Estação dos Combatentes

Since I chan­ged to a Mac I never nee­ded to use a word pro­ces­sor. So I never wor­ked neither with Pages neither with Micro­soft Word for the OS X.
Last week I was assig­ned to write a paper for the Game The­ory sub­ject with 6 to 10 pages. Even before I chose a sub­ject (since it was free, as along as it was rela­ted with Game The­ory, I took some time to cho­ose it) I deci­ded I would use Pages. I know exac­tly what to expect from Micro­soft Word, I tried it thou­sands of times, I used it for wri­ting my entire life (with some excep­ti­ons to Vim for wri­ting LaTeX docu­ments) and so this would be a won­der­ful time for trying out a new word pro­ces­sor.
Pages is pretty clean, the default tem­pla­tes are very nice and they look very good. I liked the fact that I could drag a pic­ture from Safari direc­tly into the cover page.
So I star­ted to write. My paper is about the won­der­ful sub­ject of Mixed Stra­te­gies in Game The­ory. I wrote one page and a half and I was very happy with my Pages expe­ri­ence. I saved my work and went home.

Today, the unthin­ka­ble hap­pe­ned.
I was wri­ting for about an hour, I had writ­ten another page and a half and I wan­ted to insert some mathe­ma­ti­cal for­mula. I found the option that would allow me to do that on one of the menus and clic­ked it. Pages crashed and I chose the option to relaunch it, of course. I was expec­ting to lose some of my work but I lost everything I wrote today. I was so sad. I never expec­ted any word pro­ces­sor not to have a auto-save option acti­va­ted by default and I never expec­ted any word pro­ces­sor not to have a tem­po­rary file that he would be able to reco­ver if the soft­ware crashed.

Yes, it was my fault because I didn’t save my work regu­larly. But still, word pro­ces­sors must have a way of taking care of that. In case we forget.

So remem­ber kids, com­pu­ter les­son num­ber 5489793: always save your work with regularity.

EDIT: Wiki­pe­dia really has all the infor­ma­tion a per­son needs to survive.

The name of the author is the first to go
fol­lowed obe­di­en­tly by the title, the plot,
the heart­bre­a­king con­clu­sion, the entire novel
which sud­denly beco­mes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

No won­der you rise in the mid­dle of the night
to look up the date of a famous bat­tle in a book on war.
No won­der the moon in the win­dow seems to have drif­ted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

a beau­ti­ful poem by Billy Col­lins

An ama­zing set of pic­tu­res on Flickr about art and how to explain it to geeks

here

Jogar Manhunt e ouvir a Love Will Tear Us Apart é uma com­bi­na­ção bas­tante… caricata.

Numa dinâ­mica muito a pen­sar que a minha opi­nião conta para alguma coisa, faço aqui uma lista de alguns links inte­res­san­tes que vi nos últi­mos tempos:

• Rands In Repose: The Nerd Hand­book — inte­res­sante artigo sobre mim escrito pelo grande Rands
• Playing Video Games Redu­ces Sex Dif­fe­ren­ces In Spa­tial Skills — com que então os jogos elec­tró­ni­cos não ser­vem de nada?
• Bús­sola — um blog essen­cial para toda a malta do norte. Cla­ra­mente um blog a seguir com aten­ção e que conta com per­so­na­li­da­des do Porto na lista de auto­res, como Manuel Ser­rão ou Júlio Magalhães.

…a cami­nho de casa.

Um dia, quando for grande e adulto e cres­cido, vou a Ang­kor Wat con­tar todos os meus segre­dos a quem os qui­ser ouvir. Nem que seja a um buraco na parede.

Wong Kar, seu maluco, ca ganda filme!

A Poló­nia é o melhor país do mundo por­que tem uma rua em home­na­gem a Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Algum voca­bu­lá­rio útil sobre o uni­verso Star Wars:

• Ciemna Strona Mocy — Dark Side of the Force
• Jasna Strona Mocy — Light Side of The Force
• Gwi­azda Śmierci — Death Star
• Sojusz Rebe­li­an­tów — Rebel Alliance
• Impe­rium Galaktyczne — Gala­tic Empire

Niech Moc będ­zie z Tobą!
(Que a força esteja contigo!)

• 5 da tarde
• Quarto 426
• Pink Floyd a tocar
• Bom café

PS-Obrigado Yann-Loic e Joana pelo quarto e pelo café, respectivamente.