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