cat /proc/claus

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.

The internet can be a weird scary amazing awesome place.

Someone made a twitter bot called “InigoMontoya”. It scans twitter for the word “Inconceivable!”, and responds with Inigo’s catchphrase “I don’t think it means what you think it means”. If you talk back to the bot, it gives you a random line from the character. Lol

Checking the bot’s history, it is impressive the number of people who ends their twitter posts with “Inconceivable!”

This week’s XKCD is cute:

While not directly related, it makes me remember when I was an exchange student at Waseda University. I had this awesome korean roommate who would decorate our room, and I would try to make my side of the room to “match” with his.

I really like this “living with roommates” life style, and I hope I can keep doing it for as long as I can.

So yesterday night I dropped a whole cup of coffee on my keyboard (and my whole desk, but never mind that). I desperately tried to dry it all out as fast as I could, but after I spending a ton of paper towels, the “t” and the “y” keys were still stuck (so that whenever I pressed “t” I got “rt” and whenever I pressed “y” I got “uy”).

My first tought was that maybe some sugar or coffee dried under those keys, binding their pressure sensors together. I tried as hard as I could to clean it under them, to no success. Then I decided that I would try to take the keyboard apart to fix it.

Bad mistake.

First of all, why does a freaking keyboard has SO MANY SCREWS? My keyboard had 16 (SIXTEEN!) screws attached to the lower side. Worse yet, even after I released all those screws, the keyboard would not come apart! The plastic was probably welded shut, and I could just pry at the borders. WTF?

Then I noticed something wonky — when I took off the screws, half of my keyboard stopped working — but it was not a consistent half: The enter and space keys were okay, as well as the number row and the function keys. But all the keys in between where non-responsive. As I started putting the screws back in place, the keys started responding again. Maybe the screws were just holding the sensor in place? It does not make much sense, externally accesible screws that would not give internal access, but would hold the internals of the keyboard in place >.< Of course, when I put it all back together, it was working even WORSE than before. Not only the t and y keys were stuck to the r and u keys, but the q key was stuck to the tab key, and the w key was stuck with the CAPS LOCK key (they are not even close together, WTF?) the o and p keys were stuck to [ and ], respectively. It made no sense at all.

So I guess I will have to buy another keyboard today. I don't know if I screwed my old keyboard for good, or if I just spread the water that was inside and created new and amazing connections, but I have enough work this week that I cannod afford to be without a computer until I figure out what went wrong

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

In other news, I just got this VIM cheat sheet from my laboratory’s mailing list. I should take the chance to properly learn how to use VIM, I guess. Hope it is useful to others too.

Person A generates a document, using Power Point (don’t ask). Sends it to person B. The document displays slightly differently on person’s B computer, due to differences in fonts, environment, program version. B performs minor changes to “fix” these displays differences, and sends the document back to A. A then see differences in his own computer, fix them, and sends them back to B.

Rinse, Repeat.

>_>