November 2007 Archives

Here I am, sunday afternoon, trying very hard to produce some posts for the blogs I created, to fulfill my self-made promise to blog something meaningful  every other day.

Of course, my mind went blank. Nothing regarding Java, or OOD (for the tech blog), no history from my role-playing past (for the RPG blog), nothing in general for this blog. I was suffering what is called "Writer's Block" or "Blank Page Syndrome"

This is very ironic, given that I'm currently teaching a course on creative thinking and idea generation.

That thought was my salvation.

The first post I made with ScribeFire, had "Powere by ScribeFire" appended at the end. I wanted to turn that down, so I started to browse the site. In one Comment for the release note i found this tip:

To disable the "Powered by ScribeFire" message, click on the << simbol at the top left of the ScribeFire panel, go to "Settings" and uncheck the "Automatically insert Powered by ScribeFire" setting.

Happy blogging.

My (real) name is Rafael Alvarez. I was born July 8, 1975 in Caracas, Venezuela.


I got a degree in Computer Engineering at Universidad Simón Bolívar (Caracas, Venezuela) with minors in Computer Language Theory (Focus on Virtual Machines and static optimizations like Partial Evaluation), Artificial Intelligence (focus on Planning and rule-based systems) and Benchmarking (focus on Web-based Applications)

According to the Jung-Myers-Briggs test, I'm a INTJ person. It describes me pretty well, so perhaps they're not that wrong.

I have been always passionate about programming: I see it more as a craft than as a science.


Over the years, I have taken several online tests for fun, you can see the results here

Some time ago, when I first read about weblogs/blogs I thought "Why on earth would someone want to keep one?". Now, after reading blog after blog, I found the answer: You can put your thought there, ideas too small or irrelevant to form a paper, but relevant enough so you want to write or tell them.

So, this is it. My collection of ideas, spread across three blogs (Personal, Technology and Pen-and-Paper RPG).

If at least one other people like what can be found here, I'll feel satisfied.

Over the years I have toyed with several free hosting providers and blogs provider. Several times I have lost data due to the service trashing, getting acquired by a major player, going out of business or removing my account due to 30 days of inactivity without previous notice.

So, I bite the bullet and decided to take command of my information and put it in a place I know will be secure and reliable.

This is a "stub" post, as soon as I learn the internals of MT I'll start creating my personal website.

In the meantime, these are the blogs I'll be maintaining:

Diary of Pyros, an Elder Tremere
RPG Stories
Software Development Diary