Mental Blabberings

2021 started with a a good sense of connection for me, having spent time with friends and family in a simple celebration of the oncoming year. The transition from 2020 to 2021 and being able to look back at a good part of my recent history got me thinking about how life has been for me and the family for the past decade. There’ve been a lot of people that I’ve met and become friends with while there are those that I’ve left behind and lost touch with. There’s a saying about treating old friends different from new ones, which I do appreciate now that I’m a bit older. It also means that my relationships with people that I get to spend a good amount of time with take a different shape. This reflection has given me some time and space to think about what it means to reconnect with people. Friends are the family we choose ourselves. — Edna Buchman I have the privilege of having life-long friends that I don’t always stay in regular contact with. From my perspective, if I consider you a frien...

Until very recently I believed that I needed to be on top of the latest news and happenings not only in my field (computer science and software engineering) but also in as many things as I can be on top of. This meant subscribing to all sorts of magazines, newsletters, YouTube channels, Twitch streamers, watching TV and live sport events, etc. — I was on top of a lot of the latest happenings, trends, news, interesting developments. I was having fun and I felt busy. What I did not feel was particularly effective nor productive. I felt like I was consuming so much information with the thought that it might be useful someday. When I was younger this wouldn’t have been an issue but I realised that ever since I’ve started taking stock of what I’ve been spending my time on, that a lot of it I’ve been spending just staying on top of things that I really didn’t need to be on top of. This article is about some of the realisations I’ve made in the course of exploring this issue of “FOMO” or ...

Flash back to 1998, I was a junior in high school in the Philippines. I would have been at the equivalent of 9th grade in the US educational system at age 15. At this point in my life I had been given one of the best opportunities to experience a whole new culture and lifestyle. I had a chance to be an exchange student in middle America for one full year. This post is about how passing up this opportunity changed my life more than I would have ever known at the time. Note: This is Part 2 of a series about my early choices in life which have gotten me to where I am today. If you're interested, please stay tuned to the next parts as I go through them. Thanks for reading! The Rotary Club Back during those days my parents had been invited to be part of the Rotary Club in the small town we lived in. There were various kinds of people who were in the club -- writers, businessmen, professionals (lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc.). My parents are businessmen who had very little in the...

I've recently been thinking about how my decisions early in life have done me good to put me where I'm at right now. I've certainly lived a very fortunate life -- been blessed with so many good things and been down-right lucky being at the right place at the right time. My 30 year journey to where I am now has been very interesting. I can pretty much say that the experiences I've had up to this point have very much contributed to making me who I am -- and that I regret nothing. Still though I keep thinking about what my life would be like if I hadn't made certain choices I did make throughout the years. There are a few choices I've made that I've stuck to and I keep thinking about wondering "what if I made a different choice instead" -- and the more I think about it, the more I'm happy about the decisions I've made. Note: This is Part 1 of a series about my early choices in life which have gotten me to where I am today. If you're in...

This weekend I had the chance to do a Google+ hangout with my father in the Philippines. He and I don't talk often but we do have a very good relationship. My dad is cool like that. In this hangout we talked about a few things happening in the Philippines and I've gotten the feeling that my homeland is getting ever deeper into economic disrepair, and that the politics to which I've come to be hopeless on is beyond repair. I've wanted to get something off my chest that's been bothering me for a while now, so if you would indulge me please read on. Background I grew up in a part of the Philippines where the land is fertile, there are thriving industries, and there's a certain sense of abundance and stability. This part of the Philippines has good schools, good employment opportunities (mostly industrial and service industries), good investment opportunities (real-estate and agricultural), and good potential for growth. This was true when I was young and this i...

Programmers are a tricky lot. We have a certain mental model of how things should work and we "hack" systems in order to make sure they fit our mental model instead of changing ourselves and our mental model to fit with existing systems. Programmers are the bureaucrat's worst nightmare -- our brains are wired to look at the rules and go "why?" and our immediate reaction to anything that's not at least optimal  is "well, that's stupid". If you have a programmer in your life -- a parent, sibling, cousin, partner, or friend -- it would help if you understood how most of programmers brains work. I would even say as far as certain kinds of people -- not necessarily programmers -- gravitate towards becoming programmers (or engineers, or any profession/occupation where it involves building systems or just rigorous analysis and design) so you may recognise these people. I know these things work really well for me so if you know someone like me it mig...

The past couple of months I've been asked at least twice now whether I was willing to write a book. It's no secret that I love to write -- after all they got to me through my blogs. I don't think of myself as a great writer, I just happen to write a lot I guess (and edit myself out of oblivion). I've been trained (kinda) to write essays and do creative writing when I was in high school. This is the kind of thing I enjoyed doing throughout my high school years. I'm definitely thankful to all my teachers who've encouraged me to keep improving and just keep writing. I personally hold books to very high regard and this is why I've turned down all the offers to write a book. I don't see myself as someone who has a lot of original things to say or as an expert on anything. However, I then find this video which is totally changing my mind. This isn't something I've endeavored to do in my life. However what I have endeavored to do is to make a differe...

I used to think that life would not be as much fun if there weren't a lot of things going on. I felt that there was this need to fill every hour or every minute with something. I always felt the need to always have something to do. Now I've changed my mind and cherish the simplicity of many things and sometimes, nothingness. It's so liberating to feel no pressure to always be doing something. It's also very liberating to be able to enjoy life in a natural pace. It also means I can enjoy life more and focus on the things that matter.

So earlier in the year I resolved to write about something on a weekly basis. Unfortunately I have failed that particular resolution. I thought I would have been able to write about something once a week -- that I would be able to get time to write about something interesting to me for any given week. Unfortunately it's not the time that's the problem: it's the motivation. I have found that more and more I did not need to write about what I thought more now that I think and read more than I need to express myself. I have found that in the past two months I had little need to share my thoughts about the world. However though now I find myself writing about not writing which is a little bit of an oxymoron. Let me share with you a few reasons why.

Freedom! Fresh from the store. I'm not a fan of a lot of shoes. I tend to think of them as something of a utility. I don't get attached to shoes often. In my life I've pretty much had maybe a total of twenty shoes. I had two pairs I always wore in Elementary School, two pairs I always wore in High School (maybe four total as I tend to break them often), and when I got to work I always had three shoes in rotation. I've had a lot of shoes bought for me as gifts but most of the shoes I've bought myself I've worn out until I needed to buy new ones. Recently I've been running barefoot which is awesome, but the soles of my feet were getting sore after running just a couple of kilometers. I then decided that I would get me some Vibram Five Fingers just so that I can run more. This post is about the one week I've been using them.

Running Man. Photo by Nigel Homer . So being the person that I am who doesn't just give up without a fight, I decided to try running again. After a bout of developing tendonitis on my right patellar tendon and my right achilles tendon (and having a weird clicking noise from my right ankle when I turn it a certain way) and five visits to my physiotherapist, I was determined to try something new with the way I run. This time I'm taking it slow but also I'm now running with my bare essentials. Yes folks, I tried running with just my bare feet. In this post I reflect on what the experience was like and what I've learned about myself and potentially how my body works. I know what you might be thinking: what the heck was I thinking running barefoot, am I crazy?! I may very well be crazy but that's beside the point. Let's get this out of the way: I have a reason. Actually I have two reasons. First reason is that I wanted to see whether there's some truth t...

So it's Halloween and it doesn't feel like it here. My daughter's birthday is in a few days and it's going to be a small celebration. Tomorrow's the Melbourne cup and apparently it's a big deal. There's a lot of things that I'm learning about the local culture but I'm still very much naive about what's the custom and traditions are about. I think there's a lot of things that I need to learn and that I'm learning them on a slow pace -- to slow for my liking. This post is about how I intend to get assimilated into the country and what steps I've already done to get to where I can actually say I know something about this country.

Broken Glass by akeg Don't get me started on so called technology publications. I think they're mostly bully pulpits to the influential unethically promoting self interests in the guise of "freedom of speech" and tabloids for the insider baseball in the most nebulous industry in the world. I'll reserve my ranting about certain technology writers to a forum where I can be myself and not have to worry about comment moderation. I'll keep my thoughts on certain celebrities who I feel do not deserve the attention they get. I'll hold my tongue on certain fanboys trying hardest to conceal their stripes like a zebra in the middle of an empty savannah. What instead I will write about is the need for real journalism.