Category: Personal

Posted on

Adjustments

I’ve been unemployed for a week now and it’s mostly been about adjusting to a new, different, routine. Here’s a list of some of the adjustments I had to make:

  • Making my own food – I’ve mostly been eating pre-made grilled chicken I buy at the supermarket, salad and whole rice, which I make in the new rice cooker I got as a gift. Luckily I don’t mind eating the same thing for long periods of time so it works for now. At some point, though, I’ll have to learn how to make other foods.
  • Running outside – this one isn’t easy. I still run early in the morning and currently the temperatures are pretty low. I have a route of a little under 11km, which I complete in one hour – almost the same as when I used to run in the gym.
  • Riding around on a bicycle – after many many years I’m riding a bicycle again. It’s not too bad, apart from the fact that I have to ride slower than I would have liked to avoid sweating.
  • Using public transport – for the longer distances I’ve started using the train, buses and taxis. The train is the most comfortable, as I can use my netbook and time flies. Buses and taxis pretty much suck, but I get along.
  • Giving up Diet Coke – my mild addiction to Diet Coke had to be stopped. From time to time I can still drink some, for example if I’m going to a restaurant, but generally I switched to tap water.

This is just off the top of my head. Getting up in the morning and “going to work” in my own desk at home also feels a bit unnatural. But it’s all about adjusting, and I think that after just one week I’m doing OK.

Posted on

Happy Birthday To Me. I’m 34

I’m 34 and it’s time for the yearly look back.

It was a year of starting and ending relationships. I’ve had some great moments of happiness along with big disappointments. Right now I’m happy and hoping to stay that way.

It was a year of travelling. I visited Paris and Berlin (same trip), Athens, Slovenia and Croatia (same trip), Switzerland and the US. I traveled more than I did during my trip around the world in 2009.

It was another year of Prodigy concerts. I went to a total of 3 concerts (two in Paris, one in Athens) with friends, which is even better than going alone – it’s an experience I love to share. My count of Prodigy concerts now stands on 12. Considering they’ve been around for 20 years, I think I still have some catching up to do :)

And finally, it was a year of tough career decisions. After working nearly 5 years in the same place I decided to quit and go on my own way, starting in a week’s time. It’s not easy giving up the comfort and security of being a hire in favor of an independent road, but I think it’s time to give it a try.

All in all, it was a year to remember. I can only hope for a similarly exciting 35th year.

Posted on

Dindy One Month After Turning Free

Sometimes you have to experience something to really learn a lesson. I heard before about the Hershey’s Kiss experiment and the vast difference between dirt cheap and free, but I had to see it with my own eyes.

Before Dindy was free it cost 0.80 USD and I had around one download per day for a little over a year. Now, after making it free, Dindy gets downloaded 50 times every day. So in one month it went up from 366 to 1924 downloads with 784 active installs (40%.) Dindy’s rating remains around the same (4.25 out of 5), which is good.

Users are offering good enhancements and I’m trying to keep them happy. In the past I refused to do reply-to-SMS in Dindy because Google removed SMS capturing and reading from the API in the first Android release and, for some strange reason, never brought it back. So while it’s still possible to read SMS messages programmatically there’s no official support and applications using it may break at any time. Now that Dindy is free I don’t mind adding it and the next update will probably have reply-to-SMS (the texter will get a message telling him/her to call in order to make the phone wake up from silent.)

I put up a donation button on Dindy’s website but so far I got no donations. I’m still considering a donation button inside the app.

Posted on

Idea: “Messages For Me”

This is an old school web 1.0 idea I had over the weekend. It’s very simple: let’s say you want to leave a message for someone, anonymously or not. You go into the website, put in the person’s email address and the message. The person doesn’t receive any notification about this, and can only see his/her messages if they go to the website and enter their email address. That’s it.

What is it good for? With all the connectivity among people and now that every website has “social” features, there’s no way for a simple “message in a bottle” kind of a gesture in today’s Internet.

Like I said… old school.

Posted on

Omar Rodriguez Lopez Group – どういたしまして

I’ve been a fan of The Mars Volta for quite some time now. While waiting for their upcoming (6th studio) album, I listen to one of Omar Rodriguez Lopez (The Mars Volta’s dictator) albums. Rodriguez Lopez has been releasing many (free to listen) albums lately, that are very different in style and sound. The latest one, which I really like, is a live recording called どういたしまして (“You’re Welcome” in Japanese).

(This post contains an embedded player. If you’re using an RSS reader you might not be able to see it)

Posted on

Dindy Is Now Free

After over a year of selling Dindy, without much success, I finally made it free. In that year 366 people downloaded Dindy, 105 (28%) kept it on their device, 74 cancelled their order (to get the refund) and 187 paid for it and later on uninstalled it without getting their money back.

Dindy’s rating in the market is 4.26/5, which is pretty good. I hope it will keep this rating now that it’s free. Well, first it has to be downloaded :) I want to see what will come out of it. If it will be popular, I’ll add the option to donate money.

Posted on

Leaving IBM

I’ve decided to leave IBM. After 2 years in Diligent Technologies and over 2.5 years as an IBMer following Diligent’s acquisition, and considering I wasn’t pursuing an IBM career that will last many years to come, it was definitely time for me to go.

I’ll be an IBMer until January 31st, 2011. In Diligent-IBM I worked with many great and smart people. As part of my work on ProtecTIER, Diligent-IBM’s award winning Virtual Tape Library product, I learned a lot about high-performance, high-availability systems programming in Linux. My main contributions were to the cluster version of the product and most recently to ProtecTIER’s OpenStorage (OST) implementation. I believe ProtecTIER is a great product that can bring tremendous value to customers and I’m proud to have been part of its development.

My next step is a joint project with a good friend. A garage start-up of sorts. I can’t say much about it, only that while it’s not the greatest idea in the whole wide world, I think it can be a successful venture. I expect to be unemployed for about a year :)

Wish me luck.