CSI/OEA

Leo un poco confundido la noticia publicada en El Tiempo, en el que la OEA le pide al gobierno colombiano esclarecer la forma y responsables del asesinato de los 11 diputados del Valle del Cauca.

¿No era la OEA la encargada de esta tarea?¿A que vinieron los forenses designados especialmente por esta organización? El informe de esta comisión de forenses nunca se ha presentado públicamente en Colombia, en su momento, se hizo a puertas cerradas en Washington, lejos de los familiares y amigos de los diputados, principales interesados en conocer un dictamen de esta naturaleza. Eso de por sí es bastante extraño, pero más extraño aún, es que ahora el informe no sirva para nada.

Creo que a estas alturas lo mejor es dejar descansar en paz, no solo a los diputados, si no a sus familias, nunca se conocerá la verdad de los hechos. Sin duda alguna, son culpables las FARC y culaquier otro grupo armado, si es que en realidad hubo enfrentamiento. Responsables somos todos los colombianos, las generaciones anteriores que dejaron que el conflicto se agudizara y alcanzara estas dimensiones y nuestra generación que poco puede y quiere hacer.


"I shouted out,Who killed the kennedys?
When after all It was you and me"

"Sympathy for the Devil"-Rolling Stones .

Encontrar lo que se Ama

Siguiendo con las palabras ajenas quiero reproducir un discurso inspirador de Steve Jobs, este discurso ha dado vueltas por un lado y otro y con seguridad ya se ha leído y comentado hasta el cansancio.

Para mí, es especial, no solo por Jobs, a quien admiro profundamente (este es tema de otra entrada) por su trabajo, si no por que es realmente estimulante.

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

"As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it".
Yo creo que ya he encontrado algunas.

EL BLOG VACIO

Voy a reproducir la carta de Octavio Paz que sirve de prefacio para EL LIBRO VACIO, obra de Josefina Vicens que de alguna forma da título y vida a este blog. Nunca me compararía con ella, ni siquiera con José García, su personaje principal, pero sin duda, los dos me empujaron a crear este espacio.

Carta prefacio de Octavio Paz sobre El Libro vacío.

Recibí tu libro. Muchas gracias por el envío. Lo acabo de leer. Es magnífico: una verdadera novela. Simple y concentrada, a un tiempo llena de secreta piedad e inflexible y rigurosa. Es admirable que con un tema como el de la "nada" —que últimamente se ha prestado a tantos ensayos, buenos y malos, de carácter filosófico— hayas podido escribir un libro tan vivo y tierno. También lo es que logres crear, desde la intimidad "vacía" de tu personaje, todo un mundo —el mundo nuestro, el de la pequeña burguesía—. ¿Naturalismo? No, porque las reflexiones de tu héroe, siempre frente a la pared de la nada, frente al muro del hecho bruto y sin significación, traspasan toda reproducción de la realidad aparente y nos muestran la conciencia del hombre y sus límites, sus últimas imposibilidades. El hombre caminando siempre al borde del vacío, a la orilla de la gran boca de la insignificancia (en el sentido lato de esta palabra). Y aquí deseo anotar una reflexión al vuelo: literatura de gente insignificante —un empleado, un ser cualquiera—, filosofía que se enfrenta a la no-significación radical del mundo y situación de los hombres modernos ante una sociedad que da vueltas en torno a sí misma y que ha perdido la noción de sentido y fin de sus actos: ¿no son estos los rasgos más significativos del pensamiento y el arte de nuestro tiempo? ¿No es esto lo que se llama el "espíritu de la época"?.

Rescatar el sentido de la historia (personal o social, vida íntima o colectiva), enfrentar la creación a la muerte, la ruina, el parloteo y la violencia: ¿no es una de las misiones del artista? Eso es lo que tú has realizado en El libro vacío (más allá de las imperfecciones o debilidades que los diligentes críticos encuentren en tu obra). Pues, ¿qué es lo que nos dice tu héroe, ese hombre que "nada tiene que decir"? Nos dice: "nada", y esa nada —que es la de todos nosotros— se convierte, por el mero hecho de asumirla, en todo: en una afirmación de la solidaridad y fraternidad de los hombres. Y así, un libro "individualista" resulta fraternal, pues cada hombre que asume su condición solitaria y la verdad de su propia nada, asume la condición fatal de los hombres de nuestra época y puede participar y compartir el destino general.

Y ahora quiero confiarte algo personal: la imposibilidad de escribir y la necesidad de escribir, el saber que nada se dice aunque se diga todo y la conciencia de que sólo diciendo nada podemos vencer a la nada y afirmar el sentido de la vida, yo también, a mi manera, lo he sentido y procurado expresarlo en muchos textos de ¿Aguila o Sol? y en algunos poemas de otros libros. No digo esto por vano afán de precisión literaria sino por el simple placer de señalar una coincidencia. Ahora que reina en tanto espíritu la discordia y la ira divisoria, es maravilloso descubrir que coincidimos con alguien y que realmente hay afinidades entre los hombres. Creo que los que saben que nada tienen lo tienen todo: la soledad compartida, la fraternidad en el desamparo, la lucha y la búsqueda.

Gracias de nuevo por El libro vacío, lleno de tantas cosas, tan directo y tan vivo.

Septiembre del 1958

Un Nueva Visita

Probáblemente la persona que según mi mapa de ClustrMaps visitó este blog desde alguna ciudad en la costa pacífica de Estados Unidos o de Canadá se habrá llevado una enorme decepción, poco contenido y de regular calidad, a eso, agréguele que está solamente en español.

Lo primero, se puede remediar, mi idea es generar más contenido, con respecto a lo segundo, no se que tanto se pueda, solamente el tiempo dirá, si he mejorado o no mi estilo, si mis ideas y la forma como las expreso son contundentes, si merecen ser leidas con regularidad.

Ya lo he dicho en entradas anteriores, este es un ejercicio personal, que hasta el momento no se ha difundido ni siquiera en mi círculo más cercano, creo que por ahora debe permanecer así. Este es un ejercicio que nace como una necesidad de ver en algún lado mis ideas, pudo haber sido un cuaderno, pero me gusta pensar que vivo al día con las tendencias y que por eso el camino es un blog y no un cuaderno.

A ese visitante nuevo, muchas gracias, siempre es grato ver un puntico nuevo en el mapa, al visitante de Chile, gracias, usted me dió gasolina para un par de entradas y a la única lectora a la que le he compartido este blog espero que desde donde esté, lo siga, indudablemente va a tener su marca, usted sabe la enorme influencia que tiene en mí vida y en mi obra.

ARROCITO EN BAJO

http://www.freerice.com/



Excelente iniciativa, vale la pena visitarlo con cierta regularidad y por que no, mejorar su vocabulario en ingles.

Sencillo, como debería ser todo en la vida, en este sitio se puede aprender jugando y mientras tanto, usted ayuda a un buen programa para luchar contra el hambre en países más pobres que Colombia

El Odioso FBI

No conozco a ningun policía gringo, solamente he tenido de cerca a los antipáticos policías de inmigración en el aeropuerto de Miami y en las demás ciudades que he visitado de Estados Unidos solamente los he visto de lejos. Tampoco me gustaría tener algo que ver con ellos por pasar por encima de alguna de las normas de su estricto código. Ente más lejos, mejor.

Este distanciamiento geográfico y empático es sin duda un obstáculo para poder satisfacer mi curiosidad sobre un aspecto que nos han presentado en las películas y series gringas, el odioso poder que tiene el FBI sobre la policía. Estos petulantes siempre sacan de la escena al intuitivo investigador, a ese dedicado sabueso que con más corazón que razón quiere resolver el crimen. Aparecen con sus vestidos y corbatas de tonos discretos cuando las piezas del rompecabezas empiezan a tener sentido. Mirando por encima del hombro y sin dar mayores explicaciones la investigación queda en sus manos, ellos son el manda a callar del curtido jefe de departamento que defiende el trabajo de sus hombres, la impotencia hace momento.

¿Será siempre así? ¿Cómo será aquí? No me imagino a los del DAS sacando de su trabajo a la policía, les debe dar una pereza infinita tener que trabajar de verdad, creo que por eso se inventaron el CTI, no era un asunto de juez y parte, simplemente alguién por obligación tenía que investigar.

En fin, al parecer así es el odioso FBI.


*La imagen la tomé de Flickr, lo curioso es que nunca la había visto y cuando abrí la página de Flickr para buscar una foto de un policia, estaba ahí, esperando en el home, gracias a junku-newcleus.

PERFECTA

PERFECTA PARA MI