ODAY Rianne celebrates her birthday and next week we start our next vacation. In September we get married and then I will take my longest break from the Internet in years, perhaps in a decade. So although this blog is likely to be quiet in September (the same goes for Techrights), I am still fine, just celebrating two important things with my Other Half.

Although this blog is personal, I rarely open up about my personal life in it. My experience — as well as others’ says that trolls (and sometimes just people with adverse/opposite opinions) tend to distort what’s claimed to attack the messenger.

HIS MORNING I was dreaming that I was dreaming that I was dreaming. I woke up several times, at different times, but only within the dream (or the dream about a dream), only to falsely assume it was a particular time of the day. The level of circularity was never quite so high and I took these notes after I had woken up.

I was so relived when I woke up to realise that I was dreaming about dreaming, but then I was still inside one layer of dreams and it took me quite a while to wake out of that. Confusing, eh? Anyway, dreams are a mysterious side of the human mind. They are said to have a purpose in the sense that they train our neural model of expectation for particular possible scenario, e.g. being chased by an animal in our primal past.

have begun picking up pace again, with most of the benefit being funneled into Techrights and TechBytes. Being summertime, this period will enable me to write more articles and also record more. The social life benefits also.

I recently recuperated from a shoulder injury, caused by weakened tendons, and my other half has just won the volleyball championship (her last game, the final, was last night).

I will try to blog in schestowitz.com more often than before.

O, we got the venue and on Sunday we finally chose a dress. Actually, we got two for her. We’ll both wear two outfits at different stages of the event such that I wear not only a formal suit (it’s a civil ceremony, so it’s flexible). Here she is at the shop, measuring/trying the dress.

FTER careful consideration of various venues we may have finally found a place that suits our taste, such that the wedding safely takes place in good weather in December as originally planned (near the Pacific, not the UK). It will be a Civil Ceremony, so we are preparing our own invitation, speech, etc. Here are some photos of the place, taken on a clousy day unfortunately (which does no justice to the full beauty of it).

CTIVISM for software freedom seems to have weakened somewhat. Truth be said, the FSF saw its power declining, key staff at the FSF left, and Android, which champions the Linux ideology in some sense, does almost nothing for GNU and very little for software freedom. Its code is Free/open source, but it also embraces DRM and other nasties.

Speaking for myself, I intend to extend my activism to freedom in general, as well as justice. For the past 5 years or so I’ve described myself as an advocate of fair competition. This also implies greater parity and more opportunities for new players, as opposed to the cabal of corporations that reign the status quo.

Yesterday I spent a long time speaking to a gentleman from Afghanistan. He came to the UK some years ago and I’ve had several opportunities to speak to him and ultimately befriend him. Things in his own country are grim, he told me, but he does not seem bothered by police state culture in the West, let alone the unjust inequality. For some people, perhaps not idealists or perfectionists, a world full of flaws is OK and not worth improving. But one needs to always be reminded that progress in society never happens without the hard work of those sacrificing their life for good causes.

George Bernard Shaw once said: “The resonable man adapts himself to the world; the unresonable on persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”