“emotions”

Have I mentioned how much I love wet, crisp, brisk mornings?

Rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.

My grandfather, Luis Cardenas Chavez, died last Saturday from lung cancer. It was a struggle, a mourning, of many months, many of them at my house, at that room up there ↑.

We buried him yesterday, Father’s day here in Mexico. Next Thursday was to be his 85th birthday.

Maybe it was good that his agony ended but, me, all I see is the many meaningful centuries he could have lived. I don’t say that lightly. He had more life and more lives with him than anyone I’ve known and there was at least that much still inside him. He died young. Never without a reason to wake up every morning, today he won’t.

And I feel like I have to say it because only pleasantries and comforting lies were spoken thick and fast at his most Catholic funeral: he’s dead, absolutely annihilated, choked, nothing left of him. We’ve been robbed, someone precious and irreplaceable has been taken from us, for no reason at all, taken and shattered, and we are never getting him back.^ELZR

We never wrote down his memories as we both once planned.^ELZR Always thought there would be a better time later. There wasn’t. What most disappointed me though was myself and how I reacted to his sickness. Or rather, how I not reacted, how I retracted. Oh I helped along, but I did not fight, didn’t read, didn’t research. I never understood his sickness, his ailments, his medicine. It was the scientific, idealistic, techno-utopian thing to do and I left it undone, I muddled thru.

But, to my horror, on top and despite all the sadness, all the frustration, all the personal disappointment, there’s Christina^WP-frantic, exhilarating sensafreedom thru and thru. At last. Just the six of us.

I felt so trapped in this house for so long. So unhappily submerged in rude relatives that diluted my family in their toxic, stupid undertows. Some days ago I realized sadly it would never be my home again. It was just a place all of a sudden. It’s time to go.

But for now I’m here. And I’m happy to. And it’s rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.

He was a good man.

May 10 yesterday was Mother’s day^WP here in Mexico and it was a messy affair, what with my now heart-wrenchingly weak grandfather back in our house and all the sad, crowded tension. Me, I put particular attention to the music. The undisputed classic poem for the day and inevitable tearbomb at elementary schools across the country is El brindis del bohemio (lyrics: “Sólo faltaba un brindis, el de Arturo, el del bohemio puro, de noble corazón y gran cabeza; aquel que sin ambages declaraba que sólo ambicionaba robarle inspiración a la tristeza.”), most famously declaimed by Juan Manuel Bernal. It is terribly cursi, pure schwarmerei and maudlin gesticulation, but at least it’s unabashedly so and good at it. That said, I’m glad we managed the day without it.

What surprised me yesterday was our reaction, my family’s and my cousins’, late at night and with some alcohol involved, to Denisse De Kalafe’s Señora, señora (lyrics). The song’s of course more than schmaltzy enough for the occasion but it is actually not that bad. And all of a sudden we all started singing it. We had all heard the song countless times and had been forced to learn the lyrics more than once for school recitals. It wasn’t this big emotional singing, at least not at first nor all along. It all started as some sort of joke but the song has a definite mood. And it was good to sing it.

Much less known (at least here in Mexico) is Los Churumbeles’ Cariño Verdad (lyrics), which, again, and this is perhaps inevitable, is guilty of sentimentalism, but it is all drown in some fantastic music. I didn’t even know what the song was about for a long time, always mesmerized by the tune alone.

Oh and one more song: Gloria Trevi’s^WP thankfully-breaking-the-maudlin-mood A la madre, which was actually quite an innovative, playful song back in the time.

btw, I came from the party with a cool CD Faby lent me: Rhythms del Mundo | Cuba. I had heard one of their songs thanks to Chef and it was very intriguing. The project describes itself as a “collaboration of Western artists and the Buena Vista Sound” (as if Latin America wasn’t Western) and the results are oddly arresting (Latin America appropriating the outside world!). It’s pop made salsa. It doesn’t always work wonders but it is always worth hearing. The two best tracks in my opinion are Coldplay’s Clocks and Maroon 5’s She’ll be loved. Check them out.

Can’t believe what a coward I’ve been. I guess it wasn’t until I read recently about how Jon Lech Johansen humilliated Hollywood by releasing a program to easily break DVD’s much vaunted DRM (when he was 15 years old), or about “the college droputs that run >youTVpc.com for millions of people on just two low-end desktop computers that I realized how big a wuss I am.

Take Imagery. In a way, I never wanted it to be very popular because I knew I was doing something maybe-legal by scraping Google. I wanted to scrape Flickr and Yahoo! but feared they would be even less likely to see my scraping in a good light. I wanted to create a picture cache to make Imagery much faster and reliable (and to lessen the leech on independent websites) but fretted about bandwidth costs and about whether people would get angry about my caching.

Or take the Spanish dictionary of the Spanish Language Academy. It’s a tremendously useful, gratis dictionary and yet it has a butt-ugly, nonhumane interface. I’ve been bitching about it for years. And I’ve been thinking about giving it a new interface for that long, but, again, what if they don’t like my scraping? (In all probability they won’t. They’re the quintessential staid, monolithic organization.)

A lot of what ifs. But most importantly, so what? So sue me. Well, actually, most important is that I think these scrapings are an overwhelmingly good thing. I see them as a lot of fun—for me, for the scrapees (who’ll get to see how it’s done, ehem), and for the people who will enjoy just how much they never imagined missing. I see them as criticism by example.

So here’s Domburi and here’s NotReality. The idea of Domburi has changed somewhat from its inception (oh, the shame, so many goals not accomplished), it shall now be a collection of search superpowers instead of limiting itself to imagesearching. I believe, with an arrogance that I can’t believe but that I’ve missed, that I have a thing or two to teach Google in its own turf, not just in forgotten backwaters like imagesearching (where Imagery still kicks Google’s ass easily). So I’m starting really tiny now with only a simple redesign of Google search results (there isn’t even imagesearching yet). I’ll be fleshing it out in the coming days, daily, with the daylog here below.

Not Reality, otoh, is still what I’ve always wanted it to be: my webfront for my interface experiments. It’s really simple now but I’ll be improving it daily too.

So please visit the websites, leave your feedback in this post’s comments, and come back often to check out the daylogs—there are loads of interesting things in the pipeline! Thanks for reading.

12-14/May/07

Endless fiddling on Domburi. Collapse of the incrementalism. Obsession with pipe dreams.

15/May/07

Not Reality


Domburi

1. Ajaxed requests. Loading icon. Everything happens on the same page. Title changes. Very lightweight script behind the scenes: the now deprecated but still unsurpassed moo.ajax.
2. New one-column format with even results shaded. Results turn yellow on mouse over, which is silly interactivity, but surprisingly pleasant. Entire result is a link. No numbers anymore showing order.
3. Displayed URL is now a link that shows results only within the website. This idea from SearchMash, of which I just found out yesterday, and which is a website run by Google where it tries out new interface ideas without the Google brand skewing perception. Very intriguing.
4. Displayed URL is now cased smartly. So instead of greysanatomyinsider.com you get GreysAnatomyInsider.com. It extracts the case from the result’s title, uses some general heuristics (like upcasing after a ), and if all fails, it simply capitalizes.
5. Results displayed in-page. This had been the idea ever since I decided to expand Domburi from image searching. I wanted to make the whole searching experience feel faster and more like what Ben Schneiderman calls direct manipulation. It has been much harder than I thought and it was this point where I spent most of my fiddling (I also played for hours with the two-columns layout…). Here’s what I ended up with.
   
   1. Results seem to open in the entire page, with only the result entry on top. They really open in a full-screen iframe but the effect is surprising. To return to the results you can simply scroll out of the iframe, click the result entry, or…
   2. Pixelside. This is a strange but crucial feature that even if invisible and initially nonintuitive I find very, very promising: it’s simply a 1px-wide, 100%-height leftmost line. Right now you can click on it when on a full-screen result and return to the resultlist (and from there you can click again on it to return to your full-screen result). It is incredibly fast (in Fitt’s law^WP terms, it has “infinite size”), handy, and habituating—and I imagine lots of cool ways to enhance the feature. The only problem is that crappy IE doesn’t allow leftmost pixels! So I’ll have to make up for it with JS. I cringe with only the thought.
   3. The title (but not the entire result, which is JS triggered) is a normal link so if you want to open results in a separate tab just middle-click or CTRL-click it.
6. Strange cool script used. More details to follow. If you’re interested, check out $.
7. Works in Firefox, IE, and Opera. Not tested yet on Safari. Some weird bugs on Safari but it broadly works.

16/May/07—20/Jun/07

10-day trip to the US (haven’t told you about that!) with days way too happily busy. Too many books afterwards (63!) to do anything but read for several wonderful, obsessed days until all the stress and overcrowding of the house finally bring me down. Languishment in captivity.

21/Jun/07

Not Reality

Domburi

# Fixed logo to point correctly at home. Thanks volve!
# CSS fiddling for greater clarity, minor improvements, and cross-broswser compatibility.
# Added Google Analytics tracking.
# Height adjustment menu. A simple (though surprisingly troublesome) addition that makes Domburi much more useful, you can now adjust the height of the embedded windows and so can view  and compare two or three results at the same time! Imagine this with dragging and width-adjustment…

22 and 23/jun/07

Bad time management. Sorry. :)

24/jun/07

Domburi

Not Reality # New Book Section! With great quotes and cool photocovers.

Some weeks ago water vapor was found on HD209458b^WP, an extrasolar planet some 150 light years away. Just yesterday Gliese 581 c^{WP, E} was discovered. With a radius only 50% bigger than that of Earth and within the “habitable zone”^WP—”the region surrounding a star where water would be liquid”—of its star, it is the best candidate so far for extraterrestrial life.

The perennial wild card of the discovery of alien life looks ever closer and I’m teetering already—with excitement, with fear, with awe.

Here some definitions—some funny, but all out of sadness. «Whimsical» to be (mostly) understood in the not so standard sense of “subject to our whims”—of course.

Some inspirations and context:

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…

I don’t even remember how it was that last Thursday morning I ended up reading Sutherland’s classic article. But I’m glad I did. It was exactly what I needed. Thank you Mr Sutherland.

It may only be that my grandfather’s agony has me seeing everything with long-now eyes but these days I’m increasingly aware that I should take precautions in case I die.

I don’t want to die. I don’t shake my head and look away at death, I stand up in defiance. But the fact is our lives are still too fragile and faced with the possibility I would rather think things through.

Which is why I’ve written this short will. I shall edit and refine it as long as I’m living (with the latest version the official one, of course) and so I thought I should start now.

It has taken me some three years to realize it but when I did it was obvious. The crazy sleep schedule I’ve been riding since I dropped out of college is more than the pale-hacker tropism for long quiet nights. It’s more than manic-depression, which for a time I was sure of having. It’s more than youthful immaturity, which I’m sure of having.

I remember the first nights out from college, and some before, I would curl up on my bed, scared as I’ve ever been—fingers curled, fetal, with hamsters in my head and a stomach full of nothing, churning away anyway. Scared of what you say? Oh, the usual I guess, scared of failure, of success, of not being up to the challenge, of blowing it all away in search of some silly dream. Mostly, though, scared of this fear I knew not inside of me.

Those nights stopped without my realizing but I now know what happened to them: I tired them away. I would work (or idle) my way to exhaustion, till there was nothing left for me to do but tumble down. Sleeping was sure easier than facing my fears, and since everything could wait, what was the harm of sleeping on it? Again and again.