Saturday, September 30, 2000

15:36 Barcelona, Reptiles
Scales everywhere: on the roofs of Gaudi houses and on other roofs and pointed towers here and there. Scales also on the detailed descriptions of the Evelmi, the winged reptiles that populated half of the Delany book I finally finished this morning (Stars in my pocket..., see also entry of September 10 ).



Detail of Casa Batlló, Barcelona (Antoni Gaudi, 1905-1907)

Familiar?
- My sister Valeria and her husband Luis are major Barcelona fans. I keep thinking they should move away from Sao Paulo, and imagining the impact that moving countries would have on my three nephews.
- Surrounded by soothing, familiar, irrelevant weather (almost no sense of temperature). The ultimate subtlely.
- In Stars in my pocket... the generations (ripples) of a family (stream) are defined by things other than blood relations or even the species of its member individuals.
- Amazed going up and down the towers of the Sagrada Familia. I still don't understand how Gaudi got away with a plan like that.

¡Posting from yet another easyEverything, dealing with yet another keyboard layout! (QWERTY with the special characters all shifted around - the Ñ occupying a very prominent position).
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Friday, September 29, 2000

01:53 Verhuisbericht / Moving Notice
Latenightpool is finally moving to a new host. That means that several things will work better (search, statistics, links etc). That also means that there will be some DNS turbulence in the coming days. Well, the new host XS4ALL says it could take up to a week (?!?) Some people warned me already that they couldn't get to the pool. Hmmm.

So: advice:
Ignore the pain and keep in mind, at all times, that change is fundamentally good.
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Thursday, September 28, 2000

08:40 TDSOD (that different sort of dream), ca. 1993:

A huge stadium or a similar sort of circular, public building. At the entrances all around the façade masses queue to enter. Inside, a big celebration, game or concert is about to start. You can hear the roar of the public, and also helicopters hovering somewhere. As I look down, I see the wall of the buiding stretching many floors below. I fly smoothly along the circular shell. I sense a few friends around me, we fly together feeling the excitement of what we'll see inside. We're a rearranging cloud, our formation changes lazily as we fly bordering the big round wall. We see some police. We pass by the police. The thrill goes on as we go on flying.

City Hall and Central Library, The Hague (Richard Meier, 1986-1995)
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Wednesday, September 27, 2000

20:35 Whoa.
InfoBeat Fun - Daily Dose - Sept. 27, 2000

The Sun is in Libra. Does your home need a major renovation? Is it time to paint the kitchen? Get new furniture? Move? Don't panic; it doesn't all have to be done in the same moment. Set priorities and break the job into bite-sized bits.

Skypad apartments, Earth (Hanna-Barbera, 1962)


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00:09 TDSOD (that different sort of dream), ca. 1990:

I found out that there were many more people living in my apartment than I could have imagined. It was a disturbing revelation. I didn't know about them before simply because I couldn't see or understand. A sort of wide balcony somehow helped reveal their presence.

I wish I had written this one down at the time. Now I haven't got more than a vague feeling of what actually happened (in the dream).


Copan Building, São Paulo (Oscar Niemeyer, 1951)
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Sunday, September 24, 2000

12:47 In the house
Bad dream last night. I entered my office to find all our stuff was packed or put aside and that the landlord decided to rent the place as a bed and breakfast during the vacation season (!?!). As dreams go, it wasn't really my office, but some vaguely recognizable place where I lived or worked in some time ago, somewhere else. Familiar, but not quite. This situation especially annoying because I could see all the evidence of what had been done but I couldn't find anyone to complain to.

I'm in London
I am here for a long weekend, staying at Paul's apartment. The place has many small details that remind me of my parent's house and that brings up some strange/interesting feelings. Paul has two flatmates. The kitchen and other communal spaces show signs of multiple occupancy: things change place, rooms may be unexpectedly occupied or empty. The bedrooms, on the other hand, are very private, individual. The contrast between the two is something I hadn't experienced in a long time. Other homey things: the carpet. The big table at the kitchen. The gardens around the neighbour houses.

Also: there's a lot of room, compared to how people live in Amsterdam (three bedrooms!). And the plants are many and alive.
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Wednesday, September 20, 2000

01:53 Late-night Info
(links added by me)

Dear Rogerio,

Why the name Eudora?

When looking for a name for this new Post Office Protocol mail program, we thought immediately of the title of the short story "Why I Live at the P.O.," and named the program after the author of the story, Eudora Welty. "Why I Live at the P.O." can be found in a collection entitled A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (Harcourt Brace & Co.). Ms. Welty's stories are funny, sad, and fascinating; she's surely one of the great American writers.

Thank you

Eudora Customer Service

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Sunday, September 17, 2000

12:08 I'm evil
On my way to the bathroom after posting the last entry, I noticed one of our cactuses, dead, falling out of its vase with a small puddle of yellow cactus-goo next to it. I think it died out of neglect. Its vase-mate (brother? lover?) is still there, alive, but who knows how traumatized.
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10:54 Not necessarily beautiful but mutated*
If you happened to see a very messy latenightpool last night that's because I was (finally) implementing some necessary changes to speed up the loading time of the pages. Though little seems different, every entry is now a separate table, and that should make things quite faster.

Another change is the chronological order of entries posted on the same day (until yesterday they were ordered retro-chronologically). This means that the second entry of a day will appear under the first one, making references to earlier topics a little clearer, I hope.

I am also now using stylesheets (and hating Netscape for being unable to deal with line-height parameters). In the next day or two I'll probably do adjustments to the size of text and the spacing between entries.

*From Devo's 1984 version of "Are you experienced?"
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Thursday, September 14, 2000

11:54 She's changed
Since yesterday I have the new version of Eudora. That's the e-mail software I use since my early internet days, and one of the few applications with a distinctive character, expressed in most of its error messages and dialog boxes.

One of the new features of version 5.0, called moodwatch, displays cute little chili peppers next to messages containg 'hot' content. At first I thought that was fine, and quite good-humoured, as Eudora normally is. This morning, however, it gave me this alert when I tried to send a message containing the word fuck (I've omitted the recipient's name):


this alert has caused offense

It's a pity to see such a judgemental feature being added to a great piece of software. At least the moodwatch info page keeps the good old Eudora spirit:

Q: Does this thing get ticked off if I use a few profanities?
A: Yes, and so does your mother.
Q: What if I get sick of it?
A: Turn it off.

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Wednesday, September 13, 2000

13:37 About Last Night
Pointing to the streets, a friend (to my surprise) said:

This is death; life starts later, somehow.

Many years ago, in São Paulo
I used to have a friend called Viviane (the self-proclaimed Dr. V.V.Vulva) who was incredibly energetic and worked as a representative of a medical supplies company. Her specific product line were colostomy bags (it's true - and this is not going to be a funny story...)

One day I was stuck in the traffic jam at Av. 23 de Maio, close to the IBM buiding. As usual there were beggars at the traffic lights. This very old man with a long white beard came to my car window and told me he was trying to collect enough money to buy himself a colostomy bag. At the same time he proceeded to show me how so far he had to make do with a regular plastic bag - I think I managed to stop him before he actually revealed the exact details from under his very dirty clothes. The traffic started to move but I managed to tell him that I would come back and try to help him with his problem.

It took me quite a few days to reach Viviane and ask her if there was any way she could arrange the colostomy bag for the man. She said there was no problem at all, we should just arrange a date to meet and bring it to him. If I remember well the company could even keep providing him new ones for as long as necessary.

It took us quite a few days until we managed to get in touch again. She then asked me some sort of measure or detail she needed to be able to bring the right product.

I went back to the corner, took forever to park the car, and couldn't find the man. At a nearby taxi stand I hear from the drivers (they all knew him) that I better ask at the little sandwich tent around the corner - the woman working there used to give the beggars free sandwiches, etc. She also knew the man and told me she heard he had died a few days before. I'm not sure I wrote all facts correctly, but this is more or less what happened.
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01:51 Tonight in Amsterdam
Oh the beggars, the beggars, and the reasons why, and the methods, and the nice ones, and the sad and the angry ones... what do they see in people, and why do they choose you as a possible source of what they need? What do they see?
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Sunday, September 10, 2000

12:04 Project yourself
The first really impressive home-robot news: the iRobot.

What at first seems like an expensive webcam on wheels (eight wheels, four of them designed to climb stairs up and down really fast) is a mobile, wireless server you can log on to through an internet connection. This means you can find yourself inside the robot, go around the place where it is and see everything through its eyes. You can also speak though it and hear what the people talk back to you. I wonder how many iRobots will end up being called Malkovich.

Features: each iRobot has its own IP number. It refuses to stumble over an obstacle. It creates a map of your place and knows the way back to its charging station. It will ship next year for US$ 4995.

I for one know what role distance - and tools that somehow minimize it - can have in one's life. Some of the people (and places) I love the most are somewhere far, far away. Telephone and e-mail do help a lot, but actually being able to show up there, in whatever form, and move around and express myself in space, that's something else. And the other way around: imagine being all alone at home and having a far away friend embody him- or herself into your little robot, follow you into the kitchen as you prepare something. Just think of the possibilities.

Embed yourself
From 'Stars in my pocket like grains of sand', the book by Samuel Delany I am currently reading (recommended by Paul):

'That - ' Alsrod Thant put her small brown hands behind her, gazing up at the crystal column - 'is your grandmother, your seven-times great-grandmother, the source of your stream, Gylda Dyeth?'
I chuckled. 'It's what they used to call a simulated synapse casting. All the soft lights and multicoloured flashes inside supposedly reproduce her personality, in crystalline form.'
The glimmering pillar rose from its ornate metal pedestal to soar beside the wall decorations next to the blades of the door, till it disappeared into the equally ornate capital, one with the court's roof, where silver tracery pictured what one evelm artist had thought she had seen in our stars.
'Shall I tell you the story connected with it?'
Alsrod's hands came before her to clasp in mimed ecstasy beneath her brown chin.
I put my hand on her shoulder.'Mother Dyeth lived well into the fourth generation of her children. The casting was taken right at the old lady's demise. A decent length of time after her bodily passing, when it was turned on, so we've all been told, the capital speaker up there annouced: "Now, I'm a mechanical reproduction. Not the real thing at all. I know it. You know it. You were fools to get this thing made in the first place. Frankly, I'd turn it off if I were you and let me stay dead," which was so uncannily like Mother Dyeth in life, everyone was quite astounded at the synapse caster's skill.'

Other embedded relatives
My mother the car, a TV series from the sixties.
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01:06 I know it sounds like a miracle, but I am in peace. Resting a lot and enjoying some quietness these last few days, after a nice job got done. I'll be right back.
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