myself in you". Now that I'm home I'll
probably end up hacking phpwiki. I was thinking about
rewriting it, but maybe it's not worth the shot. I already
added a Guest Book, file based, but my counter is not
working, and I'm unconnected to get some help... lucky me.
But it should be something easy that's missing, or what. I
designed a nice, menu-at-the-right, blue template for it,
and am finishing drawing the pics, using gimp.
be seeing you
buckley
13th August
having friends near makes your code suck a lot! oh well,
whatever. Since last night's great perfomance, I made a few
friends and I hanged over today with them... Usual stuff
during the day... beat the computer twice in three games in
gnuchess and watched reboot. Recorded the theatre "The
Lesson" by Eugéne Ionesco that was passing on TV2, our
Portuguese Cultural Channel, that passes Sonic Youth
reports also. As I read the book and thought it was
fascinnating... The theatre was ok, not excellent but not
awful either. I enjoyed it. Tonight's performance was not
too bad, but two mates splited so was kind of boring...
Just played two originals, and the rest was stuff like Beth
Orton's Sweetest Decline, Modest Mouse's 3rd Planet and
Lemonheads' Favorite T. My counter finally works... while
watching the recording I finished coding it. I'm leaving
the day after tomorrow, and I miss Natasha a lot!
be seeing you
buckley