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I took the pledge (quoted below), have you? I took it WITH a little modification, if I ever do send any other mail that could be seen as resend-able or forward-able to groups of people, I’ll use BCC and ask the recipients to do the same if they are to resend or forward said material.

Note: The following text is a quote of the article on Roger Ebert on Wikipedia (see the original text here).

The Boulder Pledge is a personal promise, first coined by Roger Ebert in 1996, not to purchase anything offered through email spam. The pledge is worded by Ebert as follows:

“Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

Ebert coined the term during a panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs in 1996. He wrote the text which appears above and encouraged everyone to take the pledge. It was subsequently published in the December 1996 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, where Ebert had a regular column, under the title of “Enough! A Modest Proposal to End the Junk Mail Plague.”

Here are the songs, words (or term) and pictures for the first fortnight (fortnight means 14 days) of the year, since I decided I’d pick a song, a word and take a picture worth sharing each day (or two, if I skipped a day earlier).

The songs, normally pop into my head or I listen to them on a commercial, on the radio, or are a suggestion that a friend made like a casual thing. Most of the time, I think of the song as if it could be a “soundtrack” for a said moment, and when they pop into my head it’s the “… hmmm, what’s the name of that song again? …”, as if it was in some kind of radio inside my head, sometimes It takes a lot of effort (and friend’s effort) to properly “tag” them.

Songs (you can listen to them via grooveshark, it’s awesome ):

• Toque Profundo – Cria Cuervos
• Tenacious D – The Metal
• Royksopp – Remind me
• Cake – Never, Never Gonna Gonna Give You Up
• Epica – The Obsessive Devotion
• The Prodigy – Poison
• Queen – Another one bites the dust
• Metallica – Eye of the Beholder
• Metallica – Am I Evil?
• Real Life – Send Me An Angel
• I feel pretty (West Side Story soundtrack)
• L. Carlton ft. Lee Ritenoir – Closed Door Jam
• A Perfect Circle – Pet (thanks to redzkull for sharing)
• Paul Simon – You Can Call Me Al

The words (or terms). Be them news, messages, forum posts, stumbled upon links, comments people say, I ALWAYS find an interesting word, be it new or known, if it’s still in my head by the end of the day, that was the word of the day . Sometimes a day has more than one interesting/awesome word, I use them as spares if the other day’s word isn’t as interesting.

Since I’m bilingual, I’ll have to apologize for the “mixed” words in english and spanish.

Words/terms:

• cochlea
• stem cell
• paranoia
• waffle : I ate wafflecakes (a mix between pancake and waffle; and btw, waffle > pancake)
• galantear
• acurrucarse
• cuchifrito : via a friend on twitter (mishyfu)
• groundhog : a friend at the office called another a marmot, a groundhog is a type of marmot.
• procrastinate : via two friends on twitter (redzkull and selene82)
• half
• snazzy : was mentioned in the ABCD’s (A Basic Course on Dvorak) first lesson.
• earthquake : sad day of the 7.0 quake near Port-au-Prince in Haiti, January 12, 2010.
• foster
• freno

Pictures are on my Project365 set on flickr (feel free to leave comments/critique there or here), some numbers are mismatched between the day of the year and the number of the picture, but that’s because I either didn’t take a picture on that day (for whatever reason), or I took a portrait or a picture that had a brand name in it, and I don’t wish to make free publicity OR shatter someone’s privacy.

The purpose of taking these “Project365″ pictures is to learn to do stuff with my camera or practice what I already know, and being able to produce one shareable picture a day sounded like a good challenge. The pictures in the set are at most just slightly edited (added the watermark, cropped, resized, and maybe some tint or hue manipulation).

Pictures:

“Esperanza”, which literally translates to “hope” in english,  is what people here (and some other spanish-speaking countries) call this bug (Katydid/Tettigoniidae).

My conclusion… hope is very ugly!

Esperanza/Katydid/Tettigoniidae on my ceiling

Tartan pattern on one of my favorite shirts

A friend reminded me of my comfy-wear today. Here’s a short description of what I call comfy-wear.

• Tartan long sleeve shirt (pattern shown in the picture), preferably in full cotton or similar soft cloths, with the sleeves rolled up to just above the elbows and not tucked in, with a white full cotton t-shirt under it, and normally one pen and a permanent marker on the pocket.
• Thick and semi-loose cotton pants with big pockets, or soft loose jeans.
• Brown thick leather two-strap sandals with a back strap, these had a very comfortable-like-a-sneaker-shoe feeling to the straps, not the usual leather-to-your-skin sandals.
• All these in dark colors, wine-red, green, blue, brown, black.
• No rings, watches, bracelets, or other jewelry-type thingies.
• My backpack with all my stuff. I have, over the years learnt to consider it part of my clothing.

So this is how I used to go to school, and I loved it. I have had to stop using it because now I have a job with a big business/corporate atmosphere and go to school from work.

So, I was this guy, going around on those clothes, long hair worn loose and beard, with glasses, and on bad-hair days a simple loose ponytail, and/or a baseball hat without any logos in the same tartan pattern or plain, same dark colors mentioned before.

Yes, I’m a geek, and that’s how I like to dress since it is as comfortable as it gets, and no crummy/crufty/untidy aura that might be related to such loosely worn garments, needless to say I always remain clean good smelling.

And yes, I like tartan/plaid/checked-patterns on clothes.

Note: took the liberty of highlighting some stuff by putting them in bold. I apologize for any mistakes in the lyrics transcription, since I didn’t find any reliable source for them.

“Short Skirt/Long Jacket” by Cake:

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond.
I want a girl who knows what’s best.
I want a girl with shoes that cut,
And eyes that burn like cigarettes.

I want a girl with the right allocations,
Who’s fast and thorough,
And sharp as a tack.
She’s playing with her jewelry.
She’s putting up her hair.
She’s touring the facility,
And picking up slack.

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket…

I want a girl who gets up early.
I want a girl who stays up late.
I want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity,
Who uses a machete to cut through red tape;
With fingernails that shine like justice,
And a voice that is dark like tinted glass.

She is fast, thorough,
And sharp as a tack,
She’s touring the facility,
And picking up slack.

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long… long jacket.

I want a girl with a smooth liquidation.
I want a girl with good dividends.
At Citibank we will meet accidentally,
We’ll start to talk when she borrows my pen.

She wants a car with a cupholder arm rest,
She wants a car that will get her there,
She’s changing her name from Kitty to Karen,
She’s trading her MG for a white Chrysler La Baron.

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket…

Read more at Wikipedia:Short Skirt/Long Jacket.

Just a little note… today one of the least expected things in the office happened… my boss prompted me to join his mafia in facebook… go figure.

Note: This post turned out to be pretty long for my own reading/writing standards, feel free to take bio breaks while reading. There’s also NO TLDR version.

First of all, credit to whom is due, Rappelz is a game by nFlavor/Gala-Net Inc, and all the graphics and screenshots are of the game and grabbed/taken by one of my best friends (their character names on the screenshots) of the Tortus server.

I’ve started playing a new (for me) mmorpg, Rappelz. I have three friends playing it, specially two of my best friends, and enjoying it, and since it’s free I dediced I’d give it a try.

I’ve not gotten to level my character too high, but I’m working on it and have gotten at least a taste of what the game is. At the moment I have a Gaia Fighter, at level 32, and job level 30 named Deneor in the Tortus server, he’s on the process of being an Archer.

I decided to write this review for a couple of reasons:

1. As feedback to my friends that already play the game, so that they know the awesome things we have on the game they are playing and the things we are missing in it.
2. As feedback for the game developers (see #1).
3. As an overview/introduction for anyone that approaches this game without knowing anyone that plays it.

Continue reading…

Note: This is a re-post, with or without allusion to When freedom expired…, this is by no means a declaration of intent anyways, I put it here because I find it extremely educational and nurturing to the old points I knew about this. I took the liberty of modifying a bit the format of the <pre>’d text and abbreviated some words on long lines to better fit the theme of my blog. Sorry, there’s a line I decided not to break and couldn’t abbreviate, live with it.

Everything below this line is a re-post from OpenBSD Journal – Tunnelling out of corporate networks (Part 1), credit to whom is due.

Continue reading…

Word of the day: Moronic

According to wordnetweb.princeton.edu:

Moron: S: (n) idiot, imbecile, cretin, moron, changeling, half-wit, retard (a person of subnormal intelligence)

<rant>

Due to some moronic rules/policies or the people that came up with them… or the people that weren’t fit for a “loose” system made the system tighten… now I see a message like this:

Content is blocked by your organization

Reason: This category of ___________ is being filtered: Social Networking and Personal Sites

URL: <URLHERE>

Funny that on some sites something like this reads:

To view sites on this category, you must use your quota time. You are provided with 60 minutes of quota. Click on the button “Use quota” to begin to use your allotted time in periods of 10 minutes to view this and other sites on categories limited by quota.

So, now we see that the system was too loose for some (immature) people, and now they made the whole thing tighter to the point of making the misfits as well as everyone else uncomfortable, everyone, including those who did NOT abuse their freedom which is why I find this moronic. Now I think the one that’s not fitting is me.

What will I do? Use the channels that the system lets me to, until I can find a way to change the system, or to change systems altogether.

</rant>

Note: Will update this later with the correct/linked definition from the princeton.edu… yes… it’s blocked too so had to grab it from somewhere else.
Edit: Done.