Music makes the world go round…

I believe art is something that can connect with our emotions. Being good, bad, shocking, if it makes you feel anything about that picture/painting/whatever you’re watching, music you’re hearing, texture you’re felling, for me that’s art.
Fine examples are the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo, his Pietà, Fibonacci’s sequence and the infamous Dog Death Art by Guillermo Vargas. If you don’t know it, Google it. They all can connect with me and awake different feelings.

Some are good, both Michelangelo’s masterpieces make me awe, Fibonnaci’s absorbs me by it’s elegance and Guillermo’s work makes me sick. Yet, it’s all art, good or not.

That’s why I found it funny when today, at CAE Fiqueira-da-Foz, Mr. Yann Tiersen presented us with a live performance. Most people know his work from Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain or Goodbye Lenin, yet there’s so much more from him. But most of the audience didn’t knew it. So they went there to see one thing, and he presented us his art, different from what most were expecting. The result was somewhat tragic, with some of the audience leaving when they could. Why was that? They were not touched by his music? Good or bad, didn’t they feel anything? By completely showing a lack of disrespect to the performers, the total absence of emotions led them to leave?

Thank God we’re not all alike…

Yaaaahhhrrrr!

Pirate Bay as we know it is dead. So find yourself a new tracker if you use it. After some turbulent times on court, it was finally sold to a Swedish software firm for 5 million €. That firm will use it to distribute paid content.

As any programmer will tell you, doing a torrent tracker is a couple day’s work.

In other news, no one is growing as much as Twitter. Who could’ve guessed that an internet SMS look-alike could become so huge. Now, one thing funny about it… How much money do you think Twitter has generated so far? Well, that’s easy to answer. 0€. Zero, nada. As of until now, Twitter has survived on investor’s money, generating zero cash revenues for their owners. Yet, if they could sell it they would be quite rich.

This leads me to business models. Professionally I’m on 2 projects with no defined business models. How to get revenue from the added value my (our) software provides? With the above examples, it seems I just need that people use it. Lots and lots of people. Both Twitter and Pirate Bay are on top 100 most visited sites on the web.

Seems like even if the wrong business model might not make you rich, it can still make you famous, and with hopes of getting a hefty profit on the future.

God bless you!

In the past if by any accident you sneezed, someone (if polite) would say the title of this post. As of today with the A flu you’ll probably get shot. And sell a few more newspapers, adding to the total sold by the pandemic in the first place.

It’s just stupid all the attention this matter is getting. As of today, the disease has a mortality rate of 0.02%. In the US there are a few deaths confirmed. On the whole world there are tenths of thousand infected and some deaths. OK it’s terrible, I concede. But let’s put things in perspective:

On the US alone every year 36.000 people die by regular flu.

Every year 25.000 children die by thirst and famine on the whole world.

Last year in Portugal more than 1.000 people died because of our heat wave.

There are more than 33.000.000 people with AIDS on the world, yet no one thinks or cares about safe sex, and everyone is waiting to buy their precious Tamiflu, adding a few more billion to Roche and Donald Rumsfeld that was on Roche’s director board when the drug was developed.

Heck, I have more chances of dying when I drive my car to work everyday!

It came from the Greeks

I live in a Democracy, which as we all know, it’s the worst form of Government. Except all the others. Churchill said it and I kind of agree.

Nonetheless, it has evolved into something quite non-democratic. For starters, some funny facts. A few weeks ago, the European Elections were held. All the voters of the European Union were called to make their decision on who to represent them on the European Parliament. One of the parties that made a list here in Portugal was PNR. They are the Portuguese extreme-right party. They represent nationalism, xenophobia and all that’s linked to rightmost ideology. Plus they think that Portugal shouldn’t be in the UE.

Another funny thing here is the Portuguese Monarchy Party. So we should vote on someone to switch our current government to something more monarchy-alike? The only thing that comes to my mind with these two examples is this: If you can’t beat them, join them.

As with most modern countries, Portugal only has 2 parties that have a chance of winning legislative elections, PS and PSD, representing center-left and center-right, but with last elections PS has been moving to center-right, leaving PSD with no political space and their leader with no political voice. But don’t let that fool you, also as most modern countries the differences are quite tiny, details only, and both parties guidelines are quite the same. Even so, some people are already talking about an allegiance after elections so that an even stronger voice can be heard on the parliament. To that contributes the fact that one of our current ministers and our opposition leader were both invited to the last Bilderberg meeting by their representative in portugal, Pinto Balsemão, also a founder of PSD.

So, in all reality, are we really deciding anything? Are we truly making a choice?

Egoistic Pleasures

Us Humans are driven by simple pleasures in life. The smallest things can give us unforgettable joys, or lay us down in depression. A familiar sound of a nostalgic music remembering us of the past, the smell of the perfume of an unknown stranger we just crossed on the street, simple things that can give us a mesh of unexplainable emotions and can alter the mood for quite some time.

Poetry apart, I don’t actually believe int the goodness of Mankind. As most of the psychologists will tell you, we’re driven by rewards. In every action we do there’s a hope of a profitable return. The same can be said by Adam Smith and his invisible hand. Pursue your personal benefit and society gains as a whole. So even every time we do something good to our beloved ones, we get that warm feeling of happiness of knowing that someone we’re attached to was made happy. That’s a profitable return on my book.

But imperfect beings we are. We also get pleasure of someone’s misfortune. The same can be seen in nature, the mischievous spider that plays with the flie on her web, waiting to deliver the “coup de grace” to end the poor flie’s suffering. Aren’t we all flies on someone else’s eyes, to distract them from their affairs and give them some inner joy? Could continue wondering of why getting a list of tasks to do on a friday announcing a sunny weekend, but that would be another story to tell.

The King is dead, long live the King!

As you, your friends, your family, your relatives, and even your household pets already know, Michael Jackson is dead. Well if you you didn’t, you got it here first hand!

He was one of the greatest artists of our time, who brought us songs of pure genius like “Thriller”, “Bad” or “Billie Jean”. The joy of driving around GTA: Vice City while listening to “Billie Jean”… I even bought a few of his albums as a teenager with a doubtful musical taste.

He’s the artist with the record of the greatest number of copies ever sold of an album, 104 million, which nowadays with music downloads (legal or not) will be a number very difficult to surpass.

But he was also a man involved in quite a few scandals. So I find it quite odd that as a person, not as an artist, some are already comparing him to John Lennon or Princess Diana. As once my father said: “All people after death become saints.” Funny, is it not?

In the beginning the Earth was without form, and void…

As all that is created, on it’s creation it doesn’t know the reason of why it exists.

The same happens with this blog. Insomnia, just thoughts and ideas dancing in my mind with nowhere to go, who knows. Either way it’s done, and I’m not quite sure why. Will type anything that I find worthy of being here, so don’t expect high standards of literacy.

As its title sugests, and according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the measure of disorder on a closed environment always increases. And I’m here doing my share.