Leonardo Boiko’s Diary

I’m totally not making this shit up.

— So you work at Google, eh? Where is the Google office in Brazil?
— There’s one in São Paulo and one in Belo Horizonte.
— What platform do you use at Google?
— We use Linux.
— Who created Linux?
— Er, a Finnish guy called Linus.
— Ok, you passed.

Do you seek to enter the United States to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities, or any other unlawful purpose?

YES. I heard there are still sodomy laws in some states, and I think I could use some sodomy myself.

Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization as currently designated by the U.S. Secretary of State?

Since these days everyone under the sun is designated as terrorist, I guess I must be?

Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi government of Germany;

At some point in my life I was a Grammar Nazi, but today I’m ashamed of it.

or have you ever participated in genocide?

YES. I’ve wished for quite a few blessed scrolls of genocide in nethack.

Clan or Tribe Name (if applicable)

SIGKILL on World of Warcraft, Greymane realm.
Also, my Final Fantasy Tactics Advance clan is called tatakaumonotachi.

Do you have any specialized skills or training, including firearms, explosives, nuclear, biological, or chemical experience?

YES. I don’t know any of these example stuff, but sure, I do have specialized skills or training.

If YES, please explain.

I can cook some mean olive sauce for pasta.

Mas é claro que minha velha câmera Powershot que me serviu tão bem todos esses anos decidiu dar seu defeito de fabricação precisamente quando minha filha está quase fazendo aniversário e eu estava prestes a fechar e imprimir seu álbum de fotos de negativo a um ano.

Dear teachers who used to chastise me because I was always making little sculptures with any available objects: as you can see, I’m and adult now and I still do that. Nobody cares. Also, my job pays more and improve the world better than yours kthxbye.

[Text copied quasi-verbatim from the first psot.]

Last year I tried to keep a strict diet of no computing-related–posts in my blog, Leonardo Boiko’s Diary. My diary is meant to be a personal diary (formal definition: posts in my diary SHOULD be interesting to My Mother). I was studying Japanese Language & Literature, trying to stop being a computer guy, and daydreaming about how cool it would be to make a blog exploring pop culture through academic methodology. And besides, there’s already Ω(1e6) blogs about technology in teh interwebs.

But no matter how much I tried to restrain myself, those little war stories and small configuration tidbits just kept creeping in. My plans to switch careers failed, and now that I joined Google I’m more computer guy than ever. I’ll thereby admit my inner nerdiness and ressurect this old project of a blog for observations on computer science, GNU/Linux systems administration, programming, toys, and life at the big G. Don’t expect frequent updates though; I’m only using this as long-term storage to dump stuff from my mental RAM, saving myself the trouble of refreshing it constantly.

Unlike my diary, complog will be English-only. This allows me to avoid having to fiddle with Gengo variants and to experiment with new Wordpress features (like tags). If you’re interested in computing, I take it that you know English already.

At first I’ll just pull existing content from the diary and from my internal Google blog. With time I may even write useful original stuff, who knows.

The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.

* * *

It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.

* * *

Education… now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and fans, driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.

* * *

Q. “If children are taught at home, won’t they miss the valuable social life of the school?”

A. If there were no other reason for wanting to keep kids out of school, the social life would be reason enough. In all but a very few of the schools I have taught in, visited, or know anything about, the social life of the children is mean-spirited, competitive, exclusive, status-seeking, snobbish, full of talk about who went to whose birthday party and who got-what Christmas presents and who got how many Valentine cards and who is talking to so-and-so and who is not. Even in the first grade, classes soon divide into leaders (energetic and — often deservedly — popular kids), their bands of followers, and other outsiders who are pointedly excluded from these groups.

[...]When I point out to people that the social life of most schools and classrooms is mean-spirited, status-oriented, competitive, and snobbish, I am always astonished by their response. Not one person of the hundreds with whom I’ve discussed this has yet said to me that the social life at school is kindly, generous, supporting, democratic, friendly, loving, or good for children. No, without exception, when I condemn the social life of school, people say, “But that’s what the children are going to meet in Real Life.” [...] Of course, children who spend almost all their time in groups of other people their own age, shut out of society’s serious work and concerns, with almost no contact with any adults except child-watchers, are going to feel that what “all the other kids” are doing is the right, the best, the only thing to do.

John Holt, 1923–1985