Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet

Because I am a dumb person who's still awake at this hour and keeps forgetting she's not in her twenties anymore and brain will complain in the morning.
As I said, because I still master the art of procrastination, I thought about checking what's the status of LiveJournal. Interestingly, I see many of you still seem to use it regularly.
In this day and age of moving trends, I'm curious: why do you still use LJ? And in which ways has LJ evolved (or devolved) in the past, oh, 5 years?

And how are you? :)
(I'll create a private post with a poll if you want to tell me anything more privately)

P x

Apparently it's strange that being automatically a British Citizen from birth, having lived and studied in England a rather good sum of years and being 30...

... I am only now asking for a British Passport.

When I asked to please explain the difference between citizenship and nationality, which I have yet to fully grasp I got a "It's rather complicated...", but apparently I am both.

PS: I might have to pop by Lisbon in the next few days, though. Anyone want to meet up?

Calling all agents!

It's for Cancer Research UK and the fab jvvw is behind it. Go play it, that's an order!

Operation: Sleeper Cell

Quoting: "It's free to play (though it'd be lovely to see some of the cells on the grid sponsored with pretty pictures). There are puzzles, a story, live stuff and lots more that I can't tell you about. Please do play and please do tell people about it."

What do you lot make of this article from this week's Economist?

The triumph of feminism
America’s feminists may have lost a battle or two. But they are winning the war

*nod to pmsac who will probably like a new public entry*

I'm back from holidays at the beach looking rather good, it seems. And I am feeling good, very energetic! Well, not so much at the moment... I think I caught a cold.

But on to more techie things.

I am starting to get things on the move with regards to changing to a different country and getting a job. Still too early to say anything, though.

In the meantime, I have two new projects (I'll be adding them to my webpage soon):

• An Idiot's Guide to Elliptic Curves (this will surely interest ciphergoth at least). It would be an online guide that would serve as support material to the vast resources already available covering the theory of Elliptic Curves. The idea is to provide the intuition behind the mathematics of elliptic curves as opposed to the underlying formal notions and proofs (which are, nevertheless, essential in the study of elliptic curves). It would be aimed at beginners, cryptographers and those looking for a specific intuition to better understand some notion or proof.
  
  It also gives me the opportunity to learn Django (and Python)


• Mapping experts to projects. This would be a proposal for a system that chooses among proposed projects to be assigned grants: each project is assigned a committee of two experts that grade the project according to whether it should or not be financed. The underlying mechanics is a Collaborative Filtering type of scenario: both projects and academic experts auto-assign keywords (ACM keywords, most likely) according to relevant themes and areas of expertise, respectively, and the algorithm should do a best match and distribution according to these. Also, there are a few other constraints that would work as weights in the decision algorithm.
  
  It gives me the opportunity to learn about Collective Inteligence, namely Collaborative Filtering (I still have to see if I need more complex mechanisms, which I probably will). Also, more Python!

In the meantime, I still have pontoBI's (re)design with Joana which is quite serious and for which I'm considering using Drupal as Joana will most likely be using PHP and I need a Content Management System. I've been wasting way too much timeplaying with Photoshop and the layout for both pontoBI and the subdomain BiPorto, a completely separate webpage to be hosted by pontoBI dedicated to the meeting group in Porto.

While we're at it, during the holidays I revised the Portuguese translations in the Security area of Mozilla Firefox 3 as a favour to the translator. Things I learned: when printing CVS, choose a bigger font (headache reason 1), I'm even worst at translating technical stuff that has to fit in 32 bytes UTF-8 than normal stuff (headache reason 2) and Firefox has a huge list of messages and buttons for the smallest possible things (headache reason 3).

Still, I quite liked looking at the internals of a monster like Firefox. Last time I did was when I was looking at the plugin API and how Netscape (!) and Mozilla were handling it. This was in 2000, when plugins were still quite new. Things have moved a long way away from 1995 for open software indeed...

... as my ex-neighbour's cousin would say.

The monthly bi social meeting this Wednesday, that is.

Not the most populated but much was talked about and it was even constructive and organised and not simply a group of people babbling about this and that and everything else over eachother's voices. Aha!

Met someone who wrote a queer studies themed book... I don't know of many people doing queer studies here in Portugal (I might even know them all!).

Aaaaaaaanyway, among stuff about bi material (eg: pins) and a dinner and venue... the monthly meetings will now start to have themes, voted for each 3 months over a list of ongoing suggestions. So at the moment, this is the list of suggestions. I will likely bother some of you in the future regarding a few of these.

• Bi activism and visibility
• Asexuality (and sexuality)
• Manifests of a relationship
• Manual of sexual conversation
• Purity tests
• Fantasies and fetishes
• The art of flirting
• Erotic writing
• Sex toys (after the enormous success of last year's one)
• Bi art (books, films, etc)
• Roleplaying and games

We are also planning on holding a meeting where other organisations, groups, collectives and people associated with LGBT activism in Portugal will be invited under the theme "B in LGBT" about the bilateral role of the B in LGBT activism.

Not bad, hey? ;)

Stolen from tHe reindeerflotila:

- Post 3 things you've done in your lifetime that you don't think anybody else on your friends list has done;
- See if anybody else responds with "I've done that." If they have, you need to add another!
- Have your friends cut and paste this into their journal to see what unique things they've done in their life.

Low on inspiration but here goes:

1. Throughout 6 months, I crossed daily an EU/Non-EU border on a bike on my way from home to work and back.


2. After living two decades in a different country, I lived a year in the same building and only a few meters away from where I spent part of my first two years of life (more so, it was an Oxford college hall).


3. I once had a bike accident while on holidays where I ended up being taken to the hospital by strangers, was x-rayed (1st cute male nurse), was treated (2nd cute male nurse), had a go at one-arm wheel-chairing, read while waiting (girl has to entertain herself), was sent away (2nd cute nurse caught me reading, doctor checked my x-rays), got a lift (hotel was 5K away and I could barely walk 5mts), got a lift that was stopping at a pharmacy, got my meds, got back to the hotel, shocked my parents by showing on the door step all strapped up... all in the time a normal bike ride would have taken me on those days.

ETA Bonus one: head-stand on a bouncy castle. On purpose (and not from landing on my head). Proper length of time. BiCon. I have witnesses. 'nuff said.

Today I went to pick my bike from a bike shop where I had left her for a check-up after being stored away behind boxes for 8 years. Threw some toys with the check-up and installed a TorTec Expedition Alloy Rack to pamper my girl, see if she forgave me.

And off we went!

Oh, the balance, the precision, the... something... is certainly not quite there, as demonstrated by my zig-zagging while correcting the position of the front light ("ups, use both hands! use both hands!"). But I instantly remembered how much I love to cycle! I had honestly forgotten the feeling. Of course, I didn't climb any hills so the harsh parts stayed blissfully forgotten. I also recalled I had *those* muscles. Auch auch.

In similar news, I've taken into running. Now running was always my weak spot and I never got into the "zone" as I did with cycling and swimming. After 'bout a month I can safely say the only "zone" I've been is Hell and it's as hot and red as my face and I didn't got anywhere near an exhilarating adrenaline trip. Not even a giggle.

Still think runners are a crazy bunch. Want a private swimming pool, kplstxs.

Also, don't understand how with all that walking and running and going through 3 flights of stairs way too many times a day, I have barely lost a pound. *munches on cookie*

Sleep now.

Note: Goths blacken pillows.

When you do the Half-Moon[1], do you shift your hips in the opposite direction as you bend from the waist, or keep your lower body still throughout the position?

I ask because I keep it still throughout the position. But the Wii Fit requires a (considerable) shift from the hips to centre your centre of gravity that to me feels unnatural.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Doing-It-Right but instead with I'm-Right-The-Machine-Is-Wrong.

[1] legs together, raise arms, join palms, stretch - keeping stomach and bottom tucked in -, bend from the waist to one side, stay, return, opposite side, lower arms

I am currently typing from a couch where a cat has agreed to shift from my belly to my legs so I could half-rise from my nap. (I was told to hide here and take the opportunity to rest, so there).

I was napping because these last few days have been very tiring. I built a closet! And since I cancelled my Gym subscription, I've taken into signing up to Nike+ and (re)start to run ('sides the >5K daily walking and the 3 levels of stairs I climb repeatedly everyday). I decided not to re-sell a recently acquires Wii Fit and it is quite fab indeed! Except for the fact it measures fitness by balance which I have... NON... ZIP... NIENTE...NADA.

And I managed to sleep, alone, in my new fully unpacked room for... one night. I'll be sleeping in the same couch I just napped till saturday.

Why, you ask? 'Cos of the Portuguese Perl Workshop, obviously. Which includes an Intermediate Perl Programming course by brian d foy and presentations by brian d foy, Marty Pauley, Alberto Simões, Yuval Kogman, Cristina Nunes, José Castro and 3 other more.

The list of people dining here today is: me, Joana, Ricardo, Joana's brother, brian d foy, Stacy (brian's wife), Marty Pauley, Karen Pauley, Yuval Kogman, Cristina Nunes and José Castro. Alberto is not comming.

From the dining list, the only people not crashing/living in this house for these few days are Joana's brother, brian d foy and Stacy.

From the dining list, Ricardo and Joana's brother are the exceptions in the Perl community... but they're in IT.

'nuff said.