Thursday, December 31, 2009

Sometimes you meet those kinds of people…

- Hey, do you know what I mean?

- … Pardon me?

- Listen. Do you know what I mean?

- Yes?

- Good. Great.  <walks off>

 

wtf

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Adiós 2009. Hello 2010

Goodbye2009Hello2010

It is now the time to say goodbye to the 2000's, a decade filled with changes, successes and failures, a decade which certainly changed the world. Let us now welcome the new decade, the 2010's. Let us wish/hope/pray for prosperity and wellness for all of us towards the new days dawning upon us.

GOODBYE 2009, HELLO 2010.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

You’ve got to be joking Australia

Ugh.

Bandwidth my ass

Once again I hit my bandwidth limit. My family, and specially me, is an active internet citizen. I use it way too much I think (well, what else would I do to entertain myself?). The connection itself when I am under the limit is perfect, quite fine. The problem arises when we hit the limit, then we really realize just how difficult it is to even do normal stuff on the internet, like FB or Youtube or stuff. What used to be an approximately 5 Mb/s connection becomes suddenly a 60Kb/s link. 60 Kb/s for Christ’s sake!!! That’s just like dial up! But it’s just worse since every single web page that I visit carries heaps of data.

And I thought that Australia was moving beyond the frontier of ADSL connections to what Europe, or even the USA, has. Of course, Australia is always inferior on being at the same level as those countries (no, Europe is not a country ok?) when it comes to technology and its use by consumers. What really grinds my gears is that Unlimited broadband Plans in Australia were all terminated about 2 years ago. I understand that heavy internet demand is a pain for ISPs, but it really shouldn’t be a semi-limit to our freedom of access to information. And specially now when internet websites are very multimedia-based, dial up just isn’t enough, not even fair for us.

Luckily, we’re right near the end of the month, so by NYE the connection speed will be established to normal conditions. Yay for good timing.

But, hey, what am I saying? I need to get out more often.

Happy New Year interzens (internet citizens).

Pues, entonces…

私たちは誰?

Nos encontramos en los últimos días de la década de los ceros (acaso así podremos llamarla?) y pronto entraremos en una nueva etapa de la raza humana.

2010 anno domini, un nuevo dígito se suma a nuestra cronología lineal.

Va a ser una década de retos, de logros y de fracasos. Lo que importa es que salgamos de ella vivos y unidos. Ya el mundo está expandiendo su conciencia colectiva, y pronto todos estaremos unidos como nunca antes, en conjunción con nuevas tecnologías, ideologías y demás –gías.

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! FELIZ AÑO NUEVOOOOO!!! :D

Y ciertamente el blog continuará, pero ahora con más temáticas y más cosas que antes (pues voy a estar viviendo en otra parte de Sydney, así que va a estar muy divertido).

Monday, December 28, 2009

You’ve got to be joking…

Since the past 5 years I have been an avid listener to Last.Fm, what was once a free music streaming internet service that introduced me to tons of new music genres, artists and styles; completely revolutionizing my own musical spirit.

Sadly, today I discovered that I now have to pay for a subscription to use the service (unless I lived in UK, US or Deutschland, or used a crummy proxy). I was listening to some shoegaze artists, and suddenly this came up:

Thelastofthelastfm

And I was like

  (( ° Д °)’’’’’’’’’’’  oh crap oh crap oh crap

I’m screwed!! >.<  What am I going to use now that gives me the same flexibility as Last.Fm?? I checked out Libre.Fm, but it’s just not the same thing. Maybe I should go back to Myspace and do what my friend does, check the musicians’ friends to listen to more music. But it’s just, once again, not the same thing. I can’t get the same excitement and semi-randomness that Last.fm has.

So then… what’s next?

I should just shut up and pay for the goddamn thing, 3 bucks a month may not be too much. BUT I’M SO POOR RIGHT NOW. I guess I’ll go back to Myspace.

Monday, December 21, 2009

On to the future…

  A few days ago my life changed forever.0425

I witnessed it transfer from the many possibilities I imagined with excruciating scrutiny, detailing all the emotions that would arise from such event and predicting an action plan of what would happen in the next months; all of them changing into a bright future.

To my own surprise, all those “negatively focused” predictions collapsed under the weight of the reality I unlocked from the universities admissions website. 9 AM. All my work at high school in Australia for the past 2 and a half years were summed up in the ATAR ranking I was awarded. My original predictions of such were once again quite negative, just barely enough to get into science at a good university. However, my ATAR rank is so high that I could get into the highly-sought-for design, commerce, medicine, social studies, art, business, even perhaps lower-end law courses.

A few days have passed, and it feels that it really didn't make a difference to the present. Maybe I haven’t felt it, it’s just been a few days. But I know I’ve been incredibly tranquil for getting such surprising results. Other people would be just jumping around like crazy, drinking or yelling in the streets of their success had they obtained my results. Really, I am actually surprised by how quiet I have been about it, not being excited about it, or even feeling proud for my success.

Why the hell am I not feeling proud about it, just 2 years after migrating to a new country, having to start from zero and integrate to the Australian society? Really, it is an incredible success. The biggest thing that has ever happened in my life since I arrived to this country. As I said, my life has changed completely. And even though I am consciously writing that, I still can’t feel it, it hasn’t hit me yet.       D:

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Me siento tranquilo cuando llego a escuchar la voz breve de la lluvia en este país árido.

En estos tiempos de verano, la lluvia se vuelve escasa. Pero cuando llega, el mundo parece recobrar vida.

Yo salgo de mi fortaleza para saludar a la lluvia; al menos con solo tocar algunas gotas y respirar el aire húmedo puedo declarar que he conversado con ella.

Amo la lluvia.

Trip to the heart of Australia - Part 1

Surprisingly, I did end up somewhere else in Australia after the HSC.
And of all possible places, I went to the most remote one. (warning, tl;dr)

Ayers Rock, also known as Uluru, is the place I visited during the first days of December. To quickly describe the surrounding areas, here are a few words: barren, boiling hot, disturbingly overcrowded by flies.

Taking a bus ride from Ayers Rock Airport to the closest settlement, , one can begin to appreciate the outstanding magnitude of the rock. It looms in the distance, like an omen of incredible power that it simply grabs your attention. It just pops out of the flat desert floor,

Surprisingly, in this arid spot of the country, people do actually live here. Few aboriginal clans have lived here for a long time. And of course, they have their own stories of how this rock formation appeared. Native serpents in the area were involved in a somewhat cataclysmic combat, and the resulting mound of corpses and conglomeration of negative and harmful feelings/energies/wavelengths/etc hardened and solidified to form such rock formation. So the rock then is not really a symbol of the greatness of the country or of the Australian landmass' geological history, but rather a monolith of remembrance of the destructive force of violence and discontent. At least that's one of the few dreamtime story interpretations.
IMG_1817
Uluru at a distance

The nearest settlement features everything everyone should have as tourists: good food, swimming pools, air-conditioning, a place to sleep. Seems pretty good. However it's pretty far away from the rock, so this means that you have to take a tour bus, rent a car, bike, or even walk. Rent a car, and you'll save money. Don't walk nor bike to the rock, it's too far away, it's too hot, there are too many flies. Don't go on a tour unless you have plenty of money to burn. It's expensive there, but it's the only place to actually do stuff and still be alive in the desert for hundreds of miles. It is so far away from anything else in the country.

And when you get to the rock, you realize how big it is.
And as an intangible memento, I remember very clearly when one of the tour guides yelled out to the group: "So, HEY, who's excited to see a huge piece of rock?!" Apparently some are. Hahahh
Uluru 2009
I have touched the rock
Natural etchings on the rock
Uluru
Rocky Hills


More later.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Google Maps Street View now in Mexico

First off, I’d just like to say: SWEET!

At first I thought it would be practically impossible that Mexico, a third world country next to the US, would be featured in Google Maps' Street View feature. When I checked it out, I was flabbergasted. Outstanding. Cities like the monstrous Mexico City, Puebla, Guadalajara, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta and Monterrey are included, and others are soon to follow. The quality of the pictures is crisp clear and, as any other virtual globetrotter, I dived in to search for interesting things that were taken by the Google Maps cars that ran through those cities.

I know Mexico City fairly, I know most of the main vehicular arteries that connect the city and most of its landmarks. And I thought that perhaps the poorest or more criminal-prone regions of the city would feature the most interesting “happenings”. And as such I explored. Here’s what I found.gstmx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the very end of a street in a northern district of the city I found this water-carrying truck. Taking a closer looks, it seems that Google’s face-blurring mechanism failed right there. I don’t remember seeing a person’s face so close in Street View. I wonder if he knows that he’s on the internets.

gstmx9This guy should know better that he must not try to enter wormholes without the proper equipment, let alone with a modified bicycle like that one. And once again, his face is not blurred. What’s going on Google?

 gstmx8

Oh GAWD. Somebody’s going to have to pick up all this mess. Either a garbage truck exploded or the ground broke up, overflowing with rubbish. I don’t know. All I know is that I took this around the Tepito area, Mexico City’s greatest and most infamous open-air black-market complexes. Not surprisingly, there are very few shots of the stalls that normally cover the entire area. This is because almost all of the shots there were taken at the crack of dawn. Smart thinking on behalf of Google.

gstmx4

This is just a little  gem that I found, the Callejón de los Patos, or Duck Alley. This is in an impoverished area, not even the road is paved. In any case, it holds the essence of the harsh reality a lot of Mexicans have to face everyday.

gstmx5

If I lived in Mexico City, and if my house was ever broken into, I would always go to a place like this to buy the stuff that was stolen from me back. This is what house-owners have to face in Mexico City. Not kidding. My dad’s car’s rims were stolen one day, so he went to a nearby car repair shop to locate them and buy them back.

gstmx3

Almost all along this street, this particular area of the photographs has its colors messed up. The trees look purple!! And everything else is in black and white (almost), as if we were looking back into the past or something like that (the world before color tv was invented was actually in black and white, yeah haha).

gstmx7

And now for something different. I found this bizarre relic among the urban jungle. I wonder what it represents. A saint? A guard? An eavesdropper?

With Google Maps Street View now available in this country, there are many hopes that silly, weird or unusual things may be found in the future. And I hope I get to have my hometown featured. That would be nice.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Contando los días

Just as a warning, you might want to get a translator for this one. Otherwise, ignore this post and move on. As a tool, use the applet on the side to translate this page. :) bannerescondido Últimamente he podido sentir el peso de mis propias acciones en el presente. Esperando a que nuestros resultados de nuestros exámenes finales de bachillerato, he pasado el mes pasado contemplando, jugando video juegos, viendo películas, buscando trabajo, trabajando de vez en cuando, viendo ánimes, etcétera. El problema de estos actos, que meramente son unos pasatiempos para acelerar el tiempo, es el hecho de que los hago en la soledad absoluta. Desde hace un mes, sólo he visto y conversado con un amigo mío. Voy a mudarme en unos cuantos meses, y temo que esta soledad está cavando un hoyo en mi alma.

Para dejarlo en claro, ¿qué motivo tiene entretener la pupila si no hay alguien con quien compartir aquel entretenimiento?

Me siento vacío por dentro, a pesar de que he compeltado mis exámenes finales de una manera cuasi-gloriosa (o al menos eso es lo que quisiera pensar).

Mi mejor amigo está armando una reunión de amigos en su casa este fin. No he sido invitado. ¿Será ésto una señal de lo distante que he sido de la gente que conosco?

En fin, quizás estoy siendo muy negativo.

A pesar de todo, aún estoy curioso sobre el motivo de que no haya sido invitado.

Y sigo así, contando los días que pasan. Recibiremos nuestros resultados de los exámenes finales en dos semanas. Va a ser muy interesante ver qué resultado obtendré. Admito que estoy algo nervioso.

Buenas noches internet.