Another Grey day. The weather makes you feel slow, heavy and these days my brain is also somehow slow or at least I don’t feel productive at all :-/. Day passes by without much being done. Patience, that something else to learn, to be patience. It was cool to implement the CalendarHelper so that the calendar view now is ready, till the point you have to deal with date types, one of the things that I learned is that Rails decides on its own the date type, so even if you have defined date type as DateTime, when manipulating the date data, Rails will convert it to TimeWithZone, it makes sense to “force” to use Time zones, since they are important, you just get a bit crazy till you know about it.
Today was our Q&A session and it was funny, because at some point there was the comment of “why developing a webcalendar when there is google calendar and it’s so cool”, and I was actually thinking that one of my motivations to start doing a webcalendar was exactly that one,why our only option of using a decent calendar is google, why do I have to give up my privacy, what if I need just a simple calendar for myself, for the collective I work with. No idea if at some point I will be able to develop something decent enough to be called a calendar, of course nothing similar to google calendar, but still my wish would be that there was a good free software calendar.
The more interesting part of the day, was the night. If was kind of funny to go to a kartoffelfest, a guy from Israel, had just got German nationality and was celebrating it. Of course getting the German nationality does not mean that you have the same rights as the Germans, but almost and he had also to resign to his previous nationality. So the idea was to celebrate it, with kartoffel, and something I did not know is that Germans are called kartoffel :-D. The curious part of the kartoffel fest was that there were almost no Germans, but most of us were people from some other countries. Which of course is much more interesting, I came to meet a guy from Sudan, he has also done IT, he is a refugee, he is cool and he was telling how absurd had been the war that lead to the division of the country, of course there are a lot of different cultures, religions, languages within Sudan, but there was no problem between people, but Governmental manipulation of things, external “support” lead things to a war, where many people died and are still dying. Lately there had been revolts in Sudan, many people was killed during them, of course the most politically active people and thousands are in jail. The reasons for making a war, gold, oil, and who will make profit of the exploitation of the natural resources, of course not the people.
The good thing about meeting people is that you can keep in touch, so hopefully we’ll meet soon, learning from each other without mediations is the only way the world can change for good.