Green business is an innovation. Certainly, it will be more and more important in our lives in the future. I believe in green products as a way to conserve natural resources and I support companies which products are green.

Make environmental friendly products is a process. Maybe we can find some products not truly or totally green, but we must consider the effort to increase the quality of these products. Biodegradable packages, for example, aren't easy to be developed in few months or years. Research is necessary. So, a package 20% biodegradable today probably will be 100% biodegradable in the future, but only whether we support the company that makes and sells that package.

I think green products will be the rule in the future. I don't go out of my way to buy it because green products are easily found in every place. So I don't care about it. Green business will find me first.

Conserving energy

After I propose to stop smoking, using recycled paper notebooks and using better supermarkets plastic bags, I was forced to think of a fourth means of contributing to the preservation of nature.

So, we lived the time of the risk of blackout energy of the Cardoso government, nothing more obvious thing to do: save energy.

Okay, but how? Not washing our body? Living in the dark? Do not watch TV or internet?

No, I could not think of anything very sophisticated at the time, because I lived in a cubicle that did not consume very little electricity.

The only sensible action that I thought was replace my common incandescent bulbs with electronic bulbs, most economical, durable and expensive.

What was the result? I do not know. There are no real ways to measure the impact of isolated individual actions like this.

Then, my life was increasing, I was moving to bigger houses, buying more electrical gadgets and today, I paid a fortune to use energy. I do not know if we still live so intensely the risk of blackouts in Brazil, but that time was important for learning the Brazilian people in general, who became more rational in relation to electricity.

Still using electronic lamps, now a little cheaper. I think people should even do your duty and save what you can, but I think there are limits and there is no way in the end, we must build more electrical plants. This somewhat resembles these games administration of cities and farms, such as Sim City or Farmville, but what more can I think? What will live forever in the same level of consumption?

Sure, new technologies will reduce energy consumption through more economical products, but in the meantime, we consume without fear of blackouts.

This reminds me of a story I once saw in TV in these news programs at lunchtime, when we normally see local reporters doing unimportant matters, but curious.

A reporter bothered to mention the theme of the popular economy. How can people be economical. And of course, the thing descended into the anecdote. Soon, there was talk of the Avars, the miserable, the hand-to-cow, those kind of people who save not only out of necessity but for pleasure or addiction.

This is a serious matter and we'll discuss it in the future, but back to the story, the reporter came, through clues from neighbors, at a poor and simple man, a resident of those little towns in countrified areas, those that living in simple houses with used worn and old furniture.

It was not just a matter of saving, but of addiction, but a kind of addiction coming from a simple drug addict  and worthy of compassion, because really simple and with not much money.

The person in question, a thin old man sixty years old, more or less, looking worn out by life, was proud of his habit. Finally, the reporter asked for an example of their diligence in saving.

The old man then came the little room of his house, grabbed the clock hanging on the wall and turned it around. He then placed two small batteries in the device and it started working. The reporter asked what that meant and he said that batteries cost money. Soon, there was no point getting the clock running, showing the time for no one and consuming the battery if the resident was not in home. So whenever he comes out, he took the batteries, and when he returned, replaced batteries, adjusted clock pointers and life went on.

There is a profound lesson to be learned in this story.

Super 8 and the best of worlds

After getting curious about the poster of Super 8 film, I researched a little about what would and, well, it was a Spielberg movie, talked about a train that derailed and something like an alien that would follow.

Ready. That was enough for me. I love things about extraterrestrials.

The movie hit theaters yesterday and I went watch it.

My wife was disappointed. I, yes too, I can not deny, but not quite. Let's look at why.

In fact the alien spider-shaped (ops!, should not say anything about the rest of the film not to frustrate the expectations of those who have not watched!) Is only a secondary character. What is cool, and this is clear in the movie all the time, is that something is happening in 1979 and it was before the digital age. It is a flood of nostalgia and it's pretty cool.

My wife lived her youth and adolescence in the '90s, so could not miss a walkman or firecrackers and made ​​models of trains for kids. But I, yes. I also made ​​my models so I understood the message of the film.

Yes, kids today are missing something important when it ceases to do many of the older things we did.

On the other hand, the kids of today enjoy certain things that we'd love to enjoy when we were kids. Who would not want to have Internet and video games like today?

So, I concluded, the best of worlds, perhaps, would be a combination of the two best times. Yes, powerful gaming, but also cool places, cool activities, which currently do not have and not do anymore. I doubt very much that the kids today would dare to record a video like the kids in the movie, or do things that we, I, my brothers and our friends, we would in real life.

What we did?

Oh, a lot. Nothing that looks like what a kid does today.

We were terrible!

Jani Lane: Too Young To Die

It is with regret that I got the news of the death of Jani Lane, the former lead singer of rock band Warrant.

Yes, I know that hardly anyone knows about this band, the Warrant. I also know that nobody cares about Jani Lane. Another drug addict who dies due to abuse and wild living, they say.

But things are not quite like that.

I am of the generation that grew up listening to heavy metal in the late 80s. I loved the hard rock of bands such as Warrant. They, the hairy rockers could even be drug users or addicts beverages, hooligans, but no matter. This was and is part of rock 'n roll. But they were our idols.

The Warrant was never a very famous band outside the United States, but even so, who was a fan of hard rock music knew them, and they had a great  poser look. Many did not like, but many liked. I loved it.

But Jani Lane is, personally speaking, even more important.

People think of rock as people inaccessible. Yes, they are even, when they are at the height of his fame, and many of them continue to flee from ordinary people for all life. But not Jani Lane.

Roni, my younger brother, left Brazil in 1993. Jani Lane left Warrant in 1992. They two met sometime between 1993 and 1998 in Winnipeg, Canada. My brother lived there and knew who was Jani Lane.

One day, Jani was playing in a bar in Winnipeg in the vicinity of where my brother lived. And then, Roni went to the show. The bar was small and the public was not very big. At the end of the show, Roni had the opportunity to talk personally with Jani Lane. I do not know what they talked about, nor how long. But Roni told me about this meeting with great pride, because, after all, Jani Lane was a great singer from a great band that had great success and sold several million records. It's not everyday that we find people like that. And is not every day that people like that allow ordinary people like me and Roni, to approach and talk like normal human beings.

After this meeting, I always had great affection for Warrant and Jani Lane. I bought their albums, now in CD format, which did not exist here at the time they were successful. Of course I dare not rock every day. In fact, I have many sounds I buy CDs and keep more fondly as a reminder to listen to every day. So, I got the CD and Warrant consider this a tribute to the band. They did a great sound.

Now, after years, I have 41 years. Roni will be 39 soon. Jani died at 47. It was a little older than us.

He was a guy who was not in the media, but it does not matter. It was and will always be the Jani Lane, the guy from Warrant, the guy who played in Winnipeg and talked to my brother like a normal guy.

And now he's dead.

A guy too young to die.

Jani Lane, here is my tribute.

Now, you too are eternal!

New look

I changed the look of this blog. Now, use a pastel, which resembles paper, which inspires me to write more and better.

Any kind of notebook, either on paper, such as 3M Post-it, or digital, such as Outlook, the Windows Taskbar, and others, like the IPad are all in that tone of brown old paper. This is a delight.

Now, my blog is like that.

Good reading.

What are diskettes?

I said one of these previous posts I had multiple computers over these past seventeen years. So, there are much tings stored in the form of bits.

because I am curious, I remembered that I still have boxes with old diskettes of 1.44 mega, those old squares. Incidentally, my computer still has a drive that reads it. Something unnecessary and outdated, certainly, when a single and cheap flash drive with 2 gigabytes can store data equivalent to about 1,400 little bums diskettes.

But I still have them: 43 of them.

One part is in two plastic boxes, each seven disks. I read all obviously doing a virus scan, because these old things are not necessarily safe. In all, I read 14 floppy disks, but they were all empty. Mere relics of a time gone by.

What to do with them?

Throw in the trash? Use in an emergency? I do not know.

Maybe I shoot some pictures of them and then put it in the trash.

Some have labels with file names. What do they remind me?

That's all that's left to do: remember how we use it, as objects of remembrance.

Farewell, floppies.

The third attitude

The third ecological attitude that I proposed to myself in my 1999 Ecological Agenda was to recycle packaging (bags) plastic to garbage.

What we have here?

First, as I said before, here is the good faith and gullibility of a good citizen trying to do their part in saving the world before the global catastrophe of the destruction of nature.

Now, plastic, poorly degradable, existing in millions of shopping bags certainly represents a threat to nature. It no makes no sense to simply throw plastic shopping bags in the trash. It is possible that we use them a few times, or at least that retain and recycle them.



And, although I do not believe much in this whole story about these damn little plastic bags, did my part. Today, just have a large plastic bucket where I joined plastic bags day after day, year after year, so that if, and certainly when, they are thrown all together in a single day and collected by the usual garbage, they will certainly be exploited by those who have to use them, or be mixed with the rest of the garbage, and have the same fate as if they were not joined, but thrown in the trash every day, as I had never proposed to myself the task of recycling it.

The third attitude, gentlemen, is a meaningless idiocy.

So meaningless that the correct solution was given by a law that simply prohibits them.

And I know that this law was only possible because many before me tried to do exactly as I did, and reached the same conclusion: there is no way of giving a target environmentally friendly to these damn little plastic bags.

I even thought about solutions, but nothing has inspired me to go ahead. One of these days I talk about some ideas that I had to put an end to  these little plastic bags .

Then I saw that the problem was deeper.

It seems a joke, but it was just a joke that made me think about it.

Want to know the joke?

It is to laugh, not cry...

Fat, mysterious and cannibal brain

After studying a little about the human brain, it seems he is very, very mysterious. Then, suddenly, he surprises us with this news of a study done by researchers at the Department of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, published in the journal "Cell Metabolism", that he can eat himself if we were to lose weight. This is surprising, though disappointing.

Surprising, because I never imagined that a body could consume themselves to save the organism as a whole. All right, we burn fat, muscles and everything else in case of need, but eating the brain itself? This is very bizarre.



Then it makes sense he sacrifice himself, if the goal is to save the whole. There are even cases of people with brains nearly absent. It is also bizarre that we can survive with a minimum amount of neurons, which cut off chickens, or acephalous cockroachs, or like humans with tiny brains as lizards.

On the other hand, it no makes sense to accumulate resources to the point of staying obese, with clogged veins and die of heart attacks. What is the logic to accumulate so much?

But the most interesting is the consciousness. Whence come, how acquires identity and personality?

Speaking more personally, because I am who I am and not someone else? Best: Why I am a person and not a cow or a fish?



Speaking further, why be who I am today and not yesterday or tomorrow? How to unravel the mystery of consciousness?

I tried "The Mystery of Consciousness" by Antonio Damasio, but the entropy does not leave. I have to back up and fix squeaks and make financial transfers and payments. Keep running modern life has a tremendous cost in time.

I need to read Damasio. I need!

Entropy and creaking cars

I try to be productive, but it is not easy.

Yesterday I spent all day running from shop to shop to solve minor problems in my car, which is not new, nor perfect.

First, yesterday, a flaccid sound and squeaks in the tire front right. Flat tire? We stopped at a gas station and calibrate the tire. But the noise continued.

Untied cap? Could be. I avoid, but eventually end up rubbing the tires on the curb, in the rush to get out of the way in the crowded streets of the modern world, where there is one car for every two human beings.

I take the hubcap and the noise decreases, but not at all. I look for a mechanic the next day. And so I do. I go to the first store. Change all caps. Then go to one second store and change a light bulb. Then I go to a third store, and we have stirred the suspension, the exhaust, but nothing. The creaking continues. Let's go, because it is night. We tried a fourth store at a mall, and there they try a fourth way, and say the problem is over, but we're leaving at ten o'clock at night and the damn creaking continues.

In the meantime, I could have made ​​great strides in a lot of important areas of my life, but did not.

Taking care of the car is urgent.



But is it important? Now, all the textbooks about time management are clear: we must distinguish the important from the urgent. I say that the manuals need a little more depth. This distinction simply did not work yesterday.

It did not work because life is not easy.

There is not a single administration manual that talks about entropy. And the manuals do not talk because this is not a concept of social sciences, but sciences of nature, physics, more appropriately.

But without understanding the entropy, it is difficult to understand that we must pass floss daily, as we keep our cars safe, but not let us save the world.

Only the entropy explains the continuity of life requires effort, much effort.

If administrators and economists knew more about the concept of entropy, life could be better.

Urgent things are important. Are urgent precisely because they are important!

Or not?

Me and my computers

I have said about my books, but I must tell about my computers.

I bought my first PC in 1994. Then I bought another in 1996. After another in 1999. Then another in 2006. Then another in 2007. Altogether, I had five computers.

Each one has a different story. Apart from dozens of machines which used in many places where I worked. My relationship with the computer, then, has lasted seventeen years. It is no small thing.

How it all began?

It started a long time ago, with concepts that are part of the culture of an era, dating back even to 70's.

It is curious that we have no notion that we're putting bricks in building something big and important, even though we know that the informatics and the computers are part of a revolution that we know to be happening. Build something without a plan is both exciting and scary.

Informatics is a matter to which we are not stop talking abundantly here.