Mental Blabberings

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.

After 20 something years of trying to put off having to run, I'm giving running a shot. Heck, I'm diving head-first into running. My personal goal is making myself able to run 5 kilometers in the morning before going to work. Whether I'll do it on a daily basis is up for debate (mostly between me and myself). Aside from that goal is to actually be able to drop two full inches from my waist (or require myself to actually need to buy new jeans and shirts. Most of all, the more important reason is my family.

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.

Library Books by timetrax23 When I was a kid growing up in a small town in the Philippines, I didn't have access to a public library. Nor did I get much from the libraries in the schools I went to except for oddly enough friendships that have lasted a good while. It wasn't until I was doing research for my thesis subject when I was in college that I finally appreciated (and wished I leveraged more) the utility of libraries. In search of better more relevant and up-to-date materials before the proliferation of Internet connectivity in the Philippines I found myself going to UP Diliman (three hours commute from UP Los Banos) to find related literature. I found the three hour commute very pleasant and I was looking forward to being able to read more about the subject I was trying to get my head around. Fast forward ten years later and I find myself seeing how transformative and important public libraries are and how they're something that I definitely wish my people in th...

I know I've written a lot of times already about how awesome the company I work for is and how much fun I've been having at work. This time though I'd like to reflect a little about how I get into the groove of being productive and learning more about the different situations I've encountered in the work I've done in the past and now. Although I can't talk about the exactly what I do in Google, I can tell you that it involves writing code (lots of it), making sure things are going according to expectations, and doing open source development. That sounds like a lot to do and the rest of this post is about how I get things done at work.

So I won't re-write everything I just posted on C++ Soup about cpp-netlib 0.9.1 being released . I'll just point you over to that blog post and talk about something else in this entry. What I do want to write about is more of a reflection on my reasoning for why I do open source development. I feel like I need to write this down in a more thought-out form with better structure than what I've tried doing before.

Mates from work. This is a few days late but I just got a couple hours of alone time to allow me to write in isolation -- more on that later. This past birthday for me is one of the most special ones I've had so far because of a few things. I feel like the past year for me has gone way too fast having a lot of things happening between July 2010 and July 2011. This of course is the obligatory birthday post which I do outline things that I find interesting and even some things that I find annoying. Here goes nothing.