Made my day

Today I had to stop by my employer’s HQ which is very close to Alegro, a shopping mall that hosts the very first Portuguese Starbucks.

The good news: it’s exactly like a starbucks latte you’d have anywhere in north America. And there’s some comfort in that.

We, as Portuguese, are by definition coffee snobs and one could argue that Starbucks is not really about coffee but about the whole experience regarding a starbucks. But it’s especially hard for Portuguese people to set foot in a Starbucks, since you can get a latte in any street corner ‘café’ for 90 cents or less and taste higher grade coffee.

Personally it reminds me of Canada and the US. That’s the only reason why I went in there, so hyea, I guess in the end it’s all about the experience, my experience.

State of affairs

There’s a lot happening, and it’s happening fast. There are changes and the inevitable adaptation to these changes. All this has been setting me aside from a bunch of activities that I’m either suppose to be doing and others I wish I had the time to do them.
Okay, so what have I been doing:
I’ve been very busy at work, not always fun stuff. These days not only a Coordinator for an operational team in IPTV network supervision, I’m now waist deep in mobile traffic supervision and route analysis, I’m also juggling a project regarding software development and coordinating a video migration from one standard to another. As if all of this wasn’t a challenge in itself I have the feeling I’m only half way into all of these, like juggling balls, you are never holding more then two at any given time but the difference is, by the time you catch the ball again it has a different texture, weight and size.

It’s a lot of new stuff to learn, since I knew zilch about ISDN networks and zilch about project management.

I’m trying hard to not drop balls.

What I wish I was doing in the mean wile:
I bought a linux based portable console. It’s a 1st generation GP2X, it runs most emulators out there (mame, spectrum, Atari, GNUboy, even apple II ) and the home brew factor is high. I mostly just downloaded stuff freely available from the web, but what I wanted to do was some development for it, I wanted to put to use it’s I/O system and plug it into interesting data output (namely my car). I expect to do a post on the GP2X in the future and if all goes well I’ll keep everyone posted on my home brew stuff.

There’s a service I’ve been musing about developing, it regards video and the internet. It’s pretty unique and I feel it would be really really useful for a really really big crowd of people. There will be no future post about it, if it’s out it’s out, if not…too bad, you’re all in the dark.

I wish I was making more music. It’s now at a full stop. Last thing even remotely connected to my musical work was a document handed to Riccardo about KDE’s sound theme so he could present it at the aKademy.

I should be finding out a way to get mobile internet access at a reasonable price. My operator decided to change the way they charge for GPRS traffic, I used to pay little over 10 euros for a year long of  downloading email via IMAP and Google Talk IM services, now they are charging me 99 cents for 10Mb…a day! They are, at the core of it, pushing me and everyone who depended on GPRS traffic for mobile access into buying an iphone, which in my case is not likely to happen. There will be a post in the future about it, but it will be focusing on the portuguese telco scennario regarding that device.

OpenMoko strikes a chord in me. I want to seriously develop a UI for it. Though I can’t foresee what acceptance it will have, both with endusers (non geeky ones) and telcos.

I should be resting more and taking better care of myself, I’m really not and I’m just expecting the unavoidable tow.

I should be working harder on my certifications. I’m not. There will be a self-pat-on-the-back post when I actually finish any of them.

I should also get a hosting plan and get my blog and all my crap in there. But in all honesty, the stories of lost data and no backups and frozen accounts and crap like that are so common that I can’t get myself to put any effort into it. Worpress.com has always been a zero hassle service, and sure I’d like to use google analytics and have full control over…well…everything on my blog, but…honestly, so much work and not trust the host? I don’t think so.

But there are some things I’d like to share:
I’ve been listening a lot to bluemars.org, one of my favorite sound tracks of all time was from the movie Solaris (and it’s possibly my favorite movie too), bluemars.org has 3 streaming stations that play just that kind of music. Very atmospheric in a space-like-calm.

Awesome collection of tshirts from the UK at 8ball. I’m trying hard not to burn too much money on a bunch of them. Suddenly it feels great to come home and get into my jeans and t-shirt.

Speaking of shopping, if you hate paying for customs when/if you order stuff from thinkgeek.com, you should be glad about these: iwantoneofthose.com and www.getdigital

I’ve been reading the Setup to Fail Syndrome by Manzoni and Barsoux from the Harvard Business School Press. I full heartedly recommend the book.

As time permits I’ll start jotting down the iphone post.

three drops of water, one grain of sand…

I’ve always been somewhat addicted to radio, from age 9 util I my mid teens I’d fall asleep almost everynight scratching on a walkman’s frequency pot hopping from station to station, “fishing” for something I’d like, something that would make me dream (I’ve also been an insomniac for most of my life)…

So it was Saturday morning one day, I woke up after falling asleep on the couch, looked at the coffee table and picked up the walkman…I tweaked by a few stations and ended up on Antena 3 for a minute or so and this song was playing…I went into trance listening to it…I was blown away by the voice, the lyrics, the harmony (a wicked fretless bass on the background) and to my utter desperation that was the last song of the segment, the presenter had said the performer’s name before he played the song (I imagine) and when it was over, it went straight into commercial break, and on with the next show…

So I walked around that day with that song in my head… and all I had gathered from the lyrics was the continuous mention of “lazarus man”. Turns out I didn’t held that song in my head for a day…but for years, more then 10 years. Google never turned out any significant results, as “Lazarus man” is used in far too many lyrics, books, essays to ever come up with a close to accurate result. I had the harmony, the folk guitar main line and that voice in my head sining “I’m Lazarus, man” day in and day out for long enough to become an obssession.

So a week ago I created a last.fm account… I was never to keen on the service, I have all the CD’s I want, and I became rather pretentious and self-obsessed with the music I expose my self to (too much radio? lol)…but never the less I created an account, starting adding stuff to the play list and inevitably I searched for “Lazarus man” (couldn’t hurt!) A gazillion results as always, but on the next tab, for the same search there was this song with that exact name from a guy called Terry Callier, I pressed play. Goose pumps all over…it was it! I recognized that chord sequence my the second chord. So Last.FM had 30 seconds of the damned song…you can’t even hear the voice! but now I had a name, and youtube,once again was able to make me a very very very happy puppy.

here it is, Terry Callier and “Lazarus Man”, live…

okay, now I’m off to amazon… I’ve got a discography to buy.

aaaah vacation work. gotta love it.

I finished up Kollision’s sounds and sent it to the project’s maintainer. He liked them and commissioned sounds for another KDE game called Kbattleship, so that’s up next.

Aside from the oxygen project I’ve been using some sounds I made for my ipaq. I’ll be releasing them tomorrow, in the making is a silly little tutorial on how to get them going on Windows Mobile 5… since MS decided the default sounds were so great and who would ever want to change them???

In between I managed to re-install our home server and I dumped OpenBSD in the process giving FreeBSD a fair chance, tomorrow I’ll finish up configuring the services and by the end of the week I hope to have everything up and running again.

Tomorrow will also be the dreaded Ikea day. I need shelfs, lot’s of shelfs…stuff is piling up in stacks formed by themselves by spontaneous implosion of crap. (honest!)

Also I picked up ‘Blink” by Malcom Gladwell yesterday and I’ve been struggling not to leave everything else behind and finish the book.

so…I suppose that’s my take on “resting”.

Team Building

Last weekend my employer held the usual annual regatta (aka: team building event).

I admit I wasn’t too keen but I’m not in a position within the ranks to find a David Lynch-ian excuse not to go and being, let’s call it “swimming impaired” I felt very strongly about getting in a boat in the middle of a river that if it didn’t kill me by drowning it would sure as hell kill me from toxic ingestion.

To my surprise I absolutely positively loved it.

There’s something about me people don’t usually get, not even my closest friends or even family: there is nothing that puts a smile on my face faster then silence. Complete and utter silence. So there I was, in the middle of the Tagus river and as my team mates decided to venture to the tip of the sailing boat to enjoy the view I stayed back working the …well… things with the ropes and all and for a few minutes just enjoying the wind in the sails and the slight brushing of water against the hull.

It wasn’t a life altering experience, true. But I’ve been feeling much more tiered then usual and it felt like a quick battery recharge (as it will not last, but I’ll keep pounding the drums for a bit longer)

Vacations are coming up about a week from now, I crave a ‘gettaway’ but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

SYN-ACK

Last few days I finished up the IM sounds for Kopete. They are calm and not all that intruding, so there is no justification for turning IM sounds off on KDE 4.

I had a few free hours last Friday and browsed around Lisbon, got my mac it’s long waiting second skin. For anyone interested there is 40% off discount at all sorts of bags at Papelaria Fernandes (at least the one in Rato), there were a few 12″ green ones at that store yesterday that end up at around 14€. They are not really second skins, as they are made of this vinyl like material, but it keeps the ibook tight and there’s some padding on the top and bottom.

Incidently today I discovered that at El Corte Inglês there are some neoprane ones at 17€, which seem like a much better deal on the bang-for-buck ratio.

I actually ended up at Rato because my first stop was at MacZone near Amoreiras. I must say the guy behind the desk was rather rude when I asked for the 12″ inch tucano second skin. I’d imagine someone working at a mac oriented store would have a deeper understanding of the mac user. We love our macs. No matter how old or outdated they are. We love them like we love our pets, our close ones. Is that the kind of guy that makes crack jokes about someone’s pet? it’s offensive. quit it.

On a lighter note: Just back from Ocean’s 13. As enjoyable as the other two. As soon as you see he credits you get this grin on your face…hyea baby, hyea…

And I discovered m.twitter.com which is great for anyone with a PDA with internet connectivity. But I can’t help to wish for a stand-alone application for Windows Mobile. Launching the browser and typing in the address is far too much work for something as frivolous as twitter.

(GTSD) Getting Things Sorta’ Done

Getting a system to get fully organized is a monstuous job in itself.

I’m a half-way GTD implementer, and things aren’t quite clicking yet. Ends up GTD like anything else isn’t a one-size fits all deal like we all wish it was. Every one of us has his/her’s mental intricacies that end up rendering the system not as fool-proof as somewhat promised by the hype. There are a gazillion sites out there about it and some of them are true pearls, productivity and knowledge working seems to be a new and emerging art form.

Gina Trapani has a wonderful shell script that let’s you create action lists based on txt files from the command line with very nice perks. There are .sh and .py versions available and some parsers to create nifty reports based on the txt files.

Pedro Melo created an add-on to Gina’s script that makes the tab key work like it does in the shell, so finding stuff on the files via the shell script is dead-on easy.

…a bit of zen meeting tao.

Txt is clearly the way to go, I’m far too platform independent as an individual to accept anything else. But it’s not enough. At least it doesn’t feel like it’s enough.

I envision a DevonThink sort of system, where I can have this huge e-inbox, with pdf’s, docs, pictures, e-mails, whatever.
Life is 97% electronic with me. I don’t deal well with paper and avoid it at all costs. (there is a devonthink template out here for gtd, but I feel it only addresses the 43 folder aspect of it)

I’m categorizing for the main areas that constitute my life. Unlike strict GTD with all of those @home, @computer, @errands that really wouldn’t do it for me. (Let alone people who meta tag with @computer:email, @computer:research). So I’ve got a few items like @home, @work, @music, everything inside that fall into projects or quick actions.

Right now I end up writing stuff, but it’s all meshed up in a few big-ass lists, which feels like a bubble waiting to burst into organizational chaos. I’m not big on prioritizing, but if I have feel the need to do so I’m also aware that these running list will not the be most practical thing on earth to quickly glance at what’s what.

I could consider using outlook as the main data repository, but I viscerally hate outlook with a vengeance. If it was up to me I’d telnet the server directly to read my mail, if that would keep me from using that ghastly piece of bloat-ware. Man I miss pico.
Much of GTD is about filling, I’ve got that covered with file system folders. It just works if there isn’t much physical items for an inbox.

Anyway you can gather from all this that this isn’t much of an GTD implementation, it’s much more of a “borrowing of concepts” that end up in a big pile of nothing. But this is never the less a journey into getting things done, and sorting things out fast.

I got one thing down: most of the stuff I’m pounded via email, im or whatever has a clear and automatic priority/context scenario and until those two factors merge they are @hold. That provides me at least with the peace of mind to deal with current and pressing issues and gives me time to eventually get to whatever just fell on my lap.

Quitting a job, embracing another…

It’s all about the journey, isn’t it? because that’s the only way I can justify everytime I pack my backpack and leave a job. Things start as projects and soon enough turn into mundane tasks as the project ends and the maintenance beggins, that seems to be my trigger to leave. The money bar is rising, sure, but its honestly not about that. I tend to get discomfortable with…well…comfort. I hate it! I hate the mere thought of it. I like t stay on my toes and challange myself on daily basis.

that’s the only way I can justify quitting a job as SysOp in a bank.

other then that I’m mostly insane and dementia creeps with quick bursts and a sounding woosh.

I’m embracing a new job in the telco business, and as big big international players enter the 4play business model (yes, I still giggle at that term), here in rural downtown portugal everyone’s excited about triple-play (yes, triple play before 4play…interesting, no?). I’m venturing into a team of admins, my life will be less techie and more bureaucratic (don’t know how to react to that yet), impelementing sla’s, meetings, excel spreadsheets and stuff that never caught my attention in the past will now be my daily late annema.

we’ll see how it all turns out.

this will be my last week staring at my dell workstation. I can’t say i’ll miss it…or my desk at all. My last week of a desk filled with other people’s crap, that I anally try to keep spotless. I hope it’s my last week in an openspace working environment. but on another side…it’s my last week with great people I loved working with for the past few years. I’ll surely miss IBM’s team, our internet security officer, our absent network admin’s weird sense of humor, our raging screaming-out-of-her-lungs director, alas… there’s always something to be grateful for leaving, and human relations to regret losing. the last day is always a rollercoster, that inevitably ends up with one holding his emotions by the hair, trying hard not to go drama-queen on yourself.

It’s all about the journey…either that or about building a strong case for a life-long supply of precription prozac.