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a chance to start again, with less.
in a few days i'll be moving to finland with (at most) 3 pieces of luggage [1].
while thinking about it, my thoughts keep turning to the 100 things challenge from a few years ago, and i imagine a small, bare apartment.
a bookcase, table, and chairs in one room ( Read more... ) -
so, should i tell a story?
i feel like writing all about my trip to california, but i'm hard pressed to tell it in a good way, an original way.
the fact of the matter is that i travel fairly often .. not as often as others .. but probably too much for my own good ( Read more... ) -
yeah, that superpower question.
i've been asked the "invisible or fly" superpower question more than a year ago, and my answer's invisiblethen i told my brother about the question recently ( Read more... ) -
under a familiar roof, but not my own.
it's been two weeks of staying with my parents, for no other reason than my apartment lease ended on the 29th of july. i could have moved right away to helsinki, but there's a conference in late august in berkeley, so at the time it seemed worthwhile to delay the impending transatlantic flight. [1]that said, this better be a good conference ( Read more... ) -
there's getting older, and there's understanding the nature of getting older.
about 5-7 years ago i read a story by jorge luis borges called "el otro" (except it was an english translation). then and now, i've always liked his work, but to me that short story was utterly crap and artificial.
the story is about borges, an old man, sitting by the charles river in boston, and somehow encountering a younger version of himself ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
tomorrow i will be parent-sitting, so perhaps i will have few chances to reflect on this second stint in pittsburgh. my intention is not to meditate on this too much, so let me give you my impressions ( Read more... ) -
the new laptop smell .. q-:
so i bought a new netbook .. which means that it runs windows. [1] so for the next few hours i'm running the usual updates and installations:
- firefox / chrome, for web browsers,
- miktex & tecniqcenter, for LaTeXing,
- zonealarm & ad-aware, for firewalls and security
- *new* -- wubi, in order to avoid the headache of re-partitioning my laptop memory and ( Read more... )
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this has been on my mind for a while.
it still seems unreal to me: in a month i'll be moving to helsinki ( Read more... ) -
cooling my heels in canada.
it's been a week in montreal, living in a dormitory while attending a summer (research) school.
i miss having a kitchen and my own bathroom, having to hike for 10 minutes before reaching some source of decent coffee. i don't often cook anything elaborate, but the simple dishes --- like making eggs or a sandwich or stir-fry kale --- are what i ( Read more... ) -
on optimism (from a time magazine article)
the following excerpt puts new meaning to the old saying: "without the past, we would have no future."
from "The Optimism Bias" by tali sharot:
.. Scientists who study memory proposed an intriguing answer: memories are susceptible to inaccuracies partly because the neural system responsible for remembering episodes from our past might not have ( Read more... )