Tag Archive for 'Life'

London!

So, it’s high time I did a post explaining what the hell has been going on with me. Well, I’m now in London about to start an MSc in Communications and Signal Processing at Imperial College London. In between the presentations, miscelaneous arrangements and preparations, I’ve been enjoying London a lot!

I really like the city and especially South Kensington, where the campus is located. There is clearly a great deal of concern with keeping the original building facades and so the whole city feels like a city with history. The campus has an interesting clash between the modern and the historical, with the Queen’s Tower right in the middle of modern glassy buildings. It really is an interesting place to work in.

Moreover, I’m loving the facilities of the college and especially the sense of community that the college has in its core. Right from the very initial introductions we are urged to join a society of something that interests us. In fact, the amount and diversity of societies is astonishing and there is surely something that anyone would find interesting among them. If not, you are urged to start your own!

As for the weather, it’s been really good lately, with clear skies and sunny days, but I’m sure that will soon change and give way to the permanent rain that London is so well known for. In the meantime, I’m sure I’ll have a lot of work to do!

Update: I transferred to Computing Science (Specialist Pathway) as I missed Computing in my course.

I got some ‘splainin to do…

Hey everyone!

I’ll finally update you with what the hell is going on with my blog (other than my sloppiness). As you are aware, I had it hosted on 110mb.com, mainly because it was a free php hosting account I had registered a loong time ago… They stopped supplying databases for free and so I looked for some free mysql hosting, and ended up using freemysql.net. It worked fine for a while, until every sort of trouble started happening. freemysql.net lost my database once during whatever maintenance, and I didn’t make any backups, but I was too busy at the moment to do anything else than start over again. So I did start over again… Meanwhile I had decided that I didn’t need a database and started trying to do a static website with comments via disqus. I was testing it at my former subdomain in 110mb.com, in a different directory, so I kept both the blogs running during development. Then before I was finished with it, freemysql.net stopped working again… and to make matters worse, 110mb started an advertisement program in their 404 error pages which led to a naked wrestling website (nwwl.com). Seriously now, wtf?

I decided I had enough, and started arranging the details here at dreamhost and moving stuff around. Meanwhile I temporarily put my beta website, without comments or feeds implemented, on the main folder of my subdomain, and moved the old wordpress into a subdirectory. Now I just discovered that by doing that, any links on the RSS readers of the users of my old feed would just redirect to nwwl. I uploaded a stub index.php to correct that situation (I mean, I’d rather show an error than an embarassing picture).

I am really really really sorry for any inconvenience caused by all this situation, and I hope the few of you subscribers haven’t given up on me yet… If anything, this will serve to show you should never trust ad-supported hosting or free mysql hosting.

In honor of Dreamhost I’ve themed my blog with the Dreamhost inspired theme “A Dream to Host” :)
To better days!

But I digress

This is a quick online follow-up to a conversation I had last night about the portuguese language. Me and some friends were discussing how dull it can sound. In fact, we agreed that it sounds a lot duller and sadder than a lot of other languages, even latin ones. It can be beautiful, really poetic and emotive, and powerful in literature, but on our day to day “happy” conversations, it always comes up as a bit rough and cold.

Whether you like it or not, even the smallest things end up influencing people throughout their lives, and the culture of a country is unified by a lot of small things, being unique because of that. I couldn’t help but wonder that if we could grow into something completely different by exposing ourselves to more positive influences then shouldn’t we try? It strengthened my wish to go study abroad. Portugal can be so depressing and I think it shows in the general attitude of the population. And besides, if you never try, you’ll never know, right?

Edit: I realized just now I really did digress a lot(!), but I think it’s interesting food for thought.