Gracious and graceful

I am reading Miracle, a novel by D. Steel. I ran into some text which was interestingly like having come out of my mouth. Of course, I had to change he's to she's and vice versa in the quote:

"... All he could do was accept the fact that she was gone now, and had chosen to be. It was about acceptance and surrender, and loving someone enough to let them go forever ..."

" ... he would let her go without a murmur, and he had every intention of keeping his promise, no matter how hard for him, or how painful her absence. She was a gift that had come into his life unexpectedly, and when the gift was taken from him, ..., he was going to be both gracious and graceful about it ..."

"... he began to find a sense of peace about what had happened. Instead of looking at the years he wouldn't share with her, he thought of the months he had, what a blessing they had been for him, and how lucky he was to have known her ... He concentrated on gratitude instead of loss ... All he should do now was wish her well, and cherish the memories ..."

Just for the love of dance!

I found this paragraph very interesting in the autobiography of Milton Cobo, who somebody I believe in considers an excellent dancer:

"Since the beginning of his dance career, Milton has thrived on satisfying his partner on the dance floor. Whether she was a beginner, intermediate, or advanced dancer, he wanted to make sure that when the song was over she was fulfilled. His addiction to Salsa has always been tremendous, but his ultimate high/addiction has always come from the sincere look of content gleaming from his partner's smile (thinking to herself, "when will be the next time we dance?")."

Victorious

The battle is not over yet, hell not yet. I don't know If I can call this a battle, its a struggle anyway, there are still work to do, pages to write and people to convince. But it feels soooo good to have such a feeling and to know it will be soon over, victorious:

"I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, his greatest fulfillment of all he holds dear, is the moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious. " -Vince Lombardi

Windows Programming

The last time I did windows programming was for pre-2000 versions, especially windows 95 which was the most stable one. Back then, I used to write VxD's (virtual device driver) to make our high-level application communicate with the data acquisition board we used to design.
Organizing my bookshelves, I run into my books on this topic and got interested to see how the topic has advanced for XP and soon for Vista.
There are quite a bit of websites discussing the issue. I found a wikibook. Also this one seems well-written yet on very basic stuff.

I also found this free win32 full-featured Integrated Development Environment Dev-C++.

Some recent cooking

Some delicious dishes:



1) Pancake (actually Dutch babies): see sort of a good recipe here.








2) Chicken and walnuts in pomegranate sauce ("Fesenjaan")










3) Polenta with shrimp/tomato sauce