David Acevedo's Blog

A black man was shot in Florida. A kid really. Wearing a hoodie, buying skittles not to far from his home. Unarmed. The man who shot him was Hispanic. Everybody is crying racism.  I doubt it.  Race had something to do with it I'm sure, but I don't think it's as simple as racism. I think it's from a different way of looking at the other man, a way where the man is suddenly a threat before anything else, a kind of Anton's blindness that prevents people from seeing what's in front of them . A teenager with skittles becomes a threat. A danger. A terror that has to be stopped, lethal. I, of course, don't know for sure if this is what happened in Florida a few weeks ago, since few details have come out. But I doubt the calls for racism and wonder if it is this other thing. I'll call it the Scary Man syndrome, w hich is distinct from racism. I've seen it before. My roommate in college told me an experience so bizarre at first I thought he was pulling...

I've been rather bemused by the calls to increase STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) education in this country. Mostly because I think the stress is in the wrong area. The US in my opinion doesn't need any more STEM mayors. What it needs is to have the base level of understanding in those subject areas raised across all disciplines . The fact that a simple process like global warming is misunderstood and one as complex as evolution dismissed and in danger of being taught along side creationism in many states (see teach the controversy bills) are real problems. But a shortage of engineers sounds fishy to me. I can't put my finger on why exactly that is but I have a good intuition about this things and I'll trust it. One clue however is the H1-B1 program . In my former company we had software-engineers that were part of that program and I found something strange about it right away. The visa is owned by the company you work for not the individual: it is a hi...

Opera Opera was for the longest time my favorite browser. It had tabbed browsing when that was just an idea in the back of a Firefox developer and it had a great hiding ability in the PC which made it great for work, Ctrl+H (they changed it afterwards) and it minimized to a task-bar icon, perfect for that unexpected visit to your workstation and even better, as my job was visually intensive but I could listen to whatever, it has a voice reader built-in on Windows XP. Unfortunately, Opera has more or less dropped from my the list of browsers I use with one exception: It's my default feed reader and IRC chat client . I also use it on my Mac laptop because it allows private tabs (as opposed to the whole browser) saving screen-real-estate. Sadly on the PC it has gone from main browser to occasional special use, which is a bit sad considering Opera pioneered a huge amount of the technologies used in other browsers like: tabbed browsing, keyword searches, persistent tabs, bu...

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...