The outskirts of Paris, at 2 AM, are probably not the best place and time to get lost. But I did. Mind you, not really lost. I knew where I was, only I didn't find the place where I was going to sleep. A friend of mine allowed me to crash in some other friends' home, and I tried to find it. It was on some back alley, I remembered, with low houses, with a garden. Only when I tried to find it there were more back alleys, more gardens, and more low-rise houses than I had cared to get references for. I didn't have the house number, or the street name, just a vague remembrance of how it looked like. I went back to my friends' house to ask directions, but they were asleep.
I initiated an exhaustive search of back alleys and low-rise condos and garden-studded driveways, to no avail. I was a little bit in despair. And what do you do in Paris, at 3 AM in the morning (did I mention I had to catch a plane at around 6 the next morning?) when you're lost? Ask somebody.
I found a couple descending from a car, and in my weary French, I asked for help. Surprisingly, they didn't call the police (remember, banlieu, where car burning is a competitive sport, disheveled unknown guy asking for help in broken French) but they actually helped. Don't you believe what they say about parisiens. Even less what they say about parisiennes, Paris girls. There must be something great about France when a girl accompanies somebody else so late at night to help him find his place.
Happy story ending rules would dictate she really found the place, but the real thing is that it was impossible with the indications I had. So she left, and I went ahead, trying the alleys one by one, until a particular combination of garden, condo silhouette, and divine providence, all clicked together and I found, or rather recognized, the house. I took a nap rather than slept, and went to my friend house a while later, where he received me with freshly-baked croissants.
These French have something going on. Which coming from a Spaniard, is something.
Etiquetas: A novel in a year, Paris, make a long story short
It was 1988 or '89, and I was driving my first car, a white boxy Talbot Horizon that had been originally acquired on 23F, the day a civil guard broke into the Spanish Congress and popped a few bullets into the ceiling. I was going to my favorite comic book store, and was about to get my monthly fix; I was in an T-intersection, where I had to yield. Peeked left, peeked right, nobody's coming, and went right ahead, since I couldn't see a thing. But that was enough to crash into the midsection of a car that was coming from my left.
The thing could have stopped right there. We descend, produce insurance papers, maybe yield at each other "Where are your eyes?" "Why are you driving so damn fast in an intersection?", and we part in different directions, never to see each other.
Maybe that's what the other driver wanted to do, but he got his pedals mixed up, and instead of braking, he sped up. Which was not the right thing to do, since he wasn't facing ahead, but a little bit to the right. He crashed into the back of a car that was parked at the other side of the intersection. That car was jerked from his position, and lurched forward towards a person that was starting his motorbike in the space between it and another car. That person had just enough time to jump and avoid being crushed between the suddenly animated car and the other, stopped car.
All in all, 5 vehicles involved. Nobody was hurt, and we signed what we had to sign. The problem was that, since I had just bought the car, I hadn't transferred insurance from the old owner to me, so it was not clear at all if I would be covered or not. Eventually I was, but for a couple of months I was mentally adding up the tab. Instead of sleeping.
Since then, I haven't been involved in anything so bad. And I've made sure I was insured.
Tags: A novel in a year
I want to write a novel because... just because. I gives meaning and purpose to that part of the day, the week, the year, where you have nothing else to do. It's a challenge, too. Writing short stories is easy (not easier than writing a paper, though), but writing a novel... it's in another ballpark. And you end up knowing yourself by facing challenges and getting over them. Or under them. So novels are self-introspection devices.
Tags: a novel in a year
From
A novel in a year:
The day after my eight birthday, my father told me which one of his eight wives was my real mother. And, boy, was I disappointed.
PJorge gave me a copy of this book, and it includes exercises. Since the book is in English, I guess it's only fitting to do them in that tongue, although I don't intend to write anything close in extension to a novel in English (unless I can somehow stitch together 20 papers and call them an
experimental postmodern scientific novel), so I'll post them here in the
category called Homework.
I obviously harbor a lot of respect for
Donald Knuth, but what he says in
this interview (via
/.) is plain wrong:
The machine I use today has dual processors. I get to use them both only when I’m running two independent jobs at the same time; that’s nice, but it happens only a few minutes every week
Beeeeep! Wrong. If you have a dual or quad processor, the OS is delivering processes to them all the time. So you're using all of them all the time. Right now I'm listening to music, and using a browser, while I'm running X and various widgets. That's only on the surface, deep down, there are a few dozens process running. So you're running two independent jobs (and scads more) all the time, and you get to use both processors all the time. Not to full capacity, of course (right now, my own processor only takes a 20% load), but you get to use them all the same.
Etiquetas: knuth, latex, great minds, gurus also make mistakes
Marcelo has
mentioned I'm kind of old school (for a good meaning of the world "old"), and I really am. I was there when
Guido van rossum hadn't produced 1.1 of
Python and
still answered newbies in the USENET newsgroup.
However, I seem to remember that later on, after yet another silly question, Guido van Rossum himself answered with something like "You make lots of questions you should solve yourself", but have been unable to find it. Maybe it was direct email. BTW, that might explain the fact tha I stick to
Perl. Which, at that time, was into version 4.
