I thought it was time to change the look and feel of this blog. Well, it’s done. And I’ve gone as minimalistic as possible.
By the way, no more comments. At all. Ever again. I’ve had enough of spam, hatred, flame wars, and idiots of any kind. For those who played the game, thanks for reading and commenting in a constructive way.
A happy life to all of you.
I snapped the picture above yesterday evening, watching the riots in South Croydon, London, on a British TV channel called Sky News. Someone in charge of the programming thought appropriate to broadcast that event (literally) in parallel with the closing bell in Wall Street.
And when I say appropriate, I weight my words; answering my own question, I have to say that no, it is not a joke; it is sadly the way the world works.
After all my trouble with air travel, I thought I should add some positive views here. And they all turned to be around the iPad, so here they go.
The iPad is a better inflight entertainment system because…
‘Nuff said.
Here’s an update of the current status of my “one language per year” lifelong initiative:
The trend has roughly been an evolution from procedural during the 90′s, to object-oriented ones at the beginning of the 2000′s, and finally to functional languages right now.
And thus I realize, I’ve been programming for 20 years this year, 15 of which for a living.
Volviendo de Sudafrica con Clau, hicimos escala en Dubai, esa ciudad mitica, la que surgió en el desierto en solo 20 años, la del rascacielos mas alto del mundo, y que se yo cuantos superlativos mas. Lo que vimos en 10 horas ahí es algo imperdible.
He aquí la anécdota: la cosa era que nuestra escala era de 11 horas; llegamos de Durban a las 5 de la mañana, y el vuelo para Zurich era a las 4 de la tarde, así que apenas aterrizamos nos buscamos la manera de salir del (inmenso) aeropuerto de Dubai, y conocer un poco la ciudad.
Lo complicado de tal emprendimiento fue que Claudia posee un pasaporte boliviano, el cual requiere visas para entrar a varios países del mundo, incluyendo los Emiratos Arabes Unidos (donde se encuentra, justamente, Dubai). Así que fue medio tanteando la cosa que nos acercamos al mostrador de Emirates (la linea aérea) que nos dijo que, pagando lo que se debe (unos 50 dólares) no hay problema.
Dubai es el reino de la guita, y se nota hasta en estos detalles. Cabe aclarar que Clau no tuvo tal problema en Sudafrica, que es uno de los pocos países de Africa que permite el ingreso de ciudadanos bolivianos sin drama ni visa alguna. Gracias Nelson! Continue reading
2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.
Definitely one of the most useful videos I’ve seen in a while. Having to deal with clients in a regular basis, I can’t deny there is a great deal of common sense in it.
In my personal case, I do not do any client work without a contract in place, ever. I found it helps streamline the communication and the collaboration with the client, removing uncertainty and concerns upstream, instead of downstream. So far I haven’t encountered any client who didn’t want to have a contract in place; most usually we go through several revisions, depending on their legal team’s requirements or some other detail that has to be reviewed. But I’ve had people not respecting them. That’s another problem altogether.
I admit, however, that my contract model is far from perfect. And that’s where this video comes in handy. In particular, the “intellectual property transfer on last payment” part is the most interesting one for me; I’ve had payment problems in the past, even after an application was published on the app store, and I positively know that I do not want such problems in the future.
I hate flying. I hate airplanes. I hate airlines. I hate crews. I hate ground handling teams. I hate everything that has to do with that shit. Deeply. Disturbingly. Profoundly.
I hate the way you airlines cram hundreds of people into the smallest of spaces. Do you really think my femur fits the distance between your seats? Do you really think I enjoy being pushed sideways for hours by my seat neighbor because the armrest is too narrow for the both of us? Do you really think I can eat my meal when the seat in front of me is in the horizontal position? Do you really think I can’t avoid numb legs and feet during long flights? Do you really think I can go to the toilets without waking up all the people in the row in front of me or my neighbors?
I hate how long boarding and getting out of the damn plane takes. Haven’t you noticed that airplanes usually have more than one door? Then why the fuck are all 380 passengers of a 747 getting into the plane though the same, unique, small door? Can’t you design airports that take that into account? Can’t you, jetty makers, airport designers, add an extension to boarding gates that goes above the wing or below the tarmac so that we can all get in and out through several doors at once? Continue reading
When I was a student in university, I used to work in Geneva Airport, aka GVA, as a part-time luggage handling employee, an “auxiliaire” as we were called, in a now extinct company once called Swissair.
The job consisted mostly of waiting for the airplanes to park near the gate, open the cargo bays, offload whatever there was inside them, and reload them with more luggage, cargo boxes and mail bags. After that, we would close the cargo bays and stay clear of the engine ranges until the plane left the gate. Rinse and repeat. That was my routine, 4 hours a day, 3 to 5 days a week, from August 1995 until December 1997. Continue reading
A couple of months ago I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine, who happens to be a close business partner in many different ventures. During this conversation, one of his phrases, probably the simplest of all, struck me and stayed in my mind:
“Business is about giving and receiving”.
Now, don’t get me started on that chapter of “Friends”, where Joey writes a speech to celebrate Chandler and Monica’s wedding, and all he can come up with is a series of “giving and having and sharing and receiving” phrases. Stay with me; I will try to elaborate on this point. Continue reading
If there’s only one good thing we could take from the global grounding of planes all over Europe, it might as well be the possibility to enjoy traveling again. Even recognizing that the airline industry has been able to dramatically cut costs and times of travel, one can’t deny the fact that it has done nothing to increase the pleasure of traveling. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.
To put it elegantly, traveling by plane is a pain in the neck. In the 90′s it wasn’t better, but at least the Twin Towers were still standing in their place and there wasn’t a new “terrorist threat” every year or so, making the life of the rest of the travelers an ongoing misery.
Taking a plane exposes you to a staggering amount of things that can go wrong, from the most complex to the most ridiculous. They keep on telling us that traveling is the most secure way to travel, but they say nothing about the ever smaller and more uncomfortable seats, about the shitty food they keep on serving and the increasing number of destinations they keep on sending our luggage, more often than not exactly the opposite one we are going to. Without mentioning the amount of cancelled flights without warning, the non-guaranteed connections, the unbelievably ridiculous schemes of ticket pricing (why a return ticket is cheaper than a one-way is beyond me) and the oh so many other things that make air travel an utterly miserable experience.
Oh, but it is the most secure way of traveling. Yeah, right. Continue reading