Be water my friend

Religion

I have always had a strange feeling about religion and finally a friend of mine put down in words that impression: "religion sets a backdoor in your mind".

I think that truly describes what I think. Religion is a kind of people control method as it stands some precepts you don't need to think about anymore. I don't mean religion is bad or of no use at all. Indeed, as Pancho pointed out, it is very useful for that people who in fact doesn't want to evaluate their principles. For those people, religion and control by fear is quite good as far as those precepts are fair (and not misunderstood or interpreted in own profit). For me it works just as inspiration. Some times about how to act. Some others about how I shouldn't. But in all cases, I try to choose my own way of living after a thoughtful evaluation.

One example of this is baptism. Its (supposed) original meaning was related with spiritual recleaning and rebirth, mostly for adult people who are the ones who really may need that kind of recleaning before embrace Christian cult by their own decision. Nowadays, baptism is done on infants who hardly can need any clean nor recleaning and of course have not taken any decision. Despite, by custom, some people believe by baptism they are educating their childrens. Weird.

Emulation vs. Virtualization

These days virtualization is the breaking new appliance for the enterprise. Everybody is migrating to this "new" concept but, which is the difference with emulation?

And interesenting one. Just for the sake of correctness:

• Emulation involves emulating the virtual machines hardware and architecture. Microsoft's VirtualPC is an example of an emulation based virtual machine. It emulates the x86 architecture, and adds a layer of indirection and translation at the guest level, which means VirtualPC can run on different chipsets, like the PowerPC, in addition to the x86 architecture. However, that layer of indirection slows down the virtual machine significantly.
• Virtualization, on the other hand, involves simply isolating the virtual machine within memory. The host instance simply passes the execution of the guest virtual machine directly to the native hardware. Without the translation layer, the performance of a virtualization virtual machine is much faster and approaches native speeds. However, since the native hardware is used, the chipset of the virtual machine must match. Usually, this means the Intel x86 architecture. VMWare is an example of this type of application
  for Windows.

Cats

Some months ago we adopted a little kitty we called Wifi as my girlfriend always had thought it was a (female) cat name. And I must say I agree with that. Unfortunatelly she was with us just ten days before a chlamydia infection take her from us.

That was the first time I positively tried to begin a blog, but I did not.

Now, a prudential time later, we have adopted another little cat we have called Val from Valentine, Ender's sister. She is our little panther!

Salamanca

We have been thinking about going to Salamanca for a long time, but we couldn't do it after Ranty's accident two years ago.

Now, we finally were able to go there. But again this is related to a tragic happening. We were there trying to give some support to Ele, one of those friends I left behind at IBM, who has now her heart broken, stolen.

You are stronger than you think you are.

Photo tech

In the last two weeks I've discovered (or was told about) some programs quite useful for an outdoor technician (amateur photographer):

• gpscorrelate which adds GPS tags on exif fields correlating gps tracks and photgraph shooting time. Finally, I am able to geoposition my trekking pictures automagically!. Next step: some way to create google maps paths with POIs.
• hugin for image blending. The following image was obtained in Gredos composed from four pictures.
  

ADN - Everything is connected

That's the company's slogan, whose offices we are working at. And I must admit it seems quite true.

Today, we have visited one of the data centers we are evaluating for our company hosting. It was a Tier 1 company, that is networking, connections... nothing special there. The amazing thing is one of the people we meet there was visiting Australia a year ago, and he is also a photograph passionated. I feel him a bit like a twin soul of mine as we are planning to visit Australia on our marriage trip where I will take a lot of pictures, of course. We were talking and he gave me some interesting URLs about his blog, travel agency and the like. So again everything seems connected, as Google knows so frightening well.

Anyway, we went there by motorbike which was a plus not connected to anything else, but too much funny in any case.

Keep going

I took this photograph last weekend at Consuegra where we went to observe the night sky, just for fun, as we used to do. I'm sure you don't need to be told that Polaris and Ursa Major are the start on the left and the constellation on the right side. And that's why I am not telling you ;-)

Anyway, the interesting thing for me here is the effect of the Earth rotation movement. Polaris is said to be in the Earth rotation axis prolongation (it is also said this will change with time, a lot of time indeed). But, by now, for us, it can be considered a fixed point in the sky: the north point which remains a point in the picture regardless of rotation. Every other star appears as rotating around Polaris, despite the truth is we are the ones rotating. I almost can imagine I see the Earth from outside.

Lazy beggars

Yesterday in our way to the restaurant (an Italian buffet near Callao, or the "Pizza buffet" as we name it) we saw a funny beggar which asks money for "more beer", "whisky" and "resaca" (those two, his dogs names). Of course he also claims at least he is honest.

Talking about it, Jose Luis told me he had already seen that (them) in a web we managed to found again: www.lazybeggers.com

Globalization and technology has it curious side effects. And that has a lot to do with my job.

In case you are too lazy to visit the web, here you have some pearls:

• "One euro probably isn´t much to you but to us its half an hour in a cyber cafe (or a beer ;-)"
• " Those who travel on rivers of wine sometimes float."
• "We´re honest. We make you smile. What more can you ask?"
  

And that's true, I smiled, I laughed.

Old freaks, new geeks

This weekend I meet again two old friends from the debian planet. Zazu and Amaya come to our sweet home, that they liked a lot (we are very proud about decoration indeed). We talked about old and present time, saw a movie (a curious and not recommendable one), eaten Japanese food and taken some photographs with my new camera (I'm trying to do my best to understand how it works so I can shot wonderful pictures). Amaya pointed me out that camera was the one all the geeks have in the linux meetings. Great, I used to be a hacker, I though I was now a freak but the truth in seems I have came into a geek without pretending nor knowing it. I miss those days when we all were freaks ourselves and that was the cool thing to be. Of course nowadays nobody is plainly "cool" anymore, even more anybody is a freak now, one way or another.

Unfortunately, some other things doesn't change like my Debian inactivity Amaya also pointed me out. She told me I will lost my account unless some kind of activity on the project is shown on my part so I will try to do my best in the hope I won't disappoint her, I won't lost my account and the most important I will make some contributions to the community I say I support. She left me a bit worried about that, but also she motivated me.

You geeks join and conquer the world!. Oh, have we already done that?.