Personal Log

After going to work on monday, I took the rest of the week as vacations. I had lot's of thoughs of what to do in this days, and despite not having done lot's of things on the mental list (like finaly visiting "Livraria Trama" or "Discoselecção", two Lisbon stores I'm planing paying a visit to for a while now, or Cascais' lighthouses), it was a fulfilling time in many ways. I also took the time to do some things I constantly want to do but lack the time for it, like watching some movies (I count eight for the vacations, until now) and series, doing some research on various topics, reading some papers, reading an awsome design magazine (this month's issue was about "music packaging design", and there wasn't a single uninteresting article in it!), buying a couple of books and reading some others.

Lately I've been having some job purposals - some more formal than others - and while lots of them were to get me involved in some thrilling projects, I'm writing this to state a curious thing: most people seem not to understand my thrill in working at Sonaecom. There's this weird idea people have that big companies only have boring jobs: in the tecnological field people seem to assume that the only jobs there are is those of "code monkeys" (in the concept that describe those as "don't think, write" kind of coding jobs). Well, I'm not even working as a coder at Sonaecom, but most of all, I don't agree with the assumption that there are no cool/"mind thrilling" jobs at big companies. If these same people think (I assume, but I might be wrong here) that there are thrilling jobs at big companies like Google or Yahoo!, why shouldn't they assume that are cool jobs in - in this case - big Portuguese companies? Besides, there's a factor that for some isn't a plus but for me it is: the scale factor. In Sonaecom I'm not liding with a couple of costumers, I'm working with lot's and lot's of them. If you factor the number of affected clients buy the enhancement you just did... Even a small thing can cause great impact. And that's thrilling - for me. All in all, it's great to have doors open, and it's great to see that, if I wanted to, I could jump from my job and get a thrilling (perheaps even better) one more or less easily. But I'm very pleased with the job I have now, and I have no intentions of changing jobs soon.

As you might have noticed (perheaps because I think I've mentioned this in my last blog posts), I've been blogging a lot less. This doesn't mean nothing - really - I'm just spending my time doing other things. I still consider myself as a blogger and I don't think that will change. But my perception about blogs or blogging might have been changing in the last few months. I've been, for instance, reflecting on the "blogs as wiki's" idea for a while. Also, since I found myself involved with "new" concepts like microblogging or lifestream, I started to realize various uses and ways to use these tools (both the "new" ones and the "old" blog). For instance, I believe that if I were to track each visitor on this blog and profile him, I would reach the conclusion that the person that uses this blog the most, in most various ways and for several different purposes, is me. And that made me, once again, reinforce my position of "blogging to myself". To give you an example, this blog entry will help me remember that I want to pay a visit to Trama or Discoselecção, the same way I just used my cellphone and this blog to see the list of cellphones I'm considering buying earlier today, or the way I used the search tool of this blog to remember the link to a Web 2.0 service I wrote about, and that I wanted to use yesterday.

Finaly, there are some things I should have done and I didn't this vacations. I still have to finish my work on the release of Merankorii's latest album "A Viagem" (from which, I'm happy to say, the packaging was a success, making me sell a couple of CD's just because of it), dedicate once again some time to the organization of "Tecnonov 2008", a Technology and Innovation conference I'm organizing and that will happen in April, and some Noori Records work (which will bring you some news). Yet, I don't think I'll dedicate the rest of my vacations to this issues, and instead will enjoy the time reading - basicly.

Getting time for your personal projects

This post was written yesterday night, but I'm only publishing it now. Check here to know why, and to understand why does it have so few links.

José Marques asked in his blog how the hell did we, developers, had time to have our own personal projects.

I liked the question, and I'll not only answer but I also hope to see other answers to the question...

I'll give five hints on how to do it (I could spend all night going on it, but, at least for now, only these), but first I'll have to do a small disclaimer:

Disclaimer

I live by myself. I don't have a wife or kids, not a beloved one with whom I live. If I had, probably my tips would be totally different.

1) Get a thrilling job

If you have a bad job, you'll do nothing but whine the whole day, while dealing with it, and then go home, tired. On the other hand if you have a thrilling job, and one you like, then it will be natural for you to have ideas growing by themselves in your head while you're working. You'll learn new stuff, do new things, and think, think, think. And, for you to have a personal project, you'll certainly have to do some thinking.

2) Impose yourself some restrictions

This is somewhat vague. By restrictions I also mean other things, like... "milestones", if you will. I'll give you some examples. One of the things most people can't understand in my lifestyle is why, being a techie, do I refuse to have internet at home. Well, I know what I would do if I had an internet connection at home... But I also know what I wouldn't. I already spend the daywatch working, connected to the Internet. So, by choosing not to install an internet connection at home, I'm only restricting its use in the rest of the day, which gives me more time to do other stuff.

Another restriction I have is that I simply don't watch TV. It's not only throwing away time, but I believe it also makes you dumber. No, thanks.

On the "milestones" theme, I allways set up some milestones I'm way too sure I'm going to be able to achieve. For 2006 I had some ridiculous ones, and for this year they aren't much better: mainly I decided to separate "culture" in five areas: music, movies, books, theatre, others. I've setted up that I need to do something for that list once a month. I have one .txt for each one where I keep track of things: the status now at this moment is:

[marado@lemuria][21:21:07]
[~/2007]>wc -l *
   7 filmes.txt
   3 livros.txt
  16 musica.txt
   8 outros.txt
   1 teatro.txt
  35 total
[marado@lemuria][21:22:17]
[~/2007]>

meaning that this year I've watched 7 movies, read 3 books, purchased 16 CD's, went once to se a play and did 8 other cultural things (I include there things such as participating on Tecnonov or going to a museum). The total gives me 35 things for 5 lists, meaning 7 things per list, meaning stuff for 7 months made in 2. Of course that I don't really need these milestones in any way, but they help me keeping track on hows my life. I use several schemes like these for various purposes.

3) Get a relaxed job

So, I've talked about the need of a thrilling job, and about some restrictions I setted up for myself including no internet connection at home (either than my cellphone). So, how come I blog so much? Easy - I have what I'm here calling a "relaxed job". I have a job where I have to do my work, but that lets me take time to read news on the web, blog, or whatever lets me take some time to relax. If I want to do something like yesterday (a migration of one service from one server to another, trying to cause the minimum downtime possible), even knowing that it will take me one hour or so of my job... there's nothing wrong with it. Having a relaxed job also makes me spend a lot more time there than the usual eight hours per day, and I feel that it enhances my productivity job-wise and also gives me a better mindset to have my own crazy ideas, and have my own personal projects.

4) Choose your media

Choose the right tools to enhance your productivity. Choose the right way for you to communicate, to gather information, to develop ideas, to keep track of them and your own pet projects, optimize your life.

My choises are, between others, e-mail, talkers, IM only for work-related stuff, my own planet that I read in a browser (via PC or cellphone), GoPlan and lot's of others. I think this is really important, even into the step of choosing the right music player for you.

5) Get a life

The last one, and still not technichal at all... Get a life. Whatch some movies, read the news, have friends, do some expensive dinners as excuse to taste good wine, grab some books, go for a walk, live. When your notice, your mind is racing with thrilling ideas, and even when you're sleeping you're dreaming for a way to solve that problem you noticed you had in your dream two days ago.

And now, excuse me, I have a three articles to read and some coding to do before going to sleep.

Busy times

Hi there...

As you might have noticed with the lack of blog posts, and with the fact that the last ones were only sets of links, I'm really busy (and tired) lately.

I'm thinking about buying a house in Lisbon, so every second of free time is being spent in that search. Infrutiferous, until now, Lisbon is way to expensive, sellers try to decieve buyers, and the only possibilities so far is the "house I can't afford nr.33" and the "older than my granny, bad located" one. Which is a nice way to say that I still found no good possibilities.

I also found out that my laptop's sound card suck terribly. Only five months after having it, monday I noticed that there's a lot of useful stuff I could do with my "Built-in AC’97 compliant audio chip" on my Asus M3N that I can't do with my "HP Premier SoundTM 16 bit sound" on my "HP Compaq nc6220". Bah to HP. I might set up a new hard drive on my onld laptop, just to use its sound card to do some stuff for my musical project...

Changes at work. While still being at Sonaecom IT, on the ISP area, I'm not a coder anymore, to be a services architect. I thought that this "switching period" would be hard, finishing loose strings in the previous position and starting with the new stuff, but the everything is being cool. I think this is great, and if I already liked my job, the new stuff is a lot more appealing and I'm quite sure it will fit well into me.

I've been reading some stuff and having some conversations regarding virtual worlds lately. This is a topic that I've allways, since a kid, found interesting, and I'm eagering to get some time to regulary do some work on the field. But, until then, there are still some things I would like to concentrate about: maintain Selva (I have some stuff to do there, somewhat urgent), maintain Portugal Virtual (the machine is going to be replaced and I have to prepare the migration ASAP), do some work on PyTalker (a new version, v0.2.0, is on the works and I want to release it probably today, but I have to do some tweaking on its website first), on Mamnuts (I want to finish that friggin' thing as soon as possible to stop worry about it), on Second Life (lots to be done to the current open source client, so I can then fork it for my own purposes) and on gnunet-chat (I really wanted to keep updated to its development and architecture decisions, trying to avoid a later fork).

So, as you see, I think I have some excuses for the lack of updates here!

Now, for your sake, here's a new batch of interesting links:

• A Portuguese video on DRM;
• http://drm-pt.info/ is a website in Portuguese about DRM;
• How to explain DRM to your dad;
• Macrovision on DRM - translated;
• Reality - a Twisted product, still with no releases, that I should check for PyTalker v0.3;
• UK on DRM.