foot

by Miguel de Icaza

Last night as Duncan and I were walking from Sushi Express to Cafe Royale I twisted my ankle, and we had to cancel our plans to get intravenously cafeinated.

The pain in the morning was more severe than it was when I went to sleep, so I did what every other google user would have done. I googled for the problem. I found everything I needed to fix myself up through google. The process of fixing yourself up in this particular case seemed pretty straight forward, so I followed the indication.

The only bit I was not quite ready to handle was the `anti-inflamatory medication'. So I decided to get an appointment with my doctor to get some anti-inflamatories and to get a quick checkup.

I took my Profits over People book from Chomsky, and my nice sweater I got from Chiapas.

My doctor asked what the Chomsky book was about, and by the looks of my sweater, she ventured to say `Is that some kind of revolution?'. I found that funny.

I found a loophole in capitalism.

Today I went to see Michael Moore which is touring the country promoting his new book Stupid White Men.

Michael's web site is a recommended reading for everyone, and the book is a great eye opener. He does this through humor, which is great. Michael is a great speaker as well, he went through the 90 minutes that were allocated for his talk in no time, and he kept the crowd informed and amused at the same time.

Check the calendar for his book

Posted on 27 Feb 2002


Chomsky on the war on drugs

by Miguel de Icaza

I was always tempted to ask Chomsky about his opinion on the War on Drugs.

Now there is an interview where he covers this subject. Fascinating.

Posted on 19 Feb 2002


FOSDEM

by Miguel de Icaza

The confence has been incredible and everyone I have met has been great. I have pictures.

Leen Toelen from Mono fame came to the conference, and I had a chance to meet him, it is great to finally put a face to a name.

In the morning I went to Damien's GnomeMeeting talk which was awesome. The program is awesome, the demo was awesome, and those guys know what they are doing.

I also did my Mono talk. It went very well, as I prepared the talk with two days in advance, and I had been polishing it since I am now moving to use Open Office's presentations program instead of Magic Point.

A great audience, and there were some really interesting questions after the talk.

I spent most of my time with Damien, Ines, Jonita, Kenneth, Hanna, Matthias, Rodrigo and my friends from Spain (The two Carlos and Alvaro) Francisco de Urquijo also came to the show.

Brussels is a beautiful city as well. I had a very good time, and as usual the food was excellent.

Mono

Open Office Slides for my presentation are here

Posted on 17 Feb 2002


Album

by Miguel de Icaza

I finally installed some gallery software. It was really easy, and works with PHP. Trivial to setup. I am loving it.

My albums are here

Dinner

Went with my friends from Spain, Francisco and Michael to dinner to downton Brussels, and took many pictures that should be available shortly in my album.

Posted on 16 Feb 2002


Afganisthan

by Miguel de Icaza

The Guardian reports:

"I sold my daughter for money because of the hunger," he says, shivering with fever in the chill of his mud and chaff house. "I sold my daughter to save the other people in my family, to save them from dying."

And so Aziz Gul was contracted in marriage to a distant relative on the far side of the gorge that cuts off the village of Siya Sang from the outside world, for a down payment of 2m Afghanis - about �50.

Posted on 09 Feb 2002


chomksy

by Miguel de Icaza

Noam Chomsky at Harvard University. As usual a great talk, but this time the session of questions and answers was awesome: the answers were great stories that I had not heard before.

At the end we met Noam and took a bunch of pictures.

Posted on 06 Feb 2002


Time

by Miguel de Icaza

From Time Magazine: How the US killed the Wrong Soldiers:

Two dead Afghans were found with their wrists bound. One U.S. soldier left behind a note: "Have a nice day. From Damage Inc." Days after the attack, the classrooms at the school were still soaked in thick blood. Surveying the carnage, a Uruzgan elder said, "The U.S. must be punished for what they did in this room." Even mistakes aren't easily forgotten.

Made me think of The My Lai Massacre. Kind of like this

Black-Hawk-Down and Propaganda

I was pondering whether I should watch this movie. Today I made up my mind not to watch it. At The Guardian.

Embedded Gtk

Interesting read.

Chomsky

Chomksy is talking this week in Cambridge. Just got his new book 9/11.

Am reading also Catch-22, very amusing so far.

Posted on 04 Feb 2002


Final day

by Miguel de Icaza

Today was the last day of LWE. As usual, these things consume all of your waking hours, and by the last day I was pretty tired.

The show was over relatively early, and everyone at Ximian had gone home (the two options we had were: to take a boat ride in NY or eat lobster in Boston). Patrick, Mancha and myself stayed another day to enjoy New York a bit more. We had dinner and a greek waiter at "Pete's" with the Rutgers University LUG members.

Show

Afterwards we catched the `De la Guarda' show in Union Square per Patrick's advise. Lovely show. Worth watching a couple of times. The NY times said about this show `Better than Sex'. Patrick, always full of expressivity summarized it with `No mames'.

NYU

We met with our friends from NYU (Felix, Mauricio, Ramon) and went for some bar hoping, despite the fact that everyone was very tired. Here are four mexicans in the third stop that night.

Dinner

Attempted dinner at 2am `El Coyote Cojo de las Nalgas Pintas' in the Village (see picture for evidence). Met with Mauricio's friend Alma Marcela (Silva de Alegria) at the last stop.

Nice evening. Given that Patrick talked to everyone we ran into in the streets, cabs, shops or bars. More than one cab driver knows about Patrick's new son Nicolas.

Mexico City

Earlier this year I was in Mexico City:

Roberto, Coffee shop.
Plaza Loreto, Jan 1st.
Raymond Hall.

Posted on 01 Feb 2002