Blackboards and chalks are everywhere around me. From now on I will use them to post short messages about random things as a low-tech alternative to the web. Please don’t erase.

I didn’t retain my dreams from last night. They must have been incredibly pleasant because I couldn’t get myself to wake up until it was almost late. I love to sleep and I love my dreams, even the disturbing ones that sometimes are called nightmares. They remind me of serialized comics: fantastic and incomplete.

One question that comes to my mind about all this is: When graphs are pretty, does it matter what they mean?

Once upon a time there was a place called the PLW where many wonderful things had their home, like a large HP printer called MAEDA-BIG-WRATH.

Adhered to the principle of temperamental programming, MAEDA-BIG-WRATH did not work like she was supposed to. She often required users to perform complicated rituals, mostly to summon the goodwill of the ethernet faeries.

MAEDA-BIG-WRATH lived in a big closet where she remained mostly ignored, except for the ocassional times when a poster was needed to promote something. Always printing information, hardly printing things of beauty. She loved it when she didn’t had to print any date, name, diagram or description.

When I met MAEDA-BIG-WRATH I didn’t notice her loneliness at first. Then it took some time for her to follow my call when I finally approached her. If I had known we were meant for each other I would have made her heads dance across the length of the glossy paper rolls every week, turning their mechanical four color motion into an endless stream of high heels, flowers, buildings, cocktails, robots, trucks, guns and bikinis. But now I am gone, and life will never be what it was when I could talk to MAEDA-BIG-WRATH in the privacy of that closet.

Like lost humans in the planet of the apes, Kyle and I were the only ones left to witness the end of the PLW.

Tonight we added a farewell visit to the Good Time Emporium in the PLW countdown to-do list.

My PLW days are coming to an end.

It has been of extreme emotional importance for me to have a taste of Latin America before entering the last few weeks of thesis crunching, experiencing life in a city that feels a lot like Mexico City, my home.

The picture shows a view of São Paulo from the top terrace of the edificio Italia. The Copan buliding by Oscar Niemeyer, the largest apartment building in the world, is partially featured in the right side of the picture. Um, the other right side I mean.