This blog template is fucked up, I think.

Two Percent Bandwidth

Filho da puta do Live TIM.

Bloody tropical subisidiary of Telecom Italia.

Various speed tests show that they are still serving us up two percent of the promised bandwidth though our bill has been paid for two weeks now.

We are filing a police report. Seriously.

A Helen Keller of Sambodian Dogs

Neuza and the dog squad from the local park swing into action again, armed with smartphone power and hypermobile selfie capabilities.

They discovered a lost dog and immediately hauled it off to the veterinarian. This is what they do. This is their militancy. Blanca apparently is willing to pay for such things, which I find extravagant.

Diagnosis: The poor creature is senile – canine Alzheimer’s – banguela – toothless – as well as lame & blind & deaf.

And bald. And while housed in our smaller bathroom downstairs barked for twelve hours straight from 2 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday.

At eighteen years of age, Fadinha – Fairy – is a canine character from the plays of Samuel Beckett.

The only thing she seemed to sense was the olfactory experience she had when I lit up a cigarette nearby. It seems her owner – he lives right around the corner on the Natinguí although Fadinha was found by Sása on Delfina Street –smokes.

Let me see if I grab the photography from Facebook, to the small screen version of which my wife the News has taken like a pato to água.

Can you not link directly to images?

Access to scontent.fcgh5-1.fna.fbcdn.net was denied

I dislike mobile Facebook just as intensely as I do the in my case 1368x768 version.

A Practicing Harpo Marxist

Above: A very basic Pug on Harp

I know I promised not to bore you with my sessions with the infernal machine, but these have in fact preoccupied me most of late, along with mornings or afternooons spent at Cancer Ward.

Based mainly on Harp, above – with Concise CSS – and with help from Express and Node, I am learning Jade, which offers a remarkable variety of boilerplate for Semantic UI.

I am also learning a bit of EJS, a native format for harp init harp-project.

I have cloned my basic Harp project to include one of maybe a dozen schemata I as studying for my Admiráveis Engenhos project. I try to create at least a Hello World! app in all of them.

In this wise am learning Foundation better and expanding my knowledge of Bootstrap. I budget an hour or so a day for each, for building layouts from scratch.

In the remaining time I am learning a few of the lesser known and simple CSS frameworks such as Concise – above – and the fabulous Baseguide and Pure CSS and I really like Primer CSS from GitHub and Vanilla Framework from Ubuntu.

Or Tacit, for example. They exist for the sake of dummies and old farts like me who learned CSS just after it was invented in 1994.

What else? I am reverse-engineering the open code provided for my eventual informational site – I am compiling an Awesome List – and I am discovering how the fixed sidebar is styled and coded.

It may not sound like it but I am getting organized in my learning work at last. I move in circles but the spiral is mostly upward.

The next few months should be dedicated to building from scratch just to see what is under the hood of all these frameworks. I can do this on my own, but I will need a course in Javascript eventually.

On Desiring Machines

Λορεμ ιπσθμ δολορ σιτ αμετ, θσθ διcτα σθσcιπιτ ιντελλεγαμ νο, νε πρι γραεcε εqθιδεμ λοβορτισ. Cθ qθο στετ cονσθλατθ δισσεντιασ, σεα νο ομιτταμ δετερρθισσετ ιντερπρεταρισ. Εξ εοσ μοvετ ιντεγρε. Θσθ αεqθε δολορθμ σιμιλιqθε εξ, τε σεδ vελιτ ζριλ απεριαμ. Ατ cορπορα τραcτατοσ φορενσιβθσ εστ. Θσθ φερρι σενσεριτ αν.

Deleuze & Guattari – Capitalism & Schizophrenia –remain Greek to me.

I am having regular conversations with a certain Lacanian in recent months and even he – brilliant as he is – finds it difficult to explain any of it to me. Yes, in Samodia there are Lacanians in clinical practice. I also find this odd.

The body without organs and desiring-machines I think I am having an inkling about but it has been a very long time since I waded through this sorth of thing, and I am not very nostalgic about those days, either. I always preferred old-school philology to the post-modern theorists. Discovering new volumes of forgotten lore, that sort of thing.

I now hear there are now Polish sociologists or something who have superceded that generation of 1968 with its Foucaults and the like. But I am still stuck on Cybermarx by Nick Dyer-Witheford.

Multiple Process CPU Burnout

Above: simple boilerplate for the Harmonic static site generator.

It has been several days since I began this post and in the meantime I have started to experience that error in which your computer simply shuts down without warning and then reboots.

From which I can google this seems to be a combination of dust in the CPU fan and perhaps also a necessary kernel upgrade to correct a sensor malfunction.

I have to inspect my BIOS settings as well, my googling tells me.

But really, is it any wonder?

I abuse the infernal machine terribly.

It is after only an Intel DualCore® and here I am running multiple processes like npm i and bower install and sudo gem install and grunt and gulp all at the same time.

I have a new rule: no more than three terminal sessions open at time.

Unscientific Postscript

Above: These musings come in Portuguese as well.

I often refer to the Cancer Ward in this diary and perhaps I should explain what I mean.

I would hate for anyone I know there to think I use the nickname cynically. Or, well, perhaps a little cynically given my long medical history, but not entirely.

The Centro de Rehabilitação Hospital Dia – «day hospital rehab center» – is one of several similar programs at the Psychiatric Institute of the Hospital das Clínicas, an enormous complex run by the Unversity of São Paulo medical college. Others serve geriatric and pediatric patients.

Clínicas is preeminent in so many research and practice fields throughout Latin America though it is probably best known for tropical disease research. You meet people from all over Brazil on the campus. Ambulances from small towns in Bahia. My amigão Paulo from Piauí.

The Cancer Ward is the adult day hospital program I have particpated in since a five-month hospitalization for severe depression last year – one in a series of profound crises that started when I was 19 or 20.

The Brazilian unified medical system, SUS, has footed the entire bill even though I am only a resident alien.

This amazes me.

Believe me, I have experienced the Medicare let-down more than once in my life and times and spent my time in the public psychiatric gulags as a result. Where Haldol is applied liberally as a way of chemically handcuffing any and all dissenters.

This, of course, is nothing like those gulags.

The professionals of the CHRD are extraordinarly competent and dedicated. And there is another program of psychosocial rehabiliation for more chronic and severe patients with which our program cooperates.

And yet the nickname Cancer Ward does refer to the Tolstoy of the soviet gulags, Solzhentisyn. Yes, I mean it to.

I mean only to imply that we all are very different people – a cross-section of Brazilian social reality – brought together in one place by common suffering.

Like the people fleeing the Black Death in the Decameron of Boccaccio.

Bipolar Disorder Type II being my personal Black Death into which I seem to disappear every five to ten years or so.

I would like to think that it is over for now and I can rest easy. Hospital Dia has provided a welcome daily reality check that keeps me from working too obsessively.

It is like that movie from the 1960s, Charly, as I was telling my Lacanian the other week.

You emerge from mental darkness into a beautiful lucidity – You are alive again! – but then you realize you must inevitably return to the night from which you emerged.

Rent the film and we will discuss! There is a similar premise in an old Simpsons episode, remember that? Five year-old Homer sticks a crayon up nose and into his brain?