Posts tagged #personal

Building a Creative Practice –Could it even be the key to longevity?

I ask a lot of people about their life plans. At least half of them tell me that they have no idea where to move and are just coasting along, not sure what to do next. Therefore, this post.
What to work on? Y Combinator’s Requests for Startups Also see Jay Zaveri’s World’s Hardest Problems (via Gary Basin) José Luis Ricón’s (Artir) Technology some people are excited about Church Lab’s list of projects and of their implications (via Adam Marblestone) Also see …

Second-order thinking Consider the long-term consequences of your decisions. September 5, 2021 at 02:18PM

I came across my old blog that I’ve not posted to in 3 years and, well, found some really good stuff. I recently dropped all social media because it had become a total time sync. Bit yeah, some really good stuff. Also WordPress is a very nice platform. It’s evolved right under me and now it’s downright pleasant to use. Maybe… Should I start blogging again?

I spent over an frustrating hour on the phone yesterday with Bank Of America and Paypal trying to sort out what a charge that was showing up on my credit card. All of $4,200.00. So nothing small. It turned out that it was correct, but the description was so incorrect that it was impossible for me to figure out just from reading the statement. I know we’ve all been there.

During this fiasco I spoke to five different people, earned myself a $25 Amazon gift certificate to ‘apologize’ for the bad service (Is that all my time is worth?), was on infinite hold (15 minutes+) waiting for a ‘supervisor’ – twice. Anyway I won’t go into the blow by blow because it’s boring and stressful to recount.

My...

Maybe it’s because I just arrived from a long drive and stay in New York where I was guided by the nose by my TomTom GPS lady.

Did you know that the Garmin GPS Lady gets a little annoyed when you choose a direction different from what is suggested? She says something like: “Incorrect Route, Recalculating…”, which after you hear it two or three times sounds like “Incorrect Route, you jerk, you are wasting my time again by making me do all this work to recompute another route for you. Can’t you listen???” The TomTom lady just suffers in silence and provides you with a new route as soon as she sees that you didn’t follow directions.

Which led me to thinking of a cool feature that none of the ...

I just saw that the final “Season” of Mad Men will be delivered in two mini-seasons, 7 episdodes in 2014 and 7 more in 2015. I had this idea for a TV show that has not been done yet.

Just like the contrivance of 24 hours is that it occurred over a 24 hour period, in real time, my show, called 30 Years, occurs over a 30 year time span, in real time, with the same actors. Here’s how it works.

We commit to 30 years (calendar years) of seasons, with 4 epiisodes each. The actors start out in year 1, and the same ones, appear year after year, so you actually see them aging and the world changing around them. It’s one cogent story line which is determined up front, but it runs for 30 actual years, 4 episodes at a time.

(c) Pito Salas, 2014. Patent Pending.

I am (after 10 years) a beginner pianist who wants to improve. I practice, but not diligently enough. On average I think I practice 5 days a week, for about 1/2 hour, so that’s less than 3 hours a week. Clearly I could do better. But I am proud of the effort I put in and I definitely have made a lot of progress. But I am at best still an advanced beginner.

From an article,“If you’re busy, you’re doing something wrong”,

“We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate ...

[](Y.Squarespace.Utils.lightboxAsset()I designed the calendar to the right to help me keep track of my piano practice. As you know, maybe, to learn piano you need to practice every day. Well I don’t do that regularly enough, and as a result (and general clumsyness) my piano study is going at a snails pace. So of course, technology to the rescue.

Jerry Seinfeld described how he would force himself to do something every day. In his case, work on his comedy. He would put an X on each day in his calendar when he worked. He would then psych himself up to never break the string of X’s, and...

I’m excited to tell you that I just accepted a position as Visiting Lecturer at Olin College for Spring 2013! Actually the full name is Olin College of Engineering.

Olin is a small engineering college, actually in the top ten of engineering colleges according to US News’ Rankings. ...

Code T-Shirt, © Pito Salas, 2012. Let me know if you want to order one!

I have a warm spot in my heart for independent bookstores, as such a store paid for my college education. My family business was a bookstore. It is no longer around however, having gone out of business years ago. Blame Amazon?

Secondly, I read lots of books, and own even more. (Yes that implies that I buy books that I don’t read. I don’t feel bad about that. I enjoy books.)

Thirdly, I love, I mean, I LOVE Amazon.com. What convenience, what great prices, what free shipping. I even own some AMZN stock. In truth I bet in the last year I spent more money on books at Amazon than from local bookstores.

See the conundrum coming?

Whenever I am in a strange town, o...

It felt like a war zone without the danger! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofUdhro7G2o&w=420&h=315]

A few months ago, a friend of mine told me he was struggling, really struggling with a big career decision. Here’s what I told him, and what I believe and have applied to my own decisions:

“Try to pay very close attention to what you yourself want to do. It is easy to get confused by expectations put on you by others or by yourself based on what you think others – parents, friends, colleagues and so on, would expect you to do or what the conventional wisdom says is the right thing to do. All that is confusing.

You need to try hard to filter that out and find out what you – YOU – really want to do, what your heart tells you. It’s hard to do but I have found it to be a very good exercise. On...

Here’s a tiny social conundrum. When someone writes you, calls you and leave a message, calls and doesn’t, or even texts you, what is your obligation to respond? If the question is “are you free for lunch today” and you know you are not, is it OK to just not answer? If the question is “have you seen this?.”

This seems to come up, and different people and different communities seem to have different rules about this. So before you take offense at the lack of response, consider that it might just be a different social protocol that you may not necessarily adhere to!

I’ve had that happen, though, when leaving several emails or support tickets with services that I use. What do you make of a la...

Finally someone writes about somethingthat happens to me (and yes, to you) all the time.

What was that movie about that we saw LAST WEEK?

How come did it take till page 102 before you realized you had already read this book?

No friends, no need to feel shame anymore. It seems like it happens to everyone (should I add, for you smart alecs out there – it happens to everyone — eventually.)

“Did this mean that it hadn’t been a waste of time to read all those books, even if I seemingly couldn’t remember what was in them?” (from New York Times)

Chris and I, this morning, looking forward to a great day. We’ve waited and worked for this. And now the day has come.

I saw the inauguration communally on a big screen at the Regent Theater in Arlington with hundreds of other cheering folks. It was a fun and exciting event. People even stood up for the actual oath of office.

Quite something!

I really like this approach to vacation. I think I will try it: Check out this post Warning: Email Sabbatical is Imminent .. and other random thoughts: "For those who are unaware of my approach to vacation… I believe that email eradicates any benefits gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation. I give it a little help in the form of a .procmail file that sends everything directly to /dev/null. The effect is very simple. You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (ho...

If you are anything like me, you are constantly coming across books and other goodies that look interesting but not interesting enough to actually get. In my house, there are several shelves that contain books purchased but not yet read. It’s my queue. I love them . It’s like having a personal bookstore with only books that I love. Or at least, I think I will love.

The Amazon wish list has become basically another way station between Amazon and my shelves. I save money by storing part of my queue of interesting books inside Amazon’s wish list. After all, when will I actually read them?

Which brings us to today’s topic. Clean up that Amazon wishlist. The holidays are coming and people actua...

On Tuesday, Chris and I volunteered for Barack Obama. I got a very interesting perspective on the election process in the US, and to tell you the truth, it was impressive. We drove up to New Hampshire, and checked into the Plymouth democratic campaign headquarters. They promptly dispatched us to Benton, NH, apparently half an hour from the Canadian border.

We arrived at around 11:00am...

I like this snippet of the art work from a new exhibit at the Moma of the art of Dan Perjovsch. Ah, but is it art? Who knows. From The Museum of Modern Art’s web site: “[…]For his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, the artist will draw witty and incisive political images, in response to current events[…]”

How does this relate to Paul Graham’s recent bit about Stuff, and entitled “Stu...

Read this essay describing the feelings of someone who will soon be a first time parent. It sounds like many of the things I was thinking when I was in the same boat. Check out this post from furia log: ** [snip…] Nothing is ending. Or a thousand things are ending, both huge and trivial, like they do while you’re waiting for anything new. It’s weird that we’re in charge of picking our daughter’s name at all, weird that we’re going to be making command decisions about another person’s life, weird that it will be so long until she has the powers to which she’s inalienably entitled. [snip…]

(from**: The End of the Sky(e))

All the best, glenn!

I’ve been tagged in the new fangled blog tag game, and am now honor bound to reveal 5 things about me that you probably don’t know yet.

The “R” in R. Pito Salas stands for Ralph My ancestors have been in Curaçao for over three hundred years I’ve been studying piano for 3 years. I am still a beginner. I was a team lead on one of the earliest Macintosh software products, Jazz

And now, it is for me to tag 5 others. It would be fun if there was a permanent home for these fun factoids about us.

Brian DelVeccio – The Institute of Hybernautics Aleksey Gureev – Noizze Francois Gossieaux – Emergence Marketing Kathleen Gilroy – The Otter Group Marjolein Hoekstra – Clever Clogs

Over to you, pals!

My buddies at wis.dm had a real scare today as our offices and the rest of the building was evacuated in a big rush due to a terrible and terrifying explosion in the basement. I was in California at the time and got word of this when Brian called my cell phone while I was in a meeting. All the wis.dm folks are back home and ok now, but some actually had to go to the hospital for some treatment. Scary stuff… Here is the post from Brian Del Vecchio’s blog:

Today at about 11:00am the alarm went off in our building at One Broadway in Kendall Square. This was followed by a panicky PA announcement from the security desk that there was an emergency in the building and everyone must evacuate. As we made our way down through the crowded stairwells, thick smoke filled the tight space with that acrid smell of burning electronics.

(from: fire at one broadway)

I’ve discovered how hard it is to work on a laptop with a tiny screen, 1.2GHz and, esepcially, 256Mb of memory. Sloooooow! I’ve been keeping up with emails but not really getting into a blogging mindset. This is just a cheat post to make my blog not appear dead 🙂 Curacao? Those of you who know me, know. Those who do not, probably don’t know where Curacao is. Look it up on a map. A little island (and I mean little) in the Caribean, right off the coast of South America. It’s where I was born and grew up,so I get back here regularly. Nice.

No, just kidding, I am not. Some of my best friends are headhunters and I wouldn’t want to compete with them.**

But I do often find out about people in my network who are looking for new positions and I try to connect** them to those I know who are looking for new people. Recently another person emailed me saying they were looking for someone, and I realized that I might have lost track of what openings I know about.

So – to those of you who know me personally – if you are hiring, feel free to send me an email so I can keep an eye out and connect you to candidates.

No, I don’t charge a fee 🙂

Technorati Tags: jobs

I just updated this site a little to have some more up to date information about my consulting business. Yes, you know about this blog, and you know about BlogBridge, but perhaps if you ever clicked on the links on the right of this you will have noticed that they were old and decrepit. Well, they are new and much nicer now. Still nothing profound, but at least informative if you are looking for me to do work for you!

Technorati Tags: Consulting

In the continuing efforts to rid my house of junk, we are donating a whole bunch of nice Tchotchke briefcases. For the heck of it, and to expand recent innovations in “laundry blogging” let me introduce you to Tchotchke Blogging.

Here you see a selected history of the computer industry in the last 15 or so years. Also, you see the evolution of my interests and attention. Let’s see, there are several Demo bags of cours...

Long time readers of this blog (yes, I can say that now, it’s been 2 years or so 🙂 know that I am a Dave Winer fan and a daily reader of Scripting News. In yesterday’s posts, Dave talks about life and death, honest, open, sincere, like no one else can:

“What’s it like to die? Some people believe they know, but that’s ...

What does the existence of “BCC” (which I think stands for the anachronism “blind carbon copy”) tell us about the social norms of emails? This thought occurred to me just now as I was the recipient of an email (corresponding to (3) in the not at all uncommon scenario that I describe below. It is an interesting piece of deception that we all participate in, isn’t it? Has anyone ever thought about the morality of email addressing?

Scenario:

X sends an email to: A, CC: B and C A does a “Reply all” so that B, C and X see the response A sends an email directly to X, BCC to B

Analysis:

X wants to tell A, something, and make sure that B and C also hear. X wants to communicate that the message i...

We all love reading blogs (right?), and some of us even use their valuable time writing blogs. In my evangelism of blogging, a common question is “Why?.” Why would you spend your time writing, for a small (for most of us) mostly anonymous audience, for free? Well I have a (lower-case “t”) theory that many bloggers (like me) work alone, at home, or as a consultant, or perhaps wor in a company but not among like minded people.

In this scenario, the blog becomes an outlet for casual little thoughts, insights and discoveries (like this one), which usually would be shared around the office coffee machine, by popping into someone else’s office, or when running into them at lunch or on the elevator. When none of these outlets are available, a solo worker becomes a blogger and shares those nuggets with “the world.”

I don’t know if this rings true to other bloggers, but it does to me.

I am away from home, at my home in Curacao for a reunion of Salas folks from around the world. I saw an childhood friend of mine, Raul, who asked me ‘So what’s a blog, anyway’? I was taken aback, because, what would Raul be doing, reading my blog, and especially with the rather ‘odd’ image that I left as the top entry before I headed down here? So, this is just a reminder of what I already knew, of course, that anyone around the world can read this. And secondly, that anyone with the name Salas might be tempted to see what’s to be seen on www.salas.com, so be careful what shows up on the front page!

A blog is a contraction of the word “Web Log”, as in web diary or web journal. A blog is a w...

Occassionally, I will have either an incredibly positive or negative reaction to a book, play or movie and I will be moved, who knows why, to write a bit about it here. Well, I just saw “The Day After Tomorrow”and it is totally lame. Yes the special effects are impressive, but the story, the dialog, the way the characters react, is so stilted, so ridiculous, that it annoyed me after 5 minutes in the movie.

And I am not objecting on scientific grounds. I don’t know enough about the science to judge whether or not its realistic, semi-plausible, or totally nutty, but I am willing to suspend disbelief. And by the way, about the special effects: why do these folks standing around in sub zero temparatures in street not even look cold?

Anyway…