We need stranger stories

I've been living in Gangneung for a bit over 2 weeks now. My apartment is furnished and I'm getting used to live here, and so far it's quite good^^.

Warning: Geeky post ahead, and spoilers for Halo 5.

When I came here, I brought with me a new xbox one that I bought. Since I'm alone, I thought I may have a chance to play a bit, and indeed I have played. Since games are expensive, I currently only have 2 games, one that came with the console and another one. I will bring some of my old xbox 360 games with me soon, and I will be able to play those as well, but for the moment it's quite enough.

The two games are Battlefield 1 (it came with the console) and Halo 5.

I've been a fan of Halo since I discovered it, and I made other posts about it. I think it's a game that combines fun gameplay with story and ambientation (music, scenery) that makes you want to continue playing and advance. It is impressive, epic, dramatic, and also fun. When Bungie stopped developing them it was a big drama, but after playing Halo 4, I saw that the new dedicated department that has the task of continuing with the games was dedicated and similar enough to continue with the original feeling and making an interesting plot.

Halo 4 had some confusing plot elements, but I continued to like it. So, I started Halo 5 with the expectation to be similarly good. And I was not disappointed, I'm enjoying it greatly. After such a long time without playing a Halo, it was like riding a bike or driving a car...all these gestures, movements, actions and possibilities that were new but familiar, that my reflexes learned again by just remembering them.  That was pretty awesome...and the music and atmosphere were still great, epic and strange, maintaining the sci-fi feeling some stories do not manage to achieve.. .


However, there were 2 tings that annoyed me a bit. First one was one new playable character, called Locke. The game changes perspective between him and Master Chief.

In a world full of bland space marines, this character manages to outbland most of them. He's not interesting, he's not dramatic, he does not transmit empathy nor makes me care for him at all. Master Chief, even being pretty bland, has a huge amount of very subtle registers, and a clear inner world that seems interesting. I did not detect any such thing in Locke. He's like your typical "I follow orders" type of military main character,

Also, you're playing in a team with another character voiced by Nathan Fillion, with his looks and part of his tone and characteristic humour. I would much rather play as him, really...no comparison whatsoever....his character is interesting. The one you play, not really.

The second thing is that in this game Cortana is labelled and acts as the bad guy (or girl, or AI). First of all, the most interesting thing in all Halos is Cortana, period. Other characters just do not reach her level at all. Her sarcasm, funny comments, usefulness, depth, etc....cannot really compare with the others. Second, her turning evil is just managing to get to immortality (she was created with an arbitrarily short expiration date) and trying to establish some system to stop people form killing each other constantly. In a world where 2 games ago several species where about to be wiped out because of conflict and war, that seems quite a sensible move, really. I don't see why this is supposed to be bad...Sure, there's the eternal discussion about dictatorships and liberties and all that....but, again, we're taking about a world setting where intergalactic wars are glassing planets and entire colonies get exterminated....and where the guys that are saying "this is bad, she cannot have this control" are the ones that are sent by their bosses and superiors to kill and conquer without much question...hell, the "main character" seems to be a guy that was sent in purely assassination missions ....I mean, the feeling I get is that if it was the human species achieving this power, the game would paint it positively (take Mass Effect's example).

This made me think that I'm a little tired about stories where the omniscient creature is labelled evil when they try to tell humans to stop killing each other or else...plenty of times we get situations where the humans are being forced to be pacific, and this is presented as reducing our liberties....I believe here there's heavy influence from USA's second amendment craziness and the fact that plenty of these stories are made by people in the USA or based in USA's movies and so on... in general, I have repeated this before, but we need to stop focusing on humans when telling sci-fi or fantasy stories....we tend to put the humans as the main characters, and this is the same as putting male bland military protagonists...I don't know at which point someone decided that male guys are the main market for all this fiction and they cannot relate to people unless they're also male and manly....and human, when we add fantasy to the plot...and we need to get rid of this preconceptions.

Stories need to be weirder, more open, more diverse, and take risks, take new stances and original paths. For example, whatever happens in Halo 6, I would love for Cortana to win, and to see that the new results was actually pretty nice. This would be a nice plot twist, something out of the norm, and something to remove humans from the protagonist and ruler point of a sci-fi story with so much more potential than what stupid military space marines offer...

Gangneung: First Contact

So, I’m in Gangneung now:


This is situated in South Korea. I’ll be here until this Friday, and then I’ll come back at the end of November.

South Korea is a very interesting place. After Brazil and Russia, I really wanted to try and live in a country more technologically and socially advanced, just to check the differences and enjoy the better level of live.  We lived very well in Russia, but Adler had plenty of issues. In Brazil, we lived adequately but the problems of the city and the country really affected us, and we managed fine but we would not want to live there for long periods again, we would go back just for tourism and in a while….so, South Korea sounded attractive. The only thing is that my son has started school and after considering this and other variables, we decided that this time I would go alone. This is not the best thing in the world, but just for a year and 3 months and with a total of 5 trips back while being there we thought it would be ok after all…

The trip itself was nothing special after having done plenty of other transoceanic flights, but it’s true that Turkish airlines is really good, nice food and nice movies to watch while flying^^.

The first contact I had with the country was of course in Incheon Airport (Seoul). On the passport control, after scanning mine with a machine, an automatic voice told me in Spanish to put my index fingers in two fingerprint readers. IN SPANISH. After that the check lasted 2 minutes, if that much. This is the first thing I loved.

The second thing I loved was free wifi without registering anywhere. Just connect to the open network and use it….after other airports, this was amazing. The third thing I loved was going to the airport shops and seeing signs about leaving the suitcases outside to not bother people…and people doing so, with suitcases in the corridors, unsupervised, while the owners could not see them. Do you know how that feels, especially after Brazil??

At this point I knew. Whatever happened later, and whatever problem I found in the country, culture or in the project, I was going to love this country….

Since Gangneung is actually pretty far from this airport, I went to the information post. I had been told there was a bus that went directly, so I asked about it. They told me its timetable, which exit to use to get there and what to do and wrote everything in Korean, so no problems there^^.

The bus was pretty awesome, its seats were huge, only 3 per row, soft and comfy. The only problem is that the trip was more than 4 hours…the last 2 felt very long, especially because we got a couple of traffic jams.

During the trip I looked around, but I got a bad day for sightseeing since everything was covered by a low cloud and it was raining. I could see it’s a very green country, but not like Brazil (which is green but clearly tropical, with really huge plants and trees), more like France or Germany, but with different vegetation. There was a surprising amount of agriculture going on, I could see plenty of people working in small fields under the rain, even if it was Sunday. And lots of lights and leds in the road indicating different things, I noticed that too, they seem to love leds and lights….

Gangneung is a coastal city after the mountains where the Winter Games will take place. The mountains themselves are rather low, 700-1000m, but I’m told it snows enough in winter to do snow activities in there. The feeling I got was like a big town or small city, with some main roads but afterwards plenty others with no sidewalk, areas with small houses and not much people or traffic. Unlike the airport, nothing was in English and people don’t really speak it apart from at the office and at the stations (and even then, at the office I’m really surprised by the fact that plenty of people working for Olympics do not speak English well enough to communicate without help, which is not ideal….), so I realized it would not be easy to live there without getting the basics of the language…but I had been warned about it, so it was ok.

The first days were very nice and interesting. The area is very calm,  as I said like a small town, with some particular details that you associate with east-asian culture like plenty of neon lights, (k-)pop, cuteness everywhere, typical school uniforms, some big shopping malls (but it's a town so it's shopping streets full of little shops), very well packaged food even if it’s fruits, extreme politeness, face masks, etc…. It has stuff to do around, with bars and clubs, restaurants, bike paths and parks, and a curiously varied expat community, bigger than usual because in this country English teachers need to be native and there’s plenty of people from abroad teaching.
I found a very small apartment for me on the second day, small but ideal for this period, and it even included a bike (well, “included”, it was the bike of someone that lived there before and left it, and the man renting the place said he was going to throw it away, so instead I’m able to keep it^^) I will be using to move around. I also already ordered some furniture online, which is currently travelling towards it, and in general this first contact went very well.

The only thing it may still cause issues is the food. Food is amazing, similar to Chinese and Japanese, really tasty and healthy…but there’s plenty of things that are spicy, very spicy. And I cannot handle that…so unless I’m with a local or an expat with experience, I go to a place I already know and order the same thing, which may make me bored of the thing fast if I don’t manage to get a wider selection of places…

I’ve also heard that some processes of the burocracy are very very slow, and for example getting a simple SIM card will not be easy…but there’s open wifis with really good speeds everywhere, so it’s not a big concern at the moment….

Anyway, all in all I’m very happy with this new place I’m getting the chance to discover^^

Daily Deadlock

Some time ago it rained a bit. When leaving work I had the option to take a taxi, and I did. I will not make the same mistake another time in a rainy day...

To explain, this is Rio:

In this area there are around 15 million people. And every day, we all need to go to work.

Now, we have two main areas, the rich zones in the south(inside the red areas) and the poor zones in the north:

The poor zones tend to start working earlier,  and they basically go to work to provide services in the rich zones:

The rich zones work concentrates in the centre,  where there is a lot of offices. The centre is considered to be only this:

Now, the thing about Rio is that, do you see these green marked areas? Those are mountains.

And I mean mountains. The green right area's highest point is 700m. In the coast there are 350m and 500m mountains. Basically they sprout from the ground and get high fast, giving Rio this peculiar look:

So, if you check the map again, you'll notice that most central and rich areas are actually surrounded by mountains. As in completely surrounded. No chance in hell to make a superhighway connecting them.

So, we get tunnels or "valleys" of two lanes in each direction. Mostly in these points:

Of course, we cannot forget people coming from other cities to work, which have these entry points too:

Now, check what's the subway line available to help move all these people around these very closed areas with very specific and sparse entry points:

(this is an approximation of the subway, but you get the idea)

So basically most people need to take cars or buses. Of course the rich areas use cars, but the poor areas also have plenty of those.

This results in a daily clusterfuck of epic proportions. People in the south zone may take up to two hours to reach the centre, and 2 more to get back. If you do this in the middle of the night the route takes 20 minutes.

When it rains especially, seeing as how people clearly dissolve under the rain, people that maybe would walk a bit and take buses or metro in a clear day takes car or taxi.

The average time to go from the south rich area in the centre and the actual business centre is 2 hours during rush hour. Outside rush hour it's actually 20 minutes. And when it rains, you just better forget to take the car becasue then moving just from the business centre towards Zona Sul, where Copacabana is, can take already more than one hour....

Escape to Iguazú (II)

After the day in the Brazilian side, we reached the border to Argentina.  The border was weird, with two big areas, one for each country, where they could check passports and a shop in the middle. There was a bridge that had the point where the two countries met, and I saw pictures before if that bridge as if there were no barriers between them, when the fact is that the barriers are before that point.

We didn't get stopped in the Brazilian side, which was a bit strange, but well, we thought that was normal for people going away. In Argentina we had no problem and they just stamped out passports, and then we got to the hotel using a bus to wars the city.

The Argentinian city was similar to Brazil,  but with some differences. It looked as poor in a way, but a little more touristic as well, with plenty of advertisements about hotels, and with streets slightly more pedestrian - friendly than in Brazil. It also looked. .well, red. The terrain had red soil, and there was plenty of red bricks as well.

This hotel was much much worse than the Brazilian one. It was more like a hostel, a small room with lots of dust, almost no electric plugs, no air conditioning, very poor wifi coverage...

I did not do the reservation, so I don't know how many stars the hotel advertised. As long as they indicated 2 or less I guess it's fine, because it definitely was not 3 by far. Still,there were little details that even if you have 1 or 2 stars are shameful, like having to ask them to give toilett paper and towels...

Anyway, we managed to check-in and then go eat to some restaurant nearby. For some reason it was hard to find one open, and we ended up into a kilo place,like in Brazil, where you weight your food and pay for kg, but with some different dishes, more pasta and, of course, bread. In Brazil they don't usually include bread, and it was nice to have some^^.

The place was nothing special though, and we went back to the hotel and finally got a shower, slept and rested.

The next morning turned out to be half-sunny, so it was less likely it would rain, which was good. The breakfast here was not full of options, but it came with dulce de Leche (boiled condensed milk), tipically Argentinian and really tasty^^. It took a while to get ready and then we went to the park area.

We had been told the Argentinian side was bigger, and that's true. It was also much better done and indicated. The area looked more like a theme park, but it was very clear where you were, the paths you needed to take and even the stairs you would find on the way. With sunny weather with some clouds,  everything looked very nice but soon it was really hot too.

Since we had two days to spend here, we decided to take the lower route today and then do the higher one during the next. There was also the devil's gorge, which we would visit if we could at some point. First we had to walk a bit around the forest, and we started seeing plenty of bugs and butterflies, some Quatis (there were also on this side, and they also stole food but seemed more taken care of) and some scarily big ants and insects.

The lower road went between the forest and the river,  but at a very nice level, between the high side of the river and the low side. And while the Brazilian side gave you a view from afar, this side was right next to the waterfalls. The path was an elevated metal platform, which means that in some sections you crossed small streams that formed between two consecutive small waterfalls. It was quite impressive to see them that close, and the whole area was really green and beautiful. There were also some panoramic viewpoints, and in general it was a great path.

After walking for a bit, the path allowed you to go almost under a medium -sized waterfall. It created a big cloud of constant small drops,  and the closer you walked the more soaked you got. It was nice and refreshing, and also quite curious to see everything so close. There is something in watching do much water moving and falling that is hypnotic,  together with the white noise it makes...

We got a bit wet, not as much as other people, and we continued. In the way we also managed to see a lizard that was quite big, at least compared with most lizards we have seen...it was black, and had quite a big head and mouth,  at least as long as my forearm. It seemed to be wild but apparently used to have people around, although it maintained a distance with all the tourists...

In the end we finished this path quite earlier than we thought, after just a couple of hours. Since we still had plenty of time, we decided to also visit the devil's gorge.

To reach the devil's gorge, you had to take a small touristic train that was marginally faster than walking, but they didn't allow you to walk there so we had to use it. When we reached the gorge's station there were a huge number of butterflies flying around, drinking water from the wet floor next to a fountain for the visitors. Elay was very happy about this and "danced" with the butterflies (probably killing some, even if we tried to tell him to be careful ). It was really beautiful, but also very hot. We drank and watered our heads, and we started to walk towards the gorge.

This path was also a metallic platform on top of the higher part of the river. You could not see the waterfalls from there, and we knew it would take a while to reach the gorge. There were some islands from time to time, that offered cover from the sun, which was very bright and hot at that moment. I believe it took us around 20 minutes to reach the end of the path,  and it was very full of people and very hot with no shadows, but was the most impressive place probably.

The gorge was the area of the biggest section of waterfalls, moving the biggest ammount of water. A massive volume of water kept falling down quite a big distance, making a lot of noise and movement, and making big raindrop clouds. There was also plenty of rainbows, and in general it was really beautiful and brutal too.

With that we finished our first day, we went back to the city and had dinner in a nice place next to the hotel. We were tired after the heat (the walking was ok, we didn't do that much distance actually), so we went to sleep early.

The next day was our last, so we had to check out of the hotel. While crappy, it is true that the people managing it were nice enough. After having the same breakfast as the previous day we left one suitcase in the bus station lockers and went back to the park.

If it was your second day visiting, there was a discount, but they asked that you marked the ticket when leaving,  which was stupid since there was no one at the exit to mark it or explain this to you. At least they also accepted photos from the previous day as proof, so we got the discount.

Today we wanted to do the high path of the waterfalls, that went at the level of the river before falling, and that was short enough to let us plenty of time to go back to the Brazilian side and get to the airport. This path was, in our opinion, not as spectacular.  Sure, you could see most waterfalls from above, but it felt nicer to be next to them in the lower path. However, the nature around us was impressive, of course. We even saw a small cocrodile, and probably the biggest wild spider I have ever seen waiting in its web in the middle of the river, between two trees...

Anyway, we finished the day and went back to the bus station to start our trip to the Brazilian airport. After checking times and prices, we decided to get a taxi directly there, since buses just left you at the border and brought you to the Brazilian city center, which means it took twice as much time with any luck, and we didn't have that many hours until out flight.

With the taxi we arrived to the border, and the taxi driver gave us some papers to fill for the Brazilian border. However, we had not been stop at the Brazilian border when going to Argentina. The driver told us we should have been stopped, and that it was best then to just say we didn't have papers and we lived in Brazil.

We passed the Argentinian control without problems, and we were getting ready to lose a lot of time in the Brazilian control so we could explain out situation. However, once again the Brazilian border didn't even stop us. Apparently they do have controls, but because they have agreements with Argentina they just check people from time to time, and private cars and taxis pass without stops plenty or times. So, we visited Argentina with it leaving Brazil, according to our passports.

After this we had no other trouble, we boarded the plane and came back home. It was quite a nice and impressive visit, definitely recommended for anyone that gets the chance to go^^.

Escape to Iguazú(I)

I haven't explained anything about trips for a while..because we haven't visited anything new, that's true..but well, let's explain the latest one...

After working weekends,  we get days off to select afterwards. I usually take them as soon as possible,  but sometimes 2 or 3 accumulate.

Recently I've done this on purpose, so last week I took Tuesday to Thursday as days off, so we could travel to Iguazú on monday night.

Everybody who works here in Rio has traveled or plans to travel to Iguazú. It is a popular destination, and agencies offer packages to get there and sleep, but I didn't really do any research about what is in there, apart from knowing it had big waterfalls. It was also a natural border (the river) between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.

We spent one night in the Brazilian side, and two nights in the Argentinian side. Each side has a natural park that you need to pay to enter, and some other stuff to do around.

So, on Monday night we took a 2-hour flight to Foz de Iguazu. The Brazilian hotel was pretty good, with nice enough rooms and nice breakfast, apart from an awesome pool that we didn't have time to use but looked nice. We slept there and on tuesday we grabbed the bus that goes there(if you are not careful you will get scammed with price of transportation ).

This day was all gray and cloudy, and forecast warned about rain and storms. Far away we could see some big black stormy clouds coming our way, but well, nothing we could do about it.

The Brazilian park had another bus to bring you close to the waterfall areas. We stopped in the middle of the way and walked around the forest. First thing we saw was a warning about Quatis. We didn't know what animal was that, but got the point of not trying to feed them. We reached the first observation post, and yes, I can see why it is a popular destination.

The waterfalls are massive, and really really big. There's lots of green around it (not equatorial jungle, but more like tropical,  still pretty dense and green and humid), and there is lots and lots and lots of waterfalls. From that side, you can see them from far away and it is impressive the ammount of water that they're moving,  and the spray they create. You could literally see the water making "clouds" right there, many tiny little drops floating up towards you or towards the sky. This together with the green of the forest gives an amazing view.

On the next open area, we found Quatis.

Quatis are a type of mammal that is probably related to Raccoons. They move similarly, and act similarly. The ones in this area have adapted quite well to humans,  and are totally shameless, trying to check your bags and making puppy eyes for food. We were shooing them away from our son (who of course was very happy to see them and wanted to touch them, but was so excited it would have resulted in him hitting them), that was in the stroller, but they kept checking it and trying to grab our bags. In the end, while opening one pocket of the stroller they saw a bag of dried apples, and one of them jumped on it and stole the whole bag.

It was actually very funny, because it was not something that would be bad for them (just dried apples) nor anything we needed, but we could see that, while cute, they were shameless and problematic...

We continued our walk and found some stairs. This was very annoying, because we had the stroller with us,and previously there was no indication about them. We even passed areas that had ramps next to some steps, as if this was the norm in all the park. So we had to move through stairs several times during the day...

We passed several nice observation points, and in one of them we saw that the storm clouds we noticed during the morning were moving quite fast. They looked really awesome, as if they were unfolding, and they seemed to have a very liquid texture. There was especially dark sections moving at different speed than the rest...and for a bit we enjoyed the show without realizing their movement.

Then we saw that they were moving towards us at high speed and we had an "oh crap" moment.

We covered ourselves and the stroller with raincoats, and just managed to get ready before it started to pour water in top of us, right after the beautiful clouds passed us overhead...

This put an end to the visit, and we just run through paths and stairs to the restaurant area, which had pretty good views from far away of the top of the waterfalls and one of the main sections called the devil's gorge...

We could also see the Argentinian side from there, and there were platforms on top of the river and next to the waterfalls. It looked curious, we needed to check that next day...

We managed to eat, the rain calmed down, and we went out of the natural park to visit a bird park next to it.

This park was like a zoo, but bird-based and taking advantage of the nature around it. It claimed to be a place to rescue birds, and it is true more cages were rather big, but it is still a zoo, and a touristic one...

Anyway, I don't know if they trained the birds in there, but most of then were very sociable,  with some of them jumping towards us when they saw us. Our son was extremely happy about it and keep making happy noises.

And then we went to one of the cages, since the path entered some of them and let you be around the birds. These were big caged areas, and it was nice to see them close. However, our son was eating a chicken stick at that moment...I thought they would tell us we could not do that,  but nobody said anything...

Anyway, we were in this really big cage, and we saw some pretty big birds walking around, and some tucans. I really like tucans, and we had seen some free ones in Rio, but it was still nice to see different types around.

Then, several things happened. First, we were being followed by a number of walking birds, and we noticed that they were looking at our son's food. We shooed them away, but then a small tucan, for whatever reason, started to harass my wife trying to touch her toes, until it actually bit her a bit.

While trying to send the little tucan away, I turned around to see a big black walking bird stealing the chicken finger from our son (he maybe got scared for a sec but he was also happy that the birds were that close), and ran away followed by other big birds, who started stealing the food from one another....

It was very chaotic for a moment...and apart from the little tucan's attack, what the other birds did was funny but worrying...

After that we passed other cages, but we made sure to not have food around us...

In one of them we also found another tucan(a big one this time), this one apparently sociable and very cute, just sitting in a railing of a bridge that crossed the stream. We took pictures of it, and some people even caressed it...it seemed not to mind, although if some person was too annoying it just took some steps away, indicating that it was enough..I could not resist a gentle tap with one finger, and it just looked at me^^.

After the last tucan, and considering this one had a beak twice as big, my wife just looked at it from a distance, while taking pictures...

During the visit it started to rain again, which was annoying. Most birds at least had a place to cover themselves, but the rest of the visit happened much quicker after this. I will only mention that there was a big cage you could enter that had butterflies and hummingbirds, and it was quite impressive, especially the butterflies, big as my hand....but then they showed you the caterpillars, and they were also that big^^'.

We finished the visit quite wet, and returned to the city to grab a taxi to the Argentinian border, really hoping the hotel in there would also be nice and wanting to eat and take a warm shower after the wet rainy day...

I'll explain the other two days in another post.

Working in Integration

When people ask me what I studied or in which field do I work and I say IT they always ask me if I develop. When I say no, if they know a little about IT, they ask if I test or if I'm a system administrator. And I keep saying "No", which just confuses people. In the end I say that I "integrate", which people take as if i have said "assimilate" or some other word that, while kind of knowing the meaning, doesn't tell you anything....

In one of my earliest long posts I mentioned a little what does it means, but I though I'd spent some time explaining it a bit more...

Integration, for starters, is really a meaningless word. It means to basically put everything together, and in a way that's what I do, but not really...

I do not program, apart from sometimes automatizing some tasks. I do not test much, although there is some testing. I do not administrate systems, although I do connect to servers and run things in there sometimes.

What I do mostly is to act as a firewall between all the teams involved in providing a service and the final users and clients. I'm also (in theory) the person who should know more about a service so, when issues arise, the right team receives work.

This is still pretty vague and sounds as if I spent all day sitting in my chair and twirling my fingers waiting for people to contact me.. so, let me explain  a bit more..

I plan, or help plan, things. For example, we have a new version of the system and we need to install. The team that installs needs to tell me how long will they take and when they can start doing it, and then I go to the users, check what are they doing the day we need to install and plan when can we do it. I then prepare all the paperwork necessary, including requests to the team that installs about what needs to be installed and where.

We also have paperwork(well, it's all Web-based and through computers, but it is basically bureaucracy) about what do we have in our servers and computers, so i do paperwork updating these versions once new deliveries arrive.

Another important part of the job is to help the users  (mostly testers, except for the operational period when we're actually live and the users change) to use the system. Loooots of times someone comes to me and says "your system is not working".

After punishing them adequately for their lack of details regarding what is really not working or in what way it is not working(by being adequately sarcastic or passive-aggressive or as clear as they were when answering about it), I go to where they had the problem to visually see what they mean , check the system and the different monitoring tools we have to check the system status (here I'm not talking about system administration but more on the line of checking logs to see what our application says it's wrong), and find the cause of the issue and a solution. If the cause is not evident, finding a solution first also works.

Most of the time the solution is to smack them on the head and point them to the fact that they missed a step when doing the initialization steps. However, sometimes I need to smack someone in my team (or myself) for breaking something temporarily after having done something stupid,  or passing the problem to another team more qualified to know what's wrong. This could range from security and network teams (the real sysadmins) if things are slow or crashing for no reason, to the company that produces the data that our system reads (because they are giving us the data in a crappy format), to the people that actually prepare configuration files and parameters of the system during installation, or to the developers if we really have a bug in our code. A big part of the job is this, to investigate problems until you can figure out more or less what is happening,  why, and even ways we can fix it.

As usual, the trick is knowing enough to send to the correct team while offering a solution or workaround if possible. It is like in that joke where a guy goes to fix a machine, presses one button and everything works, and charges a lot of money for it. In the detailed bill, he writes that pressing the button costs one dollar, and the rest is the cost of knowing which button....

We have plenty of users and special moments when we need to give extra help, so I have a team that helps me in doing all that...so, I also need to teach my team, prioritize problems and plan stuff with them like vacations and such things .

I also need to speak with the clients, understand what they want and try to make sure they are happy and that when they check the service nothing breaks.

Apart from all that, I help to guide where the service will go in the future. This is not my job directly, but by having the knowledge about how people use it, my opinions in the matter are at least considered, and when something is a pain in the ass to do I try to warn so it gets improved later on. As part of this, I need to manage all petitions to change stuff in my service. Again, this is mostly paperwork, but you can see which changes have been requested, when are they going to be done and stuff like that. Another part of the job precisely is to check that these changes have been done at the time people planned to be done.

Since all this means interacting with other companies and other teams in different parts of the world, there's lots of meetings, conference calls, presentations, trainings, etc...in some of them I am presenting, in some of them I am listening only and in some of them I'm commenting on stuff.

I also do some testing, but not much. I just test things that could not be tested before. For example, you may have tested part A of a system, and it's fine, but after installation you have A connected to B and C, receiving from F and saying hi to Z every 10 minutes...and you cannot test all that until the whole thing is in place, especially because sometimes Z and F are done by another company. Most of this test is done by another team, but my team sometimes needs to test one of those interactions(like A with C, for example).

Another important aspect is to calm down tempers...as the guy people go when there is a problem, part of this job is to make sure there are no panics and things are treated with the level of importance they deserve. If we really need to panic I will say so,  but I also need to assure users and show that it is going to be fine and we're working on it, that things are under control. Perception is very important, and sometimes it does not match with reality. Therefore you need to calm down things, shown is not that bad, offer solutions, etc, not only until things work but also until people realize things work.

Finally, there is periods called operational periods where we give extra help doing work shifts(yes, that means night and weekends sometimes). These periods can be testing periods or the real thing, but in anyway during these periods we work from this nicer area that looks like NASA with lots of screens and projectors and TVs. From there we need to use our systems to prepare the sevice to be live. During the testing phase the users do that, but if we are in operations my team does it. We also practice steps required to do each task, and therefore I need to write plenty of documents about these steps, and improve them from time to time. This way anyone with some knowledge of the project can theoretically do these steps. It's usually in these steps that we can try to do some scripts or little programs that are not oficial but that make our life's easier, but that's the extend of our programming in this position.

While in operations we also take care if issues differently, with more pressure on fixing things faster and in any way possible. Again, all this without touching code, just using back doors,  emergency solutions and our knowledge of the systems. This period also means we have several teams together so we need to interact with all of them,  learn communication channels and how to propagate information to the people that will come next day. I also need to manage the people in my team in these periods, ask for reports, do daily reports myself, track problems, all that...

I don't know if these explanations help to give an idea of the type of job or the level of work we have, but I can tell that it fills our days quite completely, and the fact we are in front of the clients makes everything more intense, fast and stressful...but I do kind of enjoy this^^

Our Apartment's Distribution

Haven't written a long post in a while....we're back from Christmas holidays in Barcelona. We had fun but the amount of visits and meetings was brutal and we ended up really tired...

Now back here we will have several people coming to Rio to visit, which is nice^^. However,  I will also need to do a lot of work in this period, because I have been given several tasks to do that are important, but a pain in the ass to prepare....and I'm in this status of "oh, so much work to do", and then delaying starting working on the worst part...

Anyway, there's something new and nice that we have done while in Barcelona. We bought the apartment in may, but the apartment needed to be rebuild. That's also a lot of work and decisions...but we've made an important one, the distribution.

Here's an image of the distribution we have chosen:

As you can see, there's lots of space, but we wanted to have 4 rooms and 2 toilet,  so that already limits things quite a lot. It was hard to see how this would fit and be nice at the same time...

The end result is that we almost won't have corridors, so we save space. Instead we will reach the kitchen and the dining room from the entrance,  and the dining room is connected to the living room but can be separated at will. This way the living room is smaller but without having to worry about the table we win a lot of space.

The kitchen is big enough, and there's a window between kitchen and dining table which makes it nicer and more sociable to be preparing food. We also have a storage room/washing machine room, where we can handle all the laundry process without needing to occupy other spaces and giving us also a lot of storage volume.

Next to the living room we'll have a guest room/office. This space probably is the one that most people said to be not sure if it was needed, but we think it is nice to have and allow us to divide the living room from guests sleeping (in plenty of places the coach doubles as the guests' bed), while also giving us an office area next to the centre of the house.

The main toilet is close to everything, at the centre, so anyone can access it. Then we have two possible kid rooms, one a little smaller than the other, but we know that with the right furniture this is a very small difference.

Our room is big but as small as possible, with a nice extra second toilet. The funnier part is probably the shower, which is basically in the interior terrace, a funny position that made us doubt, but in the end we though it would be fine.

All windows are exterior and we believe the will be lots of light, also because it is a 5th floor so we're quite high.

The furniture indicated in there it's nor fixed yet, only kitchen and toilets will really be like that, so we don't know yet how everything will turn out, but it is exciting to have already decided on this^^.

Now we need still to agree about a lot of details regarding electric cabling and walls, then there's the budget planning in which we may need to change something and agree on materials and different things, and finally the actual construction  will take place...still a lot of things to do....

But it feels nice to be closer to seeing the final result ^^

Dark Souls

So I decided to give Dark Souls a try.

Dark Souls is a game from some years ago now, that became (in)famous for its difficulty, but everybody said it was great.

That made me curious, but I don't have a lot of time so I didn't check if I could get it for a while....

However, I saw Yahtzee's review in Zero Punctuation and he claimed it was really good actually, once you passed some hard fights and started to learn how to play...this plus some posts on the Internet made me want to play it, and see if it was as hard as they said...

Well, the game it's hard, but not so hard. I'm not saying I'm that good, I die a lot and I still didn't get the hang of rolling at the right time (in part because my laptop sometimes slows down too much to time things properly), but my point is that the game helps you train.

When you die and restart, you can go back where you died and recover the experience/money you gained since last time you died, plus any extra you got from fighting people on the way. Also, you can grind your way up the levels, by killing monsters in one area and resting so they reappear, and repeat this until your stats are to your liking.

This means you can train a level until you do it well. Sure, when the boss kills you and you need to kill again  all the minions between the boss and the resting area it gets annoying, but you're getting extra experience after all, and training.

What is true is that the game doesn't hold your hand, but that's a refreshing change from current popular games. In most new games you don't have lives, checkpoints are everywhere and death is cheap, a small nuisance. Dark Souls makes you suffer instead, you really need to put effort.

However, that's just like more traditional games that had no saving points, like Mario or Sonic. You just had to get good at finishing everything, and if you died enough times, you had to start from the beginning. This poses a challenge.

Challenges are not for everyone, not everyone enjoys them and they are free to prefer a simpler game. It also depends on the challenge, there are some challenging games where I don't like to put the effort it would require to finish them...and who knows, Dark Souls may become like one of these eventually. But for the moment it is really addictive...

The game itself has little plot, and I'm fond of plots. Only very good games can get away with having no extra reward from advancing than the advancement itself...I'm not sure yet if Dark Souls achieves that..there is a plot, but it is very nebulous....the world feels half empty, a feeling I don't like, but it is for plot - related reasons, and it is true that the map is huge and it seems you can visit plenty of different areas...if you see something big and looming on the horizon , you will probably visit it...

The game itself consists of exploring the different areas, abandoned castles, silent ruins, graveyards, etc. while fighting monsters (mostly undeads). You have the traditional RPG classes (cleric, wizard, warrior, archer) with variations (so you actually have different classes than what I mentioned, but they are recombinations of those traditional stats).  Depending on your class gameplay varies, but in most types it is based on shielding/avoiding attacks and striking back afterwards. 

I decided to start with the Deprived class. At first glance that seems insane, but I read a review that explains quite well why this is not so weird....the Deprived basically start with nothing (very simple weapon and shield, no armour), but their stats are the same in every aspect. This means that 1-Any drop is usually better than your current equipment, so you appreciate them, 2-You can adapt better to your gameplay because you can increase your favourite stats first, and 3-The game is as hard as it gets at the beginning, so you will not reach a point that is harder and will just adapt to the difficulty, or not, early on. 

For example, I discovered I depend a lot on my shield but I also like to roll around, so the heavy knight may not be for me actually. I like to be fast, but I want to have enough endurance to do lots of things. I don't like slow weapons, but I want to do some damage which very light weapons do not provide.  I didn't experience any ranged attacks yet, but I've heard they are a little game-breaking (as it usually happens), but well, I may give it a try at some moment too. 

Ah, the game has 3 major annoying things, that is also true:

1-You cannot pause with one button. You can only exit the game and load again, but the time it takes to do this you may end up dead...We should have moved past this crap by now, all games should allow you to pause at any moment, including during cinematics, without having to skip anything or suffer for it. People that play videogames has changed a lot in these years, and lots of them are the same that started playing 20 years ago, and now they have families and things to do, sometimes you really need to stop the game at this moment and not having this option is just stupid. 

2-In theory you play always online. They say you do not enjoy the full experience if you don't, but I do not want to interact with other players so I disconnect my wifi when I play. This should be an option always as well, I'm not interested in PvP or interacting with unknown people.

3-The game sometimes "cheats" with fake difficulty. The game is hard enough as it is, but sometimes there's some surprise event that will kill you straight if you're not prepared for it, or wound you badly. This is nasty, because one thing is to suck at some point and get killed and another is to get into a trap you had no way to know it was there until it killed you. 

Anyway, at the moment I'm stuck at the gargoyle boss, and rather letting it kill me again and again I leveled up a little, to see if things are better...I'm also getting the hang of the two-handed use, because with such big monsters it is useless to cover....I still need to learn to time better my actions or I won't survive for long in this game...

I don't know how many hours it will require, to finish, or if I will give up, but for the moment it's being quite fun....

Creating Your Own Narrative In Rebellion

Warning: Geeky post ahead...

As I keep saying, I love to play games...however, we don't have much free time every day, so we tend to use it to do things together like watching a movie or series. Sometimes we play together, but it needs to be some special game, with a plot, interesting to watch too.

Anyway, that means I have a big waiting list for games....not necessarily new games, since I also love replaying. And just now I have been(and I haven't finished ) re-playing Star Wars: Rebellion.

I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I'm...well, cannot really say a Star Wars fan maybe, but well, a fan of the universe described in Star Wars, or fan of the original trilogy and of several of its games. Some people like the force and the lightsabres,  some people may like the story...but what attracted me since I was little were the spaceships.

I loved the spaceships. I loved the small fighter types, the transports, the capital ships..and I especially loved the Imperial ships.

I mean, look at an Imperial Star Destroyer..it's a city-sized monster with lasers. Look at a Super Star Destroyer dwarfing all the other ships....look at the Tie Interceptor, sleek and menacing, agile and fast...look at the spotless decks, the white polished ships, at the superior technology....of course I like the Imperials.

Also, the Imperial March kicks ass...

Anyway, that's something that I always remember being attracted to, the ships and the space combat, although it is in the games that I really started to love it...Games like X-Wing, Tie Fighter and the corresponding successors.

So imagine my emotions when, as a kid/teenager, I heard they were making a game,  a strategy game, where you could expand your side, conquer planets, make fleets, etc. I remember hearing about it and salivating, basically. Most other games made by LucasArts were pretty awesome, so a Star wars strategy game where you controlled all that seemed a dream come true.

I remember the game took some time, was delayed, etc...and when it came out it was not a success.

This was because the game has big flaws.

The first one is the interface. Playing the game is more like managing windows and trying to copy files from one folder to another. Everything opens windows and plenty of times you need to rearrange then and move them around to do what you want. With a rather low resolution, this becomes a problem fast..

The available actions are not evident, and it is actually a bit annoying how you manage building things and assigning them to planets. Mission assignment is also not very clean, and movement without confirmation means that a mistake can send something the wrong way without you realizing it or being able to do anything about it.

Then you have the graphics. They are not good even  for the time, with plenty of low resolution images and less than stellar original drawings.

There is also the space combat area, which uses a different interface. It still is pretty clunky, not comfortable, and hard to operate efficiently. The graphics in this section are also not good, with 3D models without details and without realistic shapes and forms. To put an example, the SSDs should look impressive as hell, but they look kind of small and short. Also, the combat lacks detail, showing only the occasional laser. The internal engine maybe only does a combat simulation once every so much seconds, but only firing once in so much seconds looks bad. In the end you have the option to let the computer to take charge of the battle, and plenty of times this is better.

The game itself also has a lot of little annoying bugs, like needing to click several times to make someone start a mission and similar issues.

There is no plot, you just start after the first death start and continue your way, and the planet assignment and forces makes no sense, starting with a few planets and spaceships even if you're the Empire. The game mechanics have some flaws that you can abuse and make the game easier, and I think it's not especially hard once you figure a few things out.

However, I loved the game. Even with all these flaws, I enjoyed it a lot. I loved designing new advancements, building capital ships, fighting in space, performing missions, recruiting and using diplomacy...one of the things I liked most is that you can rename all the ships, so I could recreate fleets from the X-Wing games...

The game has sectors with around 10 planets each, and you have a few central sectors and lots of outer sectors. Central sectors are populated and can be neutral or support the rebels or the Empire, while outer sectors tend to have just a few populated planets, and you can colonize the rest. You can control a planet that doesn't support you by assaulting it and leaving troops in there, but it is better to maximize support by making a character do a diplomacy mission on it. You have characters from the movies and expanded universe, and you can make them command troops and ships or perform missions, with each character having its strengths and weaknesses. You have ships, ground troops and buildings. Resources are quite simple, you can have mines and refineries, and this gives you maintenance units. Everything uses maintenance units to be build and maintained. Factories can be built in planets, and the more you have the faster things are built, but planets have a limit on buildings they can have.

Building and moving around takes days, and you can change the speed of time passing. Usually the game is played by triggering movements, missions and constructions, and then speeding things up until something interesting happens.

The game is hard to win and hard to loose: you need to capture the 2 leaders of the rival side (the leaders cannot be killed) and destroy the rebel base (you only need to do it once but the base can move around) or capture the planet Coruscant (you need to maintained control of it but you always know its location). This means usually you will need to conquer everything or be very lucky to win the game.

In these games without plot, you create the plot. You create an internal narrative, and you get attached to squads and characters without there being a real plot, just based on random events. And there's plenty of those, that make the game extremely interesting, at least for me. I'm going to explain some of them....

For starters, one of the most common stories that motivates you to play this game is as follows: you have control of some planet with big support, and then the other side comes with a fleet and bombs the place. You have some fleet situated somewhere else, and you move it there. You arrive late, and meanwhile the enemy is now in another close planet, bombing it. You start a nice chase around the sector, but every time you encounter them they flee. Then you finally research the interdiction technology and create a ship that blocks hyperspace jumping, and when you finally catch again with them you disintegrate them and feel quite rewarded...

Another good one is when you send a diplomat to some neutral planet. Diplomats are usually the nicest characters, and some of them get really good at it, so you develop certain care for them, also because not so many characters can do this. However, this time the planet changes sides before they reach it, and when they arrive they get captured or even wounded.

Of course what follows is a epic rescue mission across the galaxy, searching for the fleet that had them and hoping you didn't blow them up in that last combat...and when the mission is successful you feel pretty awesome^^

To finish the post, one last story...

If you control the Empire, you can make death stars. They are very expensive, hard to maintain and take forever to build, but once you have one you can destroy planets. The downside is that this lowers Empire's support in all planets in the galaxy (usually your actions just increase or lower support in on planet or one sector, so this is a big deal, you can end up losing all planets).

The first time I played the game, I was having difficulties in capturing the enemy leaders and in convincing sectors to like the Empire. I had maintenance problems and ships were falling apart. Tired of this and just to see what happened, I managed to get a death star and I proceeded to visit planets that supported the rebels and blow them to pieces.

Fast enough I had whole sectors rebelling against me. Of course, I was a bastard leaving a path of destruction on my way...I even started to destroy planets that had slightly lost support, but I was leaving no land to hide.

And then something magical happened, that I don't know if it's a bug or was programmed like this....the sectors that I still controlled, not that many by that time, started being indifferent to me blowing up another planet. Not only that, support for the Empire started to increase galaxy - wide after each new destroyed planet. Planets were cheering around for every new explosion.

It was awesome,  I had manage to obtain support by pure fear somehow, or by tiredness. I think it was a bug maybe, but it was extremely funny.

With the support of these sectors too afraid to complain, I laid waste to half the galaxy, and eventually managed to capture the rebels (because they ran out of planets :D )

It was one of the best narratives I've ever seen in this type of game :D

The Last Discworld Novels

So I finished the Shepherd's Crown, and a lot has become clear.

The novel itself....could be better. Much better. Actually, it is similar to the last novels he wrote, and it is painfully sub-par compared with most of other Discworld.

I think his last novels that I read were Making Money (probably the less affected), I Shall Wear Midnight, Unseen Academicals, Snuff, Dodger, Raising Steam and The Shepherd's Crown. And all of them have several of these problems, although the worst offenders were the latest.

It would be a disservice to Terry Pratchett to say that his last novels were really good. They were not. The characters became Mary Sues, perfect, clearly without any problems to survive the story, with everybody agreeing with them or fighting them in a very peculiar way that made them even more correct and successful. And characters were not speaking any more, they were giving monologues,  they were offering speeches. Worst of all, in the last book all of a sudden magic could do everything and all witches had powers never before mentioned. There were even continuity errors with previous books. And it ended with a battle, a battle without soul, without casualties (well, one, but I would not count it), without doubts about who would win.

It saddens me to say so, but Terry's novels died before he did. And well, what would one expect? He had Alzheimer's disease, which made writing hard, and a very limited timetable (his life expectancy after the diagnostic was extremely short). He wanted to write some stories still, but the end result was that he "rushed" his last novels, I guess in fear of not finishing them. This is the hard truth, what my First Sight is telling me.

In the last pages of the book they explained that in 2007 he was diagnosed, after finishing Nation. It is the year when Making Money was published, and you can see that all the books written after this moment decrease in quality. Apart of what I've said, they cram social issues in there in a way that doesn't work, because it is not subtle or woven with the rest of the plot. I'm not saying you cannot explicitly defend social issues in a story, just that you need to know how to fit them inside, and the last books did not manage to do that very well.

The thing is, remembering Terry Pratchett by these books is also a disservice, a huge one. If you want to know Terry Pratchett and why he was one of the greatest writers that have existed, you need to read all his other books.

You can start with Nation, one of the last he wrote, a book that grips your emotions and manages to express sorrows, fears, determination, brutality, love and plenty of other things in its characters and in you. A book that questions who's the uncivilized, the savage, the one without important culture. A book about science and discovery, about survival, about growing up.

You can continue with his early works, Johny Maxwell, the Bromeliad Trilogy, Strata, etc. They may be minor, or smaller in scope, but they teach you about humanity, about youth, about beliefs and traditions.

You can see the genius of Good Omens, genius shared with Neil Gaiman, a book about the apocalypse that laughs at religion while defending belief, spiritual and in humanity, and in our inner goodness.

And you can tackle Discworld. Discworld is huge. The first books are small jokes, good but without a point. But the rest is simply awesome. You can analyze traditions in Pyramids. You can consider revolutions in Nightwatch. You can understand life and death in the Reaper Man. You can see the problem with blind belief in Small Gods. You can enjoy the primordial energy of Rock in Soul Music. You can understand stories and the evils of Christmas in Hogfather. You can see what a good teacher is while pondering about the nature of time in Thief of Time. You can talk about integration in Men at Arms. You can see racial problems and stereotypes in Thud! or Jingo. You can experience that, and a thousand times more, if you immerse yourself in his books. You can experience poetry that leaves marks in your soul, and right afterwards  enjoy a vulgar joke that makes you laugh without control while in the subway. You can ponder deep philosophy while being entertained. You can see that wars are not meant to be fought, and that true heroes do not fight but prevent the fight from happening. You can learn that good people, if they think you should die, won't waste time gloating and will kill you straight. You can see that being human is a state of mind and a matter of choice.YOU CAN HAVE FUN WITH DEATH. You can experience a different world that is exactly like our own.

Terry Pratchett has all this to offer, and I'm not going to insult his memory by saying his last rushed books done while terribly ill are good. I will say that the books before that moment are beyond good. They are amazing. They are incredible. They are mind-blowing. They are hilarious. They are dead-serious. They are totally worth your time, and you should read them. All of them. Even the last ones. And then reread them.

That's how we do proper service to his memory.