Mental Blabberings

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...

Two years ago today I became a father. Reality didn't hit me hard enough at that time. I was still relatively young and wasn't aware of how my life would be affected by becoming a father. It's one of the best things men can be in their lives yet it takes a lot of us a long time before we realize this. Today I celebrate my daughter's second birthday and my second year of being a father. This post is about remembering what life was back when Julia was born and how much different our lives are now. Two years ago I was still working as a consultant to the largest telco in the Philippines, helping make a growing messaging service something that can scale to a lot more users. I had a great manager at that time but I was too thick skulled to realize this at that time. I had a lot of things going for me: I was fresh from helping evolve a pioneer social network's internal system to handle 3x the original amount of requests (and more) and was getting ready to make a name ...

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.