When the wedding photographers gave us their budgets, and all of them were full of limitations (hours, number of pictures, bla bla bla),
and the cheapest for only the pictures and no post-production costed about $1500. I started looking online for a better camera and do the wedding pictures ourselves.

This is my old camera

This is my new camera.

Click Here to see the specs from Flickr.com which ranks it as the #2 Camera from Canon being the number one an older model, which if you see the Flickr user graphs has started to decay so this Digital Rebel XTi is likely to become the number one camera from Canon in Flickr.com

For a total of $990 (including taxes), I got myself what I’d call a professional camera with lense, 4.0gb compact flash card, SD/CF usb reader and extra one extra battery.

Now I gotta learn how to use it well before the wedding, but being in New York it’s gonna be a lot of fun taking pictures with the Rebel XTi

El primero es un consejo Geek.

Si quieres ver archivos de ayuda en HTML compilado tipo Windows, pero en Linux, es decir abrir archivos .CHM en Linux, utiliza xchm.

Para instalar en Ubuntu, es tan sencillo como hacer sudo apt-get install xchm, luego solo invocas el programa y abres tus archivos .CHM.

El segundo consejo lo escuche de Deepak Chopra en un canal de Joost. El dice que una definicion de Neurosis es hacer una misma cosa una y otra vez y esperar tener diferentes resultados… (para mi esto es correr Unit Tests ;) ), pero llevandolo a la vida el consejo lo que te dice es que intentes hacer cosas diferentes todos los dias, que tomes nuevos riesgos y evalues sus impactos. Has cosas diferentes y tendras resultados diferentes.

General IQ Score

Damn it, I was good but took too long, If you don’t put the time penalization my General IQ is 146. I feel limited, I wanted to be above 150 :(

I get to be a bit special but not too much, since I read this somewhere on the internet:

“Only approximately 1% of the people in the world have an IQ of 135 or over”

Here’s the explanation of my results:

Your General IQ Score of 139 shows how able your mind is in general. Anyone with a General IQ Score this high is considered to be gifted. This score is better than 99.53% of all persons taking this test. Virtually all occupations can be comprehended with a General IQ this high. You should be able to handle almost all academic challenges.

You scored higher than your General IQ Score in 12 individual ability categories. 5 of these better scores could be called statistically significant and may indicate special abilities, or that you were distracted on those parts of the IQ Test that counted more heavily in the other ability categories.
Arithmetic

Solving many of the IQ Test’s problems required the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers mentally. Many mental tasks require arithmetical operations even though numbers may not be involved, and thus number manipulation abilities can strongly indicate general intelligence.

Your Arithmetic IQ score of 149 is exceptionally higher than your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.95% of all persons taking this test.
Spatial Skill

Understanding what changes will occur when conditions vary is a deep and powerful ability of the mind. All invention and creativity of every sort is based upon this ability. Although test problems usually involve manipulation of objects in space, persons with a stronger ability to spatially manipulate can also be expected to use this ability to be able to better predict how social and psychological situations would change due to variation.

Your Spatial Skill IQ score of 144 is not significantly different from your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.83% of all persons taking this test.
Logical

This is the ability to determine if a set of rules has been correctly followed. This ability is most useful in combination with other mental skills listed above. Those with strong logical ability are quicker to see where a given set of conditions is going to lead, have a strong sense of justice, and better understand–from an intellectual analysis–the benefits of harmony.

Your Logical IQ score of 148 is exceptionally higher than your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.93% of all persons taking this test.
Spelling

The ability to spell can indicate general intelligence. Remembering a set sequence of letters indicates the mind’s ability to retrieve remembered facts. Learning how to spell and use the words of a language is almost a complete IQ test in itself. Although poor spellers with high IQ scores can be found, it is rare, and in general–everything else being equal–the better spellers have higher IQ scores.

Your Spelling IQ score of 149 is exceptionally higher than your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.95% of all persons taking this test.
Short Term Memory

The ability to remember things for a short period of time allows the mind to check back and retrieve facts needed to complete a problem solving operation. This ability becomes more critical when problems have many aspects that need consideration and/or need to be solved mentally. This ability strongly determines how efficiently one handles the many aspects of normal life. If your short term memory ability is strong you are much less likely to seem inattentive or “slow to get it” to others.

Your Short Term Memory IQ score of 144 is not significantly different from your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.83% of all persons taking this test.
Rote Utilization

This is the ability to take a set of memorized facts and mentally extract and/or operate with or upon the facts within the set that are pertinent to the problem at hand. Persons with more of this ability can be expected to spell well, remember telephone and other numbers easily, be more adroit in procedural operations, and have a stronger foundation for tasks that require the use of memorized material.

Your Rote Utilization IQ score of 151 is exceptionally higher than your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.97% of all persons taking this test.
Algebraic

This is the ability of the mind to abstractly handle quantities and qualities. Persons who are strong in this ability can more quickly and more deeply understand analogies, stories, derivations, equalities, and hierarchical structures.

Your Algebraic IQ score of 149 is exceptionally higher than your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.95% of all persons taking this test.
General Knowledge

Knowledge that is casually picked up and remembered can indicate intelligence, because persons with higher intelligence will exhibit greater retention of those pieces of information that are encountered less often. Because higher intelligence allows a person to have a deeper appreciation of the connectivity of facts that may seem disparate to others of lesser intelligence, memory of such facts becomes easier.

Your General Knowledge IQ score of 147 is exceptionally higher than your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.91% of all persons taking this test.
Visual Apprehension

This is the ability of the mind to mentally picture visual information and to be able to extract portions of that information for separate use. A person whose visual apprehension is strong enjoys a richer, more creative appreciation of visual aspects of experiences.

Your Visual Apprehension IQ score of 145 is not significantly different from your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.87% of all persons taking this test.
Geometric

How well one can comprehend geometric relationships of lines, sides, planes, angles, and topological properties strongly determines one’s ability to make sense of visual information. The strength of one’s geometric ability can strongly determine how quickly knowledge can be absorbed if it is presented visually.

Your Geometric IQ score of 142 is not significantly different from your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.74% of all persons taking this test.
Vocabulary

Knowing the meaning of words is an ability that directly increases along with the increase of general intelligence. The meaning of a word is more easily remembered with higher intelligence, because it takes more intelligence to understand and correctly use words based upon the subtle differences between words with similar meanings and to comprehend difficult concepts which are sometimes symbolized by a single word.

Your Vocabulary IQ score of 144 is not significantly different from your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.83% of all persons taking this test.
Intuition

Intuition is defined as that ability of the mind to develop answers to questions without consciously dealing with the problem at hand. Often a question will provoke your mind to answer without using conscious processing time, and the answer is said to come “out of the blue” or “suddenly, it just struck me”. Of all the many abilities of the mind, this is one of the most often used. Just knowing what to do is often an automatic process that occurs without much conscious figuring. Those with stronger intuition make less mistakes and can seem luckier, wiser, or more mature.

Your Intuition IQ score of 143 is not significantly different from your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.79% of all persons taking this test.
Computational Speed

If you can correctly solve a variety of problems faster than another person, you may be demonstrating a generally more orderly internal arrangement of your mind’s problem solving methods. While speed cannot be the sole factor in determining overall superiority in one mental operations, in general faster computational speed will often indicate that a problem’s comprehension was more complete. With everything else being equal, a person with faster computational speed than another person’s will be better at tasks that require the synthesis of many bits of information.

Your Computational Speed IQ score of 53 is significantly lower than your General IQ score.This score is better than 0.09% of all persons taking this test.

I did the test at www.iqtest.com

Me entere que Paco de Lucia estaba en Miami, que va a tocar creo que esta noche por alla, total que me meti en su pagina y esta de tour, y no va a pelar Nueva York.

El concierto en NY esta agotado, pero gracias a Dios toca el domingo en Newark, que es cerca de donde yo vivia antes en New Jersey, asi que voy con Paulina el domingo.

Me acuerdo siempre de mi papa cuando escucho Paco de lucia, pq mi papa tenia todos los discos y supuestamente que se lo encontro en el aeropuerto en espana.

Vamos a ver como toca ahora que esta mas viejo, ojala sea aun mejor. Me siento privilegiado de ir a oirlo tocar antes que se muera, definitivamente un sueno hecho realidad para este geek que es un fanatico de Paco de Lucia desde que tenia como 7 anitos.

Debo dar credito al blog Periodismo de Paz por haber hecho la mencion de Paco en Miami esta semana, de no ser por haber polemizado en ese articulo (que termino dando tremendo dato), no me hubiera enterado de que Paco de Lucia estaba de gira en USA este mes.

Esto fue en diciembre de 2006

Finally, not a provisional license, but the real thing baby.

New York State Driver License!

I can rent a car!!!!! Yay!!!

BTW, I’m pissed that I got my upgrade in New Jersey instantly, then I go to NY to switch it, and it took them 2 weeks to send me the license. BULLCRAP!

2006 was a great year for me, and now that I think about having an even better 2007 I guess its worth to resume the last 10 years in this post, since it was 1996 the year I finished high school.

1996, I want to be an engineer

I’m 16 years old, finished high school and got accepted to study Software Engineering at the UCAB in Caracas, Venezuela. The university just opened up the career that year so I was there for the first classes ever given to software engineering students in the faculty, we had a lot of responsability into being the best we could be to make a name for the school, and so far I think we’ve been doing a great job, in our country and out.

During these years my parents sold their accounting firm and bought a liquor store, in 98 Chavez wins the president and things start getting worse and worse economically for us.

After a lot of hard work, sacrifices and being really really broke for many years I finished school and got my engineering degree in 6 years.

During this time I worked for Microsoft Venezuela doing marketing and product launch support, then I worked for the venezuelan Java Center with great java engineers, I might say the best java engineers in the country at that time (Ing. Sergio Fernandez), then I worked for a consulting company called DKV Asociados along engineer Angel Olivera doing my internship and thesis under his tutorship.

2002, I’m an Engineer

Here’s a picture of the group on the graduation day, most of us started on the first promotion but ended on the third one, things in school in Venezuela aren’t as easy as in the US where you pretty much know what’s gonna happen on your exams.

So right after graduation, that december the country goes on a full stop for over a month so that Chavez would quit, but he won’t do it, even the oil industry goes along with it, Mr. Chavez just fired almost every executive wasting millions of dollars in human capital, as a consequence many other companies that work with the companie loose all the contracts, including the one where I worked for, so I pretty much lost my job…

2003, Flirt with the US, then leave my country
So I get a call from a friend in the oil industry telling me there’s a startup in Miami that needs a pocket pc developer, I start working for them off shore, and a few months later…

I’m off to Miami. I travel back and forth until the company decides to take me in for good.

After a year of work and learning all what I needed to learn about the job and developing a larger scale system and the american culture…

Up to this point… from 2000 till like aug 2004, Marjorie was very much part of my life, but everything has an end and so did my chapter in Miami, I went on a trip to New York for the first time I believe in May 2004, this trip absolutely changed my perception of life and I felt I was completely wasting my time in Miami, I saw the people in the city and thought to myself, what do you have to do to live in such an expensive place, its so cool, they’re so lucky to live here, I wish one day I may come to live here.

Me for the first time in New York

I went back to Miami, and found out about a website that put a lot of doubt into what I should do with my life if I wanted to go live in New York, the site is Craigslist, in it, I saw over 50 New York job offers on Information technology when in Miami I’d only would see no more than 5 posts a day, plus the pay was way better.

So, I took a weekend off with my friend Tati and we went to Orlando to do all the parks, during the long lines I made the decision and told Tati that I’m leaving to New York.

2004, New York, New York

On September 2nd 2004, one day after my birthday, I came with my suitcases to New York where my friend Maritza received me for one night and helped me get up on my feet.

I had my employer pay me all the money they owed me, and I went to New York with $9000, my logic was this. I just turned 25, If I go back to my country with $9000 they will be spent anyway, so why not go and give it a try in New York while I’m still processing the VISA. I had no place to stay, so I had to look for a place asap, I had no source of income so I had to save until my last penny to stretch those $9000 as much as I could, and I gotta move fast because I don’t want to be illegal. Being optimistic and following my dreams will always be one of my premises.

I lived in West New York, NJ, paid $100 a week on a very small room, tried to live on $5 to $10 a day and the only thing I did was send resume’s to postings on craigslist and monster. I learned everything about resume’s, cover letter’s and interviews (the hard way), and a month and a half after I found my second employer in the US willing to sponsor my H1B visa. I worked as a consultant and I only did one project for one of their clients, Nielsen Entertainment in White Plains, NY, here I learned a lot about Unix, Linux, Perl, and above all, I learned how to use emacs under the teachings of David Link, one great engineer who used to work for Oracle and at the time developed an amazing dataware house system written in perl for Nielsen, my props to this great hacker.

I wasn’t contempt still with my first success in the city, finally recovering financially from moving away and no longer living on $5 a day, I kept looking for jobs, and I found a little company named “LimeWire” :), which creates a P2P application, and I thought it’d be the most amazing thing to work with these java hackers and learn about the world of P2P.

Next thing you know…

2005, LimeWire

I’m working for LimeWire as their web developer, here I learned a lot about running a high traffic website, and above all I learned a lot of what it means to be an open source developer and the culture around this.

This is probably one of the best things that has ever happened to me career wise, I got to learn a lot and I was surrounded by people of an amazing level of intelligence and computer software knowledge, I’m very thankful for this.

2006, Year of big changes, and trips

At this point I’m still working for LimeWire and thanks to them I went to Austria

Egg, Austria

there I came in contact with python, which I believe is a tool that’s changing my professional life, plus I enjoy coding in it a lot, there I started writing an RSS engine which I called “SnowRSS” since I started writing it there sitting with all that snow around me. SnowRSS runs everyday as the core of wedoit4you.com rss fetching engine.

Also after leaving LimeWire I was free to join FrostWire, and we recently launched a new version on which I learned a hell of a lot more on what comes in to play about releasing client software for the masses in multiple operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux)

2006 was a year of many changes and trips, this year I:

- Switched jobs twice, worked for Flycell.com, and now I’ve settled at Temboo where I feel super lucky and happy doing many exciting things and surrounded by the most amazing team of engineers

- Started the wedoit4you.com podcast and blog directory, its has been one of the most rewarding hobbies which allows me to be in contact with technology and with my good friend Tati.

- Since the change of visa, I couldn’t leave the country so I decided to get to know the country with my girlfriend, I went to:

Jim Thorpe, PA

San Francisco, CA

Chicago, IL

Cleveland, OH

Bear Mountain, NY

Washington DC

Las Vegas, NV

Grand Canyon, AZ

Also, my girlfriend graduates in Syracuse (after one year of a long distance relationship)

and we finally moved in together in Brooklyn, NY

so what now in 2007? what will be of the next decade?

Hopefully everything will be even better this year, I just hope me and my family have health to accomplish all the goals, and maybe this year things will keep moving at a fast pace, I expect to launch my own piece of software, finally have the visa stamped on my passport so that I can travel outside the country and visit europe or asia, and maybe who knows, I might even get married with my princess.

So for the next decade, I hope to become an even better person, professionally and personally, I hope to achieve my goal of making my first million during this decade, and hopefully will be able to get closer to my family somehow, at this moment I guess that part of my life is a bit broken, everyone lives at a different place, but what are you gonna do, everything to live free without the menace of a communist government.

Happy New Year 2007, now let’s make all our dreams happen so let’s not waste any time and get to work on them.

Son las 3:30am, acabo de despertar, tuve una pesadilla en la cual al inicio estaba caminando descalso en mi casa y me corte los pies, luego al tratar de levantarme, mi mano derecha, sin querer, se apoyo sobre una botella que estaba cubierta, y por algun motivo se quebro de manera muy fragil, los vidrios se enterraron profundamente en mi brazo, y dolia mucho.

Empeze a llorar, un vidrio era largo y fino, y se habia clavado profundo como una estaca, el segundo no me habia dado cuenta que estaba ahi.

Mi novia en el sueno me llevo hasta el bano, y yo tenia miedo de sacar el vidrio, pensaba que me iba a desangrar y morir, ademas ella nunca habia sacado vidro de la piel asi de profundo, al sacar el vidrio, solo salio una o dos gotas de sangre, y se desaparecieron rapidamente. Pero luego me di cuenta, que tenia un vidrio plano, clavado en todo su borde a lo largo del brazo, bien profundo, logramos sacarlo, dolio, pero no sangre y me desperte.

Aun puedo sentir el vidrio en el brazo.

Nunca habia sonado que me habia cortado, asi que me levante y busque en diccionarios de sueno lo que podria significar:

- Cambios en la vida
- Terminacion de empresas en forma abrupta
- Una muerte accidental

Ahora si que me cague mas….

Tambien hace como un mes, sone que estaba montado en un caballo de la policia de Nueva York, a pelo, agarrandolo por los pelos, pero tuve que bajarme del caballo y devolverme caminando a pie, caminando por un terreno lleno de escombros y basura totalmente descalzo. Al final del sueno, estaba de vuelta en mi casa con mi madre.

Montar a caballo significa exito, riqueza.

Espero que solo sean suenos, pero aqui quedan anotados como prueba de cualquier prediccion.

La prueba la hice en dslreports.com, tienen un applet java. Hice la prueba conectado de aqui de Brooklyn a un servidor en New Jersey, a unas 50 millas de aqui.
Tasa de bajada 11.59 mbps, Tasa de subida 1752 Kbps.

Luego hice otra prueba a un servidor en Palo Alto, California, al otro lado del pais literalmente…

Tasa de bajada 3.59 mbps, Tasa de subida 1593 Kbps.