David Acevedo's Blog

I'll post a picture with the shirt once I get it.

I've been researching to write a book on Truth after I finish my novel. It's slow research, one can't rush philosophy or theology. So tonight on a restless night I was reading about a person that ran into trouble with his neighbor on his tiny house. I got upset. I got sad. I went through teeth-grinding frustration reading his blog post. Only words yet they got me so upset. I've been noticing this more and more lately and paying attention to them and recording them to see why they make me so upset. Like for example one of the people in my Agile Management Class, writes in such a way that I get upset, angry and furious about it and become rather arrogant with him. I'm not sure why it pisses me off so much the way he writes but I'm beginning to think I strikes me as him "being better than me" and I just want to show him his not better than me. I should say that in his writing he doesn't say he's better than me but that's how it strikes me, pre...

One of the weird things that is hard to explain about growing up in Puerto Rico is the lack of Public Libraries. I'm a bit of a compulsive book buyer. So being able to borrow books is still a novel concept for me. Of course Universities and schools in Puerto Rico have libraries but a public library, one that's there for the community? That still shocking to me. And it's a very American thing too. Even tiny towns I've visited seem to have them and some are shockingly nice. The Oviedo Florida public library was gorgeous, and I loved to go there. The Burbank Public Library has meeting rooms you can use and a whole section for children. I tell you this because another thing that was shocking to me was the Abram Friedman Occupational Center Adult School . From the outside it looks way worse than I was expecting. It looks like a prison, actually a juvenile detention center. No windows, painted while like a polar bear with a blue strip down the bottom. Only a government build...

Typing accents on a PC is a complicated Alt + three numbered code affair. One feels like a sorcerer casting a spell. "I summon thee accented é! I press the weird magical key Alt, and with 0191 get the flipped question mark!" For a bilingual person this meant that writing on the computer was a start-and-stop process. With Mac's it a whole lot easier, just Alt + e and the letter you wanted for accents and alt + ? for the question mark. No need to leave the keyboard for the number pad and no need to remember arcane number combinations or have a paper cheat sheet next to the keyboard, as I've seen in virtually every secretaries computer in Puerto Rico. Linux has a interesting approach to foreign language characters: using a compose key . You hit this key which I typically map to Caps Lock and ' and the letter you want and voilá you get the accent. Kinda makes sense: single quotation mark is an accent, double gets you the ümalaut , works pretty well. Except for the ñ...

STOP SOPA AND PIPA (censored)

My friend Denis' nephews were involved in a car accident in December. I wish them both a fast and happy recovery. That they are still alive is a sort of miracle. Here is a link to his blog for the whole story .

Kodak has filed for Chapter 11. Not particularly surprising, but kind of sad. Here is a great article on why Kodak failed to which I want to add an anecdote. In early 2001 I visited Australia and on the trip back (I think) I talked to a person moving out of Australia that had been a manager at a Kodak shop. By the 2001, developing of film had changed. It was all about scanning and digitalizing. Having just been in Japan I'd see that Fuji was all over scanning. So I wondered what Kodak was doing about that. And the woman told me nothing. She said that for years they'd been complaining to the central office about how expensive their development process was and that it wasn't even tied to digitalization. Their response was that "it's Kodak so people will pay more." Even then it was clear that developing was changing and Kodak was not being visionary about that. Unsurprisingly Kodak stores closed through out Australia. If they weren't listening to their mana...