“announces”

Yesterday I got deported from the US on my way back from my mom’s 50th birthday in Mexico. Visa revoked for a year. I’m alright, friends. Saddened and stunned, yet exhilarated by the challenge. The world beckons.

I have so much to write about all this, I remember it so vividly… Expect a long post no longer than tonight.

As part of our WUXMs (Weekly User Experience Meetups, a tiny event of fine people), Chris crafted Tonight Radio, a very cool mashup to listen to the bands playing in town tonight, this week, this month; the idea is to make it easier to find and sample new cool bands to go watch live.

I was going to wait announcing it until I got my Caltrain timetable redesign finished but today Tonight Radio won mashup of the day and I couldn’t hold any longer.

41 days delta! That’s more than 10% of a year of silence and more than ever before. Frankly, I’ve been too busy living, trying everything I’ve been able to and coming to grips with my new life and how I want to live it. Now that I’m a bit more settled I want to again take the time to write here—I’ve wonderful stories, thoughts, and discoveries to share. So see you soon! (In the meanwhiles I’m frequently updating both my my twitter and my flickr)

I’d rather be me, right now, right here —an upper middle class 22-year-old male Mexican in Guadalajara—, than any other human —emperor, king, sultan, noble, philosopher, artist, scientist, genius,...— from any time before, any place. We have been humans for some 15 thousands years and there’s no time past I’d rather be at.

I don’t mean this as some outburst of excitement, it’s just a calm realization that downed on me a while ago, out of the blue—a surprising measure of the reality of progress, the splendor of the present, the promise of the future.

There are now almost a quarter of a thousand tags densely covering every single post I’ve written since February 8, 2006. Hopefully, these will mean a better related posts, better serendipity. The categories themselves should also be a nice way to navigate around the archives. Among the many new categories, there were many surprises, like questions, arguments, rain, touching, or three, and there were many, many long overdue ones, like interesting people, inspiration, introductions, sex, symbols, ethics, venting, transhumanism, or experiments.

After commenting, you can now choose to be notified by email of new comments to the post. This is long overdue and the hope is it will keep conversations alive. You don’t need to comment to subscribe by email to a post’s comments, you can subscribe right through the new form at the beginning of the comment section. Finally, you can now subscribe by email to the posts themselves, to all of them or only the favorites, and even just to a weekly digest (sent on Sundays). The subscription form is right below the ELZR logo. These should be an easier way to keep track of this blog than RSS (which a surprising amount of people still don’t have the foggiest idea about).

Apropos of Elie Wiesel, I’m in the strange process of choosing a name for myself that Americans can pronounce. Most automatically  call me “ely” (ee-lie, rhymes with fry) but I’m not a big fan. I think I’m going to go with “elie” (eh-lee, rhymes with jelly), which I like the sound of. Plus, I totally dig girlboy names.

A fun thing, renaming oneself. We should do it more often.

Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.

But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.

The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.

After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.

The 2month silence was worth it. Brace yourself.

A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is raw sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.

Espanhol llano es espanhol escrito sin acentos, ñ (que se suele sustituir por nh, nn o simplemente n), dieresis o signos de puntuacion iniciales (¿¡).

Perfectamente inteligible para hablantes del dialecto ortografico dominante, el espanhol llano entra en auge a la par que el teclado, cuya dificultad intrinseca para escribir caracteres especiales se vuelve el argumento original a su favor. Hoy en dia las razones para usarlo son enormemente variadas.