[{"content":"I have been reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky over the past few weeks. More than a novel, it is a psychological journey. Dostoyevsky manages to place the reader inside the mind of a person enduring what seems like an endless internal conflict. Perhaps the greatest punishment we can receive is the one we impose upon ourselves, and Rodion Raskolnikov has done so in many ways.\nI nonetheless have a peculiar way of approaching Dostoyevsky. While Raskolnikov lies in bed lamenting and suffering alone, I cannot help thinking about what else must be done. Suffering may reveal the conscience, but it does not necessarily repair the harm.\n“Suffering and pain are always mandatory for broad minds and deep hearts. Truly great people, it seems to me, should feel great sadness on this earth.”\n— Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky\nIt is often stated as a fact that those who examine their lives deeply are the ones who live a life worth living. And it is often taken for granted that such examinations may indeed include suffering and pain of the highest level because it is self-inflicted more often than not.\nThe great sadness to which Dostoyevsky is referring is that sort of melancholy that comes from feeling alone in this world despite an acute awareness of its problems and difficulties, yet remaining trapped in a never-ending internal conflict of consciousness.\nYet we know from contemporary philosophy that the peasant who does not examine his life because he is too busy to ponder such matters lives a life that is worth living in its own way. No two lives are more valuable or worthy than the other. This is true in the deepest sense that life as we know it is meaningless, at least that is what the evidence points to. But we bring meaning through our actions and the effort we put into making things come into existence, whether that be our thoughts on a page or a ploughed field.\nSo whenever you feel like suffering for any wrongdoing you\u0026rsquo;ve done to others, or if I find myself in such a circumstance, acknowledging my suffering through my self-inflicted punishment may well be my conscience telling me that I am only human.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/posts/2026-07-24-on-suffering/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI have been reading \u003cem\u003eCrime and Punishment\u003c/em\u003e by Fyodor Dostoyevsky over the past few weeks. More than a novel, it is a psychological journey. Dostoyevsky manages to place the reader inside the mind of a person enduring what seems like an endless internal conflict. Perhaps the greatest punishment we can receive is the one we impose upon ourselves, and Rodion Raskolnikov has done so in many ways.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI nonetheless have a peculiar way of approaching Dostoyevsky. While Raskolnikov lies in bed lamenting and suffering alone, I cannot help thinking about what else must be done. Suffering may reveal the conscience, but it does not necessarily repair the harm.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Suffering"},{"content":"As I was scrolling through twitter, I happened to come across this beautiful thread that spoke of the lessons learned by a researcher while contemplating his research in the grand scheme of things. Though he was passionate about his research and the questions he was trying to answer, there would come a time when future researchers - with the advantage of hindsight - would contemplate his work as obsolete and irrelevant. But the truth is that we all have to come to terms with this situation.\nIt starts with this tweet:\n1. One of formative experience of grad school for me was when our lab moved across the hallway to a bigger space \u0026amp; I realised my research didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of science \u0026amp; that this actually made me love science even more. So here is a thread about that.\n\u0026mdash; Tanentzapf Lab (@TanentzapfLab) February 26, 2020 He came to this realization when he had the opportunity to sit down and listen to someone older than him who had gone through the same excitement for science as he was at that moment. He was young and arrogant. To him, the work of those old guys seemed quaint and had long been solved by other means. But the message that got to him was when that person told him, “we thought what we were doing was the best science.” Also, they had trained many successful scientists in their lab.\nSo it all boils down to the mere revelation that we should be humble, but still strive to do our best. While in the future, our work may be irrelevant, it is only in hindsight that this judgment should be made, but even if it does become irrelevant for the future, in the present, it is still worthwhile doing. Just the mere fact of training future researchers is an enterprise worth investing in. Because they become the ones that invent the new and more exciting ways of conducting research.\nTo this thread, someone replied with a quote from the famous poem Ozymandias by Percy Shelley.\nOzymandias\nI met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: \u0026ldquo;My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!\u0026rdquo; Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away\nHe might have been mighty in his day. But all that remains from his empire is sand. So, let’s look at things in context. We know nothing will last forever. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts. If you are passionate about your craft. Keep doing it because you love it, not because you think someone in the future is going to find it useful.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2020/03/02/nothing-besides-remains/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAs I was scrolling through twitter, I happened to come across this beautiful thread that spoke of the lessons learned by a researcher while contemplating his research in the grand scheme of things. Though he was passionate about his research and the questions he was trying to answer, there would come a time when future researchers - with the advantage of hindsight - would contemplate his work as obsolete and irrelevant. But the truth is that we all have to come to terms with this situation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nothing Besides Remains"},{"content":"Last week I attended the OSA Latin America Optics and Photonics Conference in Lima, Peru. I had a great time, but above all, this was my first conference, since I started my lab, in which I didn’t feel so out of place. Let me elaborate. I knew several people that were attending the conference, I knew the work of some of them, and I was also comfortable talking to old and new acquaintances. What I felt was more reassuring, was presenting some of the work we’ve been doing in our lab for the past two years. I was proud to be presenting the work of my students, what we have accomplished with the available resources.\nAfter starting from scratch about three years ago, we are now at a position to start contributing to the greater conversation in science and technology. During the conference, I took the time to finish a revision on a paper we had submitted to Applied Optics from the first results of my Ph.D. student. It is his first journal paper, and it is my first paper as a Ph.D. advisor. Exciting times! The day before traveling back to Colombia we found out it was accepted. An accepted paper is always something nice to celebrate, but each acceptance has a unique story, which only the authors know. We know.\nAt the conference, I met many colleagues working in different fields of optics, but I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Arti Agrawal from the University of Technology Sidney. She is a theoretical physicist working on modeling and simulation in photonics. Amazing stuff. However, we met at a lunch organized by the conference for early career professionals and Ph.D. students about preparing presentations. I was amazed by the involvement of the OSA embassadors which were basically young professionals as well. Dr. Arti was overseeing the session and made insightful comments from time to time. I remembered when I was preparing for my Ph.D. defense several years ago. It seemed quite a challenge back then. I read many books about presentations and was quite mesmerized by the many ways one could go about producing a rich and entertaining presentation. But it takes time and practice. Actually, this is something I’ve written about before here.\nI later had the opportunity to talk again with Dr. Arti. This time about a work I was presenting. She was inquiring about the type of optimization approach we had used, and why did we think it was the right one. As it often is the case, we had not explored other optimization approaches, and we used this one because we knew it and we thought it could give us the results we wanted. It mostly did, but we are now looking into doing something more general that avoids optimization loops. Let’s see how it goes.\nOverall I had a great time in Lima. The food was fantastic and the organization of the event went quite well. Mostly, I enjoyed the networking possibilities that these events offer, as well as presenting our work and getting feedback from the community. My second presentation was the last day of the conference in the last session. In the photo, the final presenters in the session for 3D imaging.\nI came back to Cartagena and talked with my students about the fascinating new topics being presented at LAOP, like Deep Learning in Optics, and also about several people working in optical metrology in the region. Exciting times for Latin America.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2018/11/20/attending-laop/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLast week I attended the OSA Latin America Optics and Photonics Conference in Lima, Peru. I had a great time, but above all, this was my first conference, since I started my \u003ca href=\"http://opilab.utb.edu.co/\" title=\"OPI∙Lab — Laboratorio de Óptica y Procesamiento de Imágenes.\"\u003elab\u003c/a\u003e, in which I didn’t feel so out of place. Let me elaborate. I knew several people that were attending the conference, I knew the work of some of them, and I was also comfortable talking to old and new acquaintances. What I felt was more reassuring, was presenting some of the work we’ve been doing in our lab for the past two years. I was proud to be presenting the work of my students, what we have accomplished with the available resources.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Attending LAOP"},{"content":"\nI like to do presentations. I really do. It\u0026rsquo;s not my favorite thing, but I sure love inspiring others from the work I do.\nEver since I learned of many creative ways to prepare a presentation, I\u0026rsquo;ve liked to undertake the task with a sense of commitment and a great dose of creativity.\nI read the Presentation Zen book. The The Non-Designer\u0026rsquo;s Design Book. I learned about Sketchnotes, I also read about academic presentations and cooking ideas, and many other things. Not in a single stretch, but as a constant search for getting better at something I value. So I\u0026rsquo;ve come to realize a couple of things. A presentation is definitely not prepared in the computer or presentation software. A computer per se is not good for the creative endeavor, but paper and pen are.\nOne plans a narrative because people like to hear stories; even about how you deconvolved an image using total variation regularization. If you tell it right, they\u0026rsquo;ll listen.\nHowever, I like to include my own things. Give it a personal touch. When I prepare the presentation, I doodle and draw to get an idea of the picture or image I\u0026rsquo;d like to include in my slide. But I\u0026rsquo;ve often found that my doodle is even better at getting the message through than a picture I can download from the internet. So I draw it on my phone using paper, and I import it to Keynote. They\u0026rsquo;re just doodles, but (I think) because it\u0026rsquo;s different from what everyone does, people pay attention. And they get the idea.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2017/02/12/how-i-do-presentations/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:460px\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"/images/2017-02-12-notes.jpeg\" alt=\"Notes\" width=\"\" height=\"\" border=\"0\" /\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI like to do presentations. I really do. It\u0026rsquo;s not my favorite thing, but I sure love inspiring others from the work I do.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEver since I learned of many creative ways to prepare a presentation, I\u0026rsquo;ve liked to undertake the task with a sense of commitment and a great dose of creativity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI read the \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Design-Delivery/dp/0321811984\" title=\"Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter): Garr Reynolds: 8601419413515: Amazon.com: Books\"\u003ePresentation Zen\u003c/a\u003e book. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Non-Designers-ebook/dp/B00PWDFWEE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books\u0026amp;ie=UTF8\u0026amp;qid=1486955341\u0026amp;sr=1-1\u0026amp;keywords=design\u0026#43;book\u0026#43;robin\" title=\"The Non-Designer\u0026#39;s Design Book (Non Designer\u0026#39;s Design Book) - Kindle edition by Robin Williams. Arts \u0026amp; Photography Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.\"\u003eThe Non-Designer\u0026rsquo;s Design Book\u003c/a\u003e. I learned about \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Sketchnote-Handbook-illustrated-visual-taking/dp/0321857895/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books\u0026amp;ie=UTF8\u0026amp;qid=1486955391\u0026amp;sr=1-1-spell\u0026amp;keywords=sketchnots\" title=\"The Sketchnote Handbook: the illustrated guide to visual note taking: Mike Rohde: 8601300203768: Amazon.com: Books\"\u003eSketchnotes\u003c/a\u003e, I also read about \u003ca href=\"https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/speaking.html\" title=\"Giving an Academic Talk\"\u003eacademic presentations\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"http://5by5.tv/mpu/82\" title=\"5by5 | Mac Power Users #82: Cooking Ideas\"\u003ecooking ideas\u003c/a\u003e, and many other things. Not in a single stretch, but as a constant search for getting better at something I value. So I\u0026rsquo;ve come to realize a couple of things. A presentation is \u003cem\u003edefinitely\u003c/em\u003e not prepared in the computer or presentation software. A computer \u003cem\u003eper se\u003c/em\u003e is not good for the creative endeavor, but paper and pen \u003cem\u003eare\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How I do Presentations"},{"content":"My name is Andrés Marrugo, and I’m a professor of Mechatronics Engineering at the Tecnhological University of Bolívar in Cartagena, Colombia. My research interests are: digital image processing, medical imaging and computer vision.\nThese days I spend most of my time either at work with teaching, research, and meetings and stuff or at home with my wife and my two sons. Becoming a father has been an amazing experience, it has changed my life and the way I look upon life itself. When I\u0026rsquo;m not being the family guy or the professor, I\u0026rsquo;m usually fiddling around at the terminal (doing nerdy stuff), editing photos/videos of my kids, cooking (I love to cook), writing on my journal, catching up on my favorite blogs and podcasts, and\u0026ndash;of course\u0026ndash;blogging1.\nSince 2010 I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging on Between the Candle and the Star a blog hosted on wordpress.com. It\u0026rsquo;s been quite nice, even more in the last year because I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten into the habit of posting more frequently. However, I did feel it was time for a change to something more personal and customizable. That\u0026rsquo;s one of the reasons why I changed to an Octopress powered site.\nContact me Email: agmarrugo (at) gmail dot com Twitter personal: agmarrugo Twitter professional: DrMarrugo Other places you can find me online Google scholar profile Github Mendeley Tumblr: Mil Una Palabras Wordpress.com: Between the Candle and the Star Research Gate Lab website About this site This site is built with Jekyll and published automatically by GitHub Actions. Every post is written in Markdown. The repository is public, so feel free to check it out if you want to see the source.\nThis is a multilingual site without mixed language feeds: andresmarrugo.net is the English version and andresmarrugo.net/es is the Spanish version.\nThe current design is based on the Royce Jekyll theme.\nI also do other things, but this is no bio\u0026ndash;is it?\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/about/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy name is Andrés Marrugo, and I’m a professor of Mechatronics Engineering at the Tecnhological University of Bolívar in Cartagena, Colombia. My research interests are: digital image processing, medical imaging and computer vision.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese days I spend most of my time either at work with teaching, research, and \u003ca href=\"http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=028de8672d5f9a229f15e9edf\u0026amp;id=ee59dab2a5\u0026amp;e=7ff32264cd\" title=\"spare time is for work\"\u003emeetings and stuff\u003c/a\u003e or at home with my wife and my two sons. Becoming a father has been an amazing experience, it has changed my life and the way I look upon life itself. When I\u0026rsquo;m not being the \u003cem\u003efamily guy\u003c/em\u003e or the \u003cem\u003eprofessor\u003c/em\u003e, I\u0026rsquo;m usually fiddling around at the terminal (doing nerdy stuff), editing photos/videos of my kids, cooking (I love to cook), writing on my journal, catching up on my favorite blogs and podcasts, and\u0026ndash;of course\u0026ndash;blogging\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"About"},{"content":"These are basically notes for my future self, but it may sort of work out for someone else, so here it is. I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on a project in which we obtain a large number of images all stored within a single folder. However, it would be ideal to store them on separate folders. The file names are like this export0_Lastname_FirstName_1.jpg, and there are several files per person.\nWhat I basically wanted, was to organize the mess of files into something like the following:\n├── 01-lastname_firstname │ ├── export0_lastname_firstname.jpg │ ├── export0_lastname_firstname_1.jpg │ ├── export0_lastname_firstname_2.jpg ├── 02-lastname_firstname ... So I made a Python script to deal with it.\nView group_by_person.py on GitHub\n#!/usr/bin/env python3 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # Import the necessary packages import os import re import shutil # Getting the list of people personList = [f for f in os.listdir(\u0026#39;.\u0026#39;) if re.match(r\u0026#39;e.*\\D\\.jpg\u0026#39;, f)] personNames = [f.split(\u0026#34;_\u0026#34;) for f in personList] # Getting the list of all jpg images files = [f for f in os.listdir(\u0026#39;.\u0026#39;) if re.match(r\u0026#39;e.*\\.jpg\u0026#39;, f)] # Getting existing subdirectories # they start with ./01/ existing_dirs = next(os.walk(\u0026#39;.\u0026#39;))[1] N = len(existing_dirs) # Iterate over all images to sort them per person # and create a new folder if it does not already exist for r in personNames: N+=1 for f in files: if r[1] in f: NewDir = \u0026#34;{:2d}-{}/\u0026#34;.format(N,r[1].replace (\u0026#34; \u0026#34;, \u0026#34;_\u0026#34;)) if not os.path.exists(NewDir): os.mkdir(NewDir, 0o777) try: shutil.move(f, NewDir+f) except: print(\u0026#34;The file does not exist.\u0026#34;) The personList line is done in such a way to get the unique number of people. This is done with the regex. Because there is a file that doesn\u0026rsquo;t end with a number, matching all files that begin with e, that don\u0026rsquo;t end with a number and .jpg, it serves as a list of the people for all the images in the directory. In the next line we build a list of the names of each person. This is later used to match and sort each file to its corresponding folder.\nBecause I had already created some directories, I could have the new directories start at 01. So I use os.walk to get the list and len(N) the number of existing directories. The directories to be created should start at N+1.\nThe outer-most loop iterates over every single person name, and then matches it the existing image files in the folder. When a match is found it creates a directory, if it does not exist. Then it moves file to the newly created folder. If the file doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist it prints the error, but it continues. And voilà that\u0026rsquo;s it. Just a quick tip. Make a copy of your files before starting to manipulate them (you could end with corrupt or no data at all). And also, before moving/renaming files, try printing the variables first to see if that\u0026rsquo;s what you intend to do.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2016/06/09/group-images-by-person/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThese are basically notes for my future self, but it may \u003cem\u003esort of\u003c/em\u003e work out for someone else, so here it is. I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on a project in which we obtain a large number of images all stored within a single folder. However, it would be ideal to store them on separate folders. The file names are like this \u003ccode\u003eexport0_Lastname_FirstName_1.jpg\u003c/code\u003e, and there are several files per person.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat I basically wanted, was to organize the mess of files into something like the following:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Group Images by Person"},{"content":"So, I was preparing my clases for the upcoming semester and I wanted to produce an outline of the lectures with the corresponding date and topic. For instance I have a class that\u0026rsquo;s once a week every Friday. I could look up the calendar and write every date, which is what I initially did. But then I though, I could write a script for this. And that\u0026rsquo;s when I entered the rabbit hole.1\nThe script I\u0026rsquo;m showing here went through several iterations. I had several difficulties until I got it to work. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t pleased with it, so I fiddled a bit more. Later when I saw Dr Drang\u0026rsquo;s post about formatting multimarkdown tables with tabulate, I knew I had to use that. So I did. Here\u0026rsquo;s the script.\nView get_fridays.py on GitHub\nimport calendar from tabulate import tabulate c = calendar.Calendar(firstweekday=calendar.MONDAY) year = 2016 months = [2,3,4,5] monthName = {k: v for k,v in enumerate(calendar.month_abbr)} listFridays = [] for month in months: monthcal = c.monthdatescalendar(year,month) for week in monthcal: for day in week: if day.weekday() == calendar.FRIDAY and day.month == month: listFridays.append([monthName[day.month]+\u0026#34; \u0026#34;+str(day.day),\u0026#34; \u0026#34;,\u0026#34; \u0026#34;]) headers = [\u0026#34;Date\u0026#34;,\u0026#34;Lecture\u0026#34;,\u0026#34;Lecture Topics\u0026#34;] print tabulate(listFridays,headers,tablefmt=\u0026#39;pipe\u0026#39;) As you can see, the script is quite simple. I give it the year and the months. The loops go over the months, and then the weeks and it looks up the friday of that week. On line 18, I have to append the white spaces \u0026quot; \u0026quot; and convert day to str in order to get three columns per day, so that tabulate gives me back a nifty formatted table. Another cool thing is that tabulate can also output in LaTeX format.\nThe script will produce this:\n| Date | Lecture | Lecture Topics | |:-------|:----------|:-----------------| | Feb 5 | | | | Feb 12 | | | | Feb 19 | | | | Feb 26 | | | | Mar 4 | | | | Mar 11 | | | | Mar 18 | | | | Mar 25 | | | | Apr 1 | | | | Apr 8 | | | | Apr 15 | | | | Apr 22 | | | | Apr 29 | | | | May 6 | | | | May 13 | | | | May 20 | | | | May 27 | | | As you can see it works. However, by now you\u0026rsquo;re wondering, but what about holidays. The script should be smart enough to exclude holidays. I am implementing this, but I\u0026rsquo;ll leave it for a future post. When rendered looks something like this:\nDon\u0026rsquo;t we all?\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2016/01/30/get-fridays/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSo, I was preparing my clases for the upcoming semester and I wanted to produce an outline of the lectures with the corresponding date and topic. For instance I have a class that\u0026rsquo;s once a week every Friday. I could look up the calendar and write every date, which is what I initially did. But then I though, I could write a script for this. And that\u0026rsquo;s when I entered the rabbit hole.\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Get Fridays"},{"content":" Despite all the tools and applications at my disposal, I like to write my comments, feedback and grade the lab reports I get from my students using plain text files. To be precise, markdown formatted plain text files md.\nI typically write in a plain text file using nvalt or textmate as my text editor. With the help of a TextExpander snippet I print out the class list and the other fields I must fill out, typically a general comment/feedback and the grade. The snippet produces something like this:1\ntags:#vision,#lab - Pérez Ramos, Miguel A. - Comentario: - Nota: - Beleño Hernández, Liliana P. - Comentario: - Nota: ... Other parts look the same ... After filling it out I get something like the following:\ntags:#vision,#lab - Pérez Ramos, Miguel A. - Comentario: El informe está completo y bien argumentado. Se demuestra que se realizó la práctica a cabalidad. Concluye adecuadamente y cita las referencias consultadas. - Nota: 5.0 - Beleño Hernández, Liliana P. - Comentario: El informe comienza bien, pero termina abruptamente. No se mencionan los aspectos relacionados con la lectura y tampoco se evidencia adecuadamente los resultados de la práctica. No hay bibliografía. - Nota: 3.5 - Carrascal Mendez, Martín S. - Comentario: El informe es adecuado y cumple con el objetivo de la práctica. - Nota: 5.0\tThis is easy to fill out, looks nice and is well formated. I can preview it - if I want – in Marked or in any other markdown previewer. But the truth is, I\u0026rsquo;m fine viewing it just like that in plain text. The tedious part comes when I need to copy the grades from this file to a spreadsheet.\nThis is where automating the boring stuff in python makes this a fun and interesting problem to spend an evening solving with a script. The following script takes an input text file formatted like the one previously shown.\nView grades2csv.py on GitHub\n#! /usr/local/bin/python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import re import csv import argparse class REMatcher(object): \u0026#34;\u0026#34;\u0026#34; A little class that returns the boolean result of calling match, and retains the matched groups for subsequent retrieval. Attributes ---------- matchstring : The string to match match : Matching the regular expression, returns True/False group : Returns the matched groups with index i Modified from Paul McGuire, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2554185/match-groups-in-python \u0026#34;\u0026#34;\u0026#34; def __init__(self, matchstring): self.matchstring = matchstring def match(self,regexp): self.rematch = re.match(regexp, self.matchstring) return bool(self.rematch) def group(self,i): return self.rematch.group(i) # construct the argument parse and parse the arguments ap = argparse.ArgumentParser() ap.add_argument(\u0026#34;input\u0026#34;, help=\u0026#34;path to the input text file\u0026#34;) # optional output csv file path ap.add_argument(\u0026#34;-o\u0026#34;, \u0026#34;--output\u0026#34;, help=\u0026#34;path to the output csv file\u0026#34;) args = vars(ap.parse_args()) # Path to text file filePath = args[\u0026#39;input\u0026#39;] # Path to output file if args[\u0026#39;output\u0026#39;]: fileCSVPath = args[\u0026#39;output\u0026#39;] else: # If output file path is not provided fileCSVPath = args[\u0026#39;input\u0026#39;].split(\u0026#39;.\u0026#39;)[0] + \u0026#34;.csv\u0026#34; fileCSV = open(fileCSVPath,\u0026#39;w\u0026#39;) wr = csv.writer(fileCSV,quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL) # Write titles in csv file wr.writerow([\u0026#34;Nombre\u0026#34;,\u0026#34;Nota\u0026#34;,\u0026#34;Comentario\u0026#34;]) with open(filePath,\u0026#39;r\u0026#39;) as f: # Iterate through all lines in f for line in f: m = REMatcher(line) if m.match(r\u0026#34;^-(.*$)\u0026#34;): Name = m.group(1) if m.match(r\u0026#34;^\\t.*-.*Comentario:(.*$)\u0026#34;): Comment = m.group(1) if m.match(r\u0026#34;^\\t.*-.*Nota:\\s*(\\d.*$)\u0026#34;): Grade = m.group(1) List = [Name,Grade,Comment] wr.writerow(List) The usage is very simply, you just call the script grades2csv.py with the file you want to process. If you don\u0026rsquo;t specify where the output should go (-o option) it defaults to the same path as the input text file.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t bother on avoiding overwriting an existing csv file with the same name. I never name two text files with grades the same way.\nAbout a year ago, I found out about this awesome trick of setting up a REMatcher class so that I can have an object that saves the matched string and returns True when it matches the regex. I\u0026rsquo;ve never gone back to implementing other regex paraphernalia in python. This works and I stick with it.\nThe script looks for three different matches in every line of the input file. One for a line that starts with a dash (^-(.*$)), capturing the name of the student (m.group(1)). The second, that matches the word Comentario(\u0026quot;^\\t.*-.*Comentario:(.*$)\u0026quot;) and captures the comment, and the third that captures the grade (\u0026quot;^\\t.*-.*Nota:\\s*(\\d.*$)\u0026quot;). If the grade is not captured, then not a single item is written to the csv file (wr.writerow(List)).\nIf everything is well formated in the input file. The output is a nicely formatted csv file:\n\u0026quot;Nombre\u0026quot;,\u0026quot;Nota\u0026quot;,\u0026quot;Comentario\u0026quot; \u0026quot; Pérez Ramos, Miguel A.\u0026quot;,\u0026quot;5.0\u0026quot;,\u0026quot; El informe está completo y bien argumentado. Se demuestra que se realizó la práctica a cabalidad. Concluye adecuadamente y cita las referencias consultadas.\u0026quot; \u0026quot; Beleño Hernández, Liliana P.\u0026quot;,\u0026quot;3.5\u0026quot;,\u0026quot; El informe comienza bien, pero termina abruptamente. No se mencionan los aspectos relacionados con la lectura y tampoco se evidencia adecuadamente los resultados de la práctica. No hay bibliografía.\u0026quot; \u0026quot; Carrascal Mendez, Martín S.\u0026quot;,\u0026quot;5.0\u0026quot;,\u0026quot; El informe es adecuado y cumple con el objetivo de la práctica.\u0026quot; \u0026quot; Piñeres De La Rosa, Néstor N.\u0026quot;,\u0026quot;4.7\u0026quot;,\u0026quot; El marco teórico apunta a lo necesario, pero con las citas correspondientes. Muy bien por utilizar otras imágenes. Los comentarios son oportunos. Una discusión un poco más extensa sobre los distintos tipos de filtros que se implementaron en la última parte es deseable, \u0026quot;\u0026quot;prewitt\u0026quot;\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;\u0026quot;sobel\u0026quot;\u0026quot;, etc.\u0026quot; \u0026quot; Daza Beltran, Juan A.\u0026quot;,\u0026quot;3.5\u0026quot;,\u0026quot; El informe se ajusta a lo mínimo. Debería tener una discusión de resultados más extensa u observaciones del proceso de filtrado con diferentes filtros. Termina abruptamente. No hay bibliografía.\u0026quot; Which looks like this when viewed as a spreadsheet:\nYou might be wondering, but why go through all this trouble. Because I can, but mostly because I find spreadsheets useful, but I don\u0026rsquo;t like typing data into them. I find it more productive to write continuously in a plain text file. I can use Textexpander and other tools more easily. And finally, why not let the computer do the work it\u0026rsquo;s supposed to do - I\u0026rsquo;m no monkey.\nThese are not the real names of my students.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2015/10/19/grading-lab-reports-workflow/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:320px\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/50652826@N03/22134710389\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5721/22134710389_db6f90e967.jpg\" alt=\"Grades 2 CSV with Python.\" width=\"320px\" height=\"\" border=\"0\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite all the tools and applications at my disposal, I like to write my comments, feedback and grade the lab reports I get from my students using plain text files. To be precise, \u003ca href=\"https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/\" title=\"Daring Fireball: Markdown\"\u003emarkdown\u003c/a\u003e formatted plain text files md.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c!-- more --\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI typically write in a plain text file using \u003ca href=\"http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/\" title=\"nvALT - BrettTerpstra.com\"\u003envalt\u003c/a\u003e or \u003ca href=\"https://macromates.com/\" title=\"TextMate — The Missing Editor for Mac OS X\"\u003etextmate\u003c/a\u003e as my text editor. With the help of a \u003ca href=\"https://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/index.html\" title=\"TextExpander: Mac Typing Shortcut Utility Saves You Time TextExpander: Mac Typing Shortcut Utility Saves You Time\"\u003eTextExpander\u003c/a\u003e snippet I print out the class list and the other fields I must fill out, typically a general comment/feedback and the grade. The snippet produces something like this:\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Grading lab reports workflow"},{"content":"\nWe often live worrying about the future and longing for a less troublesome past; like when we were kids. I know that not everyone had a perfect childhood. I certainly did not, but I still had my moments in which my joy was true and worry free. Those moments are precious to me.\nAdulthood has many upsides when viewed from a teenager\u0026rsquo;s perspective; the opposite is also true. If only they could talk to each other.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2015/10/10/life-inmutable/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/copiancestral/22093344571/in/datetaken/\" title=\"Life immutable.\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://farm1.staticflickr.com/724/22093344571_5a128fb7da.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"379\" alt=\"Life immutable.\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cscript async src=\"//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003c/script\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe often live worrying about the future and longing for a less troublesome past; like when we were kids. I know that not everyone had a \u003cem\u003eperfect\u003c/em\u003e childhood. I certainly did not, but I still had my moments in which my joy was true and worry free. Those moments are precious to me.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAdulthood has many upsides when viewed from a teenager\u0026rsquo;s perspective; the opposite is also true. If only they could talk to each other.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Life immutable"},{"content":"I have a recurrent discussion with my wife.\nShe likes to do most things as fast as possible.\nI like to pause and think about things, and do them often slowly. At my pace.\nI think that if you do things too quickly you might not be fully aware of what you\u0026rsquo;re doing.\nYou might feel that you are not really in charge of your life.\nYou might feel that you can\u0026rsquo;t really remember things truly.\nLike nothing becomes a memorable experience.\nYou have no time for metacognition and self-awareness.\nI wrote these lines before finding out about this book In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré. It seems this has inspired the slow-movement which tries to raise awareness of how we need to take it easy and enjoy life. Like the saying goes, anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.\nIt seems I have a new book to read.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2015/08/07/in-praise-of-slow/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI have a recurrent discussion with my wife.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShe likes to do most things as \u003cem\u003efast\u003c/em\u003e as possible.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI like to pause and think about things, and do them often \u003cem\u003eslowly\u003c/em\u003e. At my pace.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think that if you do things too quickly you might not be fully aware of what you\u0026rsquo;re doing.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou might feel that you are not really in charge of your life.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou might feel that you can\u0026rsquo;t  really remember things truly.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"In Praise of Slow"},{"content":" My favorite topic in an introductory differential equations course is mechanical and electrical vibrations. I enjoyed learning about it as a student and I enjoyed teaching it later. (Or more accurately, I enjoyed being exposed to it as a student and really learning it later when I had to teach it.)\nJohn D. Cook on Mechanical vibrations\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always thought that education is about learning, as much as parenting is about maturing and growing up. On the parenting side, you can\u0026rsquo;t really teach your kids how to live – you can\u0026rsquo;t even imagine the kind of world they will have to live from the time they\u0026rsquo;re born – but you can expose them to the best things you know. In doing so, they can at least have the chance to form an opinion on the many matters of life, they\u0026rsquo;ll surely make mistakes, but I bet they won\u0026rsquo;t regret much.\nEducation is a difficult topic. Everyone has something to say about it, yet no one seems to have true answers. I do think that education is much more about being exposed to something, rather than being taught that something. There\u0026rsquo;s an incredible difference between the two things.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2015/01/29/on-relearning-things/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy favorite topic in an introductory differential equations course is mechanical and electrical vibrations. I enjoyed learning about it as a student and I enjoyed teaching it later. (Or more accurately, I enjoyed being exposed to it as a student and really learning it later when I had to teach it.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJohn D. Cook on \u003ca href=\"http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/02/19/mechanical-vibrations/\"\u003eMechanical vibrations\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve always thought that education is about learning, as much as parenting is about maturing and growing up. On the parenting side, you can\u0026rsquo;t really teach your kids how to live – \u003ca href=\"http://www.radiolab.org/story/288746-future-cant-control/\" title=\"A Future You Can\u0026#39;t Control - Radiolab\"\u003eyou can\u0026rsquo;t even imagine the kind of world they will have to live from the time they\u0026rsquo;re born\u003c/a\u003e – but you \u003cem\u003ecan\u003c/em\u003e expose them to the best things you know. In doing so, they can at least have the chance to form an opinion on the many matters of life, they\u0026rsquo;ll surely make mistakes, but I bet they won\u0026rsquo;t regret much.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On (re)learning things"},{"content":"Dr. Drang recently shared two date commands he uses for: i) calculating how many days have passed since a given date, and ii) another that returns the day of the year of the current date.\nI was mainly interested in the first one because I often have to do that calculation.1 Because the script can also compute the days remaining until a future date, you can imagine how handy it can be. For instance, if I\u0026rsquo;d like to know how many days until the day I start my vacations, I just run the script with a future date and it\u0026rsquo;ll return a negative result in days. Or if I\u0026rsquo;d like to know how old I am in days.\nThis is how old I am in days. I thought it would be something useful to have on my iPhone so I turned it into a Pythonista script that I run from Drafts. If you want to know exactly what the script does go to Dr. Drang\u0026rsquo;s post, I just modified it a bit so that it runs from Drafts when you enter a date in the following format DD MM YY where YY is optional, it assumes current year.\nYou can download the ago.py script from this gist. The Drafts action is available here.\nMy solution is typically to google for a date calculator. Then I have to go through the links, and find the one I need. A bit cumbersome, but since I don\u0026rsquo;t do this everyday I don\u0026rsquo;t complain much. It just seems simpler to have it as a Drafts action.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2014/12/07/date-commands/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2014/12/two-little-date-commands/\"\u003eDr. Drang recently shared\u003c/a\u003e two date commands he uses for: i) calculating how many days have passed since a given date, and ii) another that returns the day of the year of the current date.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was mainly interested in the first one because I often have to do that calculation.\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e Because the script can also compute the days remaining until a future date, you can imagine how handy it can be. For instance, if I\u0026rsquo;d like to know how many days until the day I start my vacations, I just run the script with a future date and it\u0026rsquo;ll return a negative result in days. Or if I\u0026rsquo;d like to know how old I am in days.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Date Commands"},{"content":"\nA Ph.D. thesis is one of those things that has a life of its own. Last January, I had the opportunity to write a two-page abstract of my thesis for publication in Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis. It has been published and is now available on the web along with the PhD thesis.\nThe paper is only a glimpse of all the hard work that went into the making of the thesis, but anyone who reads it may get a decent idea of what it is about, and where to find the results I\u0026rsquo;ve published in different journals. I don\u0026rsquo;t think anyone wants to go through the process of writing a thesis twice, but most will agree that it is a life changing experience. Many of the best moments of my life so far, happened while working towards the PhD, especially the birth of my two boys.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2014/06/19/a-cv-for-my-thesis/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:460px\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cimg src=\"/images/2014-06-19-IMG_0775.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"460\" height=\"\" border=\"0\" /\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA Ph.D. thesis is one of those things that has a life of its own. Last January, I had the opportunity to write a two-page abstract of my thesis for publication in \u003cem\u003eElectronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis\u003c/em\u003e. It has been published and is now \u003ca href=\"http://elcvia.cvc.uab.es/article/view/597\" title=\"Retinal Image Analysis Oriented to the Clinical Task - Marrugo - Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis\"\u003eavailable on the web along with the PhD thesis.\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A CV for my Thesis"},{"content":"Today in “This American Life” I was listening to an episode about hidden truths. It was really interesting to find out about a secret letter that the prime minister of Britain writes to every commander of a nuclear submarine. It supposedly contains instructions on what to do if the nation has been wiped out and if the commander should retaliate or not. It poses a mystery on what the contents are, even more so because every time there’s a new prime minister in office the letters are destroyed unread.\nThere are many questions that come about in knowing what the contents of the letter are. But to my understanding it is a way of reassuring your people that both possibilities exist. To retaliate or not. It is like delaying the final call on a difficult decision. Something akin to a Schrödinger cat situation.\nI’ve thought of this for while and I’ve come to understand that many people actually like to live their lives this way. Not wanting to know certain things, or more precisely clinging to the hope that a certain aspect in one’s life does not turn out to be what we fear so much. Keeping both options open (not collapsing the wave function) is probably a reassuring situation, relieving anxiety and allowing one to continue living unmoved by the cold hard reality.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2014/01/31/not-collapsing-the-wave-function/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eToday in \u003ca href=\"http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/399/contents-unknown\" title=\"Contents Unknown | This American Life\"\u003e“This American Life”\u003c/a\u003e I was listening to an episode about hidden truths. It was really interesting to find out about a secret letter that the prime minister of Britain writes to every commander of a nuclear submarine. It supposedly contains instructions on what to do if the nation has been wiped out and if the commander should retaliate or not. It poses a mystery on what the contents are, even more so because every time there’s a new prime minister in office the letters are destroyed unread.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Not Collapsing the Wave Function"},{"content":"\nphoto credit: mkorsakov via photopin cc All too often I see people who simply talk too much.1 Wether what they speak is nonsense or even meaningful things, there\u0026rsquo;s a limit to how much one can tolerate.\nBy talking too much – and too often – we miss out on many things. We don\u0026rsquo;t let others speak (which to my understanding is common courtesy), and worse of all we lose our capacity to empathize with others. We can\u0026rsquo;t read faces well while uttering words out of our mouths continuously. Loosing that feedback is what prompts us to speak without pause and with no care for what the people around us may feel. It\u0026rsquo;s what turns you into a prick. We\u0026rsquo;re just too focused on ourselves to care about others.\nHaving no feedback at all is dangerous, it really is. You tend to get the feeling that you\u0026rsquo;re always right. Usually, people are too polite to interrupt you and bring you down a notch and say, it takes two to converse! This is no lecture. A conversation is about sharing and paying attention to your conversation partner’s needs.\nIt is no surprise that by talking too much we may alienate our loved ones and friends from our lives. They\u0026rsquo;ll avoid us and our utterances at all times. It is this kind of behavior that we have to be careful about.\nI used to be one of those, I know better now.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2013/06/10/the-perils-of-talking-too-much/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:500px\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"/images/perils-talking-too-much.jpg\" alt=\"\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nphoto credit: \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/mkorsakov/5731336614/\"\u003emkorsakov\u003c/a\u003e via \u003ca href=\"http://photopin.com\"\u003ephotopin\u003c/a\u003e \u003ca href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/\"\u003ecc\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAll too often I see people who simply talk too much.\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e Wether what they speak is nonsense or \u003cem\u003eeven\u003c/em\u003e meaningful things, there\u0026rsquo;s a limit to how much one can tolerate.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy talking too much –  and too often – we miss out on many things. We don\u0026rsquo;t let others speak (which to my understanding is common courtesy), and worse of all we lose our capacity to empathize with others. We can\u0026rsquo;t \u003cem\u003eread faces\u003c/em\u003e well while uttering words out of our mouths continuously. Loosing that feedback is what prompts us to speak without pause and with no care for what the people around us may feel. It\u0026rsquo;s what turns you into a prick. We\u0026rsquo;re just \u003cem\u003etoo\u003c/em\u003e focused on ourselves to care about others.\u003c/p\u003e","title":" The Perils of Talking Too Much"},{"content":"\nphoto credit: Pablo Moroe via photopin cc. Before Darwin it certainly was very difficult to be an atheist or a nonbeliever – that is, an intellectually fulfilled one.1 At least that\u0026rsquo;s how Richard Dawkins usually puts it and I quite agree with him. It was not that the scientific method2 didn\u0026rsquo;t exist at the time, it was that the mystery of life was too big a mystery to even consider tackling through the ways of science. Yet that was what Darwin did.\nThe topic of this post does not have to do with Darwin, at least in a direct sense. The other day I was listening to Point of Inquiry, a podcast from the center of inquiry.3 They had Frans de Waal on and he talked about his latest book The Bonobo and the Atheist. There was a moment during the interview that the host, Chris Mooney, referred to him as being an atheist to which he replied saying\nI am not necessarily an [atheist], because atheism has now come to stand for being very strongly opposed to religion which is really not what I am, I prefer to call my self either a nonbeliever or an apathetic meaning that, the agnostic doesn\u0026rsquo;t know if god exists, the atheist denies the existence of god, and I basically don\u0026rsquo;t care. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it is an important or interesting problem to discuss god. And as a scientist, I don\u0026rsquo;t know what to do with the god question. It will never be resolved, certainly not by science.\n– Frans de Waal, On Point of Inquiry: Frans de Waal - The Bonobo and the Atheist\nI can truly relate to his words. As much as I identify with people like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, being an atheist does not have to mean being opposed to religion. I can do that without being one. As a matter of fact religion and the institutions that promote it have done so much wrong to mankind that the logic behind them falls apart rather quickly.\nWhat I can\u0026rsquo;t seem to get around my head is that despite that, religion is still a creation of humans and if I want to take the scientist\u0026rsquo;s approach I should accept it for what it is. That doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean, like de Wall suggests, that it cannot be replaced with something else. In his book, he argues that morality is something that is older than our species. Research suggests that many primates, and other animals, have a sense of morality. Meaning that they have impulses and self control mechanisms to resolve conflicts, to determine rules, etc.\nIn fact Massimo Pigliucci\u0026rsquo;s book Answers for Aristotle attempts to solve that problem by saying that we should lead a life that is both philosophically and scientifically pertinent. Going back to the whole being opposed to religion issue, I say, denying god gets us nowhere. The existentialist questions still remain and it says nothing about what\u0026rsquo;s the best way to lead a life. Our society is too big and complex to pretend that we shouldn\u0026rsquo;t pursue such questions. However, we should use the best tools we\u0026rsquo;ve got for the job, and in the twenty-first century these are not religion or theology.\nTo conclude I would like to say that we shouldn\u0026rsquo;t really attack religion for what it is or for being wrong, we should instead try to show the way with the best tools we have. Resolving conflict without invoking god. Discussing real life issues with the best evidence we can find. Addressing our questions knowing wholeheartedly our limits.\nYes, before Darwin we had David Hume, but his reasoning was solely based on the fact that God isn\u0026rsquo;t a good explanation for biological design. It was Darwin who came up with one.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nGalileo Galilei is often referred to as the father of the scientific method.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n\u0026ldquo;A think tank promoting science, reason, and secular values in public policy and at the grass roots\u0026rdquo;.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2013/04/10/new-secularism/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:500px\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"/images/new-secularism.jpg\" alt=\"\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nphoto credit: \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/pablomoroe/2911020311/\"\u003ePablo Moroe\u003c/a\u003e via \u003ca href=\"http://photopin.com\"\u003ephotopin\u003c/a\u003e \u003ca href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/\"\u003ecc\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBefore Darwin it certainly was \u003ca href=\"http://choiceindying.com/2011/03/02/could-you-be-an-intellectually-fulfilled-atheist-before-darwin/\" title=\"Could you be an intellectually fulfilled atheist before Darwin? | Choice in Dying\"\u003every difficult to be an atheist\u003c/a\u003e or a nonbeliever – that is, an intellectually fulfilled one.\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e At least that\u0026rsquo;s how \u003ca href=\"http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA602_1.html\" title=\"CA602.1: An intellectually fulfilled atheist\"\u003eRichard Dawkins\u003c/a\u003e usually puts it and I quite agree with him. It was not that the scientific method\u003csup id=\"fnref:2\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:2\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e didn\u0026rsquo;t exist at the time, it was that the mystery of life was too big a mystery to even consider tackling through the ways of science. Yet that was what Darwin did.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"New Secularism"},{"content":"In the latest Generational podcast episode Aaron Hillegass told Gabe that he wrote his Objective-C book with his ten-year-old in mind.\nI found this to be quite interesting and truly inspiring. By writing the book \u0026ldquo;for his son,\u0026rdquo; he made sure anyone could actually read and understand it, but also he was deeply motivated to get it right. I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want my son to read a crappy book.\nIf I ever had to write a guide about how to be (stay) motivated on a project this would definitely be there.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2013/03/27/a-book-for-my-son/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn the latest \u003ca href=\"http://www.70decibels.com/generational/2013/3/24/027-aaron-hillegass-and-teaching-experts.html\" title=\"70Decibels - Generational - 027 - Aaron Hillegass and Teaching Experts\"\u003eGenerational podcast\u003c/a\u003e episode \u003ca href=\"http://www.bignerdranch.com/instructors/hillegass.shtml\"\u003eAaron Hillegass\u003c/a\u003e told \u003ca href=\"http://www.macdrifter.com/\" title=\"Macdrifter\"\u003eGabe\u003c/a\u003e that he wrote his \u003ca href=\"http://www.bignerdranch.com/book/objective-c_programming_the_big_nerd_ranch_guide\"\u003eObjective-C\u003c/a\u003e book with his ten-year-old in mind.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI found this to be quite interesting and truly inspiring. By writing the book \u0026ldquo;for his son,\u0026rdquo; he made sure anyone could actually read and understand it, but also he was deeply motivated to get it right. I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want my son to read a crappy book.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Book for my Son"},{"content":"This post is in fact a Day One entry. I treat my Day One journal as a sort of personal blog. A blog with a readership of one – at least in the present. What I mean to say is that, for the most part, I write about my life and for my kids, which are too young to read. I hope they read this in some distant future. I think that the things I might forget are probably the things they\u0026rsquo;ll want to know about. That is why I write.\nOccasionally I like to share and entry with my wife, which now Day One makes it so easy by offering the export to PDF option (click here to see what the pdf looks like). Day One is an awesome app which inevitably has made me write more, reflect upon my thoughts and experiences both personal and with the people close to me. It has enabled something which I had lost, having conversations with myself, past and present, which I believe is part of being and feeling alive.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to teach Alejandro how to go down the stairs for several months now. For the most part it\u0026rsquo;s been an unfruitful endeavor, and not because he doesn\u0026rsquo;t want to go down the stairs; quite the contrary. He loves going down (or trying to go down) but walking right up on his two feet, like he sees everyone else doing it.\nJust about every time I tried to show him how to slide his little butt, step by step, to go down safely, he would hurry down the stairs unafraid of falling. After a couple of months of no progress whatsoever I gave up, he can crawl up the stairs, but to go down I have to grab him while he pretends to go down like a grown-up.\nToday that was different. I took him out to a nearby park so he could play outside in the sun. After riding his tricycle for about ten minutes he started to wander about in the park. Most of the times he wanders erratically, like going with the flow; chasing whatever is in his sight: a pigeon, a rock, a ball or another kid.\nAfter a while he began to play going up and – with my help – down some stairs in the park. For him it was quite fun, for me a bit stressing because he can\u0026rsquo;t quite sense the danger in playing around stairs.\nAfter several tries he – out of pure accident – stumbled upon a solution to go down the stairs in a fairly safe way. Sliding on his buttocks. He doesn\u0026rsquo;t speak yet, however I could sense in his eyes the satisfaction for having made a significant discovery, another way of doing things not known to him before.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not making an argument for implying that he has a deep thought process like an adult, I know he doesn\u0026rsquo;t. Yet that feeling of true discovery was as vivid in his eyes as I see it in adults. I would say it is even more powerful, because he doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel shame in expressing his feelings. He has no reason whatsoever to hide his ignorance. His discovery is genuine, as are his feelings.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2013/03/10/a-brave-new-world/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThis post is in fact a \u003ca href=\"http://dayoneapp.com/\"\u003eDay One\u003c/a\u003e entry. I treat my Day One journal as a sort of personal blog. A blog with a readership of one – at least in the present. What I mean to say is that, for the most part, I write about my life and for my kids, which are too young to read. I hope they read this in some distant future. I think that the things I might forget are probably the things they\u0026rsquo;ll want to know about. That is why I write.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Brave New World: The joy of discovery"},{"content":"\nphoto credit: chiarashine via photopin cc As is often the case, ideas come about in the most unexpected moments. Lately, I\u0026rsquo;ve found myself taking notes while walking to work, while waiting for a coffee in front of a bending machine, or like now while getting dressed for work.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s become a habit of mine to write what I think, when I think it. My iPod touch has enabled that. I could well have pen and paper with me at all times, but I\u0026rsquo;m not used to that and nothing beats the digital format.\nI journal much more now than ever before, and that\u0026rsquo;s thanks to apps like Day One or Drafts. Writing my thoughts down has never been easier. And, to tell you the truth, it\u0026rsquo;s liberating. It\u0026rsquo;s like Merlin Mann says, \u0026ldquo;your brain has permission to think at all times.\u0026rdquo; And, as Melissa Donovan says in her book 101 Creative Writing Exercises, “Journaling…promotes observation, self-awareness, and reflection, all skills that great writers must possess”, (by way of Christi Craig). My journaling has come a long way since I started using Day One last year. Some blog posts start there, or even certain personal emails too. Journaling helps me to reflect upon my thoughts and to make important decisions.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been fond of writing, yet I\u0026rsquo;ve never had such an intimate relationship with my thoughts and my inner self. I believe that writing brings about the best in me. Through writing I can look at my human face and recognize my afflictions and ghosts.\nEven as I sit here on my bed, tying my shoelaces, I feel an urge to get my thoughts out. I had never experienced this strong desire before. I, however, am totally aware that the more I write, the more I feel this urge. It\u0026rsquo;s quite fascinating and at times I just can\u0026rsquo;t help myself.\nHappy new year to all my readers. Hope you had a nice time during the holidays and that you soon start your 2013 projects motivated and committed to getting things done \u0026ndash; at least that\u0026rsquo;s my main purpose for this year.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2013/01/02/writing-my-thoughts-down/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:500px\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"/images/writing-my-thoughts-down.jpg\" alt=\"iPod touch\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nphoto credit: \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiarashine/3989921751/\"\u003echiarashine\u003c/a\u003e via \u003ca href=\"http://photopin.com\"\u003ephotopin\u003c/a\u003e \u003ca href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/\"\u003ecc\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs is often the case, ideas come about in the most unexpected moments. Lately, I\u0026rsquo;ve found myself taking notes while walking to work, while waiting for a coffee in front of a bending machine, or like now while getting dressed for work.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s become a habit of mine to write what I think, when I think it. My iPod touch has enabled that. I could well have pen and paper with me at all times, but I\u0026rsquo;m not used to that and nothing beats the digital format.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Writing my thoughts down"},{"content":"\nphoto credit: Unhindered by Talent via photopin cc I read the other day an email that desperately needed some editing. Writing without editing is pretty much the same as speaking with little attention to what we are saying. The great advantage of the written form over the spoken one is that you can go back an edit. Not editing what you write is both a poor use of the written form and a sign that you don\u0026rsquo;t care much for the person that will read your message.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that a typo is not allowed, no one is perfect. But to write something without punctuation is just insane. All too often I hear people say that, because they are not writers or journalists they are somehow excused of writing poorly. I think it is just plain laziness. It\u0026rsquo;s a laziness that reads as our lack of interest for a craft so important to us by which we express what we feel and think.\nHow is it, that common sense doesn’t rouse in these situations? Why is it so difficult to realize that a 500+ word email written in a single paragraph without punctuation is just illegible. It costs so much to get the ideas out of that mess. The laziness to which I refer does service to no one, and buries even the meaning of your well-intended message.\nSo do yourself a favor and go back and edit the message a bit before hitting the send button.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/12/26/careless-email-writing/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:500px\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"/images/careless-email-writing.jpg\" alt=\"Text editing.\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nphoto credit: \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/2756494307/\"\u003eUnhindered by Talent\u003c/a\u003e via \u003ca href=\"http://photopin.com\"\u003ephotopin\u003c/a\u003e \u003ca href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/\"\u003ecc\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI read the other day an email that desperately needed some editing. Writing without editing is pretty much the same as speaking with little attention to what we are saying. The great advantage of the \u003cem\u003ewritten form\u003c/em\u003e over the spoken one is that you \u003cem\u003ecan\u003c/em\u003e go back an edit. Not editing what you write is both a poor use of the written form and a sign that you don\u0026rsquo;t care much for the person that will read your message.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Careless email writing"},{"content":"I love to cook – or one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is – because it\u0026rsquo;s a manual activity that, quite often, lets my mind wonder about. While cooking I can think about my problems,1 about the future, about a world different from this one. I can hear my thoughts in a undisturbed way. It is like a moment of pristine inspiration. Me and myself. Nobody else.\nI seldom write those thoughts down, because – well, it\u0026rsquo;s quite obvious – I\u0026rsquo;m cooking at the moment and if I did that, dinner would take forever to be ready.\nSo, as beautiful and inspiring the whole while-cooking thought process may be, it is ephemeral. As soon as dinner is ready I get back to the current issue and most of what was in my mind, just moments ago, vanishes – or so it seems. I think that on a subconscious level those thoughts do stick around.\nWhat I certainly don\u0026rsquo;t like about cooking is the planning itself. If I want to cook chicken in the evening, and it\u0026rsquo;s in the fridge I have to remind myself to take it out in the morning – which quite often means I have to plan it the day before. And let\u0026rsquo;s be honest, having to think about getting chicken out of the fridge is not exactly the most intellectual thing one could be doing – yet, it\u0026rsquo;s got to happen and someone\u0026rsquo;s got to do it.\nExcept for that, cooking (to me) is quite a satisfactory experience which enables me to enjoy myself and have an encounter with my thoughts and imagination. It\u0026rsquo;s (almost) like day dreaming, but it\u0026rsquo;s not. It\u0026rsquo;s much more.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s something of a coincidence, but there\u0026rsquo;s a great mac power users episode called \u0026ldquo;cooking ideas\u0026rdquo;, where David and Katie cover strategies for using mindmapping and outlining tools. I highly recommend it.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/12/07/cooking-ideas/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI love to cook – or one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is – because it\u0026rsquo;s a manual activity that, quite often, lets my mind wonder about. While cooking I can think about my problems,\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e about the future, about a world different from this one. I can hear my thoughts in a undisturbed way. It is like a moment of pristine inspiration. Me and myself. Nobody else.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"'Cooking' Ideas"},{"content":"I like to write, for writing reminds me of who I am, who I want to be, and where I come from. It is no mistery that I enjoy it, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t make it any easier.\nI often get compliments on my writing, but still, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a long way to go before I feel more comfortable with it – I still struggle over single words or sentences.\nLately, I\u0026rsquo;ve been rediscovering myself in many different ways. I find myself more aware of everything – and that is probably not the most interesting thing – if not by chance, by fate, but I do feel different. I certainly am not the same person I was a while ago. I write more, which means I exit my body more often.\nI write about my writing, for it serves as confession and a means to see my reflection in a mirror of prose. A reflection of what I think, and of who I am. It is no coincidence that by writing I often find answers to my problems or get a glance of the next step I should take.\nWriting is almost certainly not for everyone, at least in the sense of writing for the fun of it. I hardly know people – in person that is1 – that write out of pure pleasure, let alone people that truly make a living out of writing.\nWriting is an art, but is also a skill. A skill that – despite natural talent – requires time and effort in developing. Like Colin Nissan says in the \u0026ldquo;Ultimate guide to writing better than you normally do\u0026rdquo;\nWriting is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.\nYes, it\u0026rsquo;s about exposing yourself and becoming stronger in the process.\nIn the virtual world, I do know a number of people that write for the fun of it and are lucky enough to make a living from it.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/11/16/my-reflection-in-a-mirror-of-prose/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI like to write, for writing reminds me of who I am, who I want to be, and where I come from. It is no mistery that I enjoy it, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t make it any easier.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI often get compliments on my writing, but still, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a long way to go before I feel more comfortable with it – I still struggle over single words or sentences.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLately, I\u0026rsquo;ve been rediscovering myself in many different ways. I find myself more aware of everything – and that is probably not the most interesting thing – if not by chance, by fate, but I do feel different. I certainly am not the same person I was a while ago. I write more, which means \u003cem\u003eI exit my body more often\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":" My reflection in a mirror of prose"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t really know what this post is about or even why I decided it should be blog post in the first place. All I can think is that I really liked it. I thought it would be interesting to share it with others. Not that it would be useful or anything, simply a pleasant read.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not meant to mean anything in particular \u0026ndash; at least in any philosophical way. It\u0026rsquo;s just something I conjured up the other day before going to bed. After I read it a couple of times, I knew it was a true gem. Only four paragraphs long, yet so deep with frustration and love. The love of a father towards his son, and of those little \u0026ndash; apparently insignificant \u0026ndash; moments that stick with you for the rest of your life. Here it is.\nA very short midnight story It\u0026rsquo;s almost midnight and I can\u0026rsquo;t really prevent my eyes from closing. I\u0026rsquo;m tired as hell, yet I can\u0026rsquo;t seem to convince myself into the idea that I should get some sleep.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have a big day tomorrow or anything, it\u0026rsquo;s just that my kid wakes up so goddamn early. Well, that\u0026rsquo;s what he\u0026rsquo;s supposed to do, and I can\u0026rsquo;t find an argument against that \u0026ndash; at least a plausible one.\nSometimes he just stays awake, lying there in my regular-sized bed, staring at me directly into my eyes, even though I have them closed, like waiting for the slightest hint of evidence that I too, am awake.\nAt the first sight of a blink, he launches himself toward me. \u0026ldquo;Papa, papa,\u0026rdquo; he shouts with excitement. I open my eyes wide, he sticks his finger in one of them \u0026ndash; it hurts.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/11/02/four-paragraphs-long/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI don\u0026rsquo;t really know what this post is about or even why I decided it should be blog post in the first place. All I can think is that  I really liked it. I thought it would be interesting to share it with others. Not that it would be useful or anything, simply a pleasant read.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s not meant to mean anything in particular \u0026ndash; at least in any philosophical way. It\u0026rsquo;s just something I conjured up the other day before going to bed. After I read it a couple of times, I knew it was a true gem. Only four paragraphs long, yet so deep with frustration and love. The love of a father towards his son, and of those little \u0026ndash; apparently insignificant \u0026ndash; moments that stick with you for the rest of your life. Here it is.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Four Paragraphs Long"},{"content":"To Tweet or Not to Tweet It always seems I\u0026rsquo;m late to the party. For several years I pondered on the idea of joining Twitter, but it never really made much sense to me \u0026ndash; at least at the time \u0026ndash; to join a social network where there were hardly any friends of mine1. Big mistake, that actually is one of the cool things about twitter. Unlike Facebook, it does provides an open space suitable for engaging in discussions, albeit short, of all sorts with interesting people who don\u0026rsquo;t really have to be your \u0026ldquo;friend.\u0026rdquo;\nIt turns out that shortly after joining twitter most people2 were already considering abandoning it in favor of App.net. For the time being App.net seems like a niche thing, and most people seem to continue on twitter. Whether that stays that way for the next year or so depends on twitter and their recent policy changes that could well endanger the platform as we know it today.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s All About The Editor For quite a while it seemed that everywhere I looked, geeks where rejoicing and feeling proud of their text editor of choice: Textmate. I did look into it a couple of times, but I always thought it ways a bit too expensive for me.\nFor the most part it seemed I had always managed to get by with the tools at my disposal, I really didn\u0026rsquo;t feel like I needed something else. I would use the builtin Matlab editor for writing Matlab code. As regards LaTeX \u0026ndash; for writing papers \u0026ndash; I would use the open source and free (as in beer) Texmaker. I really wasn\u0026rsquo;t aware of the exciting and cool features of advanced text editors like Textmate or Vim.\nFor as long as I can remember, I\u0026rsquo;ve been a computer enthusiast, but a lone one. I never did have close friends that were into the sort of things I liked. I was never really ostracized, but I was the \u0026ldquo;nerd\u0026rdquo; nevertheless.\nThis brief digression is not without a purpose, which is to bring forth the fact that despite being a geek, I\u0026rsquo;ve never been part of a geek community of any sort. And this influenced my way of life and how I \u0026ndash; before social networks \u0026ndash; ended up finding out about the latest and coolest thing. More often than not, late and when it wasn\u0026rsquo;t really a new thing. The text editor dilemma is proof to my lack of geeky-social interaction.\nBefore I bought Textmate, I did do a little background check to see what was happening to its development. Apparently it was being not-so-actively developed, but version 2.0 was on the way. I had managed to somehow convince myself that it was totally worth it and that I would write my thesis with it.\nShortly after I bought it, it went open source, and to the impression of some: abandoned. It seems that for quite some time, everyone had been moving to Sublime text or BBEdit. Late to the party once again. I just can\u0026rsquo;t stop thinking that if somehow I had looked into it a bit more, if I had participated more on forums and different communities all of this would have ended differently. I can however say, that I am still using Textmate 1, and I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying my self quite a bit.\nA Static or Dynamic Blog Technically speaking I\u0026rsquo;ve been bloggin since 2010. However, I must be honest and admit that for about the first year of my (former) blog I hardly posted a thing or two. It was a wordpress.com blog and for nearly the last year or so, I began posting more regularly and I was really enjoying myself. I rapidly got accustomed to wordpress; so much, that I felt trapped in the platform, and I needed more customization to set things my way. Well, for the looks of it, I had to leave wordpress.com and move my blog somewhere else in order to do just that.\nI kept blogging there, while I looked around to explore my options. It was interesting that this time I was also late, but not so much in the sense that I was able to catch a lot of people during their migration from a dynamic blog to a static one. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to go through the details of why I chose a static blog, but it does have its advantages with respect to a dynamic one, like wordpress.\nGetting Stuff Done As a final section for this already long post, I\u0026rsquo;d like to mention how I\u0026rsquo;ve also been late to the whole GTD movement (if there is such a thing). It\u0026rsquo;s amusing how shortly after I started to actually read David Allen\u0026rsquo;s book on \u0026ldquo;Getting Things Done\u0026rdquo;, some people were already arguing\n\u0026ldquo;whether GTD [was] valid after more than 10 years without any real “update”.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ndash; Sven Fechner, The State of Getting Things Done.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t really say for my self, if it is still valid. I can, however, say that it still seems to make sense in the philosophy behind it, probably not so much in the methodology. But hey, what can I say, I haven\u0026rsquo;t even finished the goddamn book.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been late, as always, to many fascinating events of recent years \u0026ndash; at least the geeky ones it seems. But I\u0026rsquo;ve come to accept that as a reality of mine. These days I can say that I try to keep myself more in the loop by following several interesting people on the web, whether it be via their blogs, twitter, or podcasts. This seems a bit of a remedy to my bad timing, but hey everyone\u0026rsquo;s entitled to do things their way. I\u0026rsquo;m still struggling to actually find what is \u0026ldquo;my way\u0026rdquo;, but I\u0026rsquo;m in no hurry. There probably isn\u0026rsquo;t any real answer, I reckon the search is more valuable than the goal itself.\nI still have few close friends on twitter; most of them are rarely active. As regards Facebook, I cannot say the same.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhen I say most people, I actually mean the majority of people worth following.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/10/22/always-late-to-the-party/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"to-tweet-or-not-to-tweet\"\u003eTo Tweet or Not to Tweet\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt always seems I\u0026rsquo;m late to the party. For several years I pondered on the idea of joining \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/\" title=\"Twitter\"\u003eTwitter\u003c/a\u003e, but it never really made much sense to me \u0026ndash; at least at the time \u0026ndash; to join a social network where there were hardly any friends of mine\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e. Big mistake, that actually \u003cem\u003eis\u003c/em\u003e one of the cool things about twitter. Unlike Facebook, it \u003cem\u003edoes\u003c/em\u003e provides an open space suitable for engaging in discussions, albeit short, of all sorts with interesting people who don\u0026rsquo;t really have to be your \u0026ldquo;friend.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt turns out that shortly after joining twitter most people\u003csup id=\"fnref:2\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:2\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e were already considering abandoning it in favor of \u003ca href=\"https://join.app.net/\" title=\"Join the Movement - App.net\"\u003eApp.net\u003c/a\u003e. For the time being \u003ca href=\"https://join.app.net/\" title=\"Join the Movement - App.net\"\u003eApp.net\u003c/a\u003e seems like a \u003cem\u003eniche\u003c/em\u003e thing, and most people seem to continue on twitter. Whether that stays that way for the next year or so depends on twitter and their recent policy changes that could well endanger the platform as we know it today.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Always Late to The Party"},{"content":"I often use Imagemagick for image manipulation1. However, for simple conversion of an image to another format or similar things I have to go to the terminal and type something like the following\nconvert somefile.png somefile.pdf Which is quite simple, and much better than opening preview -\u0026gt; export2-\u0026gt;select pdf-\u0026gt; and hit save. But typing that for more than one image is also tedious. So, I decided I\u0026rsquo;d better create a service that would essentially do the following.\nIt would take the selected finder items, mainly images in png, jpeg, or whatever, and convert all of them to pdf. Simple.\nThe automator service is shown in the following image. It does exactly what I\u0026rsquo;ve described.\nAutomator service. The shell script is quite simple. Because the convert command from Imagemagick is not a command in bash, I have to call it with the whole path. The rest of that one-liner is a sed call to substitute whatever extension the input file has (with the regex \\..*) to .pdf, and that\u0026rsquo;s it. Here\u0026rsquo;s the script.\nfor f in \u0026#34;$@\u0026#34; do /opt/local/bin/convert \u0026#34;$f\u0026#34; `echo \u0026#34;$f\u0026#34;|sed \u0026#34;s/\\..*/.pdf/\u0026#34;` done As a matter of fact, now that I\u0026rsquo;ve finally upgraded to Mountain Lion, Imagemagick stopped working. Had to reinstall with macports.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n\u0026ldquo;Save as\u0026rdquo; in the old days, prior to OS X 10.7.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/10/18/image-to-pdf-with-automator-and-imagemagick/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI often use \u003ca href=\"http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php\"\u003eImagemagick\u003c/a\u003e for image manipulation\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e. However, for simple conversion of an image to another format or similar things I have to go to the terminal and type something like the following\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cpre\u003e\u003ccode\u003econvert somefile.png somefile.pdf\n\u003c/code\u003e\u003c/pre\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhich is quite simple, and much better than opening preview -\u0026gt; export\u003csup id=\"fnref:2\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:2\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e-\u0026gt;select pdf-\u0026gt; and hit save. But typing that for more than one image is \u003cem\u003ealso\u003c/em\u003e tedious. So, I decided I\u0026rsquo;d better create a service that would essentially do the following.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt would take the selected finder items, mainly images in \u003ccode\u003epng\u003c/code\u003e, \u003ccode\u003ejpeg\u003c/code\u003e, or whatever, and convert all of them to \u003ccode\u003epdf\u003c/code\u003e. Simple.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Convert Image to PDF with Automator and Imagemagick"},{"content":"It may seem that, for the most part, I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging about blogging. No matter how pointless it seems, I do think that this could prove useful to someone, in the same way I have benefited from others while setting up this site1.\nOne of the things I like about having an Octopress driven txt-only blog is that I have the liberty to set things my way. The topic I am addressing here is that of writing blog posts on different devices2 with the help of Dropbox3 and Hazel. I\u0026rsquo;m still working out the whole remote blogging thing, this is but the first stage of a soon-to-be remote blogging workflow with Octopress.\nMy blog post writing workflow Ideally any blog post starts with an idea that I write down in a text file named runx-blog_ideas-qqq.txt4. This is done either on any of the two Macs using nvAlt or on my iOS device using any text editor5. I always write in Markdown (technically I mostly write in Multimarkdown, but that\u0026rsquo;s another thing).\nAfter I decide that this idea is ready to become a draft, I create a text file that follows the same name convention for Octopress (2012-10-14-Post-title.text) on a folder named _drafts that resides in the source. You might have noticed that the extension is not .markdown and that is because I was having issues making Hazel read the contents of markdown files. So I opted for .text which is technically the same as .txt, but I would differentiate them as drafts and most importantly Hazel will be able to do its magic.\nThe underscore (_) on the name of the drafts folder is so that it won\u0026rsquo;t be deployed, just as the posts folder\nsource/ |__ _drafts/ |__ _posts/ With the help of Typinator on my mac or Textexpander on my iPod I create the yaml header like this\n--- layout: post title: \u0026quot;Post title\u0026quot; date: 2012-10-14 23:28 author: Andres Marrugo comments: true published: false categories: [blog] --- Notice that published: false, which means it is a draft. When I\u0026rsquo;m finished with the post I\u0026rsquo;ll change it to true.\nThe Syncing The Syncing is done via Dropbox, because any iOS text editor comes with Dropbox support. iCloud has still a long way to go. Because my octopress folder does not reside in the Dropbox folder I made symlinks on my Mac to the _posts, _drafts, and images folders so they get synced\nln -s ~/octopress/source/_posts/ ~/Dropbox/PlainText/blog/_posts ln -s ~/octopress/source/images/ ~/Dropbox/PlainText/blog/images ln -s ~/octopress/source/_drafts/ ~/Dropbox/PlainText/blog/_drafts On any other machine they become actual folders.\nAutomating with Hazel Ideally I would like to change the published: false to true and have it posted to my site, but it still requires some workarounds and this is why for the time being my hazel magic script only moves the file to the _posts folder when the published option changes to true. I then generate the site and deploy it manually, but this will soon be automated as well.\nThere are actually two Hazel rules for this. It first monitors the _drafts folder for files whose content contains the phrase published: true. When this happens the file gets moved to the folder _posts.\nMove file to _posts folder. Then the second rule is for the _posts folder. If the extension is text (which means it was a draft that recently got moved) it will run a shell script.\nModify latest post. The shell script is the following. What it does is to replace the date with the current date \u0026ndash; you see, several days could\u0026rsquo;ve passed since I created the draft \u0026ndash; in both the yaml header and the file name. And the other thing it does is to change the extension to .markdown.\n# Replace yaml header date to current date sed \u0026#34;s/[0-9]\\{4\\}.*:[0-9]\\{2\\}/`date \u0026#39;+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M\u0026#39;`/\u0026#34; $1 \u0026gt; tmp \u0026amp;\u0026amp; mv tmp $1 mydate=$(date \u0026#39;+%Y-%m-%d\u0026#39;) fname=$(echo $1 | sed \u0026#34;s/text/markdown/\u0026#34;) # Rename file to current date mv $1 `echo $fname | sed \u0026#34;s/[0-9]\\{4\\}.*-[0-9]\\{2\\}-[0-9]\\{2\\}/$mydate/\u0026#34;` It may look like there\u0026rsquo;s not much automation, but if you think that this runs on my Mac while I\u0026rsquo;m writing it in my iPod Touch, then it gets really interesting, and the possibilities are almost infinite. Besides, updating the post date, moving files and changing extensions are quite tedious tasks by themselves. To make it automatically generate and deploy the site I\u0026rsquo;d have to add several more lines to the script, but I\u0026rsquo;m ok with how it is for now.\nSpecial thanks to Neil Smithline for helping me out on the two blogs one domain issue.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMy Mac or my iPod touch.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI can\u0026rsquo;t really write this post without mentioning two posts that served as inspiration and reference: \u0026ldquo;Synced and scheduled blogging with octopress\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;My Dropbox Writing Workflow.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIn some future post I\u0026rsquo;ll explain my note taking workflow and how I name files. In this case I use Merlin Mann\u0026rsquo;s q trick and the runx stands for running notes.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI use several editors, but mainly Byword, WriteUp , Elements, and Nebulous Notes.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/10/15/blog-post-writing-workflow-dropbox-hazel/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt may seem that, for the most part, I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging about blogging. No matter how pointless it seems, I \u003cem\u003edo\u003c/em\u003e think that this could prove useful to someone, in the same way I have benefited from others while setting up this site\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the things I like about having an \u003ca href=\"http://octopress.org/\" title=\"Octopress\"\u003eOctopress\u003c/a\u003e driven \u003ccode\u003etxt\u003c/code\u003e-only blog is that I have the liberty to set things my way. The topic I am addressing here is that of writing blog posts on different devices\u003csup id=\"fnref:2\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:2\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e with the help of Dropbox\u003csup id=\"fnref:3\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:3\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e and \u003ca href=\"http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php\" title=\"Noodlesoft | Hazel\"\u003eHazel\u003c/a\u003e. I\u0026rsquo;m still working out the whole remote blogging thing, this is but the first stage of a soon-to-be remote blogging workflow with Octopress.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"My blog post writing workflow with Dropbox and Hazel"},{"content":"\nMy new keyboard. It's been quite a while since I've grown accustomed to switching back and forth between an english keyboard at home and a spanish keyboard at work. Like anything, at first it takes a while to get fully accustomed, but all in all it isn't too bad. This week my English keyboard at home died, so I bought a new one this time in Spanish, because that was what they had at the store. One of the things I don\u0026rsquo;t like of the spanish keyboard 1 is that most (if not all) applications design the shortcuts assuming an English keyboard. Therefore, what could be single key shortcut in the English keyboard becomes a double key shortcut in the Spanish keyboard. And that\u0026rsquo;s not all.\nIt just so happens that in some applications, in my case Apple Aperture there are some really nice single key shortcuts like left square bracket ([) for rotating an image counterclockwise, but in the spanish keyboard the bracket, while being in the same place has to be typed with the option (⌥) key.\nFor some unknown reason Aperture doesn\u0026rsquo;t recognize this double key shortcut as the single key shortcut I\u0026rsquo;m trying to reproduce. As a matter of fact it assumes I\u0026rsquo;m pressing (⌥ ` ), where the back-tick is the other character sharing the same key as the left square bracket.2\nSquare bracket on spanish keyboard. I have googled a bit about this topic and in an apple discussion this was somewhat discussed, but to no great length. And the only solution for the time being is to go to 'Aperture' \u0026gt; 'Commands' \u0026gt; 'Customize...'. But I\u0026rsquo;m still not comfortable changing the default commands in Aperture. I really liked the single key shortcuts for rotating an image and stuff like that. Let\u0026rsquo;s see how this ends up.\nOr any other keyboard that\u0026rsquo;s not the English one.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe reason I hadn\u0026rsquo;t noticed this is that I don\u0026rsquo;t use Aperture at work.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/10/07/spanish-keyboard-and-aperture/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:320px\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/copiancestral/8060866808/\" title=\"Mac keyboard by copiancestral, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8030/8060866808_dc3b5dc915_n.jpg\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" alt=\"20121007-PA077266\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nMy new keyboard.\u003c/div\u003e\nIt's been quite a while since I've grown accustomed to switching back and forth between an english keyboard at home and a spanish keyboard at work. Like anything, at first it takes a while to get fully accustomed, but all in all it isn't too bad. This week my English keyboard at home died, so I bought a new one this time in Spanish, because that was what they had at the store. \n\u003cp\u003eOne of the things I don\u0026rsquo;t like of the spanish keyboard \u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e is that most (if not all) applications design the shortcuts assuming an English keyboard. Therefore, what could be single key shortcut in the English keyboard becomes a double key shortcut in the  Spanish keyboard. And that\u0026rsquo;s not all.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Spanish keyboard and Aperture"},{"content":"I recently wrote about inserting footnotes in Day One and how it could be achieved with the new markdown support. I realize that ideally Day One should support multimarkdown footnotes, but this has not arrived yet. It could well be planned for a future release, but I\u0026rsquo;ll stick to my solution for the mean time.\nOne of the tedious things about my solution to footnotes in Day One is that you have to do everything manually. The insertion of the footnotes plus the formatting, not to mention keeping count of the number of footnotes. For one or two footnotes this doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like a big issue. But for several more it gets complicated.1 You have to put the superscript (^), the number of the footnote, the horizontal line (which I think necessary) and the footnote itself. Therefore, I thought I could automate this\u0026ndash;somewhat.\nHere comes the magic script So I though I\u0026rsquo;d ask Brett Terpstra2 for advice, to see if this could be automated somehow. At the moment he\u0026rsquo;s probably quite busy with the premiere of his book 60 Mountain Lion Tips, which promises \u0026ldquo;to turn you into a Mac ninja\u0026rdquo;.\nDespite that, I remembered he had released a service for writing multimarkdown footnotes inline. The idea is that you write your text like this\nThis is the regular text(*This is the footnote*), and you can drop the footnote in at any point. You run the service and you get something like this\nThis is the regular text[^fn1], and you can drop the footnote in at any point. [^fn1]: This is the footnote According to Brett \u0026ldquo;one nice thing about this syntax is that\u0026ndash;if you’re previewing as you write\u0026ndash;it italicizes the output to differentiate it until you’ve used the service to move it out of the main text.\u0026rdquo; So it\u0026rsquo;s a win-win situation.\nI decided I would modify the script, even though I am a neophyte in ruby. The modification is practically nothing, so all the credit goes to Brett. Here\u0026rsquo;s the modified script\nUpdate on Oct 2, 2012 \u0026ndash; Brett took a look at the code and gave it the thumbs up.\nI will definitely not go into the details of the script, but I\u0026rsquo;ve tried it and it works. The only thing I didn\u0026rsquo;t bother to make work was the part of the code that made sure that footnote reference titles aren’t duplicated if you have existing formatted footnotes in the document. It\u0026rsquo;s commented out, but feel free to further modify it or make any suggestions.\nFor the same input as above you should get this\nThis is the regular text^1, and you can drop the footnote in at any point. **** 1. This is the footnote Here\u0026rsquo;s a download link so you can download it as a system service. You\u0026rsquo;ll have to move it to ~/Library/Services/. Enjoy!\nI don\u0026rsquo;t usually write long entries in Day One, but hey there\u0026rsquo;s always a day when I feel so inspired, I could write a short story if I wanted to.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBrett is a computer geek that makes awesome things (most for free) like Marked or nvAlt. He blogs at brettterpstra.com, and for what it seems is one of the nicest guys on the internet.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/10/01/a-service-for-writing-day-one-footnotes-inline/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI recently wrote about \u003ca href=\"http://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/09/29/footnotes-in-dayone/\"\u003einserting footnotes in Day One\u003c/a\u003e and how it could be achieved with the new markdown support. I realize that ideally Day One should support multimarkdown footnotes, but this has not arrived yet. It could well be planned for a future release, but I\u0026rsquo;ll stick to my solution for the mean time.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the tedious things about my solution to footnotes in \u003ca href=\"http://dayoneapp.com/\"\u003eDay One\u003c/a\u003e is that you have to \u003cem\u003edo\u003c/em\u003e everything manually. The insertion of the footnotes \u003cem\u003eplus\u003c/em\u003e the formatting, not to mention keeping count of the number of footnotes. For one or two footnotes this doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like a big issue. But for several more it gets complicated.\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e You have to put the superscript (\u003ccode\u003e^\u003c/code\u003e), the number of the footnote, the horizontal line (which I think necessary) and the footnote itself. Therefore, I thought I could automate this\u0026ndash;somewhat.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"a service for writing day one footnotes inline"},{"content":"My favorite journaling app, Day One, just got updated to version 1.7.2, and it includes some really great new features.\nIt now includes more multimarkdown syntax like strike through, fenced code, and other nifty things. However one of the things I still find missing in Day One is multimarkdown footnotes. I\u0026rsquo;ve grown so accustomed to footnotes, that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I could live without them anymore.1\nFootnotes are way better than using parenthesis for digressing a little and adding an additional comment to the sentence. I think that if it\u0026rsquo;s below four or five words there\u0026rsquo;s no need for a footnote, but when you pass that threshold the comment is just too long and the footnote is more than welcome.\nUntil recently I avoided the use of footnotes in Day One because they were not supported, but in this last update they also added superscript (^ ) support to the markdown syntax. So I thought I could have my temporary solution to the footnote problem by using the superscript and ordered lists.\nMy custom footnotes are basically the superscript with the number that I have to keep track of manually like\nThis is a sentence^1 And the footnote which I add (manually again) at the end of the entry with a horizontal line and ordered lists\n**** 1. This is a footnote. It looks like this on the Mac\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not an optimal solution (in the automation sense), but I\u0026rsquo;ve found that most of my Day One entries have one or two footnotes, so it\u0026rsquo;s not really a big deal. I think it\u0026rsquo;s totally worth the effort.\nI probably could but I would really, really miss them.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/09/29/footnotes-in-dayone/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy favorite journaling app, \u003ca href=\"http://dayoneapp.com/\"\u003eDay One\u003c/a\u003e, just got updated to \u003ca href=\"http://dayoneapp.com/about/release-notes-mac/\"\u003eversion 1.7.2, and it includes some really great new features\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt now includes more \u003ca href=\"http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/\"\u003emultimarkdown\u003c/a\u003e syntax like strike through, fenced code, and other nifty things. However one of the things I still find missing in Day One is multimarkdown footnotes. I\u0026rsquo;ve grown so accustomed to footnotes, that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I could live without them anymore.\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Footnotes in Day One"},{"content":"\nselbstporträt by Vincent van Gogh . I think that everybody, to get the screaming out of their heads do different things […] beautiful losers and genius lunatics […] there are people who make things that we really, really admire, and love and feel some kind of a resonance with because the work itself is fantastic, but there\u0026rsquo;s another level to what they make when you know the backstory […] There are a lot of people whose work I admire that I think partly what brought me to them, in some ways, is knowing that backstory.\n\u0026ndash; Merlin Mann, Back to Work Episode #84 - Every Genie is an Actuary.\nAs Feynman spoke once of the science knowledge of a flower,1 I restate here in another context. There are many interesting questions that come from the knowledge of the backstory of the work of those we admire, which only adds to the excitement and mystery of the work itself. I don\u0026rsquo;t understand how it subtracts.\nKnowing the backstory makes a great deal of a difference. It sometimes shows you the human being behind the curtains, and in many ways I truly think that this is good thing.\nThere are times when I might bring forth a piece of work of by someone I admire. That standalone piece may well be beautiful and quite unique, it may even require no explanation whatsoever, because it is truly a work of art. But then, when you start to grasp on the knowledge behind the work, when you try to unravel the mysteries, it only gets way more interesting. It\u0026rsquo;s almost like trying to take a peek inside the mind of a grandmaster in the very exact moment he makes a move. I may be exaggerating a little, but it seems so fascinating to be able to get a glimpse on how that amazing idea came to be.\nWhether it be demons or just plain madness, many artists2 struggle to get the screaming out of their heads, and some even succeed in translating such affliction into beautiful works of art. By trying to empathize with the people you admire, their work transcends to levels you couldn\u0026rsquo;t have foreseen. Their demons seem much more real to you, and some mysteries start fading away. The world is different, but it sort of makes sense. You feel like you\u0026rsquo;ve made a connection.\nIn getting to the backstory you appropriate the work, you make it part of who you are. It no longer is just another thing I read, saw, enjoyed, etc. Traditionally, the backstory to an artist was something not so easily accessible. Quite often I would find myself going through different sources, written posthumously and narrated with the voice of others to get a glance of the seemingly backstory. But things are changing, today I can follow someone in their true voice, in their first person narrated backstory. Today an artist can, and most, willingly convey their story via their personal platform: their web log.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gone into such length at writing this post because I feel proud of something. I feel proud of following a writer, a great guy by the looks of it, a self publisher,3 and a contributor to the general conversation and the greater good on the internet. His name is Christian Mihai and I really don\u0026rsquo;t remember how I stumbled upon his blog. But now he is on my favorite RSS feeds. This week he\u0026rsquo;s published a great book called \u0026ldquo;The Writer\u0026rdquo; (it\u0026rsquo;s on sale in amazon). I bought it and so far, so good. Here\u0026rsquo;s a exceptional quote from the book\nAll great men are misfits, yet I couldn’t help but wonder what was worse: to be like everyone else or to be entirely different. I could only think about the fact that I needed a tragedy in my life, just so I could feel alive, just so my heart wouldn’t stop beating.\n\u0026ndash; The Writer, by Cristian Mihai\nFeynman originally said, \u0026ldquo;There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don\u0026rsquo;t understand how it subtracts.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhen I write \u0026ldquo;artist\u0026rdquo; I mean anyone that makes something he can be proud of.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhich to me means a great thing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/09/26/the-backstory/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:258px\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/copiancestral/8021150733/\" title=\"Selbstporträt by Vincent van Gogh, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8442/8021150733_abdaa02811.jpg\" width=\"258\" height=\"320\" alt=\"Selbstporträt\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nselbstporträt by Vincent van Gogh .\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think that everybody, to get the screaming out of their heads do different things […] beautiful losers and genius lunatics […] there are people who make things that we really, really admire, and love and feel some kind of a resonance with because the work itself is fantastic, but there\u0026rsquo;s another level to what they make when you know the backstory […] There are a lot of people whose work I admire that I think partly what brought me to them, in some ways, is knowing that backstory.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ndash; \u003cstrong\u003eMerlin Mann\u003c/strong\u003e, \u003ca href=\"http://5by5.tv/b2w/84\"\u003eBack to Work Episode #84 - Every Genie is an Actuary.\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs Feynman spoke once of the science knowledge of a flower,\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e I restate here in another context. There are many interesting questions that come from the knowledge of the backstory of the work of those we admire, which only adds to the excitement and mystery of the work itself. I don\u0026rsquo;t understand how it subtracts.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"It makes a difference to know the backstory"},{"content":"\nphoto by striatic. If there\u0026rsquo;s something I learned from the famous talk \u0026ldquo;149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!\u0026rdquo; by John Gruber and Merlin Mann, was that one should make a great effort to write as if the people you admire we\u0026rsquo;re going to read your work. This is true even if the people you admire are fictional, or like in Gruber\u0026rsquo;s case, an idealized version of himself. I like to think that this piece of advice is as valid for writing/blogging as it is for anything else you do in life.\nI can certainly say that I personally don\u0026rsquo;t know most of the people I admire,1 which is fine by me. But I don\u0026rsquo;t write exclusively for them. Quite often, if not always, I write for myself.2 I write as a way to remind my future self of what it felt to be me in the past.3 I write to the better version of myself, in the hopes that by doing so, my worse version recognizes his mistakes and learns from them.\nIn some ways my ideal reader is the better version of myself. More often than not I find myself reading my own articles several times after they\u0026rsquo;ve been published. It certainly is not a narcissistic thing,4 I just really like to feel proud of what I make. This is why I write the site I want to read.\nThis, without much doubt will continue to stay this way, for some of them are dead, and believing in the afterlife is plain foolishness.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI had been meaning to write this post for quite a while, but hadn\u0026rsquo;t found time to do so. However, Gabe Weatherhead\u0026rsquo;s post on his Audience and Multiple Personalities prompted me to write it in a flash. Thanks Gabe.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nTrust me, one easily forgets how things felt in the very moment you were experiencing them. And all that is left is a vague reminder of what happened.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nOr so I like to think.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/09/19/the-site-i-want-to-read/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:240px\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/copiancestral/8004479709/\" title=\"a day in the life of striatic ~ end of day accident by striatic, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8313/8004479709_2bfe1eb43a_n.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"320\" alt=\"a day in the life of striatic ~ end of day accident\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nphoto by striatic.\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf there\u0026rsquo;s something I learned from the famous talk \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.43folders.com/2009/03/25/blogs-turbocharged\"\u003e149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!\u003c/a\u003e\u0026rdquo; by \u003ca href=\"http://daringfireball.net/\"\u003eJohn Gruber\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"http://www.merlinmann.com/\"\u003eMerlin Mann\u003c/a\u003e,  was that one should make a great effort to write as if the people you admire we\u0026rsquo;re going to read your work. This is true even if the people you admire are fictional, or like in Gruber\u0026rsquo;s case, an idealized version of himself.\nI like to think that this piece of advice is as valid for writing/blogging as it is for anything else you do in life.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"I'm writing the site I want to read"},{"content":"\nphoto by fiddle oak. In the past year or so I\u0026rsquo;ve read a lot about how different people get their stuff done, specially when referring to writing. There are some people who just wait for inspiration to knock on their doors, whereas others simply force themselves to write every day. Inspiration is a tricky thing, but no one can\u0026rsquo;t deny that when it comes, it certainly feels good. In the words of Cristian Mihai\n\u0026ldquo;Back when I was very young, I used to write in the moments of extreme inspiration, when my fingers were fueled by a frantic feeling of freedom and everything I wrote seemed to achieve a sort of elusive grandeur\u0026rdquo;. \u0026ndash; Cristian Mihai, Writing Habits.\nThe forcing yourself to write goes more in the lines of what Merlin Mann describes as \u0026ldquo;turning your procrastination into shitty first drafts\u0026rdquo;1. The way I see it is that writing is hard, and no one has all the answers. But as evident as it sounds, no writing is produced if you never sit down to write. This is clearly something everyone will agree on.\nA couple of months ago I read a nice piece on academic writing by Aleh Cherp. In this article he gave several tips from different authors about the art of writing. One of the books he recommended was \u0026ldquo;Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article\u0026rdquo;, and one of the ideas he puts forth is that thinking and writing are not two separate activities. It is naïve to assume that you should come up with ideas and then express them on paper. He goes on to state that\nWriting is thinking and a lot of our systematic thinking can only occur when we are writing. Thus, waiting for the ideas to come is one of the biggest mistakes young writers make. Instead, the only way to create your ideas is to actually start writing. \u0026ndash; Aleh Cherp, Academic writing: inclining your mind.\nI really couldn\u0026rsquo;t say what kind of writer I am2, but I will say that only through writing I\u0026rsquo;ve become a better writer. Writing is one of those rare skills that if you practice it a lot you can3 become better at it, but you\u0026rsquo;ve got to have at least a little bit of talent in order to progress significantly. Besides, if all you do is write, you\u0026rsquo;ll probably not end up writing something interesting. You have to oscillate between \u0026ldquo;the writing\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the inspiration\u0026rdquo; in order to produce something meaningful. This reminds me of a phrase by Merlin Mann, “The art of art is about oscillating between your time and attention.” A nice way to express this graphically is with the following plot which I shamelessly reproduced from a post by Cameron Plommer on the problem with inspiration\nThe graphic is self explanatory in that you have to oscillate between getting information and making something. If all you do is read, read, and read, you\u0026rsquo;ll most likely never end up making anything. You never give yourself the opportunity to make something, let alone something awesome. On the other hand if all you do is write, write, and write, you\u0026rsquo;ll probably never produce an interesting thing because you never stopped for a while to realize who you are and what the heck you\u0026rsquo;re doing.\nThe concept of shitty first drafts comes from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird book.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIf I could call myself a writer.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no guarantee.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/09/15/its-all-about-writing/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"air\" style=\"width:240px\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/copiancestral/7986686420/\" title=\"Typewriter by copiancestral, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8041/7986686420_96859c1d73_m.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"240\" alt=\"Typewriter\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nphoto by fiddle oak.\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the past year or so I\u0026rsquo;ve read a lot about how different people get their stuff done, specially when referring to writing. There are some people who just \u003ca href=\"http://cristianmihai.net/2012/07/16/writing-habits/\"\u003e\u003cem\u003ewait\u003c/em\u003e for inspiration\u003c/a\u003e to knock on their doors, whereas others simply \u003cem\u003eforce\u003c/em\u003e themselves to write every day. Inspiration is a tricky thing, but no one can\u0026rsquo;t deny that when it comes, it certainly \u003cem\u003efeels\u003c/em\u003e good. In the words of \u003ca href=\"http://cristianmihai.net/\"\u003eCristian Mihai\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"It's all about writing"},{"content":"\nphoto by JackVersloot. I recently finished reading \u0026ldquo;The Clan of the Cave Bear\u0026rdquo; by Jean M. Auel. It is a beautiful story of the human struggle for survival. In the time of mammoths and cave lions, a young human girl finds herself orphan because of an earthquake. Her survival instincts are put to test at their maximum, but she knows very little of surviving on her own. This desolate picture changes when she is rescued by a group of Neanderthals, the \u0026ldquo;clan of the cave bear\u0026rdquo;. She looks like them a bit, but at the same time she is too different to be accepted without it raising a few concerns.\nI liked this story, not for it\u0026rsquo;s detailed description of a world that is as strange to us, as our world surely is to the prehistoric people, but mainly because of the triumph of the human intellect above anything else. I was deeply moved by the rationalization of Ayla, the main character, and how she struggles to overcome her fears and adapting herself to the customs of the clan. I recommend this book be read with a keen eye on these intellectual moments, they are both emotional and entertaining.\nWhen reading this book I realized that the triumph of the human intellect is what really makes me fall for a story. The very same feature that makes us human is what makes us succeed. In every single story that I\u0026rsquo;ve found amusing, if not by wits or careful planned strategy or even divine inspiration in the form of genius, the plot is moved on and finally solved by the use of our intellect. Anything departing from this direction I find absolutely boring1. Our intellect is what makes us stronger, faster, resilient, and ultimately truly human.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t stand an author that describes absolutely everything, from the ceiling fan to the toilet, and above else uses five different adjectives that technically mean the same thing. I care about the human character, not so much about the decor.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/09/11/on-the-human-intellect-and-prehistoric-people/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"aic\" style=\"width:500px\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/copiancestral/7977735786/\" title=\"Lascaux by JackVersloot, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8441/7977735786_aecd77b178.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\" alt=\"Lascaux\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nphoto by JackVersloot.\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI recently finished reading \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clan_of_the_Cave_Bear\"\u003e\u0026ldquo;The Clan of the Cave Bear\u0026rdquo;\u003c/a\u003e by \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_M._Auel\"\u003eJean M. Auel\u003c/a\u003e. It is a beautiful story of the human struggle for survival. In the time of mammoths and cave lions, a young human girl finds herself orphan because of an earthquake. Her survival instincts are put to test at their maximum, but she knows very little of surviving on her own. This desolate picture changes when she is rescued by a group of Neanderthals, the \u0026ldquo;clan of the cave bear\u0026rdquo;. She looks like them a bit, but at the same time she is too different to be accepted without it raising a few concerns.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On the human intellect and prehistoric people"},{"content":"I wrote this roughly over a month ago, but by now it kind of feels like ages; don\u0026rsquo;t know why. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried\u0026ndash;without much success\u0026ndash;to catch up on old episodes of the back to work podcast1, this is something inspired by one of these episodes.\nThe Tale Today I was listening to an old episode of the Back to work podcast called \u0026ldquo;Vocational Wheel\u0026rdquo;. In it Merlin Mann said something like the following\nI can\u0026rsquo;t do everything if I want to do nice things.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not absolutely sure, word for word, that was what he said, but you get the idea. It might not appear so obvious for a number of reasons. First of all, everything is a different number of things for different people. For some people, everything might not be a large number of things, and most importantly for many people choosing not to do something might not be as easy (if it is possible) as it seems.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s true that for many people it is simply impossible to do everything, even if they wanted to. He put an example like, what would happen if he would say thank you to everyone that wrote to him, then he wouldn\u0026rsquo;t do anything at all. I bet he gets a lot of email–ergo the inbox zero idea.\nIn my case the \u0026ldquo;not doing everything\u0026rdquo; most of the times translates to not getting enough sleep. If I want \u0026ldquo;to do nice things\u0026rdquo; I normally stay up late after I put my kid to bed. I do sometimes regret not getting enough sleep, but when I manage to do something nice, I simply don\u0026rsquo;t regret a thing.\nSo, what kind of nice things do you do? You\u0026rsquo;d be amazed about the things I consider to be nice2. For example I like having little projects like making a cool video about my son. I would normally spend several weeks working on this project, shooting pictures, recording video clips, doing the editing, getting the music and all the effects right. Ok that\u0026rsquo;s great, but I\u0026rsquo;m actually doing all of this while writing my PhD thesis.3\nMany would argue that I could use that time for working on the thesis, or just for sleeping. The thing is, I\u0026rsquo;m never going to have another chance to do these things, so I really don\u0026rsquo;t complain about it. One thing I\u0026rsquo;ve learned since becoming a father: I\u0026rsquo;m more cautious of how I spend my time and, it might not seem this way, but I\u0026rsquo;m more focused and productive on my thesis. When I had all the time in the world I would not normally make good use of my time.\nOther nice things I do: I write. I write for my blog, I write on my day one journal, I write\u0026ndash;sometimes incredible\u0026ndash;notes to my future self, I write scientific papers, I read (listen) amazing stories and re-tell it a thousand times to everyone I know, I follow awesome people on the Internet and I spread out their word, I help my peers, I play with my son, I (try to) cook exquisite food for my family, I try to spend as much time as possible with my family, and many other things. These are just some of the things I normally do. Most of them don\u0026rsquo;t actually stop me from doing everything, but all of them require a certain sacrifice, more often than not in sleep time. But I don\u0026rsquo;t complain. How can I?\nIt now appears that Merlin is going through all of the episodes and writing something about them.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nYes, I am a geek, but aside from that I\u0026rsquo;m quite a regular guy.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhich is a big deal.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/09/09/doing-nice-things/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI wrote this roughly over a month ago, but by now it kind of feels like ages; don\u0026rsquo;t know why. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried\u0026ndash;without much success\u0026ndash;to catch up on old episodes of the \u003ca href=\"http://5by5.tv/b2w\"\u003eback to work podcast\u003c/a\u003e\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e, this is something inspired by one of these episodes.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Doing nice things"},{"content":"\nphoto by Mike Licht. It\u0026rsquo;s been about two and a half years since I started blogging. It was on a blog called Between the Candle and the Star (BTCATS) which I still keep, but feel I\u0026rsquo;ll be leaving aside indefinitely1, and continue my writing on this site.\nMy original intention with BTCATS was to have a place were to write about something I had managed to solve or fix so it could be helpful to others. The blog has moderately met this goal. However, on the first year or so, I barely published a handful of posts. About a year ago, shortly after my son was born, things started to get interesting.\nWhen you have a newborn, the first few months are quite difficult and stressing. You hardly get any sleep, you have to be there 24/7 and you have to have a lot of patience. Oddly enough, without having the spare time I had before, blogging came to me in the moment of greatest need. And to be honest, it has helped me a lot ever since.\nOne of the things I noticed was that I started (or wanted) to blog more frequently and with more elaborated content. More often than not, I would find my self blogging about topics somewhat unrelated to the tech and nerdy stuff I usually wrote about. Without really knowing it, I had slowly been converting my blog from a niche blog to a personality blog. One that represented my character and my voice, not only a hobby of mine. In some ways, this site is a tribute to that change.\nI must be honest and admit that the changes did not start to happen all of a sudden. It was an interesting time for me. I had recently become a father and that alone pushed me to see things from a totally different perspective. I started to care more about things like time and attention, productivity, and making sure I could still do the things I enjoy, while spending as much time as possible with my family.\nAt that time I started to follow the blog Academic workflows on Mac, I discovered the Mac power users, Brett Terpstra, Dr. Drang, and a whole lot of other extraordinary people, which in turn introduced me to a lot of neat things. For starters, things like Markdown, nvAlt, distraction free text editors, and many more cool stuff. I must also admit that if it weren\u0026rsquo;t for my iOS device2, most of these things wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have happened. Simply, because lately I have very little time to sit in front of my desktop computer and go on about doing my thing of reading blogs, writing, etc. It\u0026rsquo;s quite convenient to have this little\u0026ndash;yet powerful\u0026ndash;computer in your pocket and every time you can spare a couple of minutes, you just to take it out and start reading or typing (like I\u0026rsquo;m doing right now). It may seem strange to some, but I (think) I\u0026rsquo;m getting more things done now, than what I was a year or two ago.\nWriting on my blog and following other blogs has been both a source of inspiration and motivation for me. To me, writing down my thoughts is an excellent exercise and helps me to stay focus. It allows me to clarify my train of thoughts, and most importantly it also allows me to step away from the more technical writing I usually (have to) do on scientific papers.\nMany would argue that blogging takes a lot of your time. Some might even consider it a waste of time. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to go into much detail about this, however apparently many people that think blogging is a waste of time seem to have enough time to write extremely long email replies3. That same message can serve as a basis for a post. As Matt Might says\nBefore pressing send, ask yourself, should this answer be, \u0026ldquo;Reply,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Reply to all,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Reply to public\u0026rdquo;?\nIf you put effort into the reply, don\u0026rsquo;t waste it on a lucky few. Share it.\n\u0026ndash; Matt Might, 6 Blog tips for busy academics\nThis has been a brief summary of my initiation in the blogosphere. I feel that blogging is much more than a hobby, it has become part of what I am, and that is why I care so much about it.\nAt least that\u0026rsquo;s the idea.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nAn iPod touch 4th gen.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nOr having spent the time elaborating an email signature that is generally longer than the email itself and seems more like a short autobiography.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/08/27/why-i-care-about-blogging/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"ail\" style=\"width:247px\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/copiancestral/7890587640/\" title=\"Blogging Fun! by Mike Licht, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8313/7890587640_f1ddb21e38_n.jpg\" width=\"247\" height=\"320\" alt=\"Blogging Fun!\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nphoto by Mike Licht. \u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s been about two and a half years since I started blogging. It was on a blog called \u003ca href=\"copiancestral.wordpress.com\"\u003eBetween the Candle and the Star (BTCATS)\u003c/a\u003e which I still keep, but feel I\u0026rsquo;ll be leaving aside indefinitely\u003csup id=\"fnref:1\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e, and continue my writing on this site.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy original intention with BTCATS was to have a place were to write about something I had managed to solve or fix so it could be helpful to others. The blog has moderately met this goal. However, on the first year or so, I barely published a handful of posts.  About a year ago, shortly after my son was born, things started to get interesting.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why I care about blogging"},{"content":"This is my first post on my octopress powered blog.\n","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2012/08/15/hello-world/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis is my first post on my \u003ca href=\"http://octopress.org/\"\u003eoctopress\u003c/a\u003e powered blog.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Hello world"},{"content":"The \u0026ldquo;Links of Interest\u0026rdquo; is a type of post I\u0026rsquo;ll start to do on a regular basis here. Every now and then I come across something interesting in the web that I\u0026rsquo;d like to share with my readers, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily merit a blog post or I really don\u0026rsquo;t have the time to write one. This type of blog post is inspired by [Brett Terpstra\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Web Excursions\u0026rdquo;][1] system. As he explains, he prefers a single post with multiple links rather than a ton of individual \u0026ldquo;link list\u0026rdquo; posts. I do too.\n[1]: http://brettterpstra.com/2013/01/15/a-web-excursions-system-for-static-blogs/ \u0026ldquo;A \u0026ldquo;Web Excursions\u0026rdquo; system for static blogs - Brett Terpstra\u0026rdquo;\nTo find out more about the details and the ruby script for automatically generating the post [go to his website][1]. The links posted here, I\u0026rsquo;ve gathered in the past couple of weeks using pinboard an incredibly useful bookmarking service. Enjoy.\nThe links Wikiweb - A Delightful Wikipedia Reader The power of wiki backlinks. Visualizing connections between articles. Validating Retinal Fundus Image Analysis Algorithms: Issues And A Proposal Interesting article in which the \u0026ldquo;big players\u0026rdquo; in the field of retinal image analysis make recommendations on the possible avenues for research. The purpose is that the research may have a greater impact on the clinical practice. Footnotes, Endnotes and Textnotes A brief style-guide on the use of footnotes, and the like. I came to this page by looking up the recommended style for placing superscript of footnotes next to punctuation marks. BTW it should always go after the punctuation mark, unless the mark is a dash. VoodooPad Workflow and Notes Sean Korzdorfer\u0026rsquo;s workflow on note-taking and using a personal wiki. Really cool. xk0der » Git Tutorial : Starting with git using just 10 commands A basic tutorial on git version control. Things I Shouldn\u0026rsquo;t Forget: How to cite MATLAB (bibtex / latex) Truly important. How to cite the all powerful MATLAB. Writing Tools - Matt Gemmell Matt Gemmell gives a nice overview of the tools he uses to write plus some general advice on avoiding writer\u0026rsquo;s block and getting stuff done. Brisk An interesting alternative to LaTeXiT on the mac. Doesn’t need a latex installation. The Spark File — The Writer’s Room — Medium A \u0026ldquo;spark\u0026rdquo; file for writing down anything that goes through your mind. Later revisiting it to find reminders of useful ideas. Giving an Academic Talk A nice article on general guidelines and tips for giving a \u0026ldquo;decent\u0026rdquo; academic presentation. Writing math equations on Octopress A nice little tutorial on posting LaTeX equations on Octopress. A Tech Geek on Why We Need the Humanities | Input/Output | Big Think A nice piece on the importance of arts alongside technology. Because \u0026ldquo;the only jobs left to humans in the not-so-distant future will be those that computers can’t do – the kind that demand intuition and creative thinking.\u0026rdquo; How to do what you love, the right way A call to forget about titles and do \u0026ldquo;what you love.\u0026rdquo; Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook — I.M.H.O. — Medium MATT HAUGHEY explains his reasons for liking so much twitter and barely tolerating Facebook. In his words, twitter is the now, is the present. You follow people more for what they have to say, rather than for how they relate to you (high school friend, attended the same university, etc). Facebook is all about the past. ","permalink":"https://andresmarrugo.net/blog/2013/01/31/links-of-interest/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://andresmarrugo.net/blog/categories/bookmarks/\"\u003e\u0026ldquo;Links of Interest\u0026rdquo;\u003c/a\u003e is a type of post I\u0026rsquo;ll start to do on a regular basis here. Every now and then I come across something interesting in the web that I\u0026rsquo;d like to share with my readers, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily merit a blog post or I really don\u0026rsquo;t have the time to write one. This type of blog post is inspired by [Brett Terpstra\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Web Excursions\u0026rdquo;][1] system. As he explains, he prefers a single post with multiple links rather than a ton of individual \u0026ldquo;link list\u0026rdquo; posts. I do too.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Links of Interest for January 31, 2013"}]