mandarine

I relish these peaceful moments when my mind and body are at rest, just enjoying the eternity of an instant. The following list is an attempt at conveying the look-and-feel of these bubbles of perfect tranquility, when time seems to slow down and hold on.

• Listening to Norah Jones in the shade, on a white hot July afternoon, my hand holding a glass of icy water dripping with condensation.

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Teleportation works, I can testify. Not just for elementary particles in eccentric quantum physics experimental setups, but for real people complete with clothes and luggage and all. As a matter of fact, it has existed for a long time. [more]

I recently stumbled upon a nice post by the Literate Kitten who had just finished reading Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’ (in French: ‘Du Côté de Chez Swann’):

I learned that I can take on a challenging read, even when working at a challenging job. I learned that a few pages each evening, regularly read, do miraculously add up. I learned that I bring a certain element of unique reading to a great book. And, perhaps most importantly, I learned I could again be excited, down to tips of my marrowed-bones and quiver of my soul, about words.

Update: and another great post by Dorothy:

I’ve been reading in small chunks of about 10 pages or so, and read about 50 pages a week. For me, that’s the perfect way to read it; regularly enough to keep the story and ideas fresh in my mind, but at a slow enough pace to absorb it and to keep from feeling bogged down. This is most definitely not a book to rush.

Golden honey and warm milk

I had meant to start reading Proust’s books ever since I was fifteen. [more]

Brothers and sisters, I know it’s summertime and that some of us have been indulging in guilty light movie-watching. Some like myself probably went as low as to set their hearts on ‘Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man’s Chest’. Allow me to suggest a painless way to redemption: [more]

Although a faithful participant to Lorelle’s blogging challenge, I was contemplating skipping the latest challenge, because I am really not that brilliant at tampering with Wordpress.

Your Blogging Challenge this week is to write a WordPress Tip. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to be programming-code-from-hell technical, but it could if you are into such things.

And again, I finally realised that although they were slightly off-topic, I probably had original working habits that I might share. So, let us share.

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The absidea blog on absurd inventions is up and running. As a matter of fact, I set my first foot in the blogging adventure for that blog, but was led astray on the fabulous path of personal blogging by Lorelle on Wordpress. Contrary to the mandarine blog, [more]

Let the one who has never hacked a stylesheet throw the first stone at me

At first, I did not dare to touch more than one parameter at a time in the default stylesheet: a color code, a font definition, the size of one margin here and there. It was only local parameter changes which did not alter the structure, and for which I had little-to-no doubt on the outcome. But then I grew bolder. I wanted to have a theme of my own, with distinctive features. This is when I started to do evil things: [more]

Ubiquitous acronyms

Acronyms are abbreviations made from the initial letters of a series of words. They sound a barbaric hacked sound. They look an ugly uppercase look. They mean a cryptic jargonic meaning. And they are taking over the world. They have already conquered most technological niches, from computers to genetics, from astrophysics to psychiatry, from oil-drilling to meteorology. Blessed are those who can avoid them on their workplace. Let me just quote a fragment of the acronymic gobbledygook that I have to read through on a daily basis: [more]

Be careful when mixing information

One day in early February, I opened one of these innocent e-mails that colleagues absent-mindedly forward around to whomever they can think of. It was the minutes of a conference on the candidate technologies to replace kerosene for commercial airliners. The conclusions was that none was a credible alternative for the next few decades at least.

I could have just pressed the ‘delete’ button and forgotten about it, but before I could, this piece of info collided with another one about how much oil prices had increased in just over two years. It was like mingling glycerine with nitric acid: kabloo ! As a result, I quit my job as an R-and-D engineer for future commercial aircraft projects.

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