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Posted by on 31st August, 2016

What I have learned in the last few years

What I have learned in the last few years

In 2013 I decided to do the unthinkable: leave a five-year promising career at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA, sell everything and go on a life adventure. Mind you, that leaving, included leaving a cushy five bedroom house with an outdoor Jacuzzi on a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course, a Nissan Z350 and so many other material “stuff” that was somehow supposed to make me happy. Especially in the US, it seems that the more we have, the happier we should be. It goes without saying that in the US, we are conditioned to base our happiness on our material wealth. Deep down, I never connected material wealth with happiness… I yearned for more but wasn’t sure what that meant. My wife and I had many ideas, and together we decided that we wanted to build something for ourselves. We needed adventure and a bit more than the regulatory two-weeks-a-year routine vacation. So we planned our escape over the following year and (after several garage sales) we left for...

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Posted by on 23rd August, 2014

What are your tools?

What are your tools?

Do the tools you use say much about you? It’s like clothing, right? You might wear a shirt because you simply like that particular shirt or you like the style… or the brand, color, fit, etc. The same can be said about the tools we use for our everyday tasks like email, calendaring, storage, etc. So, let’s see what these tools say about us. I’ll start; I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours… Email Gmail My default email client for many years. It is fast, robust, powerful and simple, yet highly customizable. Works across all my devices. Calendar Google Calendar A bit on the simple simple side, but very functional. Kind of like the search engine from the same company. Cloud Storage Google Drive Many contenders in this area, but its tight integration with Google docs, makes this an easy decision. It is fast, functional and with more tools and space than I will ever need. Storage Sync InSync Google drive comes with its default sync tool;...

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Posted by on 19th June, 2013

Encrypt your Gmail, Live and Yahoo emails

Encrypt your Gmail, Live and Yahoo emails

With the current NSA affair and its PRISM program apparently listening to our conversations and reading our emails, some people may be looking to shield themselves a bit more from intrusive eavesdropping on their communications. Email as we know it, is obviously not entirely secure. Evasive tricks such as the ones used by General Petraeus to conceal his affair with Paula Broadwell didn’t work very well. [they created a fake email acount and communicated by saving drafts to that account, only communicating via drafts, so the emails couldn’t be traced as outgoing emails]. Wait, you say you use https or ssl? that’s great… however, that protects your message from being read while going over the wire to your email provider. Once it arrived at the email server in its encrypted form, it can, and usually is, decrypted and stored in its original format. The best possible way to keep your comms secure and private is to encrypt your message with unbreakable technology and store it as such on the...

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Posted by on 4th May, 2009

Google Android phone…

Google Android phone…

Although I have pretty much always had one, I have never really cared much for the functionality of a cellphone, other than what it was meant to do…like placing phonecalls. I have an uninteresting Motorola Rzr, so anything is pretty much an upgrade. So I decide to get a new phone. Windows Mobile? no thanks. I have had experience with a couple of pda’s and until Microsoft comes out with something completely new, I will not go through that again…iPhone? no thanks, not yet. I am warming up to the idea, but it seems that everyone has one and I would have to be forced to switch providers. What else…: Google Android…? all my Google apps constantly synchronized? Built-in GPS and Google Maps…? Unlimited Internet via 3G in my area? I now understand what is so interesting about a smart phone. The amount of productive apps that are available, the variety of functions they can performs is impressive, especially the location-aware applications. The one drawback is that if I...

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Posted by on 1st December, 2008

Joining Microsoft…

Joining Microsoft…

Well, that didn't take very long… a good opportunity presented itself almost immediately and although I was hoping for some downtime, I have decided to accept a job offer at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond Washington. I will be joining the development team of the brand new store.microsoft.com site as a software developer starting tomorrow. The store was launched just a couple of weeks ago and provides an online presence where one can buy any Microsoft product directly from the source. It sounds like a great opportunity that I don't want to let...

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Posted by on 14th November, 2008

Looking again…

Looking again…

Well… While on my vacation, OpenText finalized the acquisition of Captaris, for which I have been working for four years and… let's just say my badge stopped working when I returned. I am on the lookout again, dusting off my resume and working on some more experiments to learn new technologies and proof my skills. I have gained a tremendous amount of experience in .NET solutions engineering, enterprise software development, workflow, integrations and business process automation and am not quite sure in which area I will focus my...

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Posted by on 11th November, 2008

6 tips from Europe….

6 tips from Europe….

For our 10 year wedding anniversary, I decided to take my wife to the places I grew up in and maybe try to explain some of my behaviors she has never quite understood. We visited Holland, France, Italy and Spain seeing friends and family and covered quite a bit in two weeks. We just got back today and here are a few thing I learned from this trip that you might find useful: Don’t rent a car unless you are very familiar with the driving style and the roads. Unlike in the US, the lanes are narrower, drivers are more aggressive, the streets are not organized by cardinal points (N,E,S,W) and are mostly named and not numbered. Prepare to use all your reflexes avoiding cars, scooters, bicccles and pedestrians in poorly marked and/or respected lanes. Also, gas is incredibly expensive and the likelihood that you’ll spend much time of your vacation stressed, either finding your way around or simply finding a parking spot is high. Instead travel by public...

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Posted by on 26th March, 2008

Wear sunscreen….such good advice!

Wear sunscreen….such good advice!

Distracted from what I was doing, I stumbled upon this excellent and inspiring clip. Truly one clip we should all watch every single day, first thing in the morning… I mean that. We go about our daily lives not realizing how we are wasting our youth; that precious substance of which we have less of, every day that goes by…. that and other magnificent advice. From the Wikipedia article: “Wear Sunscreen or Sunscreen Speech are the common names of an essay actually called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997. The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single released in 1999, credited to Baz Luhrmann.” This version with subititles in Spanish. Listen carefully and...

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Posted by on 18th March, 2008

Boston Dynamics Big Dog…

Boston Dynamics Big Dog…

You just have to wonder that with today’s technology and vast knowledge that we’d have robots in place everywhere, exactly as we were promised 30 years ago. Most attempts at designing and developing robots that emulate human or animal like movements have been, well, let’s say, not so human or animal like… Until I saw Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog: incredibly beautiful and creepy at the same time. The project is funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency), you know the same folks that brought you the Internet… Make sure to check out 0:37…the immediate response is simply incredible and behaves so realistically that I think I even felt a bit sorry for the steel beast. Their website is not much to look at and painfully slow, but check out their other...

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Posted by on 14th February, 2008

Controlling spending…

Controlling spending…

I was thinking about ways of cutting unnecesary spending last night and thought that I tend to waste a few dollars on so many things that doesn’t seem so much at the time, but when it is all added up….well, it adds up. A cup of coffee in the morning, a snack bar in between, sometimes a pastry at midmorning, then lunch and maybe another coffee in the afternoon.  A couple of dollars at the time X a few times a day X twenty workdays = a lot of $$$. Think about it, even if it is just lunch at $8 per day for a to go salad or sandwhich is ($8 x 20days) $160 per month! A clever dude has some really good information on how to spend only $6.99 for an entire month on lunch; even if not followed exactly the same, his approach is very good and can be altered to fit your needs and definitively to keep your spending lower than it currently is. [button...

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