HAAHahaHA I ran into this...

  Looking for other people's experience regarding to finish working for your company, I found a forum site with only complains about one company: DELL
  There, I found a thread that almost made me piss my pants...  enjoy:


Dear Co-Workers and Managers,

As many of you probably know, today is my last day. But before I leave, I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what a great and distinct pleasure it has been to type "Today is my last day." For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support. Words cannot express my gratitude for the words of gratitude you did not express.


I would especially like to thank all of my managers both past and present but with the exception of the wonderful Mr. ABC: in an age where miscommunication is all too common, you consistently impressed and inspired me with the sheer magnitude of your misinformation, ignorance and intolerance for true talent. It takes a strong man to admit his mistake - it takes a stronger man to attribute his mistake to me.

Over the past seven years, you have taught me more than I could ever ask for and, in most cases, ever did ask for. I have been fortunate enough to work with some absolutely interchangeable supervisors on a wide variety of seemingly identical projects - an invaluable lesson in overcoming daily tedium in overcoming daily tedium in overcoming daily tedium.

Your demands were high and your patience short, but I take great solace knowing that my work was, as stated on my annual review, "meets expectation." That is the type of praise that sends a man home happy after a 10 hour day, smiling his way through half a bottle of meets-expectation-scotch with a meets-expectation-cigar. Thanks [ ]!

And to most of my peers: even though we barely acknowledged each other within these office walls, I hope that in the future, should we pass on the street, you will regard me the same way as I regard you: sans eye contact.

But to those few souls with whom I've actually interacted, here are my personalized notes of farewell:

To [ ], I will not miss hearing you cry over absolutely nothing while laying blame on me and my coworkers. Your racial comments about [ ] were truly offensive and I hope that one day you might gain the strength to apologize to him.

To [ ] whom is long gone, I hope you find a manager that treats you as poorly as you have treated us. I worked harder for you then any manager in my career and I regret every ounce of it. Watching you take credit for my work was truly demoralizing.

To [ ], you should learn how to keep your mouth shut sweet heart. Bad mouthing the innocent is a negative thing, especially when you’re talking about someone who knows your disgusting secrets.

To [ ], well, I wish you had more of a back bone. You threw me to the wolves with that witch B and I learned all too much from it. I still can't believe that after following your instructions, I ended up getting written up, wow. Thanks for the experience buddy, lesson learned.

[ ], I'm happy that you were let go in the same manner that you have handed down to my dedicated coworkers. Hearing you on the phone last year brag about how great bonuses were going to be for you fellas in upper management because all of the lay offs made me nearly vomit. I never expected to see management benefit financially from the suffering of scores of people but then again, with this company's rooted history in the slave trade it only makes sense.

To all of the executives of this company, [ ] and such. Despite working through countless managers that practiced unethical behavior, racism, sexism, jealousy and cronyism, I have benefited tremendously by working here and I truly thank you for that. There was once a time where hard work was rewarded and acknowledged, it's a pity that all of our positive output now falls on deaf ears and passes blind eyes. My advice for you is to place yourself closer to the pulse of this company and enjoy the effort and dedication of us "faceless little people" more. There are many great people that are being over worked and mistreated but yet are still loyal not to those who abuse them but to the greater mission of providing excellent customer support. Find them and embrace them as they will help battle the cancerous plague that is ravishing the moral of this company.

So, in parting, if I could pass on any word of advice to the lower salary recipient ("because it's good for the company") in India or Tampa who will soon be filling my position, it would be to cherish this experience because a job opportunity like this comes along only once in a lifetime.

Meaning: if I had to work here again in this lifetime, I would sooner kill myself.

To those who I have held a great relationship with, I will miss being your co-worker and will cherish our history together.

Please don't bother responding as at this very moment I am most likely in my car doing 85 with the windows down.

One!

WC WC WC !!!!

  I just cannot think of a better month than the World Cup month...   I assume that the 4 years frequency adds more anxiety to everybody who likes to watch soccer.
  But in the US the sport it's still not as big as it should...  we need timeouts, beer and popcorn instead of coffee, peanuts and bad calls by the refs ?

 It's just a cultural difference, maybe...  maybe the always-increasing latin population will push the sport as they have done with religion and consumer tendencies....  

 Soccer is and will be one of the most passionate, emotional and complete experiences and that's why no superbowl or playoff will ever match it. There is a Chilean journalist which comments at ESPN in spanish, he always starts the games saying something like: "welcome to 90 minutes of the most beautiful sport in the world" ... ditto

     
   

Stuck with postgres 8.4

I am setting up my old PS3 with ubuntu in order to be my PPC server for my entrepreneurial adventures.

After upgrading from 9.04 to the always annoying karmic koala ( :P ) , I could not find the postgis modules I need so after a few drinks and a late night of playing around I ended up with postgres 8.3 and 8.4 in my server.... 

I almost set up the server again because I could not remove the postgres 8.4 packages due to some manual removal of files (I know I'm dumb, you don't have to remind me). Lucky shot, I found this thread over the ubuntu forums where another asshole did something similar hahahahaha

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1415362

 enjoy

Decision Engine ?

I just check the new ad the guys from Microsoft made to promote Bing (their search engine) and I cannot deny that is catchy...

It is not a search engine...  it's a decision engine... Huge difference and attacks directly google's over flooding their users with worthless links and corrupted page-rank values based on dummy websites.

On my view, perception + user needs are going to be the most important things to predict in order to provide the best searching experience (let's not forget the valuable and highly traceable info that we generate...)

Summary,  do not search for hardcore porn with your logged account !!!!  ahahahaha 

WOW

estaba twitteando un mensaje para una iniciativa paralela y me encontre con la siguiente imagen.... demas que estan buscando soluciones para sus bases de datos...

The best universal remote control

I am strugglin' with too many electronic appliances and gadgets... to me that's a blessing. Nevertheless, for regular human beings, to have to control more than 1 or 2 remote controls is so complicated that they rather stick to the books.... what a shame.

So I have been looking for a good universal remote control which allows me to control at least the following devices.:

• My brand new (thanks to castroooooo !!! ) Ps3
• Yamaha 5.1 receiver
• Motorola / Comcast cable box
• Philips LCD

In addition to this support, the ability to create macros would be a nice detail too.... let's add that to the 2do list.
So there are some high end alternatives, but since I am cheap and poor (bad combination) I am not willing to spend more than what I have to for this...
With all the pain in my wallet, I thought about getting a logitech harmony 1100, which has an extra device which allows you to control the PS3 (overall ~360 USD) .
Suddently I realized that the best way to have all of this control in my hands, I needed a device with 'native' bluetooth and InfraRed support... that's when the idea came... my old and faithful Palm Zire 72. I just finished charging it after a year and a half of no use.... this is the beginning of this DIY task !

Nerd power !

Turning 12 years of digital music into a library

I started collecting / ripping my cd's back in 98... I knew that between mp3's , vqf's and all the other formats lost in time we were about to see some fireworks.

The music model distribution changed. For good. Now I do not buy cd's I download only the good songs of a disc, or I get the vinyl if I am nuts about the LP.

I have a fair amount of music I gathered over these years and now I want to turn them into a highly efficient easy to use library working on linux... I had to start from scratch though.... here is what I already have done:

• Got myself a 500GB my passport (Western Digital)
• I copied all of my discs into the Music path
• made a script (python of course :D ) to group and rename the directories by artist/group. It is pretty simple but it did the trick... similar distribution as Itunes
  
  2do
  
• Update correct the tags for each disc, I started using MusicBrainz Picard... is there another option ?
  
• Get the art work for each full disc.
• Select a music player / library
  ideas: amarok - songbird - rythmbox
  
• Let's see how they behave after some tests..... stay tuned !
  

rename_music.py
#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys
import shutil

def put_in_format(text):
texto = (text.lower()).strip(' ')
tmp = []
for word in texto.split(' '):
tmp.append(word.capitalize())
return " ".join(a for a in tmp)

def main():
count = 0
dir=('/media/Master-hdd/Music/JUKEBOX')

os.chdir(dir)
list_dir = os.listdir('.')
for each in list_dir:
if each.count(' - '):
group = put_in_format(each.split(' - ')[0])
disc = put_in_format(each.split(' - ')[1])
try:
os.mkdir(group)
except:
count += 1
if group != each:
shutil.move(each, group+'/'+disc)

if __name__ == "__main__":
sys.exit(main())

Mid-life Crisis vs 2-year crisis

It is my fair guess that everybody has a point when they feel that they should be doing things in another way. Every once in a while... maybe people normally get the feeling at a certain age, so we as society put a name to it and we consider it normal... or at least common.

How should you feel if you get those life-changing, deeply-introspective moments more often ? are you a nut-house candidate ? bah... in a normal day I would say that it is just a matter of a few cigarettes and a good shot of any kind.

But age tends to fuck everything up, doesn't it ?? Now there is no movie that cheers me up, music sounds flat and powerless, basically is back to look for something that can bring the passion back into everyday business,,,

Now I know why Al Bundy was so caught up on the past... It's so sad...

Don't get me wrong, I am not stating that everything is pointless and that we should go out and start killing people, it is just that in some periods we are so concentrated in a narrow spectrum of activities that we loose the general and forget about exploring and doing something that can make you smile more often.

We all need that, I need that.

Ubuntu 9.10 -karmic- NO SOUND !!!!!! HP INTEL's audio hardware

Well... after more than a year I finally changed my laptop from a ~dv2000 HP model (14'') to a sweet ENVY 13... In an hour of use or so I was already installing the newest version of Ubuntu (9.10) in order to work and avoid the little things that make Microsoft's OS (Windows 7 on this case) a pain in the ass.

The installation went flawless, I am trying EXT4 as the filesystem and I can seriously say that it has a great impact on database queries and handling... Thumbs up

Unfortunately, Ubuntu does not support yet the two graphic cards and their awesome hot swapping in order to save battery... (which it can added to the thin, semi-light secondary battery actually reach more than 6 hours of real action... no pussy-ass lower brightness and stuff)

The biggest problem I found was the sound.... after wonder around in many forums I realized that the problem was the ALSA library version that comes in 9.10.... 1.09.21. In order to make it work, I downloaded the new release of ALSA followed by configuration, compilation and installation and voila !!!! everything working....

I followed this guide (THX to the creator !)

This is boring but it has to be done... I just hate linux without my classics... now I'm going for the last.fm audioscrobbler....

Yahoooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Fuck new year´s resolutions... what about the questions ?

For me, it is normal that a great experience leaves more questions than to come and solve some shit.... so, with no more delay, here are the great questions I have thought during 2009 and that I am hoping to solve in the following years:

When are you really sure about it ?
are you sure ?
Why audio cassettes are no longer available ?
Why didn´t the clothes manufacturer created a real standard yet ?
If best things in life are free... why the bastards complain about not having decent education housing and others ??
Where does the lost day that people loose by flying to another part of the globe goes ?
Are they really older ?
Then which one is the reference of time ?
Is Dr. Dre going to release Detox?
Is it going to be out before Im 80 ?
Am I going to reach 80 ?
Does coffee really wake you up ?
Will I ? (I will !!!)
Always ? (I hope)
When is enough of something ?
Where the fuck is that voice coming from ?
Ok, so there is no God, then who created the unlimited parallel realities and the model ?
Even tough reality bites sucks ass, do we still just need coffee and a cigarette to live by ?
Will I reach comfort ?
2010 is kind of a big name for next year... don´t you agree ?

anyways... too much to think about but the list keeps getting longer.

Feliz Navidad

Como pasa el tiempo... todavia recuerdo cuando empece esta pagina antes de irme a estudiar el master...

Increible la cantidad de cosas que han pasado, sin embargo si hubiese que listarlas no juntaria mas de 10. No importando el paso del tiempo, y el pobre diseno del template usado, que no ha sido cambiado aun, este "humirde" blog se suma a los buenos deseos de toda la gente que en este momento esta cargando la red de tarjetas electronicas para no perder plata en correos... JajajAja

Un abrazo para todos, paz y amor para los cristianos, el infierno para los que no :P
JAjajaja

Looking for the perfect laptop

**Afrika Bambaataa beats on the background**

Universal people, looking for the perfect laptop !

Now getting serious.... I have to switch my 1.5 years HP Pavillion dv2000...
What do I need / want ???

I want the just the option just in between a netbook and a notebook
Portability: 4.5 lbs max
Screen: from 12'' - 14'' max, 1280 x 800 min
Battery life: min 5 hours
HDMI
no CD rom... rather have a external one and gain in space/volume


What models I been looking:

HP DM3T: Intel Core Duo SP9300, 4 GB DDR3 ram, 13'3 screen, 4.2 lbs Decent Nvidia graphics (the AMD version has DDR2 ram but a better ATI video card) PRICE ~ 1100

HP ENVY 13: 4 GB DDR3, 3.74 lbs light, Battery life ~12hrs (thats what the web says so it should be around 7-8 hours) PRICE ~ 2000 (OMFG)

Toshiba Satellite T135-S1307 TruBrite 13.3-Inch

Sager NP8410
http://www.sagernotebook.com/product_customed.php?pid=234739


HAAHAHAHA so many option... not too much money :S
Any recommendations ?? suggestions ?

10 Great Things about the US... one year after

It is really easy to fall into the hype of feeling that all of the new that a country can offer is better than what you already have... The grass is greener on the other side of the fence... you know. Previous posts present some of the details that I found cool some months after settled

-El ABC de USA (Dec 08)
-Extremely Necessary (Feb 09)

Now, more than a year after, I thought that re-thinking it could be a good exercise... NOTICE: JUST DUMB SHIT ! no deep thoughts but only consumer based goodies... top 10, in random order, here we go:

1) The F****ing internet !!!!! for every geek, having the basic cable internet sounds as the minimum... but when the common is 15 MBPS... OMFG, it's like heaven... stream, skype torrent and more on one of the (probably) fastest internet connections available for cheap clients :P

2) HD Television... Watching the NFL Red Zone channel almost makes you cry of how cool and real the image can be.

3) Concerts... Almost every band drops by the ATL while in the states... that gives us a nice chance to watch tons of good bands.

4) Cell phones + Wireless Internet Network... Decently reliable, omnipresent access to limitless information !!! yezzzzz.

5) Honest, consumer-oriented services and commerce. I miss that everyday I have to buy something at home... everybody is trying to trick you.

6) Driving. People it is not as aggressive, at least behind the steering wheel... in Chile you have to drive and of course add all of the body language you can to tell the other drivers to go to hell or to screw themselves.

7) Comedy Central... need to say more ?? it is not included by any cable provider in Chile

8) Well maintained Public Parks... Basically this is something about the ATL. They have the advantage of being the Olympics host back in 96, so the sports infrastructure and the public parks are still flawless.

9) Decent sized salads ! finally salads that come in a kilo-sized bucket !

10) Stores like ross, tjmax, marshalls and every extremely cheap store including probably out of season, but nice quality brands...

Sleeping mechanics 101 - Part 3: The quality

Well, after reading the comment left in my last post I realize that there is a bunch of parameters that of course affect the quality and that they where not taken into consideration. Nevertheless, I got some insights not in the causes for my sleeping quality, but only of the effects.... I might be able to find the thin line between feeling like shit and waking up sharp as a knife....
I divided the sleeping quality into 2 groups: positive nights (including Fair, Good and Fully Awake nights) and negative nights (Sleepy & Like shit).

First, an overview of the quality, with their amount of hours slept and the number of nights I experience them order by quantity:

hours slept	#	quality
07:37	7	Good
07:51	7	Sleepy
05:48	5	Like shit
07:08	4	Fully awake
08:32	4	Fair
07:30	3	No records

Hmmm... it's like the negative and positive nights are pretty even. Let's look at the same data but now ordered by the amounts of hours slept, giving quality levels a simple value: Fully Awake=5, Good =4, Fair=3, Sleepy=2 and Like shit=1. Let's see :

hours slept	#		quality
05:48	5	1	Like shit
07:08	4	5	Fully awake
07:30	3	---	No records
07:37	7	4	Good
07:51	7	2	Sleepy
08:32	4	3	Fair

Now it seems more clearer that the best quality sleep for ME (of course these values should change between individuals) should be around 7 hours. Let's give them a +- 30mins, because near 7:40 minutes there is already information of a lower quality sleep (from Fully awake to Good). So from 6:30 to 7:30 I should consider it my hours_slept target zone. For weekdays, since I have to be at work at 8:30am then my latest sleeping hour shouldn't be later than 1:30am, considering 30 minutes to wake-shower-drive (yes, I don't get any breakfast and I live really close to work :P... screw you commuters ! ).

After the mentioned logical exercise, it is no surprise that the average time I went to sleep for the most positive nights are 1:21am (Fully awake mornings) and 1:38am (Good mornings).

On the other hand... How can I know that my weekend behavior does not affect the presented averages ?? they should, since they are pretty messed up. Well easy, by checking the average time I woke up on each of those optimal nights:

#	hours slept	quality	avg(went to bed)	avg(woke up at)
3	06:38	Fully awake	01:21	07:06
7	07:37	Good	01:38	09:07

Looks like good nights have some bias to my weekend-waking-up-hours.... but anyways, I am interested in knowing the time range... independently of the day :P

Insights:

• The distribution between the number of "positive nights" and the negative ones is pretty even...
• On weekdays, my perfect time-to-go-to-bed is around 1:20am, to optimize my sleeping quality
• The curve shows that there is a high quality sleep range which starts to decrease after more than 7.5 hours of sleep
• Along with that, since the worst quality of sleep I had has an average of slept hours of 5 hours and 48 minutes, I would suspect that below that time range there should be another high quality sleep range, due to the sleeping cycles... so I might start sleeping some 5 just as a test....
  

Interesting, now I know myself better and I can push myself to bed with a better excuse... more experiments to come ? we'll see...

Sleeping mechanics 101 - Part 2: The Data

Ok, The data set is a sleeping log of 30 days (with some days missing, just because... :S ). They contain the time I went to bed, not the exact time I fell asleep, but is the best measuring point... I assume you agree. Also, there are few days where I woke up and could not sleep right after going to the bathroom or setting up the alarm for next day... whatever... you get the picture: the sleep times are quite 'optimistic' in terms that are biased towards the highest sleeping time possible.

Day of the week	hours slept
Monday	06:52
Tuesday	06:59
Wednesday	06:23
Thursday	07:19
Friday	08:45
Saturday	08:13
Sunday	07:22

The median of the data: 7 hours and 5 minutes

Insights:

• First of all, it was impressive to see that my normal perception of the hours I sleep where underestimated, normally responding "I sleep around 6 hours", while my average time is: 7 hours and 25 minutes (app).
  
• I wonder what makes me sleep less during the middle of the week (Wednesday, min value of 6 hours and 23 minutes, one hour less than my average)
• It was easy to predict that even though Friday and Saturday nights are the ones that I went to bed the latest (average of 2:30 am, 1:15 am on Fridays and 3:50am on Saturdays) , they where the ones I slept the most...
• Since I am playing soccer on Saturday "dawns" (9:30am) I have changed a little the party-routines and try to start messin' around earlier (9 pm more or less) to be able to wake up for the matches.
  
• The average time I went to bed during weekdays (or nights before I have to go to work) is around 12:45 - 12:50 am, something I would expect, considering that after a late dinner (9pm) I normally watch one or two movies or something like that.

Finally, no too many discoveries but interesting values and trends. My next post will be related to the quality of sleep and what are the conditions when I defined my sleep time as "positive"

Cheers and keep dreaming :P

Sleeping mechanics 101

Intro

Ok. To get the basic context on this blog post you have to understand my mechanics (for the last 15 years more or less).
I normally have trouble going to sleep early, I am a more active person during the evenings and night... just not a morning person, I suppose. Well, the whole "growing up thing" about working kills me because of the so called **office hours**. Ok, so you need to be completely aware and concentrated from 9 to 5 but on the other hand I can't go to sleep earlier than 12 - 1 am...
So the classic comment I've heard was "Just go to bed earlier", BUT ! of course the need to have my nightly-happy-time pushed me to ask me the questions:

• How can I optimize my sleep time ?
• Can I even reduce my sleeping hours and feel active and awake ?

The journey

First... to understand the sleeping mechanics I surf the net and read a few ebooks. The overall knowledge and tunable parameters that I learned about will be presented (just the 'meat', btw) in the following paragraphs:

Melatonine: Hormone which is highly related to the day-cycles (the so called circadian cycle). Our exposure to sun light is the main way to control his levels. Conclusion: get sunlight -> melatonin -> deep sleep (or at least, the urge of sleeping)

Day temperature cycle: During normal operation, the body has a daily cycle of temperature which ranges between 36 and 38 Celsius. By the time that we want to go to sleep our body should be closer to the lower limit (thus, avoid doing sports at night if you want to go to sleep in the following hour)

Sleep Stages: There are 5 sleep stages defined by the common wisdom: REM and Stages 1,2,3 and 4, where stages 3 and 4 are known as deep sleep. The order in which their appear is 1,2,3,4,3,2,REM,2,3,4,3,2,REM and so on.... The important variable for each is the time they take on each cycle during sleep. During deep sleep stages (longer in the early cycles) our body does the most of his muscle regeneration and rest. REM stage on the other hand presents a high brain activity, is the stage where we dream on... and is the easiest stage to wake up from, or at least the one from you will feel more awake rested and ready (<--Goal). Then.... when are my REM stages and how long are they ??

My data collection stage was to log nightly for approximately a month the hours I slept, the time I went to bed and intensity or feeling after waking up (tired - sleepy - like crap - really awake - hyperactive, etc...)

On my next post I will share the data with you, I am still trying to find more angles to conclude something that can help me optimize my sleeping time. I know that it is not a sample highly representative but I hope it will be enough to draw some suggestions at the end.

Attached to this introductory post is a screenshot of the hours of sleep per night...

Esta viejito... pero todavia me rio !

JAAJAJ "y ese weon de riveros tiene como 50 agnos" !!! AJAJAJA

Experimenting with my sleep time... the unconscious part - INTRO

After some time of sleeping awfully, probably due to work, getting used to a different culture and high stress levels (which I think they are messed up because I am smoking less) I got the idea of optimizing my sleep time... no "I need to get more sleep" crap, but the "I want to sleep the same (or less even better) but still have tons of energy and awareness"

The project then it's simple...

1) study a bit the mechanics of sleeping
2) data acquiring (30 days of basic sleep-data logging)
3) analysis
4) results and steps fwd...

Tomorrow I'll finally end task #2, meaning that I can try to catch my best sleep time intervals, Identifying approximately the length for each of my sleeping cycle stages.

More to come in the next days...

The dr. is back !

Streaming and/or Peer2Peer Television

It was about time !!!

One of my passion's is soccer, no doubt, and to follow the Chilean league or other big games from elsewhere was really difficult... basically it was listening to the local radio's through the internet... until streaming and P2P video transmission started.
For the world cup of 2006 (Germany) I watched almost every game in Singapore. It was fair in quality, and allowed me to watch the games at 3am at my dorm... So thanks to SOPCAST for that.

After some years of taking advantage of the different software available in order to watch sports, the distribution model has changed. The stand alone programs have been replaced by simple Flash-based peer 2 peer and the question was all the time in my mind... Why the hell the TV channels did not provide their programs based on a subscription, or in pay-per-view methods ???
Is incredible how in the internet people and the open source/ pirates/ hackers/ developers go one (or in fact 2 or 3) steps ahead than the industry... where are the visionary managers ??

Well all of this thoughts came to me because I was really happy to see that the "soccer channel" (www.cdf.cl) from Chile is creating an international subscription package in
order to watch the games.

Why should I pay for something that is already available for free ?
Well the quality I assume is going to be different, much better. It should be reliable and not too expensive I hope. It is nice to see that mid-size companies are taking advantage of technology.