"Ook al is de verslaafde tien jaar van de dope af, hij kan binnen twee weken opnieuw verslaafd raken, terwijl iemand die nooit eerder gebruikt heeft twee maanden lang elke dag twee shots moet nemen voordat hij verslaafd is. Ik kreeg pas onthoudingsverschijnselen nadat ik gedurende vier maanden elke dag een shot had gezet. Je kunt de verschijnselen van junkziekte beschrijven, maar het is onmogelijk om het gevoel onder woorden te brengen. Pas bij mijn tweede verslaving heb ik ervaren wat junkziekte eigenlijk is. Waarom ontwikkelt een junkie eerder een nieuwe verslaving dan iemand die nog nooit gebruikt heeft, ook al is de junkie al jaren clean? Ik geloof er niets van dat de dope al die tijd in je lichaam op de loer ligt te wachten op een kansje om je te grazen te nemen (je moet 't niet zoeken waar het niet is) en ik neem geen genoegen met alle psychologische verklaringen. Volgens mij veroorzaakt druggebruik een blijvende verandering van de cellen. Eens een junkie, altijd een junkie. Je kunt misschien stoppen met druggebruik, maar je komt nooit meer van je eerste verslaving af."
Uit: William S. Burroughs, Junky.
Do pessoal da Stratfor:
Summary
The International Monetary Fund's latest $8 billion aid package for Argentina fails to address the country's fundamental economic problems, including an unsustainable debt burden, overvalued currency and a stagnant economy in its fourth consecutive year of recession. Government efforts to eliminate the budget deficit will help the Peronist opposition party take control of Congress, and the country will still likely default on its debts by early next year.
Analysis
The International Monetary Fund announced last week it will provide an $8 billion emergency aid package to Argentina, raising the IMF's total outlays to the country since last December to $22 billion. The funds may enable the country to limp along financially until congressional elections on Oct.14, after which the government likely will seek to initiate debt-restructuring talks with its foreign creditors.
Although the aid package has calmed global financial markets momentarily, it fails to address Argentina's fundamental problems, and it will not keep the country from defaulting on its foreign debts by next year, if not sooner.
48 horas e contando. Não esperem muito deste blog nos próximos dias...
Drauzio Varella mandou bem na Folha de hoje:
"A política de convencer a população a cortar carne vermelha da dieta, adotada a 30 anos por diversos países, inclusive pelo Brasil, precisa ser revista. Não só por falta de comprovação de suas vantagens, mas pela possibilidade de causar o estrago de ajudar a engordar a população"
http://www.uol.com.br/fsp/ilustrad/fq2508200123.htm só para assinantes =^(
If you are viewing this message, it means that our planet has been destroyed by some kind of super-weapon.
Thank you for visiting our system, and we hope that you have not been inconvenienced. Have a nice day.
This message placed by the Alderaan Tourist Council - Sen. Bail Organa, Honorary Chairman.
"Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons."
http://www2.netdoor.com/~lainh/alderaan.html
Boa matéria do Ars Technica explicando o que é metadata e porque file name extensions não são uma boa idéia
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q3/metadata/metadata-1.html
We're going to explore the world of getting high? Cool!
No, beavis, not *high* *cool*, hiku--the haunting japanese form of 3 line poetry.
| ||
|
Very good! You both get A's for the day.
I have invented the thing that will make the Internet obsolete! A year from now, people will say "The Internet" and you'll say "What's that?" because you won't remember because you will be using this thing instead. It's dead, it's kaput, it's wrongthink! The Web? Amateur hour! Idiocy! It's a bunch of words with underlines! Usenet? Usenet? It ought to have been put out of its misery in 1990! Ridiculous! It's a bunch of words with no underlines! Where's the interest? Where's the buzz? Where's the heat? E-mail? Half the time it's got a virus in it! Won't anybody think of the children? Instead you will use this thing! It's scalable, it's converged, it's synergetic, it's synergistic, it's all media rolled into a better thing than any one of them! It's like Ginger only without the plastic balls that pop up and down! It's like Java only with a Quake interface. We're going to leverage that knowledge, that instinct for how people interact with computers, but, more importantly, with other people. The Internet isolates us; this will bring us together at long last. Goodbye to bowling alone! It will rework the way we build cities and cut our hair! It's the next big thing! It's the next little thing! It does 3D in a hologram-like way. It's already inside of you! What I have in mind... It's completely modular, object-oriented. It's a solution built for Extreme Programming from the ground up. It's better than the Web because it is fully interactive. It's nothing like TV because it puts you in the picture! It's going to educate our children! The Internet is anathema to good business models; we're going to do it right! Dot-com gone dot-bomb? Not this time because there's no com. There's no dot!
BOW DOWN BEFORE MY PRESS RELEASE!
--
Matt McIrvin
AGRIPPA (A Book of The Dead)
Text by William Gibson
Etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh
(C)1992 Kevin Begos Publishing
1411 York Ave. New York, NY
All Rights Reserved
I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together.
A black book:
ALBUMS
CA. AGRIPPA
Order Extra Leaves
By Letter and Name
A Kodak album of time-burned
black construction paper
The string he tied
Has been unravelled by years
and the dry weather of trunks
Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War
Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen
Until they resemble cigarette-ash
Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite
Now lost
Then his name
W.F. Gibson Jr.
and something, comma,
1924
Then he glued his Kodak prints down
And wrote under them
In chalk-like white pencil:
"Papa's saw mill, Aug. 1919."
A flat-roofed shack
Against a mountain ridge
In the foreground are tumbled boards and offcuts
He must have smelled the pitch, In August
The sweet hot reek
Of the electric saw
Biting into decades
Next the spaniel Moko
"Moko 1919"
Poses on small bench or table
Before a backyard tree
His coat is lustrous
The grass needs cutting
Beyond the tree,
In eerie Kodak clarity,
Are the summer backstairs of Wheeling,
West Virginia
Someone's left a wooden stepladder out
"Aunt Fran and [obscured]"
Although he isn't, this gent
He has a "G" belt-buckle
A lapel-device of Masonic origin
A patent propelling-pencil
A fountain-pen
And the flowers they pose behind so solidly
Are rooted in an upright length of whitewashed
concrete sewer-pipe.
Daddy had a horse named Dixie
"Ford on Dixie 1917"
A saddle-blanket marked with a single star
Corduroy jodpurs
A western saddle
And a cloth cap
Proud and happy
As any boy could be
"Arthur and Ford fishing 1919"
Shot by an adult
(Witness the steady hand
that captures the wildflowers
the shadows on their broad straw hats
reflections of a split-rail fence)
standing opposite them,
on the far side of the pond,
amid the snake-doctors and the mud,
Kodak in hand,
Ford Sr.?
And "Moma July, 1919"
strolls beside the pond,
in white big city shoes,
Purse tucked behind her,
While either Ford or Arthur, still straw-hatted,
approaches a canvas-topped touring car.
"Moma and Mrs. Graham at fish hatchery 1919"
Moma and Mrs. G. sit atop a graceful concrete
arch.
"Arthur on Dixie", likewise 1919,
rather ill at ease.
On the roof behind the barn, behind him,
can be made out this cryptic mark:
H.V.J.M.[?]
"Papa's Mill 1919", my grandfather most regal amid a wrack of
cut lumber,
might as easily be the record
of some later demolition, and
His cotton sleeves are rolled
to but not past the elbow,
striped, with a white neckband
for the attachment of a collar.
Behind him stands a cone of sawdust some thirty feet in height.
(How that feels to tumble down,
or smells when it is wet)
II.
The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
Now in high-ceiling bedrooms,
unoccupied, unvisited,
in the bottom drawers of veneered bureaus
in cool chemical darkness curl commemorative
montages of the country's World War dead,
just as I myself discovered
one other summer in an attic trunk,
and beneath that every boy's best treasure
of tarnished actual ammunition
real little bits of war
but also
the mechanism
itself.
The blued finish of firearms
is a process, controlled, derived from common
rust, but there
under so rare and uncommon a patina
that many years untouched
until I took it up
and turning, entranced, down the unpainted
stair,
to the hallway where I swear
I never heard the first shot.
The copper-jacketed slug recovered
from the bathroom's cardboard cylinder of
Morton's Salt
was undeformed
save for the faint bright marks of lands
and grooves
so hot, stilled energy,
it blistered my hand.
The gun lay on the dusty carpet.
Returning in utter awe I took it so carefully up
That the second shot, equally unintended,
notched the hardwood bannister and brought
a strange bright smell of ancient sap to life
in a beam of dusty sunlight.
Absolutely alone
in awareness of the mechanism.
Like the first time you put your mouth
on a woman.
III.
"Ice Gorge at Wheeling
1917"
Iron bridge in the distance,
Beyond it a city.
Hotels where pimps went about their business
on the sidewalks of a lost world.
But the foreground is in focus,
this corner of carpenter's Gothic,
these backyards running down to the freeze.
"Steamboat on Ohio River",
its smoke foul and dark,
its year unknown,
beyond it the far bank
overgrown with factories.
"Our Wytheville
House Sept. 1921"
They have moved down from Wheeling and my father wears his
city clothes. Main Street is unpaved and an electric streetlamp is
slung high in the frame, centered above the tracked dust on a
slack wire, suggesting the way it might pitch in a strong wind,
the shadows that might throw.
The house is heavy, unattractive, sheathed in stucco, not native
to the region. My grandfather, who sold supplies to contractors,
was prone to modern materials, which he used with
wholesaler's enthusiasm. In 1921 he replaced the section of brick
sidewalk in front of his house with the broad smooth slab of poured
concrete, signing this improvement with a flourish, "W.F.
Gibson 1921". He believed in concrete and plywood
particularly. Seventy years later his signature remains, the slab
floating perfectly level and charmless between mossy stretches of
sweet uneven brick that knew the iron shoes of Yankee horses.
"Mama Jan. 1922" has come out to sweep the concrete with a
broom. Her boots are fastened with buttons requiring a special instrument.
Ice gorge again, the Ohio, 1917. The mechanism closes. A
torn clipping offers a 1957 DeSOTO FIREDOME, 4-door Sedan,
torqueflite radio, heater and power steering and brakes, new
w.s.w. premium tires. One owner. $1,595.
IV
He made it to the age of torqueflite radio
but not much past that, and never in that town.
That was mine to know, Main Street lined with
Rocket Eighty-eights,
the dimestore floored with wooden planks
pies under plastic in the Soda Shop,
and the mystery untold, the other thing,
sensed in the creaking of a sign after midnight
when nobody else was there.
In the talc-fine dust beneath the platform of the
Norfolk & Western
lay indian-head pennies undisturbed since
the dawn of man.
In the banks and courthouse, a fossil time
prevailed, limestone centuries.
When I went up to Toronto
in the draft,
my Local Board was there on Main Street,
above a store that bought and sold pistols.
I'd once traded that man a derringer for a
Walther P-38.
The pistols were in the window
behind an amber roller-blind
like sunglasses.
I was seventeen or so but basically I guess
you just had to be a white boy.
I'd hike out to a shale pit and run
ten dollars worth of 9mm
through it, so worn you hardly
had to pull the trigger.
Bored, tried shooting
down into a distant stream but
one of them came back at me
off a round of river rock
clipping walnut twigs from a branch
two feet above my head.
So that I remembered the mechanism.
V.
In the all night bus station
they sold scrambled eggs to state troopers
the long skinny clasp-knives called fruit knives
which were pearl handled watermelon-slicers
and hillbilly novelties in brown varnished wood
which were made in Japan.
First I'd be sent there at night only
if Mom's carton of Camels ran out,
but gradually I came to value
the submarine light, the alien reek
of the long human haul, the strangers
straight down from Port Authority
headed for Nashville, Memphis, Miami.
Sometimes the Sheriff watched them get off
making sure they got back on.
When the colored restroom
was no longer required
they knocked open the cinderblock
and extended the magazine rack
to new dimensions,
a cool fluorescent cave of dreams
smelling faintly and forever of disinfectant,
perhaps as well of the travelled fears
of those dark uncounted others who,
moving as though contours of hot iron,
were made thus to dance
or not to dance
as the law saw fit.
There it was that I was marked out as a writer,
having discovered in that alcove
copies of certain magazines
esoteric and precious, and, yes,
I knew then, knew utterly,
the deal done in my heart forever,
though how I knew not,
nor ever have.
Walking home
through all the streets unmoving
so quiet I could hear the timers of the traffic lights a block away:
the mechanism.
Nobody else, just the silence
spreading out
to where the long trucks groaned
on the highway
their vast brute souls in want.
VI.
There must have been a true last time
I saw the station but I don't remember
I remember the stiff black horsehide coat
gift in Tucson of a kid named Natkin
I remember the cold
I remember the Army duffle
that was lost and the black man in Buffalo
trying to sell me a fine diamond ring,
and in the coffee shop in Washington
I'd eavesdropped on a man wearing a black tie
embroidered with red roses
that I have looked for ever since.
They must have asked me something
at the border
I was admitted
somehow
and behind me swung the stamped tin shutter
across the very sky
and I went free
to find myself
mazed in Victorian brick
amid sweet tea with milk
and smoke from a cigarette called a Black Cat
and every unknown brand of chocolate
and girls with blunt-cut bangs
not even Americans
looking down from high narrow windows
on the melting snow
of the city undreamed
and on the revealed grace
of the mechanism,
no round trip.
They tore down the bus station
there's chainlink there
no buses stop at all
and I'm walking through Chiyoda-ku
in a typhoon
the fine rain horizontal
umbrella everted in the storm's Pacific breath
tonight red lanterns are battered,
laughing,
in the mechanism.
.
Deu no HOTbits:
O programador russo Dmitry Sklyarov, preso nos EUA sob a acusação de ter infringido a lei de copyright, foi solto nesta segunda-feira mediante o pagamento de US$ 50 mil. Ele deverá ficar no estado da Califórnia aguardando seu julgamento.
http://www.hotbits.com.br/p1/cosmonet/2001/08/0016
Cringely mandando bem, como a Micro$oft pretende substituir o TCP/IP por um protocolo proprietário e virar a dona da Internet. Um pouco teoria da conspiração, mas perturbadoramente coerente.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html
Deep in engineering, where mortals seldom go
A manager and customer come looking for a show;
They pass, amused, among us and they sign in on the log
They've come to see our pony and they've come to see our dog.
Three things to be wary of: A new kid in his prime,
A man that knows the answers, and code that runs first time.
Summoned from our cubicles, to conference room we go
We bring our dog and pony, 'cause we know they'll want a show,
Watching while we enter, with a shifty, restless eye
The customer sits waiting in his pin-striped suit and tie.
Three things never trust in: That's the vendor's final bill,
The promises your boss makes and the customer's good will.
The pony kicks his heels up as the doggie does his trick,
And hams it up with vigor as we lay it on real thick;
The customer just watches as we do this song and dance
Then reaches for his briefcase, only giving us a glance.
Three things see no end: a loop with exit code done wrong,
A semaphore untested, and the change that comes along.
From briefcase then there comes a list of things we must revise;
And all but four within the room are taken by surprise.
And all but four are thinking of their last job with remorse,
The customer, the manager, the doggie and the horse.
Three things hold no secrets: files that somehow hit the net
The boss's secretary, and the third thing ... I forget.
First, twenty-one new features that we somehow must add in
Then, thirty-seven changes show up, much to our chagrin;
And this thing's just inadequate, and that thing's just plain wrong
And, by the way, your schedule's about three months too long.
Three things it is better far that only you should know:
How much you're paid, the schedule pad, and what is just for show.
The customer proceeds to go through each change, line by line
Excruciating detail which no logic can divine;
And when it ends, there's only four not sitting there agog
The customer, the manager, the pony and the dog.
Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your deck,
The one who does the backup and the one who signs your check.
Now we are contract software types who spend our days and nights
Imbedded in the system, down with all the bits and bytes;
And none but us can tell full well the damage done today,
It's what they do not know for which they're gonna have to pay.
Three things are most perilous: connectors that corrode
Unproven algorithms and self-modifying code.
The manager and customer are quick to leave this bunch
They take the dog and pony, and they all go out to lunch;
Now how will we avenge ourselves on those who raise our ire?
Write code that self-destructs the day the warranties expire.
Three things trust above all else: Your knowledge of your craft,
That someone turns a profit, and that you will get the shaft.
From: Mark Gibbs / Gibbs & Co. / 805.644.4999 / www.gibbs.com
Deu no TidBITS:
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty died last Monday at age 92. Welty was a lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi, and an icon of American literature. Among her best known works are the short story collection The Golden Apples and the novels Losing Battles and The Optimist's Daughter; two of her works (The Ponder Heart and The Robber Bridegroom) also became Broadway plays. Her stories tended to focus on the lives of sheltered characters in southern America, but also quietly contradict easy categorization into any particular genre. Welty is also noted for her photographs, particularly images of the South during the Great Depression taken when she was working as a "junior publicity agent" for the Works Progress Administration.
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms- writers/dir/welty_ eudora/
In relation to the Macintosh world, the popular email program Eudora is named for Eudora Welty, specifically because of her famous short story "Why I Live At The P.O.," published in her first collection in 1941. Programmer Steve Dorner read the story in college, and it was still with him years later when it came time to name the first version of his new email program.
[Geoff Duncan]
http://www.eudora.com/presskit/backgrounder.html
Duas recomendações: leia o conto e use o programa.