Hmm ok, so some background is required on this one. Since the socialist government is in office, the minister for education has been passing some really polemic measures. It started years ago with “replacement classes”, a fine idea in essence but horribly implemented which caused lots of protests back then by teachers and students alike (this was in the 2005/2006 and 2006/2007 school years) but has since calmed down due to the “no flexibility” policy imposed by the higher authorities. Then last year, a new “teacher evaluation” was passed, to start to be used this year. And finally at the beginning of this school year (late september/early october) we all found out a new policy is in place for those who miss classes.
Here’s the deal: Before this, you could miss classes, and as long as you justified them accordingly (because you had gone to the doctor, or broke a leg and spent a month hospital or whatever), those didn’t count towards your number of allowed misses (3 times the number of weekly classes of X discipline, every 3 months. So for example, if I had 3 math classes a week, I could miss 9 classes over a 3 month period and not justify any of them before I failed they year due to misses). This was, as far as I view it, fair and had been in place for several years. It raised one problem, students with over 18 years of age or whose parents did not care could just justify every miss every time and they’d be OK with it (though they’d still probably fail the discipline(s) because you pretty much need to attend to classes to learn anything).
But on comes the ministry, and says “Oh no, this is wrong” and now, even justified missed count towards your allowed number. Another difference though, is that you do not automatically miss the year after going over the maximum number of faults. Instead, you do a test to check if you’re up-to-date with the discipline or if you need some extra support. By what I’ve heard, these tests do not count to your final evaluation, they’re just diagnosis. Eventually, the teacher might have to say you’re not fit to pass the year, because you have no grasp of the subject at hand whatsoever (and that might even hurt his evaluation, but that’s not what I’m talking about here). But if all goes well, the student who broke a leg and is worried about not failing the discipline will stay up-to-date with what’s being taught and the slacking one will be punished. All good in theory. Now, I’m not saying this is the best (or worst) system out there, not expressing my opinion on this point.

So you will ask, “and what the hell does that have to do with a student strike?”. Well, the students ain’t happy. They never seem to be anyway. And so I present you with a new social protest form: “the student strike”. What does it consist of? Mass faults! Yes ladies and gentlemen, my dear colleagues have a mass fault appeal scheduled for the 3rd of December. That’s country-wise. But even more amazing, yesterday morning a bunch of way-too-old, way-too-bad-looking so called “students” (they don’t seem to really study much) planted themselves at the door of our school first attempting not to let anyone in, and when that failed, trying to convince people not to go in. And since that wasn’t working too well either, they had nothing better to do than getting an electric guitar, an amplifier plugged on a school’s socket and started rocking out right there (while also apparently consuming some weed, for the sake of the whole irreverent feel).
And so, out of the 20 we are, from my class only 2 people went to the 3 classes that afternoon. Mind you, we have a Portuguese test this Friday and this was the last Portuguese class before it.
So you see, my school is (in the words of one of my colleagues this morning on MSN) “missing classes for a day, for the sake of a fair cause, a cause that’s ours”.
As conclusion, an alert viewer will notice all these problems, out bursts of “protest” and “manifestations” are only coming up on public state schools. The private schools, where you pay your face and a left leg, are fine. Students getting high grades, all calm, all quiet. And mind you, these are students that will compete with the public school ones once we all get the university application phase, and the will most likely be more prepared than we are. The public school degrades, and some others benefit from that. This in a country that is ran by a so-called socialist government. Three cheers for Portugal!

A big word really, redundancy. Specifically, data redundancy. It’s of the utmost importance. Commonly known as back-ups, data redundancy is one of the most valuable assets of a good technological system. And guess what, I wanted to hurt myself this weekend for forgetting that basic rule this weekend. Yes, as you’ve probably already figured out, I almost lost something REALLY important over the last few days. It’s all good now, but phew, that’s what I call a big scare.

And thus, we finish this small post
~Gustavo

I finally got around to buy myself 2 monitors and setup dual-monitor. The 19” one I had before went over to father’s desk, and I got two of these 19” samsung beauties. The visual goes really well with the rest of the pc too. The bright black frame and blue lights are dead-on what I wanted.

So far, it is working amazingly well. In windows, it just spreads over the desktop, though, it doesn’t do the same with the task bar
In linux, I used nvidia-settings to set up as twinview, one left of the other (or one right of the other, whatever fits). So now I have a huge 2880×900 desktop, times three. I’m using virtual desktops, grouping things I need together. So, for example, desktop 1 is Firefox + programming stuff, desktop 2 is command lines and e-mail and desktop 3 is msn and irc. Since KDE saves my session, even if I shut down and come back the next morning, everything will still be the same

That’s it, I was just boasting a little about my new awesome hardware.

~Gustavo

The “Magalhães” is a new laptop the Portuguese government has been advertising lately. They say it’s an amazing piece of technology, “fully built in Portugal” and with a lot of potential. In fact, it has been said it’s a tool for the primary school students of this country. I am absolutely sure that the 7” or 9” screen will make the delights of the children. And of course, what good is such a nice monitor without a nice set of hardware behind it? With an Intel Celeron-M 900Mhz processor and between 512Mb and 1Gb of ram, it sure will run smoothly and be very efficient. Not to mention the graphics card, or the amazing 30Gb hard drive that is more space than anyone ever needed. Actually, I think they made a mistake there. They should have gone with a 20Gb disk since that’s clearly overkill in comparison with the rest of the system.
Oh but here are the good news: It’s only €50 for primary school students or around €300 for the general public. What a bargain! But oh no! In fact, the buyers are proposed (read, “made believe they want”) a 36 months contract with one of the portable Internet operators in Portugal (vodafone, TMN or Optimus) which raises the price to several hundred Euros. “But oh no, it’s not mandatory”, say the people whose interest is that as many families as possible buy the thing. “But it would really help if your kid had it”. What an hypocrisy! And the problem here is that the people buying it are doing so blinded by some faith in the government’s words and the promise that “it’s good for your kids’ education”. Apparently, the ones who needs to be educated here is a certain set of people who think they out-smart everyone else. But this kind of education is not going with laptops, no. A good old beating, on the most pure fashion of traditional education is what’s needed.
Worst even, the laptop only has a 24 months warranty, so if (read when) the thing breaks down after the 24 month period, the parents will be paying an Internet contract they can’t use and the kid will have no computer (though, nothing or this is basically the same thing).
But if you think that’s bad, just wait a minute because it gets worst. The laptop is actually a product Intel has on the market since 2006 for the third-world countries (which we are, apparently) called “Classmate” which you can buy here (thought I certainly don’t recommend you to). All JP Sá Couto, the company distributing the laptops, does is assemble them, and badly I may add. The idea is not Portuguese, the concept is not Portuguese, the design is not Portuguese. No, the only Portuguese product in this scam (yes ladies and gentlemen, it certainly looks like a scam) is the dishonesty of the government and of a few people who take advantage of the general population’s belief in said establishment to make a few (million) bucks.

~Gustavo

Well well was that fast or what? New theme in place now and two shiny new pages are staright out the oven: About and Portfolio.

I’m quite happy with the theme so it’ll probably hang around for a while. And that’s all for this post, which is now being filed under “Site news”. Time to sleep, school tomorrow. Will probably post during the morning though. Good night Internet.

So I installed WordPress. After a few months running my own CMS I figured this would be allot easier to manage (because, let’s face it, I’m not a php guru and my CMS works, but certainly isn’t the best thing around). I’m trying out the blog feel right now and I’ll probably use the page feature quite allot since there’s a fair amount of stuff I want available all the time.

The standard theme is going as soon as I find (or get the time to make) a cool dark theme (i like dark gray gradients and white lettering

The old page is still around here though many links and images won’t work. I’ll probably import the news in there into WP sooner or later.

And for now, that’s it. This was a first post. It was a dull post. It was nothing new. It was just me talking. Bye!

~Gustavo