Stop and Say Hello @ ruiaf.org

Today Mafaldinha turns 45. When I was young I spent more time reading it over and over again than doing anything else. I still like to think that I have a bit of Mafalda, Felipe and Miguelito in me.

Last week, in my way home, I did a stop over in Lille. Don't ask. There are only direct flights twice a week and, irony, going to the north of France is just a slight detour from Italy to Portugal. One day I shall write about the hidden sins of low cost flights. Guilty. Anyway, I had time to go to the city center and have bread with raisins for breakfast in a "boulangerie". Very fancy. I was quite surprised with this cool city and shock, people were nice!

I'm totally against stereotypes but I've been a few times to Paris and I know very well how the french people are! Joking, I actually like Paris, with 10 million people the darkest hobby has its place and it's just fun to go inside a store of a calligrapher and origami maker or the like. Also, I have some friends there and obviously this makes cities much more interesting. By the way Sarah, if you're reading this, thanks for you couch. My point: Parisians, hem, are not the nicest people in world.

In Lille I was ordering breakfast and the waitress, who was very nice (and cute), double checked every thing I ordered and gave advices such as "you should take the bread with pine nuts and raisins and not the sweet bread with raisins, it's much better" or "we don't have dark chocolate for your cappuccino, do you mind the organic-fair-trade-even-better one?". Sure this became complicated after I run out of the 5 different sentences I can say in french so, shock again, she changed to not-so-good-but-with-effort english! It was just this girl! - you say. No, people were generally very nice, giving indications of where the buses were and so on. I'm not really sure what's it all about with those people doing street polls in every corner, though.

All this to say that I must twist my arm and visit some other places in France with a bit more time. On other news I heard that Belgium is claiming French Flanders back.

For those of you (us!) who despise Dan Brown and don't want to read his late(st) crap, here is a great book I've just finished. In the beginning I was a bit weary of the decadent industrial setting but the characters are brilliant. So is the book.

Para não serem sempre os mesmos a fazer estes desafios e aproveitando que o vencedor do costume está de férias, aqui fica a pergunta: Onde é que este gajo foi?

Como prémio, o vencedor tem direito a uma garrafa de vinho :-)

Como dica, posso já dizer que não é o Douro nem o Napa Valley.

English version on the comments.

Scott Aaronson from Shtetl-Optimized announced that his project Worldview Manager is now live. The objective of the project is to show inconsistencies in the beliefs of each person on several topics. I think it's a very interesting idea.

in http://soda10.cs.princeton.edu/SODA10-accepted.html

The artist Bill Guffey has a Virtual Paintout project where each month people gather in one area of the world, virtually, to paint or draw a scene and composition, within a predetermined area. This month the selected place is Lisbon. This is a cool way of artists to organize and make their work known to the public. It works very well and here are the results from Florence, Paris and Seattle.

via Nuno Salvaterra