cat /proc/claus

After almost one year and a half living in Rio, tomorrow I’m boarding for Japan. I’ve been hired as an Assistant Professor at the G30 Computational Science Program at Tsukuba University.

I’m looking forward a lot for this move. For me, more than any “january first”, this signals a new year. Moving has always been accompained by a rush of productivity and energy, and I have been planning to use these to start (or re-start) a number of projects that were on the back burner. The things I want to do in this new start include: Going back to the Gym, getting better at Starcraft, Learning to program indie games, reading more technical books. Not to mention updating all my websites

This last year in Rio was great from an academic point of view. I had a very interesting research project, with awesome work mates. I will miss that. But I also look forward to my new position. The prospect of having students under me, and a bit more of academic freedom gives me all sorts of ideas to work with.

Today I had to wait for a few hours at the Tiete bus station, in Sao Paulo. I was reading “The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker, a not so good portuguese translation, in a coffee shop.

The cool thing about this coffee shop is that they had a big piano, which was open for anyone who wanted to play it. When I arrived, a kid was playing nicely, and kept on it for almost an hour. After he left, a guy dressed as a bus driver sat down and played for a while as well.

I wish I could play the piano too. When I was about 10, I took maybe 2 or 3 months of classes, but then stopped. Mom says it was because at the time we could not afford to buy a piano, which I needed to progress further. Oh well.

I wonder if I’m still capable of learning it to any acceptable degree.

Zombies are one of my favorite things And two weeks ago I had the chance to take part in the Zombie Walk RJ 2011! (portuguese only )

For those who do not know, a zombie walk is an event where a lot of people dress like zombies, gather like zombies, and shamble the streets while moaning ¨braaaaains¨, like zombies! It is a big ¨be a zombie for a day¨ event. A light hearted and fun bloody walk!

At first, I was thinking that dressing as a zombie would be the easy part - just some fake blood, dirty clothes and we´re good to go, right? Turns out that making fake wounds can be a very complicated endeavor. I decided to try my hand at making a more elaborate costume by checking some internet turorials.

The results were mixed…

But at least I got to meet these guys!

So it was pretty fun.

Two weeks ago, I had this nasty ear infection. The doctor treating me said she wanted me to check with her again on a bi-monthly basis, because the left side of my nose cannals was too small or something like that. When I told her that I was going to Japan in 3 months and probably couldn’t commit to any long term treatments, she freaked out.

- You can’t travel by air! Your eardrums will rupture! We need to do something about it before going!
- But the trip is three months away…
- Doesn’t matter, you can’t fly in this condition. — she was adamant.

And then, just after leaving her office, I remembered that I was going to take a flight much earlier, for the Brazilian Congress for Bioinspired Computing just two weeks later.

Uh Oh.

While I made a mental note to visit her again before the trip, I completely forgot about that. I was feeling much better by the end of the first week of treatment. I just remembered the punctured eardrum threats the day of my trip.

Oh man, I was swallowing and moving my jaw like crazy as the plane started to taxi out, mildly amazed at the possibility of rivers of blood suddenly coming out of my ears. My throat was DRY, and the plane hadn’t even begun the take off yet.

As you can guess, nothing happened. I after all that exercise, I probably had the best pressurized ears of the whole cabin.

Other than this scare, the flight was one of my most enjoyable domestic flight ever. I used Azul Airlines which, surprisingly, does not have an English website (shame on them!). If you can navigate the Portuguese website, I recommend it.

In this one year I have been living in this city, the one thing that makes me livid, is how freaking RUDE people who work here are. There is no concept at all that being nice to your customer is part of the product or service they are selling you.

You pay, they give you the goods, and you better be happy about it. Now get out.

Today I got greeted by (or better grunted by) a clinic´s secretary who could not deign herself to say words such as please or thank you to people trying to schedule an appointment at the place she works for. Worse yet: she would get offended when I asked her to repeat what she had said (hey, ear doctor?) and when I asked her to give me walking directions from the nearest subway station. What´s wrong with these people, don´t they realize that they just lose customers that way?

Problem is, they probably don´t. For what I have seen here in Rio, this kind of treatment is the norm, not the exception, and everyone seems to take it in stride. ¨City of happy, relaxed people¨, yeah right.