Despedida

So what do you feel now that you're leaving?

Relieved? Yes. I think I wore out my welcome a long time ago.
Happy? Yes. Now I don't have to think about issues and accounts etc.
Excited? Yes. I don't know what awaits me on the other side but I've been here before.
Nervous? Yes. I need to look for another job and I don't know if I'm still lucky.
Sad? Yes. I'm going to miss some people.

Life's good.

A Father's Letter To His Daughter (About Her Future Husband)

Here we go again. I guess writing open letters to your precious someones is very much in vogue. I got this from Huffington Post (again). Here's the link. I copied the letter verbatim from the site. Author's Kelly Flanagan, a clinical psychologist. By the way, it's cute.

Dear Cutie-Pie,

Recently, your mother and I were searching for an answer on Google. Halfway through entering the question, Google returned a list of the most popular searches in the world. Perched at the top of the list was "How to keep him interested."

It startled me. I scanned several of the countless articles about how to be sexy and sexual, when to bring him a beer versus a sandwich, and the ways to make him feel smart and superior.

And I got angry.

Little One, it is not, has never been, and never will be your job to "keep him interested."

Little One, your only task is to know deeply in your soul -- in that unshakeable place that isn't rattled by rejection and loss and ego -- that you are worthy of interest. (If you can remember that everyone else is worthy of interest also, the battle of your life will be mostly won. But that is a letter for another day.)

If you can trust your worth in this way, you will be attractive in the most important sense of the word: you will attract a boy who is both capable of interest and who wants to spend his one life investing all of his interest in you.

Little One, I want to tell you about the boy who doesn't need to be kept interested, because he knows you are interesting:

I don't care if he puts his elbows on the dinner table -- as long as he puts his eyes on the way your nose scrunches when you smile. And then can't stop looking.

I don't care if he can't play a bit of golf with me -- as long as he can play with the children you give him and revel in all the glorious and frustrating ways they are just like you.

I don't care if he doesn't follow his wallet -- as long as he follows his heart and it always leads him back to you.

I don't care if he is strong -- as long as he gives you the space to exercise the strength that is in your heart.

I couldn't care less how he votes -- as long as he wakes up every morning and daily elects you to a place of honor in your home and a place of reverence in his heart.

I don't care about the color of his skin -- as long as he paints the canvas of your lives with brushstrokes of patience, and sacrifice, and vulnerability, and tenderness.

I don't care if he was raised in this religion or that religion or no religion -- as long as he was raised to value the sacred and to know every moment of life, and every moment of life with you, is deeply sacred.

In the end, Little One, if you stumble across a man like that and he and I have nothing else in common, we will have the most important thing in common:

You.

Because in the end, Little One, the only thing you should have to do to "keep him interested" is to be you.

Your eternally interested guy,

Daddy

Letter To A Former Boss

Note: Names have been changed to protect identities (but I guess these are obvious anyway). Just a bit of explanation. What follows is a letter I sent to someone during the last day of my stay in a company; it was a practice of catharsis and closure since I didn't want to leave without at least trying to make things better for those who would be replacing me. I've posted it here in my blog on the 30th of March, 2014, after almost a year since the date I wrote it (although my initial intention was really to keep it between me and her and one other person). The abrupt decision is merely for the sake of permanence. This is part of who I was before and I didn't want to lose this piece of prose if my laptop crashed. I also am confident this isn't going to be discovered by anyone else (unless I become extremely popular). It's going to take a serious stalker to comb through dozens of posts just to arrive here. For you who are about to read this though, let's just keep this between you and me, shall we?

Electricity From Sidewalks

Imagine that all our walkways and our roads generate electricity. Imagine that by simply clicking your remote control, you're supplying it the electricity it needs to work. Imagine if we could harness all our daily motions into energy, with clothes that charge our cellphones every time we move. That's amazing, right?

Here's a link to some inventions harnessing piezoelectricity:

Energy-harvesting Street Tiles
Battery-less Remote Controls
Electricity-generating Clothes

3D Printing

 Imagine a future in which a device connected to a computer can print a solid object. A future in which we can have tangible goods as well as intangible services delivered to our desktops or highstreet shops over the Internet. And a future in which the everyday "atomization" of virtual objects into hard reality has turned the mass pre-production and stock-holding of a wide range of goods and spare parts into no more than an historical legacy.

Such a future may sound like it is being plucked from the worlds of Star Trek. However, while transporter devices that can instantaneously deliver us to remote locations may remain a fantasy, 3D printers capable of outputting physical objects have been in development for over two decades and are starting to present a whole host of new digital manufacturing capabilities. 3D printing may therefore soon do for manufacturing what computers and the Internet have already done for the creation, processing and storage of information.

- From ExplainingTheFuture.com

This is amazing. I can't wait for this technology to become cheap, accessible, and widespread. But then again, there's a word of caution for those who are still lavishing in the euphoria of this suddenly-real technology's potential:

Everyone's now aware of 3D printing — they’ve read about it in the papers, on blogs or seen it on TV. The mentality now seems to be that, in the future, we'll be able to download our products or make them ourselves with CAD programs, apps and 3D scanners, then just print them out, either at home, or in localised print shops. Which in turn will supposedly decentralize manufacturing, bringing it back to the West. But like the cupcake, Daft Punk’s latest album, or goji berries, 3D printing is severely overhyped — and I should know, because it’s what I do for a living.

- Nick Allen, Founder of 3D Print UK