this week i

woke at 4 [1], stuffed my laptop and the italian passport in my backpack, rode an empty subway car, crossed two highways in the dark, flew to brasilia [2], learned the portuguese word for cowboy, set up a doubly-remote office [3], lectured bureaucrats at the ministry of education for seven hours about how to statistical program like a champ [4] [5], turned down a consulting contract from their boss, saw a buildingside waterfall [6] and one shameless man with leopard-print neck-pillow [7] before my late-evening flight back to rio, waited at the bus stop shirtless so people would mistake me for a local rather than a robbery-target [8], gave the driver all my change instead of counting it - she said, "thanks love" and i felt it - cranked the a/c, cursed at finally ripping the front page off of my worn-out yellow fever vaccination card, then fell asleep despite the caffeine in the 11pm big gulp-sized acai intended to power me through some survey analysis bug fixes that i had had a lunchtime epiphany about over feijoada.  woke up (but not as) early to pass the next thirty hours [9] [10] [11] [12] with a woman i'll probably never see again thanks to my shitty portuguese.  we humans often remember things differently than they happened, no tolerance for that here.

















scratched another kill onto the side of my airplane.  that is to say, one more documented monetdb bug.


read..

(1) norman rockwell

rockwell's paintings have become more interesting over time
didn't know a red maple from a brown bear
rockwell's genius was cinematic rather than graphic
the familiar idea that rockwell was the commercial artist while pollock was all authentic spontaneity hasn't stoody up so well lately


(2) october at hhs

complex gearing..housed behind a simple interface

remarkably, two weeks later, on november 20, in his testimony to congress, henry chao, the chief information officer at the centers for medicaid and medicare, stated that as much as 40 percent of the website's back end still needed to be built


(3) mike tyson

you're boxing, you're not playing the piano

prize fights were marathons that might involve as many as one hundred rounds of three minutes each (the record is 110 rounds in 1893, over seven hours)



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