Brief: I'm just a guy who was born in Portugal when democracy was also being born. I love the telecomunications world and I'm also fond of music and football. I don't have any affinities with politics or religion, and I hate arrogance in general.


Portugal: My country. It's located in Europe and borders Spain and the Atlantic Ocean -- that's why we have beautiful beaches and nice weather.

Portugal is an old country with a rich history -- I'm not going to say it's all been great in all respects, because there are things about it which I'm not proud, like slavery, but fact is our brave ancestors sailed the (then) infinite seas and discovered a lot of this now (smaller and smaller) world of ours.

Today Portugal lives in a thriving Democracy, after a peaceful revolution in 1974. Apparently we have all it takes to be a developed first line country, but yet we aren't. "Why" you may ask? There are many country out there with worse conditions but they have wars and other problems that we have not.

In my opinion Portugal doesn't grow like some of our European Union partners due to corruption. This isn't a practice used by politicians alone, but rather in the entire spectrum of society. And when I talk about "corruption", I'm not simply referring to the classic stealing money, but also to not using it properly in public office. Yes, we have a big tax problem.

I think that a couple of years from now, after this new generation starts caring enough, we can, potentially, become again a powerful nation -- in terms of technology and otherwise. But until then we'll have to live off of tourism.


Telecomunications: Human kind always lived to comunicate, and these days this is truer than ever. With good comunications people can learn faster and work better. And what we call this? Evolution. So, because of this need, the telecomunications concept emerged. My interest for telecomunications resides in the fact that you can really make a better world with it, and that at the same time you can push technology to its limits.

Because of this interest I studied for a degree in this field. Some years ago, i put my hands on approach to the knowledge I gained, so I started working on this area too. Portugal has a lot of very good people, engineers, investigators, etc.. in the field, the problem is allways the money that the companies want to spent. Meanwhile, I'm also undergoing CISCO certification and working as a Systems and Network Administrator.

Talking about systems, one which I have seen coming to life is Linux and, while at that time it might have just been an infant tryings its first insecure steps, today is a very interesting and exciting piece of technology, ready to take on the the world market. It grew well beyond the mere "teen hobby". Even for me.

I'm also very much interested in Security, not only in the CS aspect of finding code faults and bugs and trying to explore them, but also more broadly, behind all life situations in general. There's hacking potential nearly everywhere ;)


Music: Music is my therapy, I really can't imagine my life without it. I listen to music in all kinds of moods, in happyness or in sadness.

I don't play in a band, I can't even play any instrument. I tried the guitar a couple times but, because the guitars were always borrowed from some friend, I didn't have all that time to pratice.

I like all kinds of music, I listen from Pink Floyd to Soulfly, but if I had to choose a band it would be Nirvana. I spent most of my teenage years listening to it, and today it brings back a lot of memories -- unfortunately not all of them are necessarilly good. My internet handle/nickname is NeVErMinD, go figure.


Football: Not much to say here. Like every other portuguese guy I like to kick the football around, as a hobby. But, since I broke my arm couple years ago, things have never been the same.

I'm not an obssessed fanatic, but my team is Sporting Clube de Portugal. I can't explain you why, but since I was a little boy I was "Sportinguista" -- maybe the fact that the club plays home about a mile away from the hospital I was born into may have something to do with it.

As a last remark about professional football, I'll leave you a thought: "How can these people make so much money just from doing this?".


Religion: I don't have any. Does this mean that I don't believe in God? Well, I believe there is something more powerful than human kind, now if you want to call it God or Buddah or Allah, I can respect that -- myself I prefer call it simply "Nature".

If instead of peace religion brings war, than something is fundamentally wrong.

Politics: All the promisses you hear, send them to /dev/null (Yeah, I can make geek jokes too)

Last update: 2004/06