Omnia Mutantur

Offline again. Be back later.

Ricardo Personal

Last Friday I was out having lunch with a group of friends. There was a cadre of women in the table next to us (along with an older, pot-bellied guy who looked like an eunuch), discussing quite openly male and female behavior. One of the women kept making the point that infidelity is not the man’s fault – it’s the temptress who lures him that’s to blame. After all, how can a man’s fortress of resolve stand up against a persistant woman?

It was amusing watching the expression in our group, as seveal of us were between cracking up and smacking some sense into her. I guess their comments tell you a lot about both the retrogade mentality still present in a lot of people, as well as to why there’s almost a culture of infidelity here.

I’ve personally always thought of relationships (whether romantic, platonic, frienship or work-related) as being a contract – you have to abide by whatever guidelines you agreed upon at the start. Not only that, both parties should enter that contract as equals, and I would expect that they do it because they derive some degree of enjoyment from it.

Needless to say you shouldn’t break that contract, two examples being cheating on your spouse and behaving like a psychotic bitch. If you want to have a more “open” relationship, you should come out to your partner and tell her – renegotiating the terms of the contract – and not just flat-out sleep around on her.

On a similar note, a recent piece in Marginal Revolution asks should you treat your marriage like a job? Their analysis of the question is a great read, and I recommend you do check it out, but the site they referr to falls flat precisely for the same reasons that most people fare miserably at their jobs. The author basically boils it down to a fulfilling a list of requirements, hoops you have to jump through in order to get some morsel.

Following that approach a marriage may certainly last longer, but unless both parties respect both the letter and the spirit of their agreement, and both find enjoyment in what they’re doing, such relationships are doomed to become nothing more significant than a daily trip to your cubicle.

Ricardo Math and economics, Personal

We’re looking to hire an ASP.Net developer for a long-term project. We’re a small team and want to keep growing by adding dedicated, team-oriented people with a sense of humor and a deep love of personal freedom.

You must have experience with C#, Javascript, DHTML and XSLT 1.0 to create modular and reusable components. Familiarity with MSXML 3+ interfaces, XPath and advanced XSLT templates is a plus. It’s fundamental that you have a keen eye for UI detail, and feel comfortable working directly with an user on design issues.

If you’re in Costa Rica and interested, just let me know.

Ricardo Personal, Science and Technology

Offline life has been was much interesting lately. I’ll be back later.

Ricardo Personal

These sort of books have always seem self-disqualifying to me.

Jacqueline has a post on her blog referencing The Rules, a dating advice book whose subtitle is Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, and how it makes good economic sense.

Not having read “The Rules” I may be missing something, but it sounds like it could be a perfect manipulation tool for inconsiderate assholes. If the book’s ruleset gets widely adopted, a slightly manipulative person would only need to pretend he’s playing by those very rules. This would send out signals that indicate he’s a decent, caring partner, and fool all women that consider the ruleset a checklist that can substitute common sense.

After all, if bastards weren’t good at sending the signals a potential victim expects, and adaptable to comply with changing conditions, they wouldn’t date at all and books like these would be irrelevant.

As for the possible male manipulation advice from the book (there seems to be quite a bit as well, just by paging through the scanned book at Amazon), how valid is that advice once the technique has been made public by the book’s bestseller quality? Any man with half-a-brain who is playing the dating game on a Rules-saturated community would know that he’s being manipulated, after at least a casual leaf-through at a local Barnes and Noble. That would leave only the lazy or brain-dead susceptible to be easily roped in by those rules.

Are supporters of these books really itching to date that demographic?

Ricardo Books, music and film, Personal

When discussing The Probability Broach with Jorge, a great friend of mine who actually lent me the graphic novel, I had to concede.

I know, I said, in part it’s because I’m a literary snob.
Oh, sure you are, he replied with a huge grin, you’re an elitist fucking snob.

I’ve got to get me a Jules-like wallet with that written on it.

Ricardo Personal

Godfrey Townsend, the current guitar player who performed live in Costa Rica with Alan Parsons, can kick Gilmour’s overrated ass. Steve Murphy on the drums doesn’t do half-bad either.

Man, that fade from Breakdown into The Raven.

Glorious.

Ricardo Personal

Happy new year, everyone.

Things have been a bit quiet on the update front, I know. I’ve been in Rumania the past two weeks, visiting Vero (who was there for the holidays) and traveling the countryside. I have several metric tons of photographs, which I’ll be uploading during the week, plus a travelogue I’m working on.

See you all soon.

Ricardo Personal

For those of you that had seen her only outlined, here’s a photo of Vero. She looks serious as a heart attack but trust me, she laughs a lot. I just have to edit one of the ones where she at least smiles, wrinkling her nose up a bit.

Bad, lazy photographer.

Ricardo Personal

There is a major difference between knowing something and understanding it. Knowing something means that specific bit of knowledge is embedded in your brain, a hopefully permanent item in one of the drawers of your mental filing cabinets, whereas understanding goes merely archiving it for future retrieval: implies dissecting it, analyzing it, and finally interiorizing the true nature of the item. It is closer to what Valentine Michael Smith would define as grokking.

This is something I’ve always known and often understood, but it is still amazing how well after my 30th birthday – and damn near close to my 31st – I still find myself surprised when I suddenly understand something and, through the process of understanding it, I realize that I merely knew it before.

More often than not these epiphanies have to do with myself. Truth be told, I know myself pretty well. I am brutally honest about my shortcomings and almost never humble about my virtues. I also use the same microscope for looking at myself that I use for other people, but when pointed at myself it tends to reveal a lot more detail – after all, I have both a lot more information and a better established context when dealing with my own person.

It came as a surprise, then, when yesterday I realized how much I enjoy being served.

I partly knew this before. While I despise a servile attitude, I delight in having people around me to take care of the tasks that I’m not good at, dislike, or just consider an annoyance and a distraction from what I really want to do.

Take for instance Harold, the bike messenger I use for running some errands. Harold is capable, punctual and bill for some errands less than I would have to pay for a 1-way cab, without even taking into account the cost of the time I would spend.

There’s also Doña Flor, a lady who shows up twice a week to my apartment to help me with the cleaning and the laundry (bull shit, she doesn’t help me, she does it all herself). She’s extremely efficient, is honest and has a great attitude: Bast respects her, Horus adores her and she doesn’t grovel and treat me like some sort of feudal lord, an approach I would hate. She is somebody I trust enough that she has the keys to my apartment and just lets herself in and out as will. Doña Flor has also half-become a sort of assistant, somebody I can rely on to filter the people that would bother me at ungodly hours of the morning (that means before noon).

Take last Friday, for instance. Vero stayed over at the apartment on Thursday, so I didn’t go to sleep until well after 4am. Some people from ATT were supposed to show up that very Friday morning to perform some maintenance on the electric gates, and I just knew they would appear when I was far off frolicking in the dream lands. I half-woke up some time after 8, the time at which doña Flor usually gets there, so I went downstairs for a moment and gave her my wallet, asked her to please take care of the ATT folks and if the house was on fire, leave me a note on the table and I’d read it when I finally woke up.

Which didn’t happen until after noon, when doña Flor had already left. On the dining room table I did find a note (fortunately, it wasn’t about the house being on fire) which had three items.

1. Despite many previous phone calls confirming their visit, the
   ATT folks had not actually shown up.
2. Anna’s Studio, the salon where I cut my hair, had called to
   confirm an appointment for 11am. Doña Flor re-scheduled it for
   the next week.
3. Guiselle from the office had called, said it was urgent, asked
   that I please return the call ASAP.

If you paid attention you’ll notice that not only she re-scheduled my appointment rather than waking me up against my instructions, which could perfectly have been interpreted as a jest, but that somebody purporting to be from my place of work had called on what she claimed was an urgent matter and had been brushed off.

Esteban can say all he wants about doña Flor realizing that it is I who pays her salary and not Guiselle, but the fact remains that you just can’t pay enough for service like that.

That sort of thing happens enough that I just can’t do without doña Flor, but it seems that I just hadn’t actually understood how much pleasure I derive from situations where I’m able to just hire somebody for a task that they can execute much better than I could myself.

But this past Wednesday sitting at the salon, peaceful music playing on the background while a woman unwrapped my arms from some spa treatment and massaged them, all in parallel with Anna’s massaging my scalp after the haircut, I reached a Nirvana and finally understood how much service pleases me.

(Too Patrick Bateman-ish?)

Ricardo Personal