Children's day!

Today's is children's day in the office. Almost everybody brings their children and they play around with each other, they freely run among the desks, happy, shouting, singing...

I love children! Everybody can tell just looking at me interacting with then, but having them running around your desk, shouting and screaming and playing their toys is not an ideal work environment!

Mainly when they play with your toys! :)

What will be?

Believe it or not, some people just don't clearly see the "interjunction" of their lives! Call it 3-way junction, Y-intersection, T-junction, it doesn't matter... you will clearly face this dilemma at some stage... the sooner the better!

Some people are so skeptic that they can't see the big steps in every little decisions they make... in other hand, some of them just think every little decision, no matter how little, is part of a bigger plan!

How to achieve the right balance?

Easy as it seems to be, this can get really complicated if we start with a simple question: are you a believer? This question probably triggers another one: in what? From there, we had open a whole world of possibilities... pretty predictable, isn't it?

Talking about predictability, isn't it the most extraordinary thing about the universe? To write down equations to describe the unseen from the seen? Yes, and I have to concur with my determinist friends: mathematics is simply beautiful!

But... what else? As my determinist friends believe, is maths the new God (if any)? Is determinism just an excuse to exempt one-self from any responsibility from their acts? Perhaps... but perhaps it's just uncertainty! Or even worse, the new faith! An irrational desire of ending up with an explanation for the unexplained!

I still sustain the free-will approach, and will, eventually, take the memorable way to my life, while the determinists, sadly don't know yet, as the way they will take is already determined, but they will only know after they've take it!

Just another lazy, drunken journalist!

Sometimes you need a good argument to bend someone's opinion, but sometimes you just need a stereotype... that's exactly what made me think I shouldn't watch Depp's new movie, The Rum Diary.

People is talking about. People usually talk about things. Cool things... even they are not really cool. Sometimes, looking cool is cool enough. That's the case with The Rum Diary. People are saying they want to watch, they have to watch, and even that someone else has watched and it's great!

Really?!? I doubt! Not because I watched, but just because it didn't sound right! I don't known if was only the advertisement, or a combination of the advertisement and the trailer, but "great" is an adjective which doesn't goes well with the whole thing... and I was right!

Apart from my own stereotype - and I don't know from where in hell I got it - I just needed a review to endorse what my impressions were, and that's it... I have a good reason to NOT waste 120 minutes in a "cliché" movie! FOMO-free!!! As was said in The Sunday Times, "... at times, the film is The Hangover for people who think they are edgy outsiders."

Dunnes Stores. The difference is we are irish!

Dunnes Stores. The difference is we're Irish! What's that supposed to mean? An "irish quality label"? Dunnes Stores claim they are irish, but they act as germans - nothing against the german people... it's supermarkets we are talking about!

Last weekend doing my regular shop - I'm not particularly loyal to any supermarket. Usually I buy certain things here, other things there... and last Saturday, while buying some stuff in Dunnes, an image of Lidl came to my mind... all the fruits and vegetables were still in their delivery boxes! A very known practice for Lidl and Audi, the so called low-budget markets. In this way they save some money as they don't need anyone organizing their shelves...

So... what's the difference again?

110911

Ten years ago today, I recall, I was in Citibank's datacentre in Paulista Avenue, São Paulo, Brazil, and around noon, 1 pm, we got the news about the attacks. We were all in the operating room watching the images, almost unbelievable, in a small TV set. We were sent back home that day, as Citibank, like all other American companies around the world, closed its doors fearing terrorist attacks... this would be the first sign of terrorism's victory over the free world!

The theme was so explored since that it seems nothing was left to be said. The change of paradigms, the split of the world, the end of individual freedom... there were many speculations, some real and some sensational, like everything else in the press. At the time I did not have a blog - a technology still blooming - but I remember the heated discussions over the subject... even an colleague, friend of a friend of mine, poet, believed to have written "the definitive poem" on the 911. Needless to say, only he and perhaps his girlfriend of the time found the poem great. An advertising people's thing...

Grudges aside, write about the 911 in 110911 seemed, at first, opportunism. Even more considering all the hoopla american media - and to some extent european as well - around the date: Ground Zero visit by President Obama and former president W. Bush, debates about Arabic-American situation, large media coverage - written, spoken and warched. It's just too much!

Reading an article this week, by Conor O'Clery, the Irish Times foreign correspondent who lived in Manhattan at the time, he said something about remember the little things... the little things! I already knew Manhattan and the Twin Towers from my first visit to New York in 1995. I revisited the Twin Towers again in 1998 and 1999, then I visit the remains of them in 2002, during a training course I was attending in New York, near to Ground Zero site... and be there with no towers was at least weird. Besides the obvious - the horror of the act and its consequences - those little things people who lived in the area miss the most, the immense shopping and service concourse, the numerous newsagents, cafes, from Starbucks to run family-run shops, with freshly baked bagels every morning, not to mention barbers, hairdressers, key-cutters, shoes-repair, deli's, restaurants... a piece of history for each daily frequenter of that World Trade Center... and me, I just experienced for few weeks during sparse visits!

So, buddy, during this 110911, instead of consuming all that super-produced material that media will push down your throats on TV, radio and newspapers, try to remember the little things... those apparently irrelevant, or meaningless, or insignificant, that in the end make a difference, simply by reminding you that you are alive to watch them!