Daniel Santos

✱ It's very difficult for me to find good cardiologists. Being the kind of person who likes everything explained to me in details, some doctors I've had appointments with in the past proved very dry and unwilling to talk to me beyond the strictly necessary. Others were just plain boring. The thing is, after looking for a nice doctor for a long time, I found myself a very nice cardiologist, Dr. Paulo was his name. He took care of me and my hereditary blood pressure affairs. He even corrected my medication after some exams. I really liked him, so it made me very sad when I learned that he had passed away February last year. And ever since, I was reluctant to look for another professional. Until, talking to some friends, I learned about another nice doctor. Dr. Carlos is his name. Had an appointment with him last Monday and really, really liked him. He seemed to be very patient with me, explaining me lots of things and making me feel nice. I'm really glad I was able to find him, and fill the gap left by Dr. Paulo.

✱ I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I had been invited to moderate the presentation of a proof-of-concept virtual reality project applied to a training solution. This week it finally happened, and I moderated the session, which took place during a technology and innovation seminar which happens every year, organized by the Engineering department of the company I work for. It was a very interesting experience — considering I had never before moderated any session or presentation made by anyone. Being a lifelong learner, that's something different I could taste, and I really liked it. People were very interested in the subject presented by my colleague, and he really aced his presentation. It made me feel very nice for me and for him, by the end of the day. 😊

✱ My older son and me went to São Paulo this week. There, he took a series of tests as part of an effort to try to be granted one of the many scholarships offered to international students at Japanese universities, under the Japanese Government Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Scholarship Program. When he first took interest in Japanese culture a couple of years ago, by reading mangas and watching anime as many children his age did, I could never have imagined it would get him that far. He's been dedicated to Japanese studies, finding his own means to study, self-learning hiragana, katakana, kanji and everything else supported by Anki and hours and hours of reading, watching and listening to raw Japanese media. Regardless of what happens now, I'm very proud of him and his personal achievements, as it's certainly no piece of cake to master Japanese as a western, Brazilian citizen.

✱ As I've been able to witness my son's effort to self-teach himself Japanese for years, I know it's no easy task at all, but a desire to also learn it, maybe at a slower pace, dawned on me too, maybe because I love language learning. So, after some advice from my son, I started learning hiragana, the first and more basic of the three Japanese syllabaries, also made up of katakana and kanji, the latter derived from Chinese. I hope to be able to keep up with my learning.

✱ Still regarding our trip to São Paulo, the only bad news I had relates to my back and its pain. I don't know for sure, but I'd say the bed I slept into has something to do with "The Return of Low Back Pain", a personal movie — a B-movie, I'd say — that insists on rerunning in my daily life… this means two things, as I'll need to get back to São Paulo next Sunday: getting by on palliative medicine for the weekend and an appointment first thing next Monday, with my osteopath doctor. 😫😫😫

✱ Our fridge, with the family for almost 15 years now, started this week decided not to work. On Monday morning we all woke up to noticing it had completely de-iced everything. And worse, as we were about to schedule the visit of a technician to look into what was happening, it suddenly came alive again — and is now on life-support. We’d been already planning to change it for a newer model and everything, but it seems we’ll need to speed things up a little bit.

✱ On the PKM side of my life, this week I came across two very interesting YouTube playlists: Mastering Obsidian and Daily Notes First. The first gave me many insights on YAML — which I currently underuse with my Obsidian setup —, the Dataview plug-in usage and inline fields, which I completely ignored existed for Obsidian, thinking it was a Logseq only thing; the second playlist gave me ideas on the Daily Note: I’ve never doubted it was an important thing, and I use it a lot, but this playlist gave me some really nice ideas on how to better structure what I have, and making it even more useful by combining what I register daily with the data view powers.

✱ I attended an in-company training about decision making on project management issues, that is, those mostly common and unexpected deviations everyone has already experienced at least once during the course of a project’s endeavor. The instructor, a workmate with whom I’ve already had the chance to learn a lot in the past, gave us many insights on decision making, but what really caught my attention was the great deal cognitive biases play on us as project managers and the way we respond to what is right in front of us. On the biases and decision making fields, I even discovered two additional reading references besides Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman — the reference literature in the area — that I didn’t know about: the first is The Art of Thinking Clearly, by Rolf Dobelli, whereas the second is You Are Not So Smart, by David McRaney, this one with the interesting subtitle of “Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself”. Both now already added to my anti-library.

✱ Nintendo Direct 2023 happened last Wednesday, airing live from YouTube. Now, while I couldn’t exactly watch it because I was working at the time, my son did, and from what he told me, this years reserves some nice things for Mario fans like we all are here, including a new Luigi’s Mansion and a game starring Princess Peach. But particularly, my interests lay on a remake of Super Mario RPG, originally released in 1996 for the SNES, scheduled for November, and on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the much expected new 2D platform game of the franchise, where Mario even turns into an elephant, scheduled for a release in October — just in perfect timing to become my birthday gift!

✱ This week I needed to step into a bank agency for the first time again, after I don't even know how many years. The reason is that I needed to close an account I had opened more than 25 years ago, and that I had not been using. And not satisfied with a single visit, to finish the account cancellation process, I needed to go there again — so after years, two times in a row in the same week! Fortunately, the account is now officially closed, and I hope not to need to go to a bank again in many years to come… 😊

✱ After two weeks in a row, I've finished reading Dragon Wing, the first of the seven books that form the Death Gate Cycle, an adult fantasy fiction series created by authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman still in the 1990's. I wrote about the book, which I found very appealing, and considered it to be unputdownable. Thus, I read it on every opportunity I found myself with some spare time in my hands. I was also helped by the fact that we had a long, four day long, weekend last week.

✱ Denver Nuggets became the 2023 NBA Season Champions. As someone supporting Miami, that’s not exactly the result I was expecting — I would have loved to see at least one additional, sixth game. On the one hand, I feel sad for Heat not winning another title. On the other, though, I kind of liked to see Denver getting to its first title after 47 years playing without ever being able to lift the trophy. So congratulations to Jokić and all the team. As for me, there’s always the next season to be played, isn’t it? 🙌🏀

✱ This week I took a couple of hours to play Hill Climb Racing again — a mobile game first introduced to me by one of my former bosses many years ago —, after I subscribed (again) to Apple Arcade. It was really fun remembering the game and spending time with it (although according to my younger son, I may have crossed some kind of invisible limit of hours played 😅).

✱ I went to the dentist this week, also, after some persisting pain in one of my upper teeth. Fortunately it wasn’t anything complicated to treat — and now I’m free from the pain I was undergoing.

✱ My older son turned 18 this week! We’re so happy for him, and celebrated the occasion with cake and pizza, exactly how he had asked it to be. My parents, sister and brother-in-law all came in to join us in the celebration. As for his future, he’s currently hard at work pursuing a Japanese college scholarship which I believe, intelligent as he is, he’ll have plenty of conditions to achieve. May God always speed your journey, son. I love you very much.

✱ One never knows when Murphy’s Law is going to strike. We have this Epson printer home, seldomly used nowadays as mostly everything became electronic, either emailed to us or easily obtainable via PDF files. We generally only use it when we need to print something for my son’s school assignments or when I sell something used and have to send it via mail to someone, when I have to print labels. This week I did it but when I tried to print the corresponding labels, my printer’s control software didn’t allow me past a warning saying I was out of magenta and yellow ink cartridges. No big deal — except until I went to the store where I regularly buy them, and found just the magenta one. With the yellow cartridge not available there, any not at any other retailer in my city, I needed to order it online and wait for 5 days for it to get home. Quite a wait for having something printed out, if you ask me. But what really stuck in my mind was where did all yellow Epson cartridges go?

✱ No matter how much technology advances, certain things remain done only when you go about attending places in person. This week I had to go see a notary, as my oldest son was in need of authenticating a couple of school documents in order to pursue a college scholarship. He had never been to a notary in his whole life, and I guess it was interesting for him to see such procedures being executed.

✱ I’m not a tennis person, meaning I seldom follow anything related to the sport. But Brazilian media had been talking about Bia Haddad all week long and how she came to play the semifinals against Polish female tennis player Iga Swiatek, current number one in the ranking — so I felt that was a game I needed to watch. Bia had very good moments, and led the second set for some time, but in the end she fell 2 x 0 against the world’s current best player, partials 6/2 and 7/6. But even falling, she was a giant and made history, becoming the first woman semifinalist of a Grand Slam in singles for Brazil in more than 50 years. She also entered the top 10 of the world rankings for the first time, both reasons for us, Brazilians, to be proud of her.

✱ William Poor, a video producer, story editor, and reporter from The Verge premiered a short documentary on YouTube last Sunday, telling the story of the Apple Lisa, released in 1983 as Apple’s first GUI desktop computer: its operating system had many user-friendly features, such as icons, windows and menus, all of them made interactive with the help of a mouse. It was also way expensive at $10,000 — equivalent to approximately $30,500 in June, 2023, making it instantly doomed and discontinued in 1985, so only two years after its release. A September 24, 1989 news article mentioned the burial of the remaining inventory of 2,700 Lisas in a garbage deposit in Logan, Utah, and the documentary dives into this story that I watched the day it came out, a really interesting video.

✱ After almost 3 months without watching almost no episodes of any of the series I follow, I’ve finally finished Spy x Family. The show’s second season is still to start airing in October this year, so I still had some time to watch the four episodes I hadn’t watched — and now that I’m done with them, I can reaffirm that overall, it’s quite a nice story and narrative. I’m looking forwards season 2 (and the upcoming feature movie, to be released in December).

✱ I’ve been watching every NBA Finals game as a Miami Heat supporter. They were East Conference champions but, the way things are going, unfortunately, favor Denver Nuggets much more, as they won last Friday’s fourth game 108-95. While I’m waiting for next Monday’s fifth game and for an almost — and likely — impossible victory away from Miami, though, I have to say that this last game gave us all the most interesting and unexpected moment of all: with 2:07 left in the third quarter and Denver already leading the score 76-68, Bam Adebayo missed a two-hand dunk attempt and hung onto the rim for a moment, making it seemingly torn. This caused the game to be interrupted for about 9 minutes, while a ladder was brought onto the court for an investigation, after which the basket was declared ok. From my part, I don’t recall having ever seen anything like that, and it was as amusing as unexpected to me… 😂v

✱ If someone asked me, I’d say the most amazing play I’ve ever watched happen in NBA was featured by Derrick White last Saturday, a couple of hours after my weekly notes: at the last second — actually, the last 0.1 second —, the Boston Celtics guard scored the basket that kept his team alive in the East Conference Finals for the seventh and decisive match, when the score turned 104-103. His feat was amazing, and even though, to my personal pleasing, Celtics were later eliminated 103-84 in the final game, I needed to note it here. Amazing how he jumped before the final buzz and, while in the air, got the rebound from Marcus Smart’s failed 3-point shoot and made magic. That’s just what I love about basketball. This unpredictability.

✱ Geffrey van der Bos organized an open PKM discussion using Obsidian as a basis last Saturday, and I was able to take part live. Besides Geffrey, Alex Qwxlea was also there, and the talk was very nice and informative. Two learnings for me: Geffrey’s custom highlights CSS snippet for Obsidian callouts (implemented and loved it), and the File Chucker plug-in, which can move my notes from my inbox to any folder I say, doing so very quickly. I hope Geffrey repeats discussions like this often…

✱ This week, while mentoring a colleague at work about storytelling and presentations, I presented her with a very nice TED Talk: the one Richard Turere presented back in 2013, when he was only 13 years-old. Two years before, Richard, who was born in Kenya and as a child shepherded his father’s cows near the south parts of the Nairobi National Park, faced lion attacks to the cattle, and seeing people around him killing the lions to avoid more cow deaths, started thinking about a way to trick the wild animals into not attacking the cows. Shortly, when he came up with the Lion Lights, an electronic device used at night, that really worked. Most impressive, though, is the fact that even being so young at 13 years-old and having never talked in public before, he got to deliver a killer presentation, which I assure it’s worth watching.

✱ It’s been some time now that I’ve come back to using RSS feeds to help me consume content. And, in order to do so more properly, last year I subscribed to BazQux reader on a yearly basis, as I found it to be both simple and full-featured to my needs. The thing is this week I came to the conclusion that I’m not being able to follow so many subscriptions, and did some autumn cleaning, being more picky in relation to what I really want to keep following. This made my unread articles count decrease from 500+ to 300. It’s nice to have the sensation to be in control again. Besides, I’ve used the mark all read button more often, as a means to combat FOMO, something I don’t need at all in my life.

✱ Years ago, my brother-in-law had a cat named Haplo. Back then I absorbed that information not to care about it at all in the years to come. Until by the end of last month, I stumbled upon Dragon Wing, the first of seven volumes that form the Death Gate Cycle series, from which Haplo, a Patryn, is the main character. It amazed me that my memory recalled that name after almost two decades… and yet, it didn’t amaze me quite as much as the reading in itself. This book is unputdownable, and, from my brother-in-law’s impressions, it looks like so is the whole seven-part series.

✱ I walked past 12,000 steps this Saturday, my personal record since having started to monitor my steps via my mobile and Apple Watch. That’s over 9 kilometers far! I have to admit that counting steps adds some gamification to the experience of exercising, making it less boring. I hope to keep the pace… 👟

✱ I’ve always been a big fan of Michael J. Fox, specially because of the Back to The Future trilogy he starred. So it was only natural for me to want to watch Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie this week, a documentary released on Apple TV+, where he gets in front of the cameras to tell his story, show how his career was inevitably affected by Parkinson’s and how, despite of everything that’s happened to him, he’s kept incurably optimistic. “The trembling was a message.. from the future”, as he says during the movie, but it never kept him from keeping on moving. He was never still. If you’re also a fan and have the chance to watch it, just do it.

✱ I know this will sound pretty volatile, but I’ve decided to carry out some experiments with the free Obsidian Live Sync plug-in in order to substitute for Obsidian Sync, which I just cannot afford now. So far, so good: using a free IBM Cloudant database I’m being able to sync between my iPhone and my Windows desktop computer flawlessly. If everything turns out well for some more time, I’ll try to also integrate Amethyst to the workflow. Amethyst is an Obsidian-compatible Hugo theme that can be used to replace Obsidian Publish. Should all of this work together, I might Soon™ ditch my Dokuwiki in favor of this crazy bundle. Stay tuned.

✱ As I usually work from home, it’s not every day that I get to meet my colleagues and my friends. This week, though, many of us met in a place that was new to me — a mix of bar and sports practicing place, where one can practice beach tennis, not that I personally did it 😅. The thing is it was very nice to be able to spend a couple of hours chatting and doing small talk, unrelated to anything about work. I hope we repeat this more often.

✱ This week’s been really busy. Lots of things to do, and learning. Thus I didn’t have all the energy I’d like to and, besides two new quotes and an image about reading, I wasn’t able to finish and publish any of the drafted texts I have saved. But I hope to publish more as soon as I finish a couple more activities. After all, writing and publishing has been a real therapy for me.

✱ I was invited to moderate the presentation of a proof-of-concept involving virtual reality applied in a training solution, during a seminar on technology and innovation organized by the company I work for, next month. I was flattered for being considered, and, of course, accepted it. And yesterday I could watch an explanation about the project — and, yet more interesting, I was able to try the solution out, by using very cool AR/VR glasses, and it was awesome.

✱ Hours before publishing my weekly notes, that is, this very same Saturday morning, I had the chance to participate live in a very interesting PKM discussion hosted by Geffrey van der Bos, where he, Alex Qwxlea and me talked about Omnivore as a replacement for Readwise, as the latter can be very pricey depending on the region of the world where you live, Amethyst as a replacement for Obsidian Publish and many other things. I got Geffrey’s custom CSS callout style for highlights up and running and also got acquainted with the Obsidian File Chucker plug-in. In the end it was all very fun and productive.

✱ According to my pedometer app, I’ve walked 29.5km this week. It’s probably not much for people who are used to walking and running as a means of exercising, but it is a lot to me. Actually, I’ve gone above the 10,000 steps a day threshold twice and got so cheered up by it that decided to try it thrice. I shouldn’t have. Last Monday I ended up visiting my osteopath, so she could put my bones into their right place. It felt nice to stop feeling pain, but in exchange I’ve been properly scolded by her, who reminded me that I should go easier when exercising, specially because I’m not actually used to do it very often. But I’ll try again, this time only in a easier pace.

✱ After considering to purchase Obsidian Publish for some time this week, I’ve decided not to. It is probably cheap in American dollars at 8 bucks a month charged annually, but when converted to Brazilian Reais it becomes very expensive, in my opinion, at over 450 bucks. Too much to keep a digital garden — although I still think Obsidian is a wonderful tool and will keep using it locally and offline.

✱ Giving up on Obsidian Publish made me consider a “B plan”. Years ago I fiddled a little bit with DokuWiki trying to create a personal wiki. And now, by using notes I’ve created locally, I went back to the idea and published my personal wiki and digital garden. It is in Portuguese only and filled with gaps that I need to address, but at least it’s gaining shape. I hope to keep on working in it.

✱ I had the opportunity of going out and have lunch with a couple of good friends from work this week. It was very nice to spend a couple of hours talking to them and making only small talk. The food was very nice also. And in the end I was gifted with a very hard to find — at least in the region where I live — chocolate bar. It was a mixture of white chocolate and cashew nuts, pretty yummy 😋.

✱ As the result of a badly curated cold, I’ve caught some laryngitis, probably to ensure my week started well. Lots of sneezes and a chronic cough came along as a result. That’s why the doctor said I’ll need to stick to some medication for the next two weeks or so. At least I need no antibiotics this time.

✱ The week also started with feedback time, due to my yearly performance review. I’ve learned quite a lot about how my peers see me professionally and about my strengths and opportunities for improvement. In general, every feedback I received was exciting — and some parts of them made me get even emotional. It’s nice to be working for a company where your leadership cares for you and tries to show you possible paths. Energized with that 👊.

✱ The small, unexpected surprises are the best ones. Last January, when I signed up to become a Matter app patron, they asked me to indicate whether I wanted to receive custom swag from them, which I said I wanted, because I love what they’re doing (otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen to be their patron from the start). It so happens I completely forgot about it until March, when an email from them kindly asked me to confirm my shipping address. I confirmed and forgot about it again — living in Brazil, I know how difficult it is for devs to send swag overseas, what I totally understand. Until an email from FedEx I received Tuesday morning told me a package coming from Matter would be delivered that same day. And it made me very happy to receive a custom, black ceramic mug and some stickers, all of them with Matter’s motto, “Words are my matter”, which also happens to be the name of an essays book from the awesome Ursula K. Le Guin.

✱ For the second week in a row now I'm involved in a mentoring activity. I love being a mentor, because I love teaching as much as I love learning. In this specific activity I'm involved with right now, I'm trying to help a work mate with improving the overall quality of her presentation skills and, so I can do it, I'm using one of my favorite subjects, storytelling, combined with a couple of professional past experiences. And from her feedback so far, it's going great, not to mention the amount of knowledge I'm also acquiring. There's definitely life in mentoring.

✱ 📚📺 After finishing reading The Nurse last week, I've watched the Netflix TV series based on the book. I've taken some notes during my read and intend to post about the book sometime in the future, but I can honestly say the book completely beats the series off. Netflix presented the story in only 4 chapters of about 42 minutes each, and this turned the story into something very shallow and limited, not focusing on the true crime investigation covered by Kristian Corfixen's book. A real shame.

✱ I just have to say how happy I am for Miami Heat. It’s fantastic to see Jimmy Butler and the team come to their Conference Finals again. That was a great way to finish Friday. There are still steps to climb, but I hope to see them repeat their 2006, 2012 and 2013 feats again. I’ll be rooting from as far as Brazil, but I know it counts! 🏀🏀🏀

✱ Talking basketball, I’ve watched AIR, the Amazon Prime 2023 vídeo which tells us a story based on true events, of how Sonny Vaccaro, a salesman for Nike led Phil Knight’s company in the search for that who is the greatest basketball player of NBA’s history: Michael Jordan. The movie was not the greatest, but it was still inspiring and demonstrative of business disruption. And no one could beat Viola Davis acting.

✱ There’s this restaurant in our city where my family and me have eaten for I can’t even remember how long now (although I’m sure it’s been for more than 18 years in a row now). We don’t eat there every day, of course, but are regular customers, either eating there, or ordering take out. This week I dropped by them as I usually do, made my regular, favorite, order (the owner knows it well), and when I was about to pay, he told me this time my meal was on the house… and it totally surprised me! When I insisted on paying him, he said that was because of the many years of orders we usually take there. He wouldn’t need to do that at all, but this certainly made me very happy, and added to the reasons for me to go on eating there.

✱ Last Tuesday I could celebrate my first anniversary at the company I’m currently working for, since I came back to work with them again. With this particular anniversary I’ve completed 20½ years of service in total — having left between 2018 and May 2022. I won’t get into specific details here, except to say that I’m proud of working where I work and to say that it feels like being home again. I really hope to remain where I am for many and many years to come 👊

✱ Also on Tuesday I flew to Rio de Janeiro to participate in Rio Websummit 2023. It’s a very big and important technology and innovation event that’s happened in Brazil for the first time this year, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to be able to visit the expositions and to watch some interesting keynotes.

✱ Then, last Thursday, when I landed back in São Paulo, I had the chance to spot one of the four existing Azul Airlines aircraft featuring Disney character paintings. While I was getting off the plane and moving inside the finger to get to the airport building, there it was: the Daisy Duck aircraft. I really liked the chance to spot it, and I posted this picture here as to share the vision with you.

✱ I briefly went out with a friend from work this week for having a coffee, so he could help me with a procedure I was having doubts with. This experience got me thinking about two totally different aspects. First, this is something I should do more often. As someone who can WFH, going out and performing certain tasks on my notebook while sitting at a coffee shop is really interesting and focus helping, if only because it allows you to change the scenario a little bit. Second, my friend introduced me to this coffee shop I didn’t know about, and it features Japanese small food and beverages. So I ended up coming back later with my children, for the older one has studied Japanese language — and culture, for that matter — for at least a couple of years now. The aftermath is that I had two taiyakis, a kind of waffle biscuit, one with my friend and the other as I returned with the kids. And I also tasted matcha green tea, which is very popular but a lot bitter to my own taste. Anyway, the experience was fantastic.

✱ Somedays ago I found out about Netflix’s The Nurse, a true crime miniseries about a Danish nurse who was accused of murdering some of her patients as if she was an angel of death. Now, I like true crime stories and was set to start watching the production, when I discovered the series is based on a book. So I first read the book, and finished it this very same Saturday (so in time to be featured in this weekly notes post). Kristian Corfixen’s book then became my eighth read book in 2023, out of the 20 I’ve set as a goal. I’ve then reached 40% of the way.

✱ My son had a tomography of his inferior wisdom teeth this week. All because his teeth are in a difficult position to come through, and will need to be extracted while internal. This exam will allow the dentist to define the best strategy to do so. The exam itself is one I had never heard about, a “cone beam” tomography — very advanced and vanguardist, according to his dentist. I hope the results are good and do allow to choose the best course of action.

✱ Anxiety fell hard on me this Monday. Lots of things I’ve still been learning and getting used to professionally were the great culprits. Thank God I have very nice friends who could quickly cheer me up and help me overcome it.

✱ Deciding to use Wordpress for blogging again is something I don’t regret a bit. Nevertheless, I knew the risks I was going to be exposed to, specially my long date mania of never being satisfied with the theme I use for the site. It is true I decided to start with a no-brainer, that is, the Beaumont theme from Anders Noren, who produces very high quality themes for free, but I couldn’t help wanting to change it, even knowing that most Wordpress modern themes are bloated, block-based Gutenberg ones. I even created a discussion thread at Órbita, a Brazilian discussion forum, looking for simple theme suggestions, but it wasn’t until Tuesday, after starting to follow Matthias Pfefferle in Mastodon, that I came across his Autonomie theme, “a highly semantic, responsive, accessible and search engine optimized WordPress Theme”, charged with HTML5 templates, and refined with several microformats, and many OpenWeb plugins. When I saw that it has auto-dark mode according to the user’s local preferences and support for post formats, I was sold. And this is why — until I change my mind again, at least, Autonomie is powering my site.

✱ 🏀 Total NBA week for me, following every playoffs game I can (even though my personal preference is for Miami Heat and Lakers). Honestly I’m rediscovering the joy of watching BB games and I’m loving it. Kudos to Jimmy Butler, by the way, for being a real LEGEND and for taking Heat further down the championship road.

✱ Took my younger son to see the doctor this week because he was coughing lots and lots. Stuffed nose too, and for many days. Needed to start antibiotics, but is doing better now. As my trip to Rio de Janeiro approaches, I took the chance and also saw the doctor, because of a (now properly medicated) sore throat. 🤒 😷

✱ So after a long wait, I was finally able to watch the Tetris movie. It took me 15 days longer than I wanted and some connection problems with the Apple TV+ service happening exactly at the same time when I decided to use my free trial, but I got it — and I don’t regret having watched it. Very good movie!

✱ This week I was finally able to finish working on my yearly income tax. In Brazil, all taxes are submitted electronically via internet, and citizens have between March and May to send in their data. Normally, I submit everything in the first weeks of March so I can receive any restitutions earlier, if applicable, but exceptionally because last year I changed jobs, it took me a little longer to gather all the information I needed. The important thing is that, now, all is solved.

✱ I finished reading my seventh book this year. It’s “A Guerra da Papoula”, the Brazilian Portuguese version of The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang. In general, despite of some ups and downs I enjoyed the story, which presents a nice plot and premise, and is actually distributed in a trilogy, from which this is the first book. With the second book already published here, the publishing house responsible for the Brazilian editions of The Poppy Wars has already declared the third and final installment of the series will be out in the second half of 2023.

✱ It made me really glad to learn, this week, that Desktop Dungeons: Rewind, the sequel I so very much anticipated to Desktop Dungeons, not only was finally released on April, 18th, but also offered free of charge to people like me, who owned the original game. Thus, I didn’t need to spend a nickel and already accumulated a couple of gameplay hours. Fantastic news!

✱ I couldn’t believe when I found out my corporate credit card had been cloned. It had just arrived and the only things I ever did with it before the incident were buying a plane round trip to Rio de Janeiro and booking a hotel there. Only a couple of days later I received a credit card purchase notification through the phone informing me of an unknown, unauthorized purchase. Fraud. I’m about to travel on business and the perspective of traveling without my corporate card really scared me, even more after the bank told me a new card could take up to 15 days to arrive. Card blocked, it was really a relief to receive a new one only 2 days after my contact. This means I’ll be able to properly travel. ☺️

✱ This last Friday, April 21st, was a holiday here in Brazil, when we celebrated Tiradentes’ day. He was the main representative of the Inconfidência Mineira movement, which fought for Brazil’s independence from Portugal. He dedicated himself to pharmaceutical practices and dentistry, earning him his nickname. "Tiradentes" means "tooth puller", a pejorative denomination adopted during the trial against him, after the Inconfidência Mineira movement was dismantled and he was sentenced to death by hanging, in 1792, 30 years before the actual Brazilian independence from Portugal happened, in 1822. History apart, I took this extra day off to rest, read, and watch some TV series. And it was really nice!

✱ Our Easter Sunday started different: my younger son broke our frontdoor key in half when trying to open it in the morning and one of the halves remained stuck inside the lock. So, besides a visit from the Easter bunny 🐰 we were also visited by the locksmith. Result of the Sunday: lock fixed and lots of chocolate. 🍫 😋

✱ “Opúsculo” is a word in Brazilian Portuguese, meaning “a very short book” or “a small work”. I learned about it reading a opúsculo, named “Como fazer inimigos e irritar pessoas” (something like “How to make enemies and irritate people”, as a free translation to English). It was free last Sunday on Amazon, as announced by Henderson Bariani, the author himself. As the name suggests, it’s a manual for the misanthrope to avoid making friends and to lose the one they (might) have. Now, I’m not a misanthrope myself (and the finest example of one for me is Gregory House), but I like to read such books so they can surprise me. And this one did surprise me. I might have misanthropic characteristics, because some of the tips offered by the author seem like things I do.

✱ Now, I normally don’t talk about people that I’ve started following on Mastodon, but Daniel Albu deserves an exception: he’s a freelance game developer from whose posts I found out about the Electronika 60 Tetris version playable from the web browser. Browsing his feed is like going back to my childhood, with Monkey Island, Space Quest, Duke Nukem and Sam & Max, besides soooo many games that fill my heart with fond memories. ❤️ Fantastic.

✱ I’ve paid a very welcome discounted price for a lifetime license of Clozemaster, at 50% off the regular price — all because I had decided to quit the service. They sent me an email with this limited time offer and, as I like their approach, went for it. Now I can keep learning French and any other languages offered without ever having to further pay for it ☺️.

✱ Our Easter Sunday started different: my younger son broke our frontdoor key in half when trying to open it in the morning and one of the halves remained stuck inside the lock. So, besides a visit from the Easter bunny 🐰 we were also visited by the locksmith. Result of the Sunday: lock fixed and lots of chocolate. 🍫 😋

✱ “Opúsculo” is a word in Brazilian Portuguese, meaning “a very short book” or “a small work”. I learned about it reading a opúsculo, named “Como fazer inimigos e irritar pessoas” (something like “How to make enemies and irritate people”, as a free translation to English). It was free last Sunday on Amazon, as announced by Henderson Bariani, the author himself. As the name suggests, it’s a manual for the misanthrope to avoid making friends and to lose the one they (might) have. Now, I’m not a misanthrope myself (and the finest example of one for me is Gregory House), but I like to read such books so they can surprise me. And this one did surprise me. I might have misanthropic characteristics, because some of the tips offered by the author seem like things I do.

✱ Now, I normally don’t talk about people that I’ve started following on Mastodon, but Daniel Albu deserves an exception: he’s a freelance game developer from whose posts I found out about the Electronika 60 Tetris version playable from the web browser. Browsing his feed is like going back to my childhood, with Monkey Island, Space Quest, Duke Nukem and Sam & Max, besides soooo many games that fill my heart with fond memories. ❤️ Fantastic.

✱ I’ve paid a very welcome discounted price for a lifetime license of Clozemaster, at 50% off the regular price — all because I had decided to quit the service. They sent me an email with this limited time offer and, as I like their approach, went for it. Now I can keep learning French and any other languages offered without ever having to further pay for it ☺️.

✱ Tetris has been gravitating around me all week now. With the Tetris movie released on Apple TV on March 29, all I’ve been wanting to do is to watch it. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to grant myself this desire so far, due to a couple of setbacks. Luckily for me, I’ve been enjoying playing Tetris meanwhile: Techmino and Falling Lightblocks on my phone, and Tetris Effect: Connected, on Steam, have sucked away a nice amount of hours from my life. The latter has even made the Tetris theme, in a new rearranged, remixed version, stick to my mind like an earworm. Hopefully, I’ll watch the movie soon… -ish.

✱ I’ll be attending Web Summit Rio, from May 2nd to 4th, and that came as a complete, unexpected surprise! Web Summit Rio will be the first of its kind in Brazil, the largest tech event of the country, comparable to Web Summit Lisbon, Collision in Toronto and RISE in Hong Kong. The surprise aspect happened when, besides learning my employer will be taking part in it for the first time, I took part on a draw among my work mates and was awarded a ti jet to the event, the opportunity to be present there. I’ve always heard about this event and now my expectations are set and high.

✱ I’m back to WordPress after sometime away from the tool. I used to keep my site running on it, and started blogging with it right in its beginning, 2003. I wrote many posts and years later decided to backup everything and pull the plug on it. After a writing hiatus, I settled with many different tools at the same time. There’s Write.as, Bear Blog and omg.lol, this last one the newest addition to my blogging stack. All of them are excellent tools, but all of a sudden I missed Wordpress and decided for a comeback. Expect my content to be concentrated here, from now on.

✱ Easter is on us again, and this means we’ve gone shopping for… chocolate 🍫. I don’t know if the custom of eating chocolate eggs is a global thing, but in Brazil Easter eggs are popular, yet not affordable as of the latest years. At home it’s already a practice to make up for the eggs with chocolate bars and assorted candy. And we’re all set for tomorrow here. Stocks filled to appeal to me, my wife and kids.

✱ Tetris has been gravitating around me all week now. With the Tetris movie released on Apple TV on March 29, all I’ve been wanting to do is to watch it. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to grant myself this desire so far, due to a couple of setbacks. Luckily for me, I’ve been enjoying playing Tetris meanwhile: Techmino and Falling Lightblocks on my phone, and Tetris Effect: Connected, on Steam, have sucked away a nice amount of hours from my life. The latter has even made the Tetris theme, in a new rearranged, remixed version, stick to my mind like an earworm. Hopefully, I’ll watch the movie soon… -ish.

✱ I’ll be attending Web Summit Rio, from May 2nd to 4th, and that came as a complete, unexpected surprise! Web Summit Rio will be the first of its kind in Brazil, the largest tech event of the country, comparable to Web Summit Lisbon, Collision in Toronto and RISE in Hong Kong. The surprise aspect happened when, besides learning my employer will be taking part in it for the first time, I took part on a draw among my work mates and was awarded a ti jet to the event, the opportunity to be present there. I’ve always heard about this event and now my expectations are set and high.

✱ I’m back to WordPress after sometime away from the tool. I used to keep my site running on it, and started blogging with it right in its beginning, 2003. I wrote many posts and years later decided to backup everything and pull the plug on it. After a writing hiatus, I settled with many different tools at the same time. There’s Write.as, Bear Blog and omg.lol, this last one the newest addition to my blogging stack. All of them are excellent tools, but all of a sudden I missed Wordpress and decided for a comeback. Expect my content to be concentrated here, from now on.

✱ Easter is on us again, and this means we’ve gone shopping for… chocolate 🍫. I don’t know if the custom of eating chocolate eggs is a global thing, but in Brazil Easter eggs are popular, yet not affordable as of the latest years. At home it’s already a practice to make up for the eggs with chocolate bars and assorted candy. And we’re all set for tomorrow here. Stocks filled to appeal to me, my wife and kids.

✱ This week work got me very busy. I had almost no time to do anything else; thus, my reading of “The Poppy Wars” has almost stopped — I guess I must have progressed a bare 5% or 6%, and my series episode watching actually stopped. On the one hand, this must have been the week I felt most tired ever in 2023. On the other hand, I feel I’m learning new things and making some progress, what feels very nice.

✱ Have you ever felt so tired, but so really tired that if you could, all you’d do would be to sleep all day long? Along with this week’s work I started to feel very much tired by the end of each day, specially last Thursday and yesterday, Friday. These were the days I needed to attend work in person — taking me out of my WFH routine. Now. One thing is to consider that having to ride to work and stay there, coming back home by the end of the day is the likely culprit for all this tiredness. I can’t actually rule it out, but I started to worry, because I’ve been feeling very sleepy — and kind of energy-less — as of lately. I’m considering setting an appointment to go see a doctor. I have some medical conditions under control, which I’m not going to list here for privacy purposes, but I guess any time feels good for a visit to the doctor for a checkup.

✱ Another side effect I felt this week was a raise in my pile of to read articles. Between my own savings from web and the newsletters I follow, there’s so much unread material that I’m seriously considering ditching it all — i.e., marking every piece as read and moving on. No FOMO here. For what I do get to read, I usually take notes, make highlights and comments. I’m considering starting to publish them in this blog soon enough.

✱ As my reading of A guerra da Papoula, the Brazilian Portuguese translation of The Poppy Wars, by author R. F. Kuang progresses to ⅓ of the book, this week started greeting me with very nice news from the team at Literal.club. I can’t remember exactly when I applied to be a volunteer librarian for the app, but this week my application was accepted! This means that now, according to the admins at Literal, I have librarian superpowers, like merging, creating and editing book information. This makes me particularly satisfied because it’s usually very hard to find Brazilian Portuguese book information on these book tracking apps, and as a librarian I can help reducing this gap. I’m still in need to learn exactly how to do it, but I’ll get there.

✱ It’s been sometime now that I’ve been considering the idea of creating some kind of linklog, a place to share interesting things I come across daily — and it would be very nice to use weblog.lol to do it, so much that I’ve created a feature request in Discourse for that. My idea is based on the idea of using (currently non-existing) tag templates that could be arranged to display in a list, and be paged as needed. I’ve written about it there, so let’s leave it where it is (hoping that Adam sees it and gets to implement it in a neat way as he always does).

✱ This must be my Elvis-iest week ever. I like Elvis Presley songs and everything, although I’m not his biggest fan. But last Monday I listened to Suspicious Minds on the radio and listened later, again, and again, and again. The song became a real earworm. Then, last night, my son told us about this new Elvis (2022) movie he found on HBO and this afternoon we’ve watched it. The film focuses on the conflicting relationship Elvis had with his long time manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, who actually narrates the story. Suspicious Minds appears quite a lot during the movie, and besides being a hell of a song, it mixes pretty well with the plot. If you haven’t watched it yet and can do, do it.v

✱ Anxious as I was to watch the ninth (and last) episode of HBO's The Last of Us, I couldn't manage to do it on Sunday. It was hard to keep waiting until last night, when I finally could see where the story led Ellie and Joel. There was even… a real giraffe making a cameo appearance! 😃 I've stated before that I've never played the two franchise videogames in my life, but I read that these 9 episodes were going to wrap up all the first game and its DLC. In the end, this last episode went following a path that I liked — and that, at the same time, displeased my son, who said he shouldn't have wasted his time watching the series. Still, when I asked him what he'd have done differently, he muted. As any and many first seasons of series before it, it came to an end. Sometimes this end pleases, sometimes it doesn't. I can't (or don't want to) comment specifics here so I don't reveal spoilers, but let's just say that the final episode of season one was just fair as I could expect it to be. And count me in for watching season 2 when it premiers.

✱ Je me souviens du français. Bien… a petit peut. I've been touching French again as of lately and I am remembering how fun it can be to explore a different language. I studied French for around a year and a half in the past, but of course, due to not using it on a regular basis, ended up forgetting a lot of it. As I'm studying French by my own and don't want to pressure myself or anything, I decided to gather vocabulary through the lightest, easiest way that came to my mind: that is, by reading comics in French. It's somewhat hard to find French comics to download, but after some scavenging, I found a couple of them, Uncle Scrooge — Oncle Picsou magazines, and they're proving to be at the same time both challenging and lots of fun. Now I'm deciding whether to gather all my vocabulary into a flash card app to practice it through spaced repetition. Maybe I'll do it. Let's see. For now, it's the fun part that's keeping me moving. Now I'm deciding whether to gather all my vocabulary into a flash card app to practice it through spaced repetition. Maybe I'll do it. Let's see. For now, it's the fun part that's keeping me moving.

✱ Card Survival: Tropical Island is a game I had my eyes on for quite some time now. I'm not being able to dedicate much time to gaming this year, but considering that Steam's Autumn Sale is on until the next 23rd, 20% off its regular price was enough argument to make me decide to buy it. In fact, I got to play it this morning, and did it for almost 4 hours in a row. I like this deck building gente a lot, and although the game premise seems simple enough — you wake up on a deserted island only to find out you have to survive it till you escape it, or till you get enough resources and make it your new home —, it's perfectly possible to notice how deep the gameplay is. Devs are active and by the time I purchased it last night, I noticed their introduction of the 41st wave of updates in game mechanics. OMG 😱 In general, I'm finding the experience of having to watch my hunger, thirst, sleepiness, health, stress and so many other leves I have to keep eyes on while scavenging, chopping wood, making fires up and a whole lot of other things very… enjoyable. It does get complicated as the days pass by, and I'm a lousy survival right know, not having passed through my fifth day surviving on the island. Yet, I wasn't wrong buying the game, as I feel something will keep me pushing back to play 🏝️😃

✱ I've been reading a lot — and creating a long reading queue — about AI these days. Part of it is because of professional reasons, and part of it is out of my sole, genuine interest. I've been trying to take notes to help make sense of everything I've discovered about the subject, but, for me , taking notes has proven to be more difficult than what I'd like to admit. I'm using Obsidian to help me, the same way I'm using it to write my blog posts, such as this very own hebdomadary post, but I have accumulated lots of unfinished texts to resume reading and notes that I've taken and excerpts that I've highlighted but haven't changed into notes yet. Still, I need to say that I can't help but consider AI a very interesting topic, starting from the fact that the term, in itself, is extremely commercial and filled with hype. Behind it, actually, there's computer science and a lot of research areas such as large language modeling, deep learning, neural networks, robotics and natural language processing, just to name a few. All these topics are interesting in themselves, so I'm probably getting busy with it quite some time yet.

✱ This week I had the opportunity to visit one of Google's offices in São Paulo. My work mates and I went to watch a series of dedicated keynotes on GCP, artificial intelligence, innovation and other subjects. I'm still to know someone who works with anything technology-related who doesn't want to know Google's offices. This was my turn to do it, as I hadn't come across a chance until then. It was a fantastic opportunity and, as such, I journaled about it in private.

✱ I've been reading two books at a time this week. Haven't finished them yet but I'm enjoying both of them. The first is Why Fish Don't Exist, by Lulu Miller. It's a book I came across very recently, which tells the true story of David Starr Jordan, a very obsessive taxonomist, possessed with the sim of bringing order to the chaos of the natural world. I wasn't going to start reading it right away, but, as it happens to me more times than I'd like to admit, after skimming through the first pages of the book, I was hooked. So, here I am. At practically 40% of pages read. The other book is Outlander, the Fiery Cross, by Diana Gabaldon. This is a book I had stopped reading and just recently resumed. I've been reading the Outlander series with interest due to the storytelling. Like I've stated before, I love long, well narrated books that makes me feel the story is endless. Man, are there so many chapters on each volume of Outlander, or what?

✱ While waiting for the last episode of the series to air this coming Sunday, I read somewhere that the first season covers the first game and its Left Behind DLC, and the second — and already confirmed by HBO Max — season will cover the second game, currently the lastest to have been released, in 2020. From what I read, it's not clear whether HBO will split the second game in two seasons (as it looks like the story follows two characters and intertwines) or not, but the producers have made it clear that if no new game is produced by Naughty Dog, nor will further series development. I find it fine. The series has been awesome, but I tend to agree to the producers in saying that some works just are not made to span through 5, 6 or 7 seasons in a row. And for me, it's ok.

✱ I've come to the conclusion that 2023 is really the year I can say I came back to a more decent rythm with my reading. This week I could finish yet another book, the fourth this year, and that gave me free time to resume reading Outlander, a series written by Diana Gabaldon which is composed of 9 books so far, each one a huge tome with more than a 1,000 pages. I love long, well narrated books, the kind that makes us feel the story is endless, and God, was I in need of diving into some fiction lately. I'm currently reading the fifth book in the series, The Fiery Cross, and I do intend to take it to the end, after pausing it in the past due to some personal affairs I'd been dealing with. The thing is I discovered this Answer in Progress YouTube channel this week, and enjoyed watching Sabrina's videos so much that when I saw Why you stopped reading I felt I needed to start reading Why Fish Don't Exist, by Lulu Miller, just because. So this is the latest book to have jumped my reading line, but… I don't actually care. I can handle Diana's fiction and this non-fiction resembling fiction written by Miller at the same time. Bring them on :)

✱ I started to… tried to start journaling using Day One, just to give up on its free trial this week. I guess I'd better keep my reflections in a more private way, like a dedicated Obsidian vault. They're supposed to be more text than imagery anyway, and I feel more relieved by keeping my thoughts at hand in a more controlled way…

✱ Some years ago I was studying French. All of a sudden, this week, I've been bitten by the learning bug again, so I'm thinking about starting to read en français encore une fois. I've got a thing with languages. When I was still a kid, I took one of these vocational tests where I found out I could learn languages easily, and since then, it's been a way filled with discoveries and lots of fun… 😃 Are you a French speaker willing to talk to me and teach me more of this marvelous language in the process? Get in touch 🇫🇷

✱ Due to Carnival celebration in Brazil, this last week was a much shorter work week: though the holiday itself was on Tuesday, several companies in my country, including the one I work for, usually concede an extra day off on Ash Wednesday. So, all in all, counting from last Sarturday on, I had a long holiday consisting of 5 whole days. I'd say it's the longest period off we have in our country's calendar. Thus, I only worked on Thursday and Friday. I don't celebrate Carnival the same way many of my fellow countrymen do — actually, I don't like celebrating it at all, like I said in this blog post I wrote last Tuesday, in Portuguese. So I usually enjoy my time off catching up with my read-it-later backlog, binge-watching series and reading books. And that's what I did.

✱ In January I started reading Solomon Kane: a saga completa. This is a book with the complete Solomon Kane adventures, as written by Robert E. Howard. Howard also created Conan, the Barbarian, a much more famous character, but my interest in Solomon was instantaneous when I learned he was a puritan who fought against the evil and the supernatural. Howard's character is the first representative of the sword and sorcery literary genre, one that I love so much. It was only natural that I read the book — and it read very fluently, so it was delightful. Besides, as soon as February started, another edition of Solomon Kane's complete works was published here in Brazil. An illustrated edition that I soon acquired and started reading in parallel. Most of the two books' contents was the same — after all, the tales and stories were most the same —, but before you call me nuts for reading two equal books at the same time, I must say there are differences. The newer book, published this month and called Solomon Kane: edição completa e definitiva is an illustrated edition — with very well made artwork, I should say. It also contains a series of fragments of stories I didn't know about which were certainly useful for my personal purpose of diving as much as I could into the character's universe. The older book had a lot of letters Robert E. Howard exchanged with other authors and mentions to an officially released movie — which doesn't seem to live up to Solomon Kane's character — and a fan made, 3 minute short. I mean to read at least 20 books this year. These two were finished during this holiday and, along with Galaga, a collection of curiosities written by Michael Kimball about the classic 80's arcade, now I completed 15% of my goal.

✱ The Last of Us remains strong and interesting. My son found the latest episode a little lacking in action, but I guess it's all part of the story. And man, what a cliffhanger… we're looking forwards tomorrow night to see where things will be going. More episodes of Spy X Family watched as well. Many of them.

✱ My weely posts have worked just they way I’d like them to. As regular prompts for me to write and reflect. I’ve just decided to do them the same way others are doing and, instead of numbering my posts sequentially (this would be the 4th in the series), I decided to name them according to the year’s current week number, which is why now the title now reads the way it does. I guess it makes better sense this way.

✱ I’ve always known about Obsidian’s daily notes and also experimented with them sometimes. But this week I decided to try it in a “more serious” approach, if I may call it this way. As after setting up the very nice Remotely-save Obsidian plugin I could finally start syncing my iPhone notes to my OneDrive account, I realized daily notes would be a perfect location for all of my quick, unstructured notes, including small reflections I come to during the day, sites and news I find, work and life achievements, book indications, and so on and so forth. I just write whatever and sync it to my OneDrive to be preserved. Then, from there, it goes (or doesn't go) anywhere I want it to go to. The approach felt the most frictionless for me — and it even allowed me to create more blog posts as a side product: I wrote Office calendars are all wrong and Notetaking has to go your way after starting to use daily notes. So this looks like a keeper to me.

✱ Another very nice effect of writing my personal daily notes is to be able to better combat imposter syndrome, a bad thing which sometimes strikes me. Writing my personal and professional achievements in daily notes is like leaving messages to my future self. Whenever the syndrome strikes me, I can just scroll through my daily entries looking for achievements and deeds that were only possible because of my competence. Et voilà, instant antidote.

✱ I came back to watching one of my favorite cartoons, Bob's Burgers, on Star Plus. This week, after some long hiatus, got to see 3 more episodes, all properly registered at Trakt. I love adult-oriented cartoons such as Family Guy and even The Simpsons, but Bob's got a special spot. I'm way behind on seasons (still on the sixth one) but, hey, I kind of prefer it this way, because it allows me, when I have time, to binge watch.

✱ On other series, me and the kids kept watching Spy X Family, having reached episode 10 of the 25 released for season one. I keep my opinion, it's an amazing anime, and it makes me very happy to know season 2 is coming in 2023, along with a movie. I'm also up to date with The Last of Us, in this case looking forwards to new episodes, released weekly. For a series based on a videogame franchise, it's going pretty well.

✱ When I was a teen there was this jingle of a FM radio comedy show I used to listen to. It aired during lunch time and, when it was summer — as it currently is here in Brazil —, it used to sing something like "summer is a damned season". Although long gone, I've always had that jingle on my mind. Summer is my least favorite season of the year because heat is something I like to avoid as much as possible, although I try to get by it as best as I can. But this year's temperatures in our city are edging the unbearable for me. For example, it's 3PM while I'm typing this and 29°C (84°F) outside. It's a nightmare for me. Luckily, each season lasts for only 3 months, and fall's scheduled to begin by March 20th here, roughly 1 month from now.