42 years

Well, the day has come, and I have just turned 42. We all know that 42 is a very important number, so I’m happy to celebrate it, and to share it with you.

One of the things that makes me proud of having this blog is running into a comment like this one:

Things we will never see on TV:
The millions of young people who study, do well in school, have friends, but on the weekend get wasted drinking or smoke marijuana.
Do you know any?
I, for one, was one of them, until I discovered something I was passionate about and could put all my abilities to work.
Why does that happen? In my case it was a symptom that doing your duty (work, studies) is not the same as inner well-being.
Out of that came my need to stop using weekend partying as a cognitive lubricant [1] and swap it for using my critical capacity, poured into my blogs, to build alternative paths more in line with how people evolve.

I don’t think the author took that path after reading my translation of Shirky’s article, but there is the quote, with the link. It may not be the best translation, and it’s true that it has its share of rough patches, but there are people who, without that translation, would never have read that interesting reflection. That’s the idea: one of the goals I set for myself when I started writing this blog was to spread material written in English, especially the kind that talks about how software impacts our culture.

Thanks to all of you who read me.

My present this year.

This year I was looking for an Alan Parsons Project video to post, just as I did last year with Time. My first choice was “Old and Wise”, but that song is really too nostalgic, even with an air of farewell about it, nothing to do with my current mood.

But the net gave me another Alan Parsons Project video which, although it has nothing to do with the passage of time, is interesting for us A.P. fans. It’s a track from the album “I Robot”, and it could well pass for an orientation video from the Dharma Initiative.