Outcomes...

It was great to have D visiting, also spending some quality time with my friends this weekend, just talking about nothing in particular, childhood memories, love, work.

My vacations this week were cancelled, that really got me, but then, it was the most likely outcome, however It's ok, all this weeks scheduled tasks were completed on sunday so I won't have to worry about that. However, it puts me in a crashing course with january's, I won't be able to do it, guess I'll had to redraw and write off it.

Today's small achievements...

Finished the Prep report. Learnt how the tables related to each other, it took me 5 minutes, David Allen was right on that, the fear of not having all that is required is what keeps you from starting.
*Finished my digital homing pigeon’s proof of concept, “CherAmi”. The idea (Wich I got at 5:00 am this morning as an excuse to skip the gym) was to send a direct message to cherami’s twitter and it would relay it to me via sms (other people had done it but my cell company doesn’t have a web gateway). Learnt to manipulate xml using *arghhh vbscript, Java for the server interface and curl for the twitter api.

See more progress on: Finish what I start

Hopefully My 7 Answers for next weekend:

1. What did I fail?

Nothing. I acomplished everything I wanted to.

2. What am I resisting?

Nothing.

3. What did I do well?
Stuck to my schedule. Finished everything I wanted to finish this week. Made progress towards next week’s goals. Overdeliver. Completed all the contracts I made with myself.

4. What can I do better?
Repeat this success more often…

5. Were you the person you want to be during the past week?
Yes.

6. Did I get closer to achieving my short, medium, and long-term goals?
Short: My Thesis. I delivered the text and completed a demo.
Medium: I got an agreement with my boss about the payment of my allowances and with that info scheduled payments on my credit cards, sent a complaint letter to my ISP about the situation with my account.
Long term: Back in my two feets, only one credit card, looking for a new 8-6 job, starting another career, being sucessful with my freelance work, travel trough Central America for a month doing volunteer work.

7. What am I grateful for?
Making my dreams real, at least the ones I know I can.

See more progress on: Answer this 7 questions every saturday for a month.

My 7 answers...

1. What did I fail?

-Handling monday’s crisis properly

2. What am I resisting?

-Avoiding the confrontation required to get the office to pay the allowances they owe me and get my finances into balance.

3. What did I do well?
-Cleaned the house, well I was manic (still I am I think hehehe, I’d rearranged my books a dozen times in the last two hours)

4. What can I do better?
-Stick to my schedule

5. Were you the person you want to be during the past week?
-No, I lose my cool hahahaha, that shouldn’t had happened, I used to handle the office stress quite well, guess is the lack of sex hehehe.

6. Did I get closer to achieving my short, medium, and long-term goals?
Short: Finish my thesis, nop
Medium: Go back in balance, nop, being avoiding that meeting with my boss.
Long term: I don’t even want to see beyond december, and I’m running out of time, only less than 50 days to change things.

7. What am I grateful for?
Spending a week with beautiful minds, devoting the weekend to my home.

See more progress on: Answer this 7 questions every saturday for a month.

Today's

1. Alia’s health is improving
2. My second attempt to prepare Jerk Chicken got great raves
3. Mom
4. Trough couchsurfing hosting Helio from Brazil, Manuel from Spain and Dominic from Germany, three very refreshing mindsets.
5. The mirror-like quality of the sea this morning with all those towering clouds hanging above it.

See more progress on: Daily: Reflect on at least 5 things for which I'm grateful (Happiness Manifesto #2)

Progress...

Water:

• Found a way to avoid the water keeping pouring after the timer turned off the bomb. The tank gets filled with two gallons of water, the setup looks awfull but I’ll work on the aesthetics next sunday, the mechanical timer I got has increments of 5 minutes, however the soil keeps moist with far less water than just pouring a whole jar on it. Sub-task 1 completed.
  Sometimes I forget and leave open the shower out of habit, need to work on that.
  *The pitcher advice worked well.
  *Got a sponge based mop and ditched the strands based ones, it takes less water to rinse it.
  *I’m doing the laundry once a week instead of every other day.

Gas:

Turned off the water heater. Only miss it in the morning :-(
Since I’m on a diet I’m not cooking big dishes, every dish I cook takes less than two minutes to get ready.
*Hanging instead of using the drying machine.

Electricty:

Being unable to find those motion sensing sockets for the lights.
Replaced all the incandescents bulbs at home by fluorescents less the one at the living room but I barely use the living at night anyways.
*Unpluggin any charger/electronics I’m not using.
*Tracking solar chargers for small electronics in town.

Gasoline:

Don’t own a car so no problem on that.
*Hiring cabs already with passengers. Using public transport or walk whenever I can. There are taxis using gas instead of gasoline out there, but they are the minority, thinking on making an arrangement with one to take me to work every morning and when I need to do errands out of public transportation routes.

Air Travel:
*None planned this year

The Carbon footprint calculator puts mine down average, that’s cool!!! Will mark this done.

See more progress on: make a smaller ecological footprint

Efforts...

Water:

• Found a way to avoid the water keeping pouring after the timer turned off the bomb. The tank gets filled with two gallons of water, the setup looks awfull but I’ll work on the aesthetics next sunday, the mechanical timer I got has increments of 5 minutes, however the soil keeps moist with far less water than just pouring a whole jar on it. Sub-task 1 completed.
  *Sometimes I forget and leave open the shower out of habit, need to work on that.
  *The pitcher advice worked well.
  *Got a sponge based mop and ditched the strands based ones, it takes less water to rinse it.
  *I’m doing the laundry once a week instead of every other day.

See more progress on: Be environmentally aware and conserve water

A platform that looks solid enough for Timelines

I found Croquet quite by accident, I was trying to find if Squeak still thrived and found a link to the Croquet project. They have an SDK, it’s a 2D/3D platform and it looks very mature. Wonder if can be adapted to be the Timelines engine.

See more progress on: Learn Croquet

My 5 things...

1. Being able to remember and share our life experiences with others.
2. Sharing an evening with aunt Mima, uncle Manuel, mom and grandma listening to grandma’s histories of her youth.
3. For having a family.
4. For all the advice from the Corgi-L group on Alia’s health.
5. John, sending me a virtual hug trough facebook when he learnt I was down because of Alia being sick.

See more progress on: Daily: Reflect on at least 5 things for which I'm grateful (Happiness Manifesto #2)

Need to make progress on this one...

Applied to four proyects trough the UN Online Volunteering Programme

Created a Google Calendar to handle the time devoted to volunteer work , will start with four hours a week and scale to 8 hours a week.

Would start reviewing the courses already in progress at PEOI to see where I can lend a hand and start plans to write and submit my own.

Compassionist asked me to organize a walk group for his next year’s project , would be great! Never done something like that, taking care of the organization and resources would be great and I’ll learn a lot.

A great service that the UN site has is the notion of groups, as a volunteer I can help those groups and as a group I can submit a request for help to the other volunteers, but to be a group It has to be registered in the country of origin. I’d enrolled a friend to help me with the paperwork stuff, a foundation of sorts, I’ll ask my neighbours at Nabuur about what’s the best way of doing it.

See more progress on: volunteer more

Ithaki

Cavafis, I dreamt once I was taking a stroll with him along the beach, outside Alexandria, I couldn’t understand what he asked me but I answered “It hasn’t changed”, we kept walking in silence.

See more progress on: Memorize a piece of poetry everyday

Drupal

I always get to a point I start working and then waste 90% of my time doing sidelines, not the intentional task.

Removed Typo3 and decided to give it a try to Drupal, a lot of good stuff but it would require time to setup, get familiar with the template system and since I wasn’t able to do anything useful in less than an hour gave up on it.

One thing I liked of Drupal is that it has a module to create facebooks applications, I’ll schedule another hour to give it a try next weekend.

See more progress on: Finish my website

Weekly Review - 13-Oct-2007

1. What did I fail?
The redo of the Update logic. It took more time than the older one.
2. What am I resisting?
Work on my Thesis.
3. What did I do well?
The Java SMS subsystem.
4. What can I do better?
Be realistic with task times. Acknowledge for unknowns instead of giving the “ideal world” times.
5. Were you the person you want to be during the past week?
No.
6. Did I get closer to achieving my short, medium, and long-term goals?
Short: Yes Medium: No Long term: Undefined yet
7. What am I grateful for?
Getting in gontact with my UK friends again.

See more progress on: Answer this 7 questions every saturday for a month.

7 Questions to answer every weekend - at my GTD Weekly Review Session

Got them from here

1. What did I fail?
2. What am I resisting?
3. What did I do well?
4. What can I do better?
5. Were you the person you want to be during the past week?
6. Did I get closer to achieving my short, medium, and long-term goals?
7. What am I grateful for?

See more progress on: Answer this 7 questions every saturday for a month.

My experience with GTD

I use Jello Dashboard for the GTD flows in Outlook, sync to my Jornada and print a daily report into my paper notebook. Use Plaxo to sync between my PC at home, my PC at the Office and my Google Calendar.

GTD is a methodology easy to follow, no big complex rules, just common sense workflows, if you are technical oriented or a programmer, you’ll love it, indeed, you can implement it only with paper and pen if you want.

Get the audio book too. I put it from time to time to avoid the cubicle noise.

See more progress on: implement GTD

One of the most rewarding things...

I used to see myself as a Siberian Husky guy, but Corgis are another issue entirely, where my sibes use blunt force to get what they want, Alia is clever enough to see how to get it or trick me into doing it for her, I bet if she had more bigger fingers I’ll find her one day smoking like a 20’s diva and reading “Dangerous Liaisons”, yep, she’s mean, she’s smart and she’s gorgeous and she knows it.

See more progress on: Have a Welsh corgi

Some setup...

Bought some construction paper and put a big piece at the wall in front of my bed, my intention is being able to see it everytime I wake up and work some time on the goals written there.

Today I’ve to show a preview.

See more progress on: finish my thesis

Spanish...

My first friend was a Canadian boy called Jerry, I’d to learn english in order to communicate with him, I was eight then, my next friend I got when I was finishing high school,bye then, all my journals and inner talks where done in english those years, so, If I need to express something very deep, emotional, it’s hard for me to do it in spanish, since english was the language for that. I wish I could speak more about my feelings in spanish, since when I must, I just shut my mouth and say nothing, sometimes I can’t even find the words, had to use their counterparts.

Now, how I do that.

See more progress on: be fluent in Spanish

on 3:00AM cooking and Ratatouille Moments....

But as usual I’m too busy to find proper time. However, when I do have a “Ratatouille moment” (usually when hungry, after 3:00am while marathoning to finish a deliverable) I pull something from the net and try it. My favourite stop for it is the 101 cookbooks site

Would be titled something like :

3:00 A.M.
Cooking for programmers, slackers and workaholics

Sounds good! I can imagen the website interface: A big empty fridge and cabinet and a selection tool “What’s in your fridge?”, “What’s in your cabinet?”. You select what you have and the site returns a list of recipes ranked by easiness, time to deliver, filling score and what will do to your body at the time of cooking.

Now I’m wondering, either I’m manic (this is my 5 night in a row I’m full awake this early), the office’s new coffe is too strong (been skipping sleep since they changed the automatic machines) or is all that water I’m consuming (put a pitch of iced water next to my bed).

See more progress on: Create a personal recipe book

One laptop per child

Have great news this morning, been following the XO laptop and it seems they are ready to deliver. Well, is not the USD 100 intended price, the asking donation would be of USD 200, and the laptop would be given to a child in a developing nation.

See more progress on: Donate 1 XO Laptop to the "One laptop per Child" programme

To Ken:

Hello Kiddo,

Some things I want to point:

-Life gets better.
-People is not as bad as you think.
-You’ll be heartbroken 4 times.
-You’ll be loved a lot, you’ll miss being alone.
-I won’t tell you wich ones, but you’ll make two of your dreams come true.
-You’ll still argue with mom

Take care Kiddo, I miss you a lot, Wish you were here…

Your future self

See more progress on: Write a note to my younger self about something I know now that I didn't know then

URL - 12 vignettes

Starting a new one. URL stands for Unrequited love. The vignette part took it from a CD of music called Sex 12 vignettes that I really enjoyed, there were short pieces of music that told an history.

And writting is about storytelling isn’ it.

See more progress on: write novels

Thanks for...

1. Working again on finishing my thesis.
2. Love
3. My peristeria blossoming
4. Starting a volunteering site.
5. Tears

See more progress on: Daily: Reflect on at least 5 things for which I'm grateful (Happiness Manifesto #2)

In Barbados...

It started to rain hahahaha, I remember the movie was Mr & Mrs Smith, we had to close the window, thankfully we discover we can listen using the radio.

See more progress on: go to a drive in theatre

I'm aware is not food but wanted to share it!!

I got a Peristeria Elata (“Flor del Espíritu Santo”/”Holy Ghost flower”), is my country’s national flower, a terrestrial orchid, when the flower opens it can be seen inside of it what looks like a nested dove with its wings open.

Mine is blooming…

See more progress on: every week we set each other challenges of things to take pics of!? And then we post them on here!

Some Ideas I like...

Be inspired by nature
Unfold, organically grow and blend with the surrounds
Be an organism in itself, self-contained, self-regulated
A place I would’d enjoyed to play as a kid

Fallingwater comes to mind…and some twists of Gaudi would be awesome.

spiraljetty pointed me to this awesome place in Mexico, Las Pozas by Edward James

See more progress on: design and build my own home

The only person I can't run away from...

Is sadly me, is funny, I was checking this and saw this goal, a song came to mind I heard before but can’t remember who sings it, the lyrics said “I was running out of trouble, you were running out of me”..I definitely need a date with myself to make ammends, there’s something itching and I need to know what. A good excuse to open that Shiraz I was keeping for a special date.

See more progress on: run away for a few days without telling anybody

Day one

After being introduced to the rest of the group my advisor asked the group to present themselves and their work, two e-learning systems for primary and secondary school mathematics and physics, an e-commerce site and a security manual. My advisor asked me if I wouldn’t want to go for the post-graduate subjects instead, I would love too, but I’m not financially ok right now to do the investment, so I declined the offer and said I was ok, my turn came, “Content filtering using semantic networks” and gave a small introduction to what I’ll try to attain, she requested the conceptual framework for next week,said 40 pages would be enough, I’d 150 completed, overall it was great, she likes it, I told her since I did the proposal three years ago this has been done and I wanted to try something else, but she insisted is a good one, I can find something else to add to it later.

See more progress on: finish my thesis

Regional oriented volunteering info site.

I’m thinking more and more on the possibility of creating a local site to promote online volunteering and allow contact with the different groups and associations that do volunteer work in my country.

I checked two frameworks already developed with this in mind. Hope to get a chance this weekend to do instead of write and put this idea to work.

Wish me luck!!

The site would be at Oderay.welcomepanama.com

See more progress on: volunteer more

Have two days...

To produce 200 pages on Semantic Networks.

Nanowrimo get that! hahahaha

See more progress on: Never stop learning

Some Ideas I like...

Be inspired by nature
Unfold, organically grow and blend with the surrounds
Be an organism in itself, self-contained, self-regulated
A place I would’d enjoyed to play as a kid

Fallingwater comes to mind…and some twists of Gaudi would be awesome.

See more progress on: design and build my own home

Grateful

1. Family.
2. Friends.
3. An unexpected hug and kiss from someone I love secretly.
4. Reading Starship Titanic.
5. Being able to feel brokenhearted.

See more progress on: Daily: Reflect on at least 5 things for which I'm grateful (Happiness Manifesto #2)

Today's entry

1. For being alive
2. For being able to listen the birds sing this morning.
3. For being able to see the clouds drift among the mountain top
4. For being able to feel the heat of the sun and the cold of the mountain breeze on my skin.
5. For being able to understand I should be grateful for what I take for granted.

See more progress on: Daily: Reflect on at least 5 things for which I'm grateful (Happiness Manifesto #2)

Grateful for whatever it was...

I woke up this morning and went to the kitchen for a glass of water, and then it hit me, or more exactly, poured over me, I felt loved beyond anything, love poured literally over me, as Zeus should have poured over Danae, however it wasn’t sexual at all, it was more like I imagen Caritas (God’s love) to be, I was so extatic tears start running over my cheeks, it got so intense I was afraid I’ll get lost on it and fade away, unlike the oneness I feel with meditating, it was one on one, whatever the other “one” was.

My theory is since I was just awoke and way out tired of working late my brain just played me a trick since I was meditating on love the day before. But what a trick :P

See more progress on: Take a moment each day to appreciate my life

Couchsurfing...

Meeting new people always terrify me, now, asking a stranger to host me for a couple of days in a place far away from home, well, I hadn’t done that before, so, why not, that’s what facing fears is about right?

I’m writting this from a small bedroom at Dave’s house, outside you can hear the bird sings and the insects doing their mating calls, stoped raining a couple of minutes ago, I’m at El Valle, an old volcano caldera (the Valley is actually the volcano’s caldera) in Cocle, Panama.

Dave loaned me his bike and I went for a tour of the town, rain got me in my way, I was soaked, but God it felt good, the rain was cool, not cold, I ended having lunch at a small restaurant called “Niña Delia”, seafood pasta and white wine, it was good and cheap, actually there were more seafood than pasta. At the market in the center of the town I bought a quartz laced in leather, I like it and bought it, tought I’m unsure who I’m going to give it, also asorted local treats I hadn’t seen since childhood and some bracelets with the panamenian flag to give as gifts to my guests back at home.

I guess I can write off this fear. :-)

See more progress on: do one thing every day that scares me

Joy

When I wake up this morning to let the dogs out I found my marigold had blossomed, that put a big smile in my face that has lasted trought the day.

See more progress on: share my awe and wonder at being alive at all

My 5 things...

1. I was able to do work together with my best friend as a team, and this endeavour would be basically our first business venture together.

2. I got to see a re-run of V, I love that movie.

3. Today my marigolds blossomed, the oregano is growing and the rosemary tasted soo good.

4. That feeling of joy that permeates everything I do.

5. I miscalculated and hadn’t enough money to going to work, then Cindy came back early because she forgot something and was able to loan me for the taxi, when I went downstairs Mimi called that she was going to my place and Omar called to see if I needed a lift to work. I ended accepting Omar’s offer. It’s amazing how the universe conspires to give you what you need.

See more progress on: Daily: Reflect on at least 5 things for which I'm grateful (Happiness Manifesto #2)

Changes...

I started re-taking my apt back, and it feels good. First step was the container garden that I lost to grettel (my new puppy) and summer drought. I got some flower bushes and started my herb garden anew. I arranged with the cleaning lady for her to clean the apt twice a week and on saturdays evenings. The dogs would stay confined to the kitchen/laundry area when I’m not at home, sleep at my room and able to roam freely after I had took them out, in the morning and in the evening. My desk is half catalogued and empty, just the other half to go. I need to dispose the old clothes, there’s a charity service that may get good use of them.

See more progress on: nurture my homenest

Starting tomorrow

I’m lacking in this goal.

Since I’ll be able to sleep tonight (thanks the Movistar project is done) I’ll be able to wake up early tomorrow and start training at the Omar park. I’m still unsure how long that track is but I’ll find out tomorrow.

See more progress on: run a 10 mile week

:-(

There are opening so many new restaurants I’m thinking on give up this task at least for a month.

See more progress on: get a six pack