I have become very fond of the word Fuck since I began working doing XP with a guy from Sweden. He says "fuck", "fucking", and "hate" every sixteen minutes. ... "You know what, alex? Fuck", "...because it's sooo fucking difficult...", "you know, Alex? I hate you", "...we are so fucking screwed...", "...did I tell you that I hate you?", "alex, you are gonna kill me.", " alex... we are in deep, deep shit!" It sounds all really violent, but actually we do amazingly well, we´re doing one of those projects were the requirements change every week, but still we somehow manage to keep everything running within the limits of Time, Price and Quality. I used to think that this was a violation of the Laws of Software Programming where a Project can only have some properties at any given time at the expense of the remaining one, but I discovered that there is a missing property in the (Time, Quality, Price) set: Sanity.


I read Vulpecula´s log and it was fucking depressing, but in a good kind of way. I felt identified with some parts of the "where the fuck is my life heading?" rant. When I came here, I felt like my life was moving in slow motion while everything else seemed to be moving really fast, I felt a little bit in Alien County, living together with an Alien race, where all of a sudden, you become a lot clumsier and a lot wiser at the same time. You learn the fundamentals really fast, but feeling like an idiot the whole time, until you reach a stadium of semi "selbständigkeit" (something that can stand on it´s own), and then you can see a reflection of all societies without most of the noise, suddenly looking at the 15 year old in the eyes and seeing the same features in 25, 35, 45, 55, 65 and 75 year old women, you can´t avoid extrapolating the evolution of the features, and then everyone looks so incredibly old.

You also learn the meaning of the word Outsider.

Even when it doesn't hit you as much as it hits the majority, still it takes precious energy everyday to overcome it in a continuous struggle that you learn to accept as a routine, but with the knowledge that should it reach a critical level, it would drag you the way bits and bytes are swept away after a multiple full hard drive format.

Today I walked the KÖ in Düsseldorf. The KÖ is a really long and wide street full of very big, expensive, expensive, expensive, expensive stores. Not only are the stores expensive and cater only to sofisticated people with money, sorry, Money, but the street itself is a public catwalk, lots of pretty people walking around with very expensive clothing. People not so neatly dressed walking in the parallel streets, in the not-so-expensive places, not trusting themselves to walk the KÖ.

The saleswomen were so incredibly beautiful. Of course, like everything else, this was not a coincidence. I mean, beauty is expensive, on the other hand, beauty sells, and some beautiful people have to earn money too, specially if they want to remain beautiful. But beauty fades away, and so, like engineers, they end up whoring to any random ugly customer with money, so that they can return to the stores, but this time as customers, and the cycle is completed.
The whole thing is so fucking beautiful.

Hmmm.

It sounds so ugly and cheap when I write it like that, besides, we´ve all been there by now ... perhaps we need some Political Correctness???

Ok here we go: Some MEN and WOMEN who fulfill a basic SET of NECESARY properties and as a consecuence perform SERVICES, enter an environment that CHANGES, or REINFORCES their PREFERENCES and ATTITUDES towards life in general in a process that may be CONSCIOUS or UNCONSCIOUS, altering their semi-independent NATURAL and ARTIFICAL survival and reproduction STRATEGIES, this is not WRONG, it is just a WAY, just as valid as, FOR EXAMPLE idiots who write WebLogs like us.

Or maybe I just saw a really pretty saleswoman who, flirted a little with me, and then I remembered my poor, very old car, that in no way resembles a BMW and somehow always manages to inspire pity looks from everyone, parked for 10 hours in a NO PARKING ZONE with a broken ignition engine some hundred kilometers away.

Ok, no so bad, let´s proceed...

The police was there explaining rich ladies how NOT to get robbed. I suspect that KÖ thieves must be very sophisticated people, they have to dress really well, or else they couldn´t blend in, they would be like "flies in milk"(*). I was giving myself the task of mentally assigning a "Probable Thief" rating to all people in the opposite direction, when guess who I saw? ROBERT DE NIRO! Yeah! And he spoke German! Ok, that is not very likely, but if RDN can say "Das ist sehr verboten!" with a heavy accent, then it was definitively him.

I am reading the Cryptonomicon, page 832 out of 918. I was very surprised when I saw that Alejo is also reading it

It´s 01h19.

Today was one of those days when all you want to do is walk around with a Hammer.
In five hours I have to wake up and take a train to Düsseldorf to stand on a line, I will give a bunch of papers, and be questioned, some person behind a glass will look at the papers, will look at me, ask some more things that I can barely remember, they will have a lot of my private data now, and will try to find out my trustworthiness rating, then I´ll go to the city, have lunch, and on the evening will maybe get a stamp on my passport, then .... I really have to go now.