Jan 31

I can’t believe what I just saw on CNN.com, per this article it seems that large parts of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia (mainly India) are suffering to get access to Internet. The apparent reason: A broken submarine cable.

This makes me think about how fragile the Internet is and that we don’t have to rely so much on the Internet to support our lives. Governments need to think in better ways strengthen the fragile communications systems between contienents to avoid issues like this. Can you imagine if someone like terrorists tried to brake all the undersea cables around the world? I’m sure this would create a great problem for most countries. Just imagine the amount of vital systems that would be affected: flight schedules, military systems, police and border controls, you name it.

I hope this incident helps to prevent similar issues in the future.

Technorati Tags: Africa, Asia, blackout, Internet, Middle East

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Jan 31

Today is the last day at my day-to-day job. Actually, I’m writing this post from my desk here at the office. I got here today at 8:00 am and I’ve haven’t done anything productive during the whole day and it’s just a matter of a few hours more before someone from the HR department calls me up to get my severance check. I’ts been a looong day, I hope it finishes soon.

The reason I’m losing my job is because Solectron was acquired by Flextronics several months ago. I used to work for a group of people here at the Guadalajara Plant, that is no longer needed by the new company owners so that’s why I’m leaving. This is the first time I lose my job so I’m quite nervous and anxious, but overall, I feel happy, because today is the end and the beginning of a new stage in my life.

I worked for Solectron during almost 7 years and I gained a lot of experience, actually I was very lucky to get global exposure due to the kind of work I did. I wish all my colleagues good luck and the best for the future.

Finally I’m Free

Technically speaking, once I get my check I’ll be finally free. No more rush to get up early in the mornings to commute to the office, no more worries for trying to please a remote boss, etc. , but freedom is always accompanied by responsibilities and fear.

As Robert Kyosaki states in one of his books, “Freedom is exactly the opposite to Security”, the more security you seek, the more freedom you will lose. Everything in life has some degree of risk, only the prisoners have the ultimate level of security, that’s why they are in “maximum security prisons”, so they really don’t have to worry at all about getting money to pay the bills, but they pay that price with their freedom.

My last day at my job  So there I am, alone in this world, only with my family, my talents and my severance check. Now I need to start using my brain to get a hold on all of these assets to leverage on them and try to survive.

What’s the plan?

As I explained on my post about my goals for 2008, in general terms, I’m going to look for a job from the very first day I become unemployed, and as I’m sure it’s going to take a while (maybe 2 or three months), I plan to work really hard on my internet business in the meantime, to try to start making some income here.

My starting point is this blog, but I have plans to make several niche websites as well as one Web 2.0 site. Now I no longer have the excuse of being busy at work, now I have plenty of time.

So, the fun part is about to begin, let’s see what the future has for me….

UDPDATE: Thanks God, on April 16th, 2008 I was hired by a great company, Hewlett-Packard and I was very lucky to find a job that was similar to what I was already doing in Solectron, so I only was unemployed for 2 1/2 months, so not too bad after all. I’ve also made new friends, the managers are extraordinary in their treat to the employees, and I must say that this company has a lot of beautiful babes (I’m glad my wife doesn’t read my blog…. hehe just kidding!). However, I still have pending my goal of setting up an online business, as always, I lose focus very easily, so something I still need to improve about myself.  

Technorati Tags: Business, flextronics, goals, Internet, job, solectron

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Jan 31

I was just checking Wikipedia and it just occurred to me to type President Clintons’ daughter name to see what Wikipedia say about her.

It is really curious to see that Chelsea Clinton has lived in a neighborhood of Mid-Manhattan called “Chelsea” since 2005.  What’s really more interesting is that the neighborhood north of it, “Hell’s Kitchen“,  it is known by Real Estate agents as “Clinton”.

These two Manhattan neighborhoods (“Chelsea” and “Hell’s Kitchen”) are often called as “Chelsea-Clinton”. Per the wikipedia article, there was even a local newspaper on that area called “Chelsea Clinton News” before she became the daughter of president Bill Clinton.   Pretty amazing, don’t you think? I wonder if she chosed to live in that neighborhood because of this curious fact or it was just pure coincidence.

Technorati Tags: bill clinton, chelsea, chelsea clinton, hillary clinton, manhattan

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Jan 30

I  just came across a great tool that measures the performance of a web page. I just changed of webhosting company over the weekend so I wanted to see if my website was improving the time it takes to load.

For me it’s very important to have a site that is easy to access and that it doesn’t take forever to load as it discourages visitors

You can find the web performance tool here:

 How my Blog is performing?

I compared my blog’s performance vs the performance of two of my favorate blogs: JohnChow.com and Shoemoney.com, so based on the tests I did, here is a table that shows how my blog compares vs the peformance of these other two blogs:

Website 56k 128k 1.44 Mbps
www.johnchow.com 355 seconds 117 seconds 33 seconds
www.shoemoney.com 112 seconds 43 seconds 16 seconds
www.technobuck.com 146 seconds 56 seconds 19 seconds

So my blog is performing slightly below Shoemoney’s blog but much better than JohnChow’s blog.

How can I improve my blog’s performance?

That tool, also gives you the details of where your website is taking more time to load a page, in my case, I think I can improve the performance by optimizing the Images. I’m going to see if I can find a tool that let’s me improve the size of the images. Do you know any?

Object type Size (bytes) Download @ 56K (seconds) Download @ T1 (seconds)
HTML: 90842 18.30 0.68
HTML Images: 159458 38.18 7.24
CSS Images: 99694 24.07 4.73
Total Images: 259152 62.25 11.97
Javascript: 226196 48.68 4.80
CSS: 60842 13.73 1.92
Multimedia: 17904 3.77 0.29
Other: 0 0.00 0.00

Technorati Tags: performance, speed, tool, website

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Jan 19

Today, six years ago, I got married with the girl of my life. Back in that day, at this time we were preparing for the church ceremony, then the party at my parent’s country house, and on the following day, we flew to Cancun where we spent one wonderful week.

Together, we formed a happy family with two little girls (Diana & Ana Paula), which have brought joy to our lives.

During these 6 years we have never had a big fight or any major issue, so given the great number of couples that have troubles these days, I think I’m greatful for the family I have.

It’s amazing how fast time goes by, I still feel the same guy I was six years ago, but when I look at the mirror then I can see that there’s some gray hair showing up on my head.

During these six years, life has brought us several challenges, but after all, we have overcome all of these, thanks to God’s help. I’m sure that there will be more (like the fact I will no longer have a job in a few more days) but I’m not worried about that, life’s full of challenges and it’s our job to face them the best we can.

Today after I finish my tax seminar, I will buy her some flowers and I plan to take her out tonight.

Technorati Tags: anniversary, gift, wedding, wife

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