Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 92

Beautifully snowed Iztaccíhuatl, 2010/01/18, taken from Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City

Among the many columns and lesser sections of my favorite national newspaper I enjoy reading the Centenaria column — Notes published one hundred years ago in Mexico City local newspapers. A couple of decades ago, we started having policletos on the streets — “Policías bicicletos”. Cops on bikes. I don’t know if we had policletos as a continuous presence before that, but I do remember it being somewhat controversial in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Anyway, this snippet (and sadly I cannot capture the 1910 writing style in English) was a joy to read: January 18, 1910 Good results...

Five out of six experts agree: It. Is. Cold. No, we are far from this very impressive picture of a fully-snowed UK seen from the sky that everybody and their dog must have seen by now. Still, in Mexico City we are experiencing the traditional one-or-two-weeks-a-year where it is genuinely cold. And, very strange being this Winter (the rainy season is Summer around here, January should be dry!) we have rain all day long. The Ajusco mountain is around 15Km south from my home, and it is the closest of the giants that surround our valley. Yesterday I managed to...

Looking over some articles in the March 2009 issue of the Communications of the ACM magazine, I found a very good piece column (Is software engineering engineering?, Denning, Peter J., and Riehle Richard D. , Communications of the ACM, 03/2009, Volume 52, Number 3, p.24-26, (2009) ). Quoting from it: The search for an alternative to the programmer image is already a generation old. In 1989 we asked: Are we mathematicians? Scientists? Engineers? We concluded that we are all three. We adopted the term "computing", an analogue to the European "informatics", to avoid bias towards any one label or description....

Five out of six cats cannot be mistaken

It seems strange to me. I don’t think I know people as aware of internationalization issues as Bubulle, a.k.a. Christian PERRIER, and I have the feeling his last post regarding how he shall address himself is somewhat short-sighted. That might just mean I am in an even worse position. First, I recognize Christian’s concern, but not only when dealing with people from around the globe – It happens in my everyday life. When you show an ID stating Gunnar Eyal Wolf Iszaevich, the first reaction is a blank stare of disbelief, only to be followed by a question: So, what...

Quoting The Klezmatics: It’s everybody-else’s annual end-of-the-year-time holiday, the name of which respectfully we do not choose to say, but that does not prohibit us in any concievable way from wishing you a very merry everybody-else’s end-of-the-year-time holiday! In order to properly welcome this 2010 in a geeky fashion, I got the following wines to share with my friends: My last bottle of the now world-famous and limited edition Debian wine, from Extremadura Tempranillo grapes What is it like trying to coordinate a timely, predictable release? Why, yes, it has precisely been described as herding cats. And even better, the...

A nice, non-aggressive, brown-colored theme suitable for your siamese herding cats, courtesy of South African people trying to bring a better life to this world. Comments Nadezhda 2009-12-24 13:54:42 Mi Marita y una pata del Mi Marita y una pata del Gordupchic. :*

[Notice] Personal content follows. If you got to this post expecting any of the recurring topics I talk about in my blog, feel free to skip it. This is one of the topics I don’t like to share as impersonally as a blog post goes… But I know I will not be able to meet most of the people I care about that this will reach in person — And even if I did, it is not something easy to say. I have failed several times to communicate this to my closest friends. And if you are among the group...

NOTA: Al preparar este texto, excedí el límite de espacio que me asignan, por lo cual después de terminar de escribir tuve que ver qué párrafos eran más prescindibles. Acá reproduzco el artículo completo, y adjunto como archivo la versión tal cual apareció impresa. <p>Hace un par de días recibí uno de esos correos que parecen venir de una época ya superada y olvidada hace años: Un correo que comenzaba con la frase:</p> <blockquote>Para evitar problemas de compatibilidad, este correo no incluye acentos ni enies</blockquote> <p>En efecto, este problema casi ha desaparecido del correo, y ese pretexto sencillamente ya no...