The Hug

I was visiting the blog of a friend, when I read a very touching story that he was sharing in his last post. The story was originally published in a newspaper in my hometown. So, I decided to translate the story and publish it here because I believe it's good to spread this kind of message.

According to him, in the country side of Brazil, a redneck was talking so calmly that he seemed to measure, analyze and meditate about every word he was saying...

“Yeah... of all men's inventions, the one that makes sense the most is the hug. There is no way of not enjoying a hug! Everybody, during a hug, participates a little bit...

When you are missing someone, the hug of someone else relieves you. When you are angry and receive a hug, you even feel ashamed of that bad feeling. If you are happy and hugs someone else, this person will get a little bit of your happiness. If someone is ill and you hug her/him, she/he starts getting better and you get better as well.

A lot of important and cult people have tried to understand why the hug is so 'hightech', but nobody has figured it out yet.

I have no clue too either! I would say that it was a nice spirit from God who told me that and I'm going to tell you what he told me: The hug is good because of the heart. When you hug someone you do a massage on your heart and the heart of the other one is massaged too. But this isn't all. The real key of the biggest secret is:

When we hug someone, both get two hearts on the chest. So, sending a big and warming hug for you."

Ubuntu 10.04 is coming to my Laptop

I was gradually moving from Windows to Linux in the last years and the definitive migration finally came in November, 2009. Today, all my work is done in the Ubuntu 9.10 operating system (a Linux distribution), running in a Sony Vaio Laptop, with 4GB RAM and dual core. In other words, the fastest machine I've ever had, not because of the hardware, but because this operating system doesn't waste hardware resources as Windows does.

If you use Windows you certainly need an anti-virus. There is no way to use Windows without it, unless you don't care about losing your work without any reasonable explanation. An anti-virus will demand around 15% of your computer resources. It means you will be 15% less productive while working. There is no need for an anti-virus on Linux. It is secure and simple. No program can do worse things without your clear permission and it has much less alert messages than Windows.

Before entering in this blog you had to turn on your computer and wait a considerable time until you're able to start using it. Why did you have to wait for so long? Because some heavy applications decided, not always with your permission, to load part of them during the Windows initialization in order to look faster when you start using them. So, after a year using Windows, you certainly installed a lot of applications and your initialization process becomes slower and slower. That's why your behavior has changed in the last years, by pressing the power button and walking around some time to have a coffee, talking to colleagues, making some table cleaning, and finally going back to work. This doesn't happen in Linux, so the initialization is always fast.

71.70% of my Blog's visitors use Windows (blue), 17.67% use Linux (green) and 10% use Mac (orange). Those who use Mac don't have the same problems that Windows users have, because Mac, as Linux, is based on Unix. The difference between Linux and Mac is basically the usability. This is the quality factor that makes people spend twice more money on the same software architecture of Linux.

Yeah, the usability provided by Linux is not that great. However, it's gradually changing thanks to Ubuntu, a Linux distribution focused on Linux accessibility, not only user friendly, but also social accessible by making it freely available for use and distribution. They don't stop improving it. In some days Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, will release the version 10.04, which has an improved usability and it is going to definitively change the way how people face Linux for the first time (I recommend this interesting post at CNET about the Linux acceptance). I published a countdown banner on the right bar (you won't probably see it anymore in a near future), which is making me much more anxious.

Pencil's Fan Boy

When I was a kid my parents never gave me the opportunity of having fancy school things, like a beautiful and thick notebook, a pen with 10 different colors, a nice pencil-case, a big backpack with dozens of compartments, but I never complained. My father always bought everything in volume to save money. So, if I wanted parents sponsorship for school materials, I had to use the standard notebook, the standard pen, the standard everything.

I'm not sure, but I think because of that I became addicted to stationary stuff, mainly pencils. I cannot see a new pencil release and not buy it. I simply love them, not because they are practical and cheap, but because they are classical, remind me of my wonderful childhood, and allow me to make mistakes without screwing the paper up, which usually happens when we try to erase pen traces. They also help me to write better because looking at a white paper and a discrete pencil there is not so much visual pollution or other computer alerts to take out my attention. Yes, it takes time, of course, since I still have to type everything later, but it makes me revisit the text for further improvements. So, when the text is not urgent, I will certainly write it down on paper before you read it.

Actually, my motivation to write this post came from another post written by Paulo Coelho, a famous Brazilian writer. He wrote a chat between a boy and his grandmother about 5 qualities pencils have to inspire us to be better persons. The qualities are:

1. We are capable of great things, but we must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and He always guides us according to His will.
2. From time to time, we have to stop writing and use a sharpener. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, it's much sharper. So, we must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because they will make us better persons.
3. The pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps to keep us on the road to justice.
4. What really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So we must always pay attention to what is happening inside us.
5. Finally, the pencil always leaves a mark. In just the same way, we should know that everything we do in life will leave a mark, so let's try to be conscious of that in our every actions.