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.

Tech events in Portugal

Portugal is not that poor in Tech events. Even today I informed a couple of people about WIDM 2007 (Lisbon, November 9), and others about OTM 2007 (Vilamoura, November 25-30). I, myself, am planning to attend to BarCamp Portugal 2007 (Coimbra, September 1-2), I Fórum de Software Livre de Lisboa (Lisbon, October 12-13), and SHiFT 2007 (Lisbon, date tba).

Yet, it allways felt that something was wrong in Portugal. But things in Portugal were awful for a big load of time. The best events were academic, the others were purely commercial. Things evolved over time, specially because we started seeing another kind of events happening, like Minho Campus Party, and people started to realize that we needed more relaxed events in Portugal, like the ones we were craving to go in other countries.

Things started changing, specially in the last year: we had our first BarCamp and SHiFT, both inspiring the first Tecnonov and the first Takeoff. There are also some regular meetings: both the Perl community and the Ruby comminity have them, for instance.

Today Vitor wrote about OpenCoffee in Lisbon. For those not knowing, the OpenCoffee Club is an idea somewhat simmilar to that of a BarCamp, but this time we're talking about a regular, open and informal meeting place for people involved in startups to meet. A first attempt was made, but the results weren't that good, because it wasn't good enough to beat the procrastination that fell over the organization, so what was supposed to be a weekly meeting never saw #2. Celso Pinto gave his oppinion about Vitor's comments, but I think we're missing the point here, we should instead think about what is failing, what needs to change, and how to do it. First, I think that there are lot's of interested people in this in Portugal, but not only in Lisbon. Changing OCL to OCP (OpenCoffee Portugal) would be a nice step. The other thing is that I don't think there's that much of an attraction for this kind of event to make it be weekly. I still think that monthly is good enough. There are already a number of monthly events I'm interested in, but usually I go to none of them: they're in a weekday. I know of others that think the same way. A solution is to make them during a friday or a saturday. Also, instead of the thipical rule of "every first week of a month", we should avoid conflit of events, with an allways changing week. But the most important thing, IMHO, instead of a rigid schedule we should have "date discussions" on the mailing list.

For now, my idea is that one issue of this meetings (maybe #2?) should happen in the upcoming BarCamp, where we would surely find lot's of interested people. There we could not only have "an OCLOCP meeting", but also discuss how could be make it work. It would be awsome to have more stuff like these happening...

Predicting the tech-future

Following my yesterday's post about predictions of the tech-future (one predicted a Dystopian world controlled by Linden Labs in 2016, the other an overall controll of the tech-world by Google in 2017), now here's a link to an article talking about an upcoming paper that represents the result of a summit and they will "define/predict" a "metaverse roadmap". Yes, I know, having a bunch of folks in the industry "decide" a roadmap for such a thing is, well... ahem, anyway, the article is quite interesting, and gives us some food for thoughts. They predict that we'll have such a world and metaverse (first self, second self and mixed self) in 10 years from now (2017). They think that the upcoming tech-world is going to have four basic metaverse kinds:

• dubbed augmented reality
• lifelogging
• virtual worlds
• mirror worlds

For starts, I really don't think that you can apply the world metaverse for any of those items but the third: virtual worlds. The concept of metaverse appeared with the excelent book "Snow Crash", and defines a Virtual World with certain characteristics, but it is a virtual world.

But let's talk about those four items there.

Dubbed augmented reality is a concept where technology enables you to have an allways-persent body-widget that lets you know more about the reality that envolves you. Think about Plazes on steroids, in a allways-present device (like the eye-screening we see on GiTS), that enables you to have any kind of info about where you are, realtime. You can enhance the concept and think about stuff like getting info about people as you look at them and that sort of stuff. Possible? Yes, even probable, but that isn't a Metaverse, it makes me recall more other aspects in Snow Crash...

Like lifelogging. Remember that guys on Snow Crash that did something like wearing a full-body gadget-suit that was used to stream images into the future version of YouTube? Well, consider that lifeblogging with a little of the previous item (correlation between video footage and the people in that footage, and stuff like that).

On virtual worlds, it seems that what's been talked is about a more immersive version of Second Life, as the previous predictions also talked about. On a side note, while the previous prediction talked about Linden Labs (the company behind Second Life) buying google, in this event the general ideas were on whether would Google create GoogleOS and Microsoft would buy Linden Labs, positioning Google as the developing mega-softwarehouse with the future of Operating Systems, and Microsoft as less a technological company and more like a big pocket of money available to investiment, which isn't really surprising if you notice that we have really nothing innovative from Microsoft for years (the Wow from Vista is a big pile of FUD about a defective Operating System with nothing innovative compared to the alternatives). I intend to write soon more about my own visions of the future of Virtual Worlds real soon. And no, I don't believe that Second Life will turn into the "final and perfect VW", as much as I don't think that WOW (not Vista's Wow but World of Warcraft) is to be the ultimate MMORPG. Oh, and the nobody-knows-what-this-is extremely-hiped areae isn't going to have persistence, which is a big no-no for me (even if I usually agree with his vision on VW's.

Last but not least mirror worlds, which makes me remembers this list of Games on Google Maps. Mirror worlds are defined as virtual worlds like ours, with places like ours: a real representation of the "first world" but where people are only virtually, without meshing virtual with real people. I really don't see this happening unless you're trying to do something like Idlewild.

The final article is yet to be released, but I'll surelly be a reader of it.

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.