Exploring the world at home!

I have spent long time on the internet doing something that gives me much pleasure: Navigating in Google Earth.

The guys at Google are pretty smart. So they launched Google Maps, I thought the best, but after they launched the Earth, with the globe that rotates, with the earth in relief and the millions of photos uploaded by Panoramio, it was impossible to escape.

I also made some contribution to the Wikimapia. It's pretty cool too, and although not the best way of knowing the world, is still faster and cheaper way. If we want to delve a little and see the thing in motion, add Youtube and is almost perfect. If you want to know something written on the subject, use Wikipedia and Google itself. Thus, we became good expert in anywhere in the world.

I have visited a lot in Earth the region where I live, Ribeirão Preto, and I lived, in Conchal, all in Brazil. But I've been to varied places. Lately I've visited Amapá State, Serra do Navio and its manganese mining.

I have many photos on my HD, but still not have released any on Panoramio. I hope to do it soon.

I have that book with the "1001 Places to Know Before You Die." He is a kind of script. The book itself is limited, but if we go ahead and follow the links that the author provides, more photos of Google Earth and Youtube videos, is magnificent.

This is one of the best things to do in life: to know the world.

My dear Outlook

I always talk a lot about my schedules, but never spoke about my Outlook.

Outlook has been for me a source of progress and difficulties. It is where I recorded my hundreds of tasks, chores, goals, projects and plans.

I do not look at these notes every day. In fact, as this blog, I am sometimes pass months without opening it. But whenever I have some quiet, give a neat in my notes.

I review priorities, look things already dismissed and write down new tasks. Because my life is not a company, no need to follow certain hours or days. So, I'm not a dedicated worker. I have plenty of time, but use it in the most good-natured and fruitless as possible. I sleep a lot, ride a lot, I'm doing nothing for long hours and talk platitudes most of the time. If I am a failure, the fault is entirely mine.

I know I'm not going to accomplish almost anything that promise to myself. I have lost hope. At best, I attack something more urgent here, a bureaucracy there, a broken pipe there, a late document there again and thus will lead to life.

The Outlook is the proof of my failure.

Nuclei from Conchal

I've been making serious efforts to understand where I came, why I had the life I had and how things are today and why they are so.

The relationship between past, present and future is a complex web. There are past facts that are levers to our present and future success, while there are others, or possibly the same facts, which are stones in our path that we are almost unable to transpose.

I've been writing something about my past, but I left for a while.

Recently, I've been traveling to my hometown, and had the opportunity to rekindle the curiosity about my past, the past of my family, my city, my state, my country, my world.

It is not an easy search, but it is gratifying to know that there are more people working on the same issues, the same search, and that are kilometers ahead.

It was good to know that someone researched about the past of my city and recently wrote a book on the subject. A magnificently well written book. Nuclei from Conchal, see Google ...

How I wish I could take time and conditions for dialogue with these people!

It seems incredible, but how difficult are the dialogues today!

I know who wrote the book, I know how to access it, but things do not work.

The Internet has become a sort of large garbage barn where penetrate it and find something useful is painful, frustrating and discouraging.

We live in something like a lonely online. People connect every day, but do not connect with each other.

People talk nonsense in chats and MSN and over, but it is just this: nonsense.

Know better how did my city is a major step towards knowing about myself and my own past, and how to make my future.

This is serious. This deserves my best efforts.

How to dodge rocks that prevent me from walking?

About "stop smoking"...

I said I have an old Agenda 99 and that one of its first pages is dedicated to what is called "affirmative actions". The schedule called for us to write some actions that we would do at the beginning of the year and that would help save the world from environmental collapse.

I, with the naivete of a good consumer, listed five attitudes that I thought ecological attitudes.

The first act was to "stop smoking".

What relation has between "stop smoking" and ecology?

I've asked this question before in this blog, but not answered.

How does a smoker to contribute to the destruction of planet Earth?

I think the fact that smoking and destroying nature are tangents things. These things are different forms of  unacceptable aggression. Both are things that must be fought. They are problems with different causes and different solutions, but both urgent and delicate.

There is between the smoker and the destroyer of nature a close relationship. It is a subtle relationship, but critical. Solve a problem is a precondition for the solution of another problem. Otherwise, let's see.

I understand that a smoker, and I was a smoker, undertakes an action in smoking that represents a serious attack on his own health. It seems that nowadays there are few smokers who admit to ignore the evils  that smoking produces. They may disregard the risks, can claim that they are long-term risks, but can not say that there are no health risks.

Now, a smoker is in a hurry to an addiction. A chemical addiction, it is true, but a destructive addiction.

In my quick thinking, it seemed inconsistent that someone can take ecological actions without first taking most urgent attitudes quest to save yourself from a clearly destructive addiction.

They are real risks arising from the ecological destruction of the planet, but a smoker is much more subject to risks that a non-smoker.

Furthermore, it was for me a matter of self-love. How can anyone love nature and not love his own health?

How can someone saving the world and not save himself before? Worse, how can we expect to save the world before dying needlessly from an addiction?

The ecological thought should rather be subordinated to the thought of a healthy life. Sick people should take care of yourself first, then take care of the world.

 

Thus, it seemed to me that I could not hold on ecological actions without first taking care of my own health.

But if smoking is an addiction, and Iwas not born smoking, how fell I in so expensive and painful mistake?

This is another question. But not now.

Moreover, that my reasoning about the relationship between smoking and ecology is relatively correct, but incomplete.

Anyway, I stopped smoking.

This is the main issue, and that really has made me think to much.

Old times, old places

After long months out of time and motivation to write this blog, finally decided to post something on it.

Yesterday I had the time and cool head enough to do something I think the best: get the car on a wonderful afternoon and go aimlessly, with my wife and my brother-in-law. We do not plan anything, but that is where's the fun of it. We went to an event in the vicinity of Ribeirão Preto, the city where we live, but changed our mind and ended up taking a dirt road and we went on it.

It was pretty cool. Old houses, mansions, abandoned coffee plantations, beautiful landscapes.

Finally, a trip to Pirassununga, unto the Emu Falls (Cachoeira de Emas). Fish for dinner in front of the Mogi-Guaçu River.

How much I love this São Paulo State!