For the lazy impatient...

...here's my Twitter bio (in <160 characters): cape verde(an), computer graphics student, hopelessly perfectionist, nerdy geek, knowledge thirsty, utopian dreamer, code indentation maniac, wiki addict.

My life in 3 ½ paragraphs

My name is Waldir Spencer Pimenta Lima (it's read 'Valdir').

I was born in Leningrad, Russia (today's Saint Petersburg), on February 16, 1986. I'll spare you the math: that makes me 27 years old as of now. We were two, by the way: my twin sister Viviane was also born that day (before me, so yeah she's slightly older).

I'm not Russian though, as you might be thinking right now. Both my parents are Cape Verdean, and so am I. In fact, I left Russia when I was 4 months old, so I don't remember anything from there, let alone speak Russian (in case you were wondering). I learned some Cyrillic though — For instance, my name in Cyrillic is written Валдир.

So I grew up and lived in Cape Verde until 2004, when I came to Portugal, to start my undergraduate education in computer graphics and multimedia, in Viana do Castelo. After I finished, in 2008, I decided to go for a master's degree, so right now I am a student at Universidade do Minho, in Braga, specializing in computer graphics and intelligent systems.

Interests

As I said in an intro, I am kind of a geek, so my hobbies don't include many popular stuff like football or television (yes, I prefer the Internet to TV). I've always loved to read and I do write some things myself, mostly essays. Some of these have been published either on my blog, Pensatorium, or in my column in the Cape Verdean magazine Artiletra.

For entertainment, I enjoy music, and have been learning to play the guitar for a while, by myself and mostly by ear (so don't ask me to play a G# minor, whatever that means!), and also I like cinema a lot (some quick reviews I wrote can be found on Flixter). As for video games, thankfully my parents were clever enough to not give me a fancy console when I was a kid, since I get addicted very easily. By now I'm safe, thanks to the resulting lack of playing ability!

Other, geekier hobbies I have include contributing to Wikipedia (since 2005), collecting stamps (though I haven't touched my collection for almost a year now), and amateur mapmaking (Really amateur: I used to trace maps by hand, just for fun, until I found OpenStreetMap).