The Vineyards

This would be a melancholic day of its own, even without the most absurd, unexpected, unexplainable fact. But it did happen, to make this day even more melancholic - and probably extend the melancholy to the next few months.

This morning, my very favorite teacher from USP had a heart attack, and died.

I doubt he was older than 60. Smoked a lot, drank quite a lot of coffee, but it surely was not expected, there were no signs of it at all. He just woke up, felt sharp pains, and died.

. . .

I hold it that he was the best teacher in the course, in the department, and probably in the whole Arts and Communications School. He knew the history of books, their making and publishing, from the very first papyrus to the latest Palm compatible e-book. He could talk for three hours (witnessed by myself) about the intricate capital letters that open some story books - where they started to be made, who made them, their value, things no one would ever imagine. He talked of the role of monks in the keeping of knowledge during the Middle Ages as if he had been there. And yet he was the most joyful of all teachers I have had, always making jokes, always laughing - when the time was proper, of course.

My first day of class, Sociology, was a disaster, and I seriously thought of quitting right then. My second day in school was two classes with him. That is what I expected from the structural classes of a Publishing course. The history of written communication starting from cave paintings and going through each step carefully, with details I had never imagined existed. That class (and ruby's eyes and warm welcome) kept me there.

His knowledge is not easy to express - it involved everything that remotely related to written communication. Ancient Greek history, which he punctuated with lots of Greek words; Sumerian legends; Middle Ages, which he refused to call Dark Ages and always mentioned multiple schools of thought from the period to base the affirmation; the origins of the postal system and newspapers (they were related, who would imagine?); Gutenberg and his revolution; the history of paper and press in China and Japan (they had their own, and he knew it top to bottom too). Impossible to remember it all. And yet it was not all.

The first two classes I had with him were mandatory; the other two were not, but I took them mainly because it was him. "History of Public Opinion" was the last, on Tuesday nights last year. Very troublesome to get to, but worth every minute. At the end, I urged him to take "History of Political Doctrines" because he was a lot more fitting than the teacher who hosted it. He apologized, said he was already lining up material to start a class this year or the next, about the history of publishing in Brazil. And thanked me when I said I would take it, too, if it was him teaching it.

He always complained about everything. Not one teacher escaped his thorns, and he surely did not have a glass roof - he could throw stones, and did, lots of it. He also complained about how most students of the Publishing course were falling into the design area, doing their final, mandatory research on it. He used to say his greatest desire was for a student to ask him to be their thesis advisor in a research about pornography in the 14th to 18th century. I doubt I could be so bold as to make a thesis about pornography, but I was very sure I wanted him to be my advisor when my thesis needed to be written.

I always regretted not being there for one of the funniest moments recorded of him. A student got up and walked out in the middle of his class, making a lot of noise and interrupting him. He just stopped to talk and observed. As the student closed the door, he looked back to the classroom, shrugged, and said, "Must be a socialist". And continued the class.

And he died this morning, of a heart attack.

. . .

Damnit.

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Before continuing the tale from the last post, I will write about something ruby suggested a few weeks ago. Perhaps no one has the curiosity, but I should explain eventually why my computer is called Asgaard (and my sister's Olympus).

Of course, it is not so "because I thought it was nice". This is The Vineyards, after all, so it will be a long story.

It began in the days of Sherwood BBS (a BBS being those things from the age of 14.4k modems). One of my friends there started a company called Omnimedia. I was never sure what it did - and I still believe it did nothing, really - but I was quite sure it did not make e-books.

Back then there were CDs with collections of shareware programs and games. A famous one was CICA, and I had one of them. I do not remember many of the programs in it, but I know there was one e-book, by a company called Omnimedia.

I was only interested in it because of the coincidence. It took no time to see it was not the same company, but both are certainly gone by now. That Omnimedia tried to apply the shareware concept to the e-book - in the CD there were the first five chapters, and the reader could buy the rest. The interesting fact about it is that it was in the now abandoned Windows Help (.hlp) format, at the time the only format that allowed indexing and hyperlinking (html was known only to those few who had seen Mosaic).

The name of the book was "Fire and Fur". I do not remember much (perhaps I should read those chapters someday), but I think it was a medieval fantasy novel with furries. Now I think that was a very silly name, but I liked it enough back then to use it.

I still have my very first hard disk, of 120Mb (yes, Megabytes), and it probably still works. But it did not work for a while back in the day, so I had a 540Mb installed, with no label. Until I decided I needed more space, with all those games counting six, eight, twelve floppies! Star Trek: Judgement Rites and Pagan: Ultima VIII were my biggest (and largest) problems, at 60 and 50Mb, plus savegames.

In a maneuver very impressive for a pre-geek in the days where motherboards had no HD detection feature, I installed the 120Mb, hoping it would work after apparently being broken for months. It worked. To celebrate, I used the always overlooked DOS command "label" and called it "Fire & Hope" (see, hope - get the idea?). Ah, up to NTFS, the file system used in Windows NT, 2k and XP, the labels of HDs could have only up to 11 characters. At least they could have spaces.

As I said before, this were the days of the BBS. We used odd programs to connect to them, and to each other sometimes. I used to know all these fancy commands like ATDT, ATH, AT H1&Q&F1, and dreaded the NO CARRIER like no tomorrow. The very first program I installed was called Quick Link II, and it sucked, but I knew no better. It put all the downloaded files into C:\QL2\inbox\. So when I switched to Procomm Plus 2.0, I made a C:\Inbox just to keep the habit.

Then the Gigabyte barrier was broken, and from 540Mb I switched to 1.7Gb. Wow, that was so much space. So much, in fact, that I divided it in four partitions. And to honor my faithful "Fire & Hope" that served me so well earlier, I labelled the C: partition the same. That is where the system went. D: was "Myscelamnia", because I wanted a funky name; big programs and saved files went there. E: was the games partition, "Game Basis", for no particular reason. And F: became "Inbox Prime". A whole partition for downloaded files, named after the Centauri Homeworld in Babylon 5, Centauri Prime.

When I got a 6.4Gb HD, I followed the same scheme for the partitions, but gave them new names, based on the previous ones. C: became "New Hope" - I was not sure if the new drive would work, due to limitations in the motherboard, so the name was still fitting (and no, I never thought of a Star Wars IV reference, honest). I made D: "Absurdya", because it was absurd to me that a partition that big could be filled with files alone, whatever they were; E: became "Fame Thesis" - gamers were getting in the spotlight a lot at the time; and F: was turned to "Inbox Rhyme", just because it rhymed.

The internet came, and with it a program called Net.Medic. Net.Medic showed the status of network traffic, routes to sites, pings, things like that. I loved it. It also showed the computer's name. I had no idea the computer had a name as well. Tired of seeing "local computer", I figured out how to change it, and made it "D.Rod", my nickname at the time. But, really, the whole setup was very silly.

When the AMD 586 was replaced by a Pentium MMX, at the time one of the best things available, I knew it needed a better name, one to represent its great power (heh heh). So I thought of the land of Nordic Gods - I always thought Nordic Gods were a lot stronger than Greek ones. And I made the computer "Asgaard".

The four partitions in Asgaard then became "odinsthrone" (C:, system), "freyascave" (D:, files), "lokistoybox" (E:, games), and "freysstudy" (F:, downloads). Each of them had a reason to be, and when I finally installed WinXP and could give them proper names, it became more apparent.

In "Odin's Throne" sits Windows and all programs, it reigns over Asgaard.
Inside "Freya's Cave" there are things mortals do not quite understand. Everything I did not know where to put I would throw in there, and it quickly got out of hand.
"Loki's Toybox" holds all sorts of games. I know it is not mentioned anywhere Loki had a toybox, but he was always the most playful of gods, even if his tricks were never harmless.
What arrives goes into "Frey's Study". The wise god is always seeking new things, and into his room files from other lands arrive for sorting before going to the rest of Asgaard.

I made up the stories for Loki and Frey, and I do not know if Odin even really had a throne, but there is a cave in Freya's story. All in all, I liked that setup enough to keep it for a very long time.

But then I realized Freya's Cave was not really necessary. Yet I could not forsake her. The other choice was Frey, but he, too, did not deserve it. I removed them all. Asgaard remained Asgaard, but at least for now the partitions are "System", "Games" and "Media". That will obviously change when I install a second hard disk, but for now, Asgaard goes godless.

Ah, Olympus. Its story is a lot simpler. I told my sister my computer was called Asgaard, she wanted hers to have a similar name. Given they were comparable in processing power at the time (now Asgaard is behind...), we named it Olympus. No gods there, either, as there is no need for more than one partition.

Notice the names always remain, even after system upgrades. My main computer has always been called Asgaard since its baptism, through all the hardware it has been made of. The previous machines either lose the status or become something else: the backup Win98 machine is called Midgaard, and if I set up another one it will be Utgaard; if I ever make a Linux or FreeBSD box to use as router, it will be called Bifrost.

I admit it is possible, however, for a computer of mine in the near future not to be called Asgaard. But the price still prevents me from assembling Valhalla, and probably will still prevent it until it is no longer worthy of the higest name. A shame.

And this was the story of Asgaard and Olympus. A very poorly done text, but today was a very melancholic day; I really did not want to continue the story from the previous post, and I wanted to write about something a bit cheerful.

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Because Asgaard is kept on most nights, I like to use it to wake me up, instead of the radio or the alarm. The alarm is horrid, loud beeping is not a way to start a day; the radio is too random in what it plays, and too easily turned off. I use a very good free program called jetAudio, then, that plays Mp3 and nearly everything else (I could only see the Utena movie because of it), and has a feature I missed so much I sometimes tried to create a program with it myself (and always failed): an alarm.

So I choose some Mp3, and at the given time jetAudio will start playing that list. My current list is adorable: Beethoven's "Ave Maria" and "Ode to Joy", Orff's "O Fortuna", Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and "The Blue Danube", and of course, Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" - all of them complete, a total of over an hour of music.

Yesterday I needed to leave home later than other weekdays, so the house was already empty when I woke up to the first notes of Ave Maria. I let it play to the end, and got up when Ride of the Valkyries started - the speakers were just too loud to be next to for that one. I decided to leave it playing, and went to have a shower.

As I was leaving the bathroom afterwards, I heard The Blue Danube coming from my room. It brightened up my day. And it would have remained that way if yesterday was not the day the gas truck comes by - and my beautiful Danube was overlapped with the distorted screeching coming from it, the sound one level above the ringing of my cellphone and the things I produced with the PC Speaker using QBasic.

I was very glad when the truck left and my music could be heard again, but by now Zarathustra was playing. I had breakfast listening to that part no one knows because it does not play in "2001, a Space Odissey". And I concluded that a day that began with such musical events would be a good day to post about music, as I said I would. But yesterday went by and I did not, so I am doing it today.

Some may ask why I would make a selection of classical music to wake me up. There are a few reasons, the first one being I like these songs. Also because the song that wakes me up often stays in my head for the rest of the day, and I am extremely tired of having songs with lyrics in my head - I so much prefer instrumental ones (okay, O Fortuna and Ave Maria have lyrics, but I cannot quite understand Latin and... is that German?). And finally because these songs are neutral. Liking them is always alright.

What am I talking about? My childhood.

My mother never cared much about music. She likes some things from the 60's and 70's, sings some catchy ones from this day, but she has no big taste for it, no favorite genre or band, nothing. She is not someone who will go out and buy herself a CD then have it play once a week or more. Most of the albums she bought or we gave her are untouched, or are listened only by myself.

My father, on the other hand, always liked music. And although nowadays he rarely touches a CD, let alone his vast collection of vynil records, music was always a part of his life a few years ago - collecting said vynils, writing lyrics, trying to learn how to play a guitar.

And when I say guitar on this post, I mean this kind, the acoustic guitar. Not the electric guitar used by Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix; this kind.

It so happened that, during most of the years of my childhood, my father was in a phase where he would listen nearly exclusively to Brazilian country music. Before it was horrendously corrupted, it talked a lot about the countryside, the cattle, the old ranches, the woods, the river (in Portuguese, that would be "sertanejo de raíz" - "root country" in a literal translation). Later it became the equivalent of American pop music, just performed by two guys instead of one girl or five boys. And more recently I do not even know the words in English to describe. Of course, there were very bad songs back then as well, about things other than ranches and cattle, but they were not as numerous; my father liked some of them, though.

I was a very insecure child. I could not possibly imagine daring to like anything my parents did not find good. I had no indication from my mother, and my father would only listen to "root country" - so that is what was good, and I should ignore all the rest. In fact, based on that idea, for many years I simply considered anything played with electric guitars very bad by design, and refused to listen to any of it. Music had to be done with acoustic guitars and talk about the countryside and the trees and rivers to be any good and to earn my ears.

The only exception I would ever accept was music used in soap operas. I was a perfect victim of mass media, and had this idea that anything coming from the TV was good - the movies they showed were the best, the soap operas were great, the news were the most important and always right. So if they chose those songs to be played in their soap operas, it was obvious that those were good songs, and worth listening to - even if they had electric guitars in them.

When I was about 10, my father's country musical phase seemed to have ended. He compiled a cassette tape with things like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and John Lennon (plus "Tears in Heaven", which I considered the only song by Eric Clapton that was any good, for reasons mentioned above). Okay, he liked those songs, I could like them too. I wanted to make a copy of that tape for myself, but it was not complete. So I had to find more music to fit in there, and I wanted it to be music I would not listen to before - but that my parents would approve, of course. I added more John Lennon, some American country, and a number of songs by Raul Seixas (a Brazilian rock singer that I thought was just "quite funny").

I listened to that tape multiple times every day. My father was no longer so deep into "root country", so I lost interest in that. My new standards were all in that tape, and a CD called "The Very Best of Country Music Vol. I" (American country, that is) - hey, if it is the very best, I can like it without worries.

Then my mother came along to play, at last. And she added many things from the 60's and 70's. Plenty of Italian songs, some French songs - things that were very popular during her own childhood. In my eyes, then, anything in Italian or French made between 1960 and 1979 was good. She also brought Johnny Mathis into my tapes. Johnny Mathis...

Of course, my personal nemesis for all this period was MTV. At the time it showed music videos nearly the whole day, with lots of guitars and drums. That was the devil. I went on a deep guilt trip when I saw a cousin watching something there and I realized I liked it. I wish I could remember what it was. All I recall is a lady crying in the middle of a room, then the room floods. I liked that song, whichever it was, when I heard it there. I felt horrible about it.

When I was 13, something around that, my father brought home a CD that, it could be said, finished screwing things up. A selection of Jimi Hendrix songs. He said the guy was really great. I tried it one day, when no one was around. Electric guitar, nothing else. Lots and lots of electric guitar. My own father... He betrayed the acoustic guitar, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. I lost faith in his musical taste. My two or three tapes, first a standard, became my boundaries - anything not in those tapes, or extremely similar to them, was not worth listening.

Not until I was 16 did I venture outside those boundaries. I completely refused to. But I will save the rest of the story for another post, even knowing it will probably be rather shorter than usual. Not a good choice, because this way I cannot make a clear parallel to the classical music that led me to write this today, but this is just too long now.

I promise to conclude this horrible tale soon.

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