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Today we went downtown to the historical center of the city with the intention of finding Chinatown. In the way there we went into a hat store and got a blue corduroy hat for me. It is similar to this one. It was really cheap, too, under 150 pesos. Then, we stopped by the street where they sell replacement parts for all sorts of kitchen stuff and got a lid handle that my mother needed. We finally found Chinatown and found it very disappointing — it is one small street with a few Cantonese restaurants and two supermarkets. We expected more exotic food and decided to leave.
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In the afternoon we went to visit my great aunts, near downtown, and later my mother, brother, and grandmother joined us there. As usual, the old ladies were chatty and happy to see us. They treated us to a simple but good lunch. They also told us where to get *really* good hats — Sombreros Tardan. We'll have to go there some day.
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Started adding cut&paste to XChat. Dum de dum.
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Oralia made a delicious lentil soup and pork chops in yellow curry with mushrooms and potatoes. Mmmmmmm.
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We saw a house for sale near our apartment, so we called their number. They told us that the house is in really bad shape and it would have to be torn down, so they are only selling the lot in which it is built. It turns out that it would take us 58 years of saving money to be able to afford it, and then we would have to build another house on top of it.
Oralia started hurting, and I was shuffling zeroes in my head.
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In the same street as the house we saw there lives a mentally ill woman who has her windows covered with bizarre signs.
Clothesmaker
Apartment 404A
I, Griselda, do not (...)
Nobody pays for my living, much less the neighborhood.
For political pigs: my husband and I were put inside just-born children. The Villónes of SS are to help me so that (...)
I have never written a will or donated anything.
I do not have a telephone or any place where you may leave messages.
There are hidden doors in the apartments. A-D and B-C communicate with each other. There is an operating room. I do not have an interphone or electricity. I am a street seller and I am posessed by the government.
I do not have a confessor or spiritual guide. I fired him in 1994. Nor a religious group.
I, Griselda, love Javier Curi since 92 he was kidnapped.
(unreadable)
I never married anyone except Javier Curi Sali
Nobody helps me in any way.
I am the legitimate daughter of the king Roberto Álvares Guzmán and María Guadalupe Vaca Villa. The three birth certificates I have with birth date September 7 1952, México D.F.: 1. Gricelda Guadalupe Álvares Guzmán Vaca. 2. Gricelda Guadalupe García Vaca. 3. Griselda Estela Mora Baca. The government only gave me apocryphal #3, and with the others they substitute and steal from me. I live in misery while I own the largest fortune in the world. I am posessed by centuries-old murderers who have a immunity in America. I am the only one in the world with the gift of bilocution.
Griselda Mora / apartment 404A / I live alone.
I have never had a civil wedding and I would not do it by shared posessions. Drug traffickers control the civil registry since 1994. Help.
My mail gets intercepted.
Carlos Eslim (sic) was born in 1872. He was professor of Arabic to my father and business namesake for the king, my father, Roberto Álvares Guzmán who was born in 1918 or 21, Mexico. Eslim and Sofía of Greece are joint murderers of my uncle Jhon F. Kenedy (sic) and kidnappers of my father, my husband. and relatives.
I do not have a telephone or any place where you may leave messages.
I have always been and I will always be Catholic. The clergy knows about my gift and they discriminate me and substitute me in fraud.
I will not speak to anyone from the neighborhood.
After a while of taking pictures, she came out of her balcony and was quite friendly to us.
– Are you taking pictures of my signs?
– Yes.
– Ooh, would you please take a picture of me next to them?
– Yeah, sure. *click*
– Will you please come up? Do you want to talk?
– Uuh, we will come back some other time.
– Good. Tomorrow I am going to get some pills for my disease in the hospital.
– Good luck!As we were leaving, the man in the floor upstairs came out of his own balcony and started making obscene gestures at her. Unfortunately we did not get a picture of that.
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I've been appointed as treasurer of the GNOME Foundation. Woot.
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I may be working on OpenOffice in the very near future. This is exciting an scary at the same time...
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Fixed the compiler warnings in GAIM, about half a million of them. Fixed some of the GTK+ warnings. Sigh.
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Oralia made mojarras al mojo de ajo for lunch, and we had them with mashed potatoes. Mmmmmmm.
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Great band rehearsal in the evening; everyone was inspired or something.
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Saturday: We finally got a DVD player, a very cheap Philco PH-6902. It needs tweaking to be region-free: open the tray, push "8421" in the remote control, use the "select" button to select region 9 to make it region-free, and then turn off Macrovision, which is designed to confuse VCRs for recording. Then close the tray and it will be all set.
I just love this Internet thing.
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Sunday: Hugo and Juanita stayed overnight at our place, and in the morning we went to Coyoacán for tacos de barbacoa as usual. Then we gave them a ride to the university supermarket, and then they took off.
We watched movies during the afternoon (on the VCR as we had already rented them). In weiter Ferne, so nah! was first, and it was very good. The ending does not match the beginning at all, so perhaps Wim Wenders had trouble figuring out how to end the movie. The learning period where Cassiel learns how to be a human is great, though. Ed Wood was second, but we got bored around the middle.
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I am fixing GAIM to support proper cut&paste. Oh boy. This is the ugliest user interface I have seen in a long time. It looks like the kind of Windows shareware that makes you feel like you are going to hurt your finger the first time you push a button.
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Started fixing the canvas with respect to idle handler priorities, GTK+ dirty regions, tearing, and general brokenness that seems to have crept in. EOG made me understand the drawing pipeline in GTK+ 2.0, and this is useful knowledge for the canvas.
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We got tired sick of Blockbuster and their stratospheric prices, ridiculous selection of films, stupid film-purging policies ("people didn't rent it anymore" for Rain Man? Give me a break), and general we-don't-care-if-our-tapes-are-worn-out bullshit, today we joined a little video club near our house. It seems to be family-owned and they run it out of their garage. They seem to have a good selection of films, even newer non-mainstream stuff like Waking Life.
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My great aunt Tony lives with her sisters in an old
neighborhood near downtown Mexico City. The old ladies
get tired from going up and down the stairs, so every
time you visit them they will drop the door key to you
so that you may go in yourself.
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Doorbell ringers nailed to a piece of wood.
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People looking over the street while they have a chat.
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One of the Degas sculptures of dancers from the exhibition at the Academia de San Carlos.
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Breakfast in Coyoacán, as is usual for us on Sundays. Then we went shopping for clothes — got a pair of very nice shoes and two blouses for Oralia, and a shirt for myself. Marvelled at the hordes of people who were carrying brand-new school supplies, as classes start again tomorrow in Mexico.
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Late lunch at my mother's, where we made flan for my mom, my brother, and my grandmother. Helped my brother in deciphering some of Bach's intentions in the 6th suite for cello, of which he has a transcription for guitar. Tried playing some Liszt in the piano out of the score, had a lot of fun. Before we left, my brother lent us the first 5 volumes of Mafalda, the lovely comic strip by Quino.
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I am starting to get that yearly feeling of you have not re-read Neuromancer for a long time. But it will have to wait as other books are in the queue.
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We went to Hugo's house for his birthday party. We had good food and blackberry cake and then digested while we watched Lord of the Rings and then Amelie.
Rubén and Adriana purchased an empty lot somewhere near Cuautla, and they want to build a house there! Wow.
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Session management is driving me crazy.
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We saw El Crimen del Padre Amaro, and it was quite excellent. It displays all sorts of corruption and hypocrisy that go on inside the catholic church. It also displays how priests are nothing but humans and as such are as capable of good and evil as everyone else.
A couple left the theater halfway through the movie, offended or something. At least they went and tried to watch through it, unlike the close-minded bigots who were speaking against the movie before it was ever shown.
We were barely able to get tickets, though. When we arrived to Plaza Cuicuilco it was sold out, and then we had a short time to drive to Gran Sur. It was full as hell, but we managed to get our tickets after all.
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Oralia has started a great portfolio in photo.net.
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Windows in Polanco.
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People gather in the public esplanade of the
basketball/handball/soccer courts of a huge apartment
complex.
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There is an upcoming movie that has caused quite a stir in Mexico, as it deals with corruption and hypocrisy inside the catholic church. It is based on a 19-th century Portuguese novel, and it has been adapted to our current time. The church is complaining about how it should not be shown and priests are speaking against it even though they have not seen it. The national pro-life zealots are suing the government because the Mexican Institute of Culture funded part of the production. And today I got spam that warns against the movie, saying how it is blasphemous, evil, blah blah blah. So it seems like religious freaks still have medieval thoughts but are pretty up to date on technology.
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Oralia made some fantastic spicy meatballs for lunch and vegetable soup. They are easily the best meatballs I have had, and my great aunt's are hard to beat.
During lunch we watched Antitrust, the movie where Miggy made his debut as a star. We were laughing our butts off, so I guess it was not bad.
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The people on the house next door to the office are installing an air conditioning system for their top floor. The AC unit is an extremely heavy box that had been lying on the driveway for about a week, and today they had some men up in the roof trying to get it up with ropes. First they tried brute force, and four men could not get it up all the way — the wooden skeleton box with of AC system kept getting stuck on the brickwork of the wall. Then they tried a pulley, and they got it up with much swearing. When they rolled it over the ledge in the ceiling, they managed to break a small water pipe, which sprayed all over the place.
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Went to Polanco to get cochinita pibil, got half a kilo. Took a bunch of pictures around a very old and pretty house.
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Went to the wooden furniture place again and got our cupboard. At first it looked out of place in the kitchen, but by the evening we were getting used to it.
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For lunch we made tortas with the cochinita pibil. Mmmmmmm. Had cheese cake for dessert.
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We finally got around to developing our first rolls of film. This is fun! Tri-X in XTOL in a 1:1 dilution, 8 1/4 minutes at 21°C. The negatives seem to have come out fine; they'll need closer inspection with a loupe or a contact sheet. I'll try to get them scanned soon.
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We woke up earlier than usual on weekends, and we went to Coyoacán for tacos de barbacoa. Afterwards, we went to look for a cupboard-type of thing to replace the small bookcase that we are using in the kitchen for pots and pans and random stuff. We also got a changing bag for our film.
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Then we headed towards downtown with the intention of finding the flea markets and Chinatown, but we stopped at the Zona Rosa instead to look at the local fauna. Got a very pretty blouse for Oralia.
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Had a late but excellent lunch at Taro, our favorite Japanese restaurant.
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In the evening we finished mixing the chemicals to develop our rolls.
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Got my father's wife's keyboard back from repairs (from the Yamaha service center in goddamn Iztapalapa, which is Way Too Far Away); handed it back to them. I suck for not having returned it before.
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Went to bed early, at least for our standards.
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Judith and Gilberto came to our place for lunch today, and we had some terrific enchiladas de mole and red rice, with chocolate cake for dessert. It's good to see them again. We were trying to convince Judith to take a trip to Europe with Gilberto, but she seems reluctant for no good reason. It is interesting that they are having some of the same troubles Oralia and I had as a couple when we were dating each other — having to ask parents for permission for trips, for example — which are as uncomfortable for them as they were for us.
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How could I have forgotten that Fresh Aire IV was so good?
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Edsger W. Dijkstra died. This is sad news.
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We went to see Scooby Doo, which was, well, ho-hum. The best part is the burping/farting scene, so that must say something about the rest of the movie.
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For lunch, Oralia made baked salmon with tomato, chile serrano, and epazote. I made flan for dessert (evaporated milk, eggs, milk, cream cheese, blend, make caramel, put in pressure cooker for 20 minutes). Mmmmmmm.
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Fixed a cute theming/accessibility bug in Nautilus. It is amazing to what lengths it will go in hacking things up to get a display.
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Found the bonobo silliness that was causing EOG to repaint incorrectly.
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Today Oralia made a huge pot of chocolate champurrado for dessert. Meanwhile, I made a pretty good pasta with mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, and garlic slowly sauteed in butter, then with cilantro, nuts, cured ham, lime juice, chipotle, and spices, and then flamed in vodka. It turned out very well.
My mother dropped by to taste the champurrado, and even though she said she really was not hungry, I managed to make her have some of the pasta. Mwahaha.
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In the evening we watched The Sticky Fingers of Time. It was shot with a very small budget and the story is great. It is good to see a movie that deals with time travel in such a casual, natural way. The stupid IMDB gives it a ridiculously low score for some reason.
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I am too optimistic. I expected a beautiful, hard logic bug in the code that detects filesystem types, or even some system-specific detail that was slipping past it because NFS is scary and stuff — one would say, "man, Unix sucks", but get done with it and learn some more about a certain system's idiosyncrasies and be proud of having conquered the non-standards. But when the bug comes out to be returning a pointer to a string that lives on the stack, I get pissed off. I am beginning to side with the hard-liners who say that writing system code in an unsafe language should be considered criminal negligence. What makes me angry is that it is not that programmers are stupid, but rather that the stupid C language will make it really really easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot and then blow away your whole leg and get third-degree burns on the rest of your body. There are two problems in the fstype.c code: one is that it is an extremely ugly chain of conditionally compiled code, based on the stupid fucking broken flavor of Unix you are building it on; the other is that such mess makes it easy to forget that, hey, some things actually were on the stack and you were not supposed to return pointers to them.
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In the morning we got a very handsome purse for Oralia and Guillermo Samperio's new book on writing stories.
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There is an Edgard Degas exhibition in the old and beautiful building of the Academia de San Carlos, which now functions as a museum. We expected there to be paintings, but it turns out that it was a sculpture exhibition, as Degas was also a sculptor and a photographer. The works they have are very interesting — you can see how his somewhat rigid studies evolved into very fluid, well-proportioned forms of horses, dancers, and women bathers.
They also have a few gorgeous painings by Zurbarán in the museum, but we only had very little time to look at them as they were closing. We should be going back soon.
After the exhibition we went close by to my grandmother's sisters' house. It is always good to see the old ladies. They were very happy to see us, and they told us most of the same funny and embarrassing stories of my childhood that they always do.
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In the evening we saw The Majestic. Not bad, but it gets a bit corny at times. The settings are very well done, though.
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The new patch produces some interesting results on my box. It does not have the bug in question as it is a Linux box, but nevertheless it shows Nautilus doing way too many is_local() operations, even for files where it cannot possibly care about the result. E.g. it makes sense to do that when populating a directory list, but it doesn't when you are reading the icon you'll use to represent a file. Nautilus does that quite a lot.
Update! It looks like it is a stupid bug in the code that came from findutils. Fuck.
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Sent my abstract for the LCA call for papers. Eeeeek.
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We wanted to see a stupid movie, so we rented American Pie 2. The first one was way better.
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There is a forest in Florida called Withlacoochee. In Mexico, huitlacoche is ustilago maydis, an edible black fungus that grows on corn and which is totally delicious. I wonder if their names are related in any way.
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My original diagnostics patch for this only confirmed the obvious, so I started writing a new patch to do logging of gnome-vfs's is_local() guts.