Black and White Aurora

I've spent a couple of days in Santiago de Compostela this week (I usually go there once a year). Santiago is the incredibly beautiful, charming capital city of Galiza. The historic center is impressive, pedestrian streets with old homogeneous buildings (not one fucking new building breaking the harmony). You can breath the centuries of History on every step. It looks even better on rainy days (there many of them in one of the most rainy cities in Europe), when the cobbled streets turn into small rivers by the moment, the colonnades welcome you and the moss living on every wall and tree looks greener. This little gem is absolutely worth a visit (for me it's quite more beautiful than cities like Cambridge, Oxford or even Bratislava, and just a bit below such an incredible city as Edimburgh). It's mainly famous because of Christianity (Saint James Way and all that) but the religious thing has no influence on my devotion for this city (for me churches are just historical buildings with architectonic interest).

The main reason for posting this entry is that one day at night I enjoyed a really beautiful visual effect. I was in Praza das Praterías and when looking at Praza da Quintana through the space between 2 buildings, the sky gave me a nice present, the combination of the lights that point to the back facade of the Cathedral, the heavy rain, the clouds moving very fast (we had like 100 km/h winds in nearby towns) and my view angle gave place to something that I could almost qualify as a poor guy "Black and White Aurora". I've never seen a real Aurora, so sure I'm exaggerating, but anyway the view was fantastic. This crappy picture below does not make any justice to what I'm trying to describe, but I think all blog posts need at least one pic.



Another curiosity. I'm quite a fan of what I usually call "Turkish fast food" (I'm vegetarian, so no Döner Kebab, but Falafel, mainly in Dürüm). There are a few of these restaurants in Santiago that are managed not by Turkish people, but by Kurdish people. They had a nice map there of their Stateless Nation that called my attention:



The Falafel that I enjoyed there was a bit above the average, but I think the friendliness that I tend to feel for oppressed territories (and particularly those forgotten ones that very rarely do headlines like Western Sahara, Chiapas, Kurdistan...) made it taste even better.

FIC Xixón 2009

Some weeks ago we could enjoy the 47th edition of FIC Xixón, a film festival mainly focused on independent cinema that is held in my town.
This year I attended a total of 11 films, of which only 2 were unbearable, 3 were absolutely great, and the rest fall somewhere between OK and Good.
Maybe one day I'll feel like writing some full reviews, but so far here is a brief description:

• Cargo 200 (Aleksey Balanov), Thursday 19th. I quite liked it, but it didn't live up to my rather high expectations. I liked the industrial wasteland cityscape and the depressive atmosphere, but maybe it was not enough. The 80's Russian Punk band playing on the car's casete was a plus.



• Los Fugaos, Saturday 21st. I ended up in this projection a bit by chance. There was a huge queue to get the tickets for this session and someone with tickets left gave me one. It's a documentary about people that after the end of the Spanish Civil War stayed hidden in the mountains fighting against the Fascist Dictatorship. It's OK, but it's rather lame that the directors chose a shitty politician like A. Guerra, a compulsive thief responsible of the economical destruction of Asturies, to talk about these heroic guerrilla.



• War (Aleksey Balanov), Saturday 21. It was OK if what you expect is just an action film, because that's what it is, sort of the Russian Rambo, killing Chechens instead of Vietnameses. Of course Chechens are very, very, very bad people, evil terrorists, compulsive rapists... This vision would be acceptable if it were the opinion of one of so many Russians that have to struggle to make ends meet, with few chances and interest to go beyond Krenmlin's propaganda... but it's too simplistic for an acclaimed film director that is able to travel all over the world... I'm not neglecting some of the attrocities commited by some Chechen yihadists... but what I'm missing in the film are references to the attrocities commited by Russian forces against Chechen civil (moderate muslim or light muslim) population...



• Contra la Pared (Fatih Akin), Sunday 22. Wow, this film blew me away. Great, great, great. It seems like a recurrent topic in this great German-Turkish director to depict the lives of German-Turkish people, how they have got integrated in Western society, which cultural elements they keep and which ones they replace, and of special interest, how they see themselves. This film is an absolute must, the story moves between comedy and drama, between hilarity and tragedy, with interesting shifts and many great moments.
  
  
• Between Two Worlds, Sri Lanka. Sunday 22. Absolutely unbearable. Terribly boring with no reference to the Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka nor to the "disaster capitalism" in their coasts after the tsunami...



• Barking Water, Monday 22:15. A good film, not as tough as the synopsis could make us think, but tough anyway. A couple of native Americans with have shared their lives with ups and downs, several interruption, set off for their last journey, as the man has a terminal disease. Drama road movie with some great visuals.



• Mammoth (Moodysson) Tuesday, 22:30. Not as impressive as Lilya 4-ever, but anyway a good film. It links together 2 troublesome stories through the life of a wealthy, happy family which bliss is at risk. All in all the general feeling is not gloomy at all, but rather happy (this great song in the soundtrack by LadyTron can give you an idea).



• Louise-Michel Wednesday, 22:15. Sort of French bittersweet comedy. Between smile and smile you get a good critic to economical globalization, tax havens, desensitized human beings... A small factory in a French village gets closed from one day to another, and the (un)employees decide to take revenge. I like that attitude.



• Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold, Thursday. Wow, take note of this name, Andrea Arnold, and keep it somewhere accessible in your head. 2 films and she's a cult director for me. After the incredible Red Road that I could enjoy in FIC Xixón 2006, we get a great depiction of realities that may seem far to us but are really close. How shitty it can be being a teenager in an impoverished housing state area in UK. There are some moments in the story where things are in the verge of total disaster... and it gives you that uneasiness that lasts for a while after the lights are on.
  
  
• Border, Friday. Unbearable film-documentary or whatever they want to classify it as.



• Polytechnique, Saturday 22:15. Absolutely amazing. The perfect culmination for an excellent edition of this festival. Impressive film, it manages to turn a story of disaster (the Canadian Columbine) into an astonishing beautiful visual and narrative discourse. It's been compared with Elephant, but for me the comparison does not make it justice at all, this is a much better film in all senses. The first sequence in the film blows you away, it's one of the most stunning starts in a film that I can think of, but the rest of the film is just at the same level. This external review perfectly describes my opinions:
  "The paradox may sound grotesque, but it must be stated loud and clear: Denis Villeneuve and the cast of Polytechnique have transformed the tragedy of the Montreal Massacre into a work of profound beauty."

CIL Debugging

Some weeks ago while chatting with a friend something came up in the conversation that brought to my mind some old memories of those times (it was in 2003) when I used to do some coding in CIL (also known as MSIL). The thing is "how do you debug CIL code?".
With the VS Debugger, MDBG or SharpDevelop Debugger you can't debug at the CIL level, just high level language (with Native Assembly view). The answer is simple, and now you can find some more entries explaining the wholeprocess, but given that it's something that I found out by myself back in those times, I'm feeling like posting about it.

First, an obvious question, what do we need for our source level debugging?
We need the .exe, the source code file and a .pdb file that somehow links the .exe with the source file. When we compile with the csc using the /DEBUG option, we're linking to the C# source, so if we want to link with the CIL source, we need that CIL source and the corresponding compiler.

So, all this comes down to giving an odd detour from your initial C# (or VB.Net...) code to the final .exe using some of the tools available with the Framework.

• First we compile from C# to .exe
  csc debug2009.cs



• then, we disassemble that .exe, and get a .il file
  ildasm /OUT=Debug2009.il debug2009.exe



• and then we assemble that .il file into a new .exe, using the /DEBUG switch.
  ilasm /EXE /DEBUG Debug2009.il
  this last step is the fundamental one, this way we obtain a .pdb file containing debug information for the CIL code, not for the C# code.

So, now we can launch the new .exe file, attach a debugger to it (for example the SharpDevelop one) and all the magic happens when the information in the .exe, .pdb and .il files is used together:



In those times when I had some CIL knowledge (it's gone terribly rustied after not using it for years) I wrote some basic articles about CIL programming for @rroba, a Spanish magazine (hey, I even got paid for it!). It's in Spanish, and sure contains some conceptual errors that I think I would not reproduce now, but anyway I'll leave it here just in case it could be of any use to someone.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

(Sorry, I still have not been able to upload the files)

Web War I, cyberattacks on Estonia

Some days ago I came across this fantastic site with short video reports on science and technology, WiredScience.
There I found an interesting report about one of the most important and less known war episodes in the last years, the Russian cyberattack on Estonia in April 2007.
OK, nobody was killed in those events, not even physically injured, so sure that with thousands of people dying in armed conflicts in Irak, Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan... my previous sentence could sound like pronounced by someone who does not know the limits between Second Life and real life, but that attack is one advance of how wars will be waged in the near future, and raises questions and concerns that our societies will have to address.
So, what happened and why it is so important?

Estonia, a European Union member and former Soviet Republic (well, I would better say a former Russian Colony, for me the USSR was never a union, but one of the last colonial powers in the classical sense) was attacked by Russian hackers. It was mainly a massive DDOS attack that made unavailable great part of Estonian network based infrastructure (ATMs, Government web sites, newspapers...). This attack was launched by naZionalist "hackers", probably linked to the Nashi, a proPutin Russian youth movement with some resemblence to the Hitler Youth. I wouldn't dare to say that the rusian government were directly involved in the attack itself, but it has been protecting the attackers by hampering the investigations (and of course, it's responsible for the wave of fanatic nationalism that sweeps Russia and fills the streets with ultraviolent nazi skinheads responsible for hundreds of attacks and murders each year) The main source of the attack could be based on Transnistria, a Russian puppet pseudostate broken away from Moldavia (and which "strange" legal status makes very difficoult any sort of international investigation).
The anger and hate of these zealots was motivated by the relocation of a Soviet Soldier statue to a non centrical place (for ethnic Estonians Soviet occupation was even worse than German occupation, so probably if I were them I would have relocated it to a landfill) . Well, that's simplistic, the real reason here is that there's a proportion of Russians that do not understand that they're no longer an empire. They don't understand that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia... want nothing to do with them. That these sovereign nations want to cut their ties with a past of horror and famine. That the end of WWII brought no liberation to them, but slavery...
These people still consider these countries as misbehaved children that sometimes deserve some punishment from Mother Russia (be it a cyber attack, be it cutting gas supply in the middle of winter, be it direct war...)
Worst of all is when you have the enemy within, and unfortunately this also happens in these countries. The footage in the video report showing some individuals vandalizing shops while shouting "Russia, Russia" is rather disgusting. These ethnic Russians have not understood that now they live in a sovereign nation called Estonia, and so they have 2 options, either they behave like Estonian citizens (and leverage the good things of being a European Union citizen) or go back to their beloved, destructured, maphia governed Russia... Seems like these people have forgotten that their parents or grandparents were injected into Estonia by Stalin to replace a part of the ethnic Estonian population (forcibly "relocated" out of their land) and russify the remaining ones, replacing their culture, language, myths...

This seems so important to me cause it's one of the first examples of the kind of combats to be waged in the near future. Attacks that can paralyze an entire country in a way that it's not easy to know who's the enemy (goverment, mercenaries, a self organized group of volunteers...) In 2007 EU and NATO governments did not know how to respond to an attack like this, but seems like it has given place to the creation in Tallinn of the CCD COE. Sure the near future will be riddled with similar events and we'll look back to see when all this started.

By the way, I was lucky to be in Estonia for a few days in April 2008, beatiful place really worth a visit.

Arma-X, Zona Minada

Great, a new video by Arma-X, one outspoken Asturian MC.
Arma-X (well, his previous project Stoned Atmosphere) is responsible for having got me interested into Hip Hop some years ago. It was by the end of 2004 when I found "Patria sin Sol", one astonishing Hip Hop track with Political lyrics about the demise (economical, social, even moral) of our homeland, Asturies. This track turned into sort of a hymn for many of those few Asturians that are aware of how fucked our land is.
Some months after releasing Issue 4 (and having made us enjoy with some memorable concerts) St.At. broke up and Arma-X started to work on his own. Different musicians provide the bases, and he adds voice and message (it's that message what turns it into the best "art product" coming out from Asturies in the last decade). Lyrics are furious and inspiring, criticizing everything from our local scope to the global one, but always with particular emphasis in "La Cuenca" (the former coal mining area in Asturies were he was born and that has been transformed, as the rest of Asturies, by the successive Spanish Governments into a reservation for sold out syndicalists, retired miners and and their cocaine addicted children, while the rest of the population emigrates).
Yes, my last paragraph may sound weird, but that's my land now... and this is how it sounds...


Zona Minada (good play on words: coal mines zone - Minefield) (video from december 2009)



Patria sin sol (video from december 2005)



Enjoy/que vos preste.

JavaScript playground

I'm using this just to test how well jQuery and some JavaScript play with blogger.

this is a text

Basic Performance Tricks

These (language agnostic) performance tricks are rather basic, but in the current programming world where most of the thinking revolves around adding more layers or more objects (one more interface for decoupling, one more class for better cohesion)... these things involving binary operators seem almost like assembler for many of us (at least for me) but it should not be that way... Performance tricks like these can help to balance the performance downsides inherent to modern (and necessary) techniques like virtual calls, delegate calls (in .Net world), dynamic languages... and anyway, it's fun stuff to know about :-)

So, there we go (to understand it just think it in binary with a couple of samples):

• Check if a number is odd or even:
  this is faster than using the classic module operation.
  if (num & 1 == 1)
  // num is odd,
  else
  // num is even
  


• Check if a number is a power of 2 ( I found this among the comments of this interesting codeproject article)
  
  //for num >= 1
  (num & (num-1)) == 0
  
  


• and well, this is terribly basic, but at least it's a good sample to me of what bit shift operations can be useful for (outside low level programming):
  Multiply for/divide by a multiple of 2:
  
  num << 1 == num * 2
  num << 2 == num *4
  ...
  num >> 1 == num / 2
  num >> 2 == num / 4
  

As an additional note, checking the Bitwise operation entry in wikipedia, I found this:
On most older microprocessors, bitwise operations are slightly faster than addition and subtraction operations and usually significantly faster than multiplication and division operations. On modern architectures, this is not the case[1]: binary operations are generally the same speed as addition (though still faster than multiplication).

And well, this is not language agnostic, but C# and VB.Net (by the way VB, you've ever been ugly and will ever be, regardless of how many cosmetics MS applies on you) specific, but given that we're talking about performance and it's so short that does not deserve a full blog entry:
Cost of Method Calls:

• Virtual method call time is 1x.
  


• Delegate method call time is 1.5x
  


• Interface method call time is 2x
  

No, I've not done any investigation myself further than finding the info here. Delegate calls being more expensive than Interface calls caught me a bit by surprise, thought well I'd never done serious thinking about it.

Lilya 4-ever

As I said in the introductory entry for this blog, I had already started several "blogging projects" over the years, but none of them lived longer than a few entries over a few months... but some weeks ago, after watching "Import Export", that brilliant Austrian film, I got reminded of Lila4Ever an abolutely moving film about suffering and despair, about being condemned since birth, about all the misery that surrounds us and we're unable/unwilling to smell... I'm not a sensitive person, so when I say that it's a very tough and touching film it really is. Think of "Requiem for a Dream" on steroids, these are not lame wealthy idiotic youngsters playing to be bad and shitting it all over, this is about people who have not been given a fucking chance even when they live at the doors of our "welfare western society"... This is not happening in a lost African village, it could be happening in a place where you and me could be flying low cost to take pics and enjoy the architecture of the city centre...

OK, so here's my original review in Asturian language, dated back in April 2005.


Hai unes selmanes que viere nel ordenador la película "Lilya 4-ever". Cumo siempres la estraña física del mío Universu Presonal dienon llugar a una bultable dilatación temporal ente la decisión d'escribir una entrada sobro tala esperiencia ya la so realización práutica.

El casu, "L4E" ye un film duru ya murniu, cuya rialidá manca no más fonderu la mente ya l'alma. Nun se basa n'una hestoria rial, pero quiciabes eso fai'l dolor inda más bultable, porque sabes que resume nuna hestoria ficticia milenta d'hestories ciertes d'esistencies inciertes.
Se basa de lloñe na hestoria de una guah.a Llituana. Nun ye una "biografía", asina que camiento la mayor parte la hestoria ye ficción ya d'esti móu ye más fácil narrar delles traxedies reales al traviés d'un solu drama semireal.

El film trescurre nuna hipotética ciudá de lo qu'un díi foi la URSS. Una ciudá cuya estética nun la fai mui distinta la mítica Pripyat, la diferencia ye que demientres Pripyat ye una ciudá pantasma, la de Lilja ye una ciudá de pantasmes... Ellí Lilja, una neña 16 años, ye abandonada pola so má que cola pa USA col so nuéu noviu cola promesa de tornar buscala en cuanto s'encuentre afitada nel "País de les oportunidaes". Dicha torna nunca ocurrirá, ya Lilja vese abocada a la prostitución de sobrovivencia, primeru na so ciudá, ya lluéu, engañada pola mafia, en Suecia. Nun voi cuntar más del argumentu, porque ye una película pa ver ya sentir, una esperiencia que nun puede sostituyise por un resume mierdosu nun blog mierdosu.

Amestar namás que la esplotación sexual nun ye nin muncho menos el Leitmotiv de la hestoria, hai munchos "Furacos prietos" nesta galasia de rebisna. La desvaloración de la vida mesma ya les drogues cumo mecanismu d'escape nun infiernu nel que la desconexón ye la única salida maxinable, la imaxe paradisiaca d'USA na mente los fíos del falsu comunismu ya'l nuéu capitalismu...

Nun sé si esta obra mayestra ta disponible nos videoclubs de la nuesa Asturies. Yo la vi cortesía d'Internet (en rusu con sotítulos n'inglés).

Cumo averamientu, dicir qu'en dellos aspeutos remembróme a "Requiem for a Dream", pero hai una gran diferencia, RFD ye dura, pero nun manca, l'autodestruición voluntaria de la primera nun tien comparanza cola destruición cumo únicu camín de la segunda. Hai munches imaxes coles que quedase, pero quiciabes una de les que más noxu dá ye la de Lilja vomitando tres el so primer intercambéu de sexu por dineru (o meyor, cumo sinónimu nesti casu, sexu por comida).

4 days in Rome

Well, I've got many things I'd like to write about places I've been lucky to be to in the last months, years... but better I start off by the most recent one...

I was to Rome last week for a few days. It was a really nice stay, better than I expected. To be true, Rome had never been in my list of "High priority places to pay a visit". There are several reasons for it: no gothic architecture, no skyscrappers, and my scarce interest in the Mediterranean world (I'm Asturian and part of my family is Galician, that is Northern Atlantic Spain, and I have strong emotional links with both territories, so I'm rather fed up of how the Spanish central government has ever dimissed our land and tried to replace our Atlantic culture with the Mediterranean culture of the rest of Spain...) but this is November, when it's cold in most of Europe, Asturies is even more isolated than usual (easyjet timetables to London in the winter season are almost not usable), and well, we have cheap flights to Rome from Santander (that means a 3.5 hours bus trip there, but I can bear with it, and better now, when after a week of heavy rains Cantabric landscape looks even more breathtaking than usual), so Rome looked like a good option to spend some of my last vacation days for this year.

I did all the common things one should do when visiting the Italian capital for first time (Trevi Fountain, all the well known churches, Piazza de Spagna,
Piazza Navona, Saint Peter...) so just check wikitravel and that gives you the idea... A good point is that November does not seem too popular for tourism there (maybe the worldwide crisis also helps), cause even when you could see a good amount of people armed with cameras, maps, backpacks and happy expressions... I did not suffer any of the lenghty queues I'd been warned about (I got into Coliseum, Saint Peter, Vatican Museums... almost inmediately).
One good habit that I try to put into practice before visiting any new place is watching some film set in that place (of course, for a documentary junkie like me this goes after checking some documentary about the place). For Rome, watching "Angels and Demons" is a must. The film is rather boring, but you get nice views of some of the most interesting places of the city... It was in this film where I first knew about the bridge that crosses the Tiber to Castel Sant Angelo (surprisingly it's called Ponte Sant Angelo). It nicely reminds me of the incredible Charles Bridge (Karluv most) in Prague, so we're talking about a pedestrian stone bridge with beatiful statues lined on both sides... This is shorter than Charles, but any way it's a must see... The stalls on the right margin of the river are also rather nice, reminded me a bit of those so beautiful green ones that you find in Paris, next to the Sena (more or less at the the Louvre level).

No doubt the area that I liked more was the one that stretches from Trastevere to Piazza Navona, with Isola Tiberina and Campo di Fiori in between. This is an absolutely charming zone, with a street landscape that delighted me more than any of the thousands of impressive baroque-renaissance churches and buildings that you find everywhere in Rome. Isola Tiberina is absolutely beatiful, cross Ponte Fabricio, go down the stairs and stroll the path almost at the river level. This activated the neural paths in my brain that store images and feelings of my nightly strolls along the river paths in the Notre Dame (Paris) surroundings. As a plus, there was an artistic installation (video + sound + architecture) that all in all was fresh and interesting. Then cross to Trastevere (Ponte Cestio), enjoy the clobbed narrow streets, sit down for a while next to that fountain looking at the St Mary of Trastevere church, continue your walk with no fixed direction and after a while get to Via Garibaldi.
Follow Via Garibaldi to climb up the Gianicolo hill and enjoy the views from there (this is even better if done just with the sunset, thanks for the advice in your miniguide Hostelworld). Go down the hill, stroll around Trastevere as long as you feel necessary and this time go to Piazza Trilussa and cross the Tiber through Ponte Sisto. Once in the left margin, go to Piazza Farnese and Campo dei Fiori. The most interesting items in this cute Piazza are:

• the sinister sculpture of what I thought was a monk and wikipedia has told me that on the contrary, he was a martyr for free thought and modern scientific ideas
  


• Library Fahrenheit 451, that seemed to display a good number of social books.
  

There are 2 other compulsory places that might not be in the priority list of most guides, but that sure deserve a place in this my guide.

• Santa Maria della Vittoria. In the outside for me it's just one more church among the
  thousands of them you find in Rome (even crossing the street you find an almost twin one). But in the inside you'll meet with the incredible sculpture by Bernini "Ecstasy of St. Teresa". It's impressive, but used to see it in pics maybe I almost expected more. What really astonished me were the paintings in the ceiling, there are some clouds that look absolutely 3D. I think I'd never seen a representation of depth that captured my attention in such a way.
  Of course, I can't help pasting here the "passionate" :-D description that St. Theresa gave about her encounter with the Angel (and that so popular has turned):
  
  "I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying"
  



• Ossuary at Sta. Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini. I had no idea of this place until that one day before setting off someone (thanks Gus!) told me about it. He didn't know the exact name, but a fast googling came up with with
  this. The ossuary is small, but rather impressive. I liked it more than
  the one in Sedlec, in which I was in 2005 and that I think is rather better known. The main plus of Sta. Maria over Sedlec are the mummified monks and that Memento Mori that you find in the last chapel "What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be". Admission is almost free (just give the recommended 1 euro aid) but unfortunately you're not allowed to take pics, so I had to buy a postcard, not the same for a DIY freak... but anyway will help to refresh my memories in the future.
  

Buff, this entry has evolved into a long one, I think it's enough...

First time, one more time

OK, I've tried this several times in the last years, under different names and conceptions, and none of them succeeded in turning into part of my life, so all of them went over. Maybe I was feeling lazy, maybe I had not much to communicate at the time... luckily, it seems like I feel more active and more communicative these days, so maybe this is the right time for starting again.

Don't expect great things, I'm just a thirty something guy that develops software for a living and for a passion, that travels around from time to time, that watches documentaries and films, tries to keep up to date with basic science, likes to dig into history to try to understand the present and predict the (no) future... So, more or less that's my life, and that's what this blog will be about, written in (crappy) English and some in Asturian, depending mainly on the scope...
I'm fortunate to be interested in many different things and have a basic knowledge of some of them, but unfortunate enough to not be an expert in anything, so almost anything I can write here will be widely exceeded by hundreds of articles by others just a few google keystrokes away... but well, writing about something makes you think, and thinking makes you improve...
It was an improvement in our communication skills what made as evolve from hominids to the complex, advanced (yes, we can be destructive, selfish, evil, but no doubt we're sophisticated) creatures that humans are now in the 21st century, so maybe practicing a bit my communicative skills will give me some sort of evolutionary advantange...

Well, enough characters for a first, content empty entry. Welcome/Afayaivos...