The Perks of Being a Wallflower

by Stephen Chbosky.

Here’s how the novel starts. If such a beginning can leave you indifferent, you’re very unlike me.

August 25, 1991
Dear friend,
I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please don’t try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out who I am, and I really don’t want you to do that. I will call people by different names or generic names because I don’t want you to find me. I didn’t enclose a return address for the same reason. I mean nothing bad by this. Honest.
I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn’t try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know that these people exist.

Charlie is a high school freshman caught between the colliding forces of inner turmoil and outside influences. The novel tells the story of a year in his life, in the form of letters to an anonymous friend. While it was difficult, at times, to believe that such deep thoughts could have originated from a 15-year-old, that didn’t stop me from feeling and relating with the character.

One could say the novel is a testimony of the friction between two desires: to embrace life, and to run away from life. But it is discussing a lot more than that. Since I have not grown up in an American high school environment, I cannot think of this in terms of “realistic” or “non-realistic”, but it certainly opens a clear and honest window into the world of a teenager.

I find it very lucky, if not downright miraculous, that Charlie manages to find a mentor (Bill, his English teacher) and friends (Patrick and Sam), who are older than him. Bill tells him to participate and stop using thought to remove himself from life. V fubhyq yrnea fbzrguvat sebz gung…

HOWTO: Read Vista-burnt UDF DVDs on Ubuntu Linux

Recently I got my hands on a DVD which I couldn’t get to mount. The message that appeared consistently in dmesg was:

UDF-fs: No fileset found

Searching the forums I found out that this is a widespread problem. Vista uses some kind of non-standard UDF which only Windows can read. I was very tempted to run to the Windows PC in the other room and let it eat the disc, but I was curious if there was any other solution.

Many suggested mounting manually with -t udf, but that didn’t work. Another suggestion was patching and recompiling the kernel. I was obviously NOT in the mood to do that. Digging a bit deeper I found that there is actually a less greasy solution. The two relevant links are one and two. I will describe now the exact procedure I used to get my Linux box to recognize the Vista-burnt DVD. Note that, because of the rapidly changing environment, this will probably NOT work on anything OTHER than *Ubuntu Hardy with kernel version 2.6.24.

Stumbling on Happiness

You may have noticed how ridiculously small the TV-screens are in most old sci-fi movies. Or how that low exam score moved from “catastrophe” to “oh well” within a few hours. Or how that long-awaited vacation is so disappointing now that it’s finally there. Or how an I love you written years ago seems so fake now. You may have wondered how you could possibly have had such thoughts or made such decisions. Now you’ve got answers.

From the also-available-in-audio shelf comes Daniel Gilbert with his great non-fiction book called Stumbling on Happiness. The author tries to answer the question of why happiness is so elusive and unpredictable.

What the book basically tells you is:

• experience is subjective;
• your imagination lies to you all the time;
• your memories lie to you all the time;
• your predictions can never be accurate;
• you make ridiculous choices all the time;
• you can never be sure of anything, past, present or future;
• you are not unique.

Pretty tough truths, huh? Well, I’ve actually exaggerated quite a bit. Besides the fact that it points out uncomfortable things, I loved everything about this book:

• It’s written in a very accessible and succinct style. If your attention slips for even a few seconds, you’ll have to rewind.
• The author has a great sense of humor (I rarely laugh out loud).
• Every chapter starts with a quotation from Shakespeare.
• It will not trigger your “citation needed” alarm. In fact, it has such a solid scientific basis that the most frequent word combination after “for example” is probably “in one study”.
• The examples given are logical and straightforward. Hey, the guy’s a Harvard professor!
• The audio version is read by the author himself. That’s a plus because his tone of voice shows you exactly what he means.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to find out the inner workings of memory, imagination, and future prediction. It’s so good that I’ll probably want to go through it again in a few months. For a more thorough summary check the Wikipedia page.

Enigma Otiliei

de George Călinescu.

(spoiler warning)

Autorul este un campion la lungimea descrierilor, detaliile sale devenind de o minuţiozitate dureroasă. Abundenţa termenilor în franceză (cu presupunerea că toată lumea o cunoaşte) măreşte tentaţia de a abandona opera

Dacă romanul ar fi divizat în două părţi: (1) poveste de dragoste şi (2) despre moştenire şi familie; aş fi renunţat fără mari regrete la partea a doua. Combinaţia acestora stă să demonstreze, probabil, că drumul prin viaţă nu este niciodată o linie dreaptă. Chiar înarmat cu aceste idei, sfârşitul m-a lăsat cu gura căscată:

“Cine a fost în stare de atîta stăpînire, e capabil să învingă şi o dragoste nepotrivită pentru marele lui viitor.

Otilia”

Două lucruri care m-au surprins:

• expresia “& co.” atât de frecventă în ziua de azi era folosită chiar şi 100 de ani în urmă, în forma “et Co”.
• calificativele “fain”, “faină” erau folosite de pe atunci (din germană, nu din engleză cum credeam).

Citate:

The World is Flat.

by Thomas L. Friedman.

When I first heard about this book it was not amongst my priorities (for me, economics == boring). But after hearing recommendations from two different sources, I decided to give it a try. I ended up listening to the audio version instead.

What I liked:

• Good answers to questions like:
  • Why does India have some of the best programmers?
  • Why are most of my gadgets made in China / Taiwan / Malaysia?
  • Why does Amazon.com not ship electronics to Moldova?
  • Why do I find it strange that my parents expect their employer to keep them hired for life?
• The author really did his homework. You wouldn’t expect to be finding Linux references in an economics book, would you? (That’s just an example.)
• Good thoughts to consider about the positive side of globalisation. The few globalisation critics I have asked couldn’t give me a good answer to what’s so BAD about it.
• Although written from an American point of view, the book contains enough ideas for people in the third world to be worth the read.

What I liked less:

• It is written in a very repetitive (self-help-like) style. To avoid falling asleep I listened to it at 1.3x speed
• This is not the author’s fault, but there doesn’t seem to be a definite way for countries like Moldova to really get into the “flat world”. India made it, but it seems like we have neither their optimism nor their hard-work genes…

This book has convinced me (yet again) that this is the perfect era to live in, and that technology and globalisation are solving more problems than they are creating. The world is moving in the right direction, and there is no point turning towards the past and swimming against the current.

A quotation from the final chapter:

When memories exceed dreams, the end is near.