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I can’t believe that exactly one year from today, I was in Holland. Who would’ve thought that one year after that I would be unemployed? At that time, I was doing great in my career in one of the main contract manufacturing companies at world wide level. Now I’m strugling to find a job.

Here is a picture of me, next to one the famous windmills, I took this picture a couple of hours after I landed in Amsterdam. I had already bought a tour package around the city before getting there, and since it was a Saturday, I had enough time to enjoy the city. You can see that I’m wearing a big coat, a jacket, a scarf, a hat, and a sweater. It was raining and chilly most of the time. As you know, I live in Guadalajara, Mexico so I’m not used to such a bad weather, although I could see that local people seemed to enjoy the weather.

Video of a tour I took from a boat ride

Here is one of my favorite videos I took when I was taking a boat ride through the Amsterdam water canals. Amsterdam is called the “Venice of the North” because it has a lot of water canals just like Venice in Italy. You will see from the video that houses and streets are very narrow, but the people of Amsterdam have made very good use of every inch of space and despite this limitation they have build a beautiful city.

You will also notice that there is a boat that in reality is a house. Due to the space limitation, some people have bought boats and now they live in them. I wish I had enough time to see how one of those house-boats looked from the inside.

Also, from the video, you can see that there are dozens of bicycles parked by the canals, this is because streets are very narrow and it’s a lot more easier to move around by bicycle than by car. Could this be the reason why I don’t remember having seen a fat man or woman?

Technorati Tags: amsterdam, holland, netherlands, windmill

Before, when I was employed, I always had the excuse of “not having enough time” to run my online business. I used to go to work from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, then spent some time with my family at dinner, and then I dedicated the last couple of hours of the day (from 9:00 to 11:30PM) to my online business. I always used to say to myself, “if I just had enough time…”

When I knew I was going to be , I started to make plans for the great amount of time I was going to have to run my onlines businesses, you know, I thought, if I wasn’t going to have a job anymore, then in theory, that meant that I could finally dedicate the right time to my business, and then within a few months, watch the money flow into my bank account, wasn’t that a good way of thinking?

The hard reality….

The thing is that things in reality haven’t turned out to be as I had planned. First, I realized that in reality, I haven’t been spending as much time in Internet as I used to do when I had a job, why? Because, I’ve been visiting headhunters, preparing my resume, going to some interviews, studying and preparing for interviews. What does this mean? Honestly speaking, it means that I had plenty of free time at work and I used that free time to ready all kind of stuff about Internet Marketing and business and now I’m busier than when I had a job, and currently I don’t have time to waste it reading every single piece of information about Internet Businesses.

I remember that I used to read every single blog post that came to my Google RSS Reader. Now, guess what, I don’t read my emails and RSS readers on a daily basis and when I do it, I read all of my hundreds of posts withing a few minutes, I just realized that most of them are not useful and they consume a lot of time, all I do know, is just scan all the blog posts and I just stop to read the few that I consider useful and interesting.

A wake up moment: I need to take the online business more seriously if I want to earn a living from this.

I think that very deep in my heart, I always knew that I would find another job soon, even though I conciously wanted to run an online business full time. Somehow, I had the unconcious feeling that I would always come back to the old routine of working my online business as a hobby, just a couple of hours a day from the “free time” in my job and a couple of hours before going to bed.

But after being three weeks withoug a job, I’m starting to feel the frustration of not being able to get a job soon, and I’m starting to feel the pressure on me and I need to realize that I might not be able to get a good job soon.

I only have money left to live up to 10 months without a job, so the clock is ticking and jobs are scarce. Now I no longer have the cushion of a secure job, so I better make this business work or die in the attempt.

There is one good thing however that I’ve gotten out of all this: I’m no longer wasting precious time surfing the net and reading from other people’s emails and blogs. This will allow me to be more focused and start reaching milestones. I’m no longer getting a paycheck whether I have work or not, now every minute is costing me and I need to take advantage of it as much as I can.

Technorati Tags: Business, job, online, procrastination, reality

Hi there!, it’s amazing how fast time goes by. It’s been 19 days after I was fired at my job, let me tell you what I ‘ve been doing these days:

My first Web 2.0 News Site

The next day I went out of work, I opened my first Web 2.0 News site, which is Newsclap.com. This is a site that works pretty much like Digg.com or Propeller.com. You can submit stories that you find in other places and then the members of the community vote for the stories that are more relevent or interesting. This website also works like a blog in the sense that you can also make comments on the news or stories.

The reason I started this site is because these type of sites are part of this wave of Web 2.0 sites that are dominating the web these days. I had already used some of the main Web 2.0 sites, but it was very difficult to make it to the homepage due to the great number of users and stories that are being submitted, besides, some of them tend to post stories of all kind of topics, so I said to myself, why not start my own?

Pligg – The platform used to run NewsClap

NewsClap.com is built with the CMS called Pligg.com, which is an open source platform like Wordpress.org although Pligg is not as well developed as Wordpress. I’ve spent these tw0 weeks tweaking the look and feel as well as making some changes to the code so the site runs as I want it.  This task hasn’t been easy for me as I’m a Public Accountant and I know almost nothing about PHP and MySQL, so unless you know what you are doing or like making changes to your sites via trial and error like me, I don’t recommend you do it yourself.

Newsclap is almost ready

Overall, the site is already setup and working, basically all I have to do is to start adding content to it. I plan to automate this task the first days in the meantime it gets well known and get some users, hopefully it doesn’t take too long.

I intend to monetize this blog initially with Google Ads and then when it has a decent amount of traffic, I intend to change Adsense for private ads.

UPDATE: I successfully sold this website in mid 2008 for US$220 dollars so not bad for something I did in one month, and with very little maintenance work.

Technorati Tags: digg, newsclap, pligg, propeller, social news, Web 2.0

  I’m back from one week vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I decided to take some days off with my family so I can order my thoughts and get some energy to face the difficult days I have ahead. If you have been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that last week was the last one in my work since I was let go due to a restructuring in the company I used to work for.

We arrived at Puerto Vallarta on Monday noon and the weather was great for a great vacation. We stayed at the  “Las Palmas” hotel. Most of the guests were canadian visitors and just a few americans and mexicans.

Two of the things that I liked the most about the hotel was that it was very close to Puerto Vallarta’s downtown and several malls. This is very convenient as you dont’ have to take long rides to the malls or downtown; everything is very close to the hotel. I you ever go to Puerto Vallarta, I recommend you this hotel very much. The other thing that I liked very much was the food, it was excellent and since I had gone under the “all inclusive” plan this meant that I could eat and drink as much as I could.

In my humble opinion, Puerto Vallarta has three things that make it unique compared vs other mexican beach resorts. One are the sunsets that are very special due to the location of this port, it is a great experience to watch the sun go down in the sea until it disappears from the sight, the second is that it’s one of the very few beach destinations in Mexico that still has a mexican flavor that is not common to find in other beach resorts that tend to very “americanized” and the third is that you can see lots of cultural manifestations everywhere. As an example, here is a picture of a sand sculpture made by some mexican street artists. It’s amazing that such beautiful sculptures are made by some guys that are not formal artists.

On the last day, when we were returning home, we saw two enormous cruises that had stopped by on the Puerto Vallarta’s harbor. Those cruises are so big that I couldn’t take a picture of the boat in a single shot. Here is a picture of one of them.

Technorati Tags: beach, cruise, puerto vallarta, vacation

Yes, today I’m one year older. It’s my 34th birthday. I will celebrate my birthday by going to the beach 4 days of next week. I plan to go to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, which is like 5 hours away of Guadalajara by car.

What did I do on my first day as unemployed?

I got up early in the morning as usual, and checked the Internet to see if my new domain was fully propagated. That domain is going to be for a new “social news” website that I’m creating with Pligg.com. I spent half morning designing the logo and I think it looks great. I expect to have this website finished over this weekend, once it’s ready I’ll announce it here.

A social news site is pretty much like Digg.com or Propeller.com, anyone can submit news or articles and vote for them so they can rank higher. Who knows this social news site might become one day in something as important as Digg.com.

A visit to the church

Yesterday at noon, I went to the church and attended a mass (I’m a roman catholic), that was specially dedicated to the “Divine Providence“. We catholics call “Divine Providence” to God’s help on our lives so that we always have what’s important to live: God’s Grace, a house, health, clothes and food.

My farewell party

Later on, at 8:00 pm, I went to my “farewell party” with my ex-colleagues at Solectron. It was a great party and most of the people I shared almost 7 years at work were there. The party was at Liliana’s house (which by the way is very nice). We drank some tequilas, and my “tocayo” prepared some grilled beef and “quesadillas”.

I’m gonna miss all my friends at work, they were like my family, I wish them well for the future.

Here are some pictures of my farewell party:

Technorati Tags: birthday, farewell, party