Resolutions for 2012

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Gabriel Saldaña

new years resolutions

At first, according to my last year’s resolutions post, I thought this year’s resolutions would look like the image above. Fortunately after reviewing a bit further, I did manage to accomplish 5 of 7 goals, so it’s not that bad.

  • I went to Google I/O
  • I got back into the open source community in Mexico giving talks in Puerto Vallarta
  • I traveled several times to San Francisco
  • I didn’t initiated my entrepreneurship with a startup, but I started freelancing and got some ideas around.
  • I lost some weight and did a bit more exercise than the year before.

This 2011 has been a year with lots of changes. The good times have been great, but the bad times have also been very deep. It’s been a year with a lot of travelling, learnings and experiences.

For this year, I’m still having trouble setting up my goals. I’ve been thinking about this post for the past two weeks and still things look blurry. Maybe because of all the things that happened last year and I still don’t have a clear mind to see where I want to go. Right now I feel this 2012 is a blank sheet of paper. Anything can happen.

Still, I don’t like having absolutely no plans. There’s a saying that has been sounding in my head for the last months: “If you don’t decide what to do with your life, life will decide for you…and it might not be what you wanted”. So I must set a few goals at least.

Improve health by getting fit.

I need to get closer to my ideal weight. I need to loose about 10kgs. I’ve been loosing weight with little effort following some tips from The 4-Hour Body . I interrupted my diet but I will restart it since it has given me good results.

Quantify and monitor life.

I would like to start monitoring and quantifying more the things I do in life so I can take decisions based on real numbers not just on appreciations of what I’ve done. For example, I just told you that I did more exercise last year than the year before. That’s just a hunch. I really can’t tell exactly by how much hours of exercise I exceeded the year before. Also because of my high cholesterol detected a few years back, I must test my blood regularly. I want to keep track of my health improvements and blood tests so I can motivate myself to keep making good health choices as I watch my progress. Things like that can be measured and tracked, and will aid me when taking decisions in health, financially and other aspects of life. Reading Sacha Chua’s blog has inspired me to start tracking and monitoring life.

Keep exploring startup ideas.

Release early, release often. Last year I did release the changes I had promised, but I’ve also had time to develop some new ideas but haven’t been published. I’ve been approached by a lot of people with ideas and the most common thing is that no one executes. I did some prototypes but nothing got published. And if it’s not published, it doesn’t exist. Those ideas must get out of my mind and my local machine and out there to gather feedback in hopes that one of them might also get some wings. If not, I still win, by learning what doesn’t work and why.

Keep the traveling going

It’s very refreshing and inspirational to travel around and change locations out of your routine. You know what they say, that sedentary life is bad for health. I think it not only applies to a sitting down in front of a computer kind of life, but also a not getting out and staying in the same places can age your mind.

Write more.

Even if it’s not a blog post to publish. I want to do writing as a mind exercise of setting my thought clearly and in order in a written form. Writing your thoughts, memories and ideas down helps organizing your mind and it’s cool to be able to go back and read what you’ve thought before, how you felt, etc. The mind can’t retain all the details. The book Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past was a very inspirational read about getting into writing, as well as a good guideline on how to start and what to do.

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Easy CSS editing with Emacs

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Gabriel Saldaña

rainbow-mode

Editing CSS in Emacs is very easy since the standard CSS mode comes included by default. But developer Julien Danjou created this nice minor mode called rainbow-mode which will display the color of the code as the background of the code’s text. It is very useful to immediately see the colors right there in the style sheet instead of trying to remember each code and then test in the browser window.

One of the problems I had was when opening any CSS file, it would open by default css-mode, but I had to manually load rainbow-mode every time. The elisp function auto-mode-alist is used to detect a file type by its name and running a function associated with it, generally the function to enable a major mode to edit that type of file. For minor modes I couldn’t find anything that would allow me to launch them without inhibiting the mayor mode’s startup.

So since auto-mode-alist takes a regular expression for the file type and only one function as its arguments, I wrote a function that will run both and use that as the second argument to execute.

;; CSS and Rainbow modes 
(defun all-css-modes() (css-mode) (rainbow-mode)) 

;; Load both major and minor modes in one call based on file type 
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.css$" . all-css-modes))

Hope you find it useful and you like the combination of css-mode and rainbow-mode as much as I do.

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Montecristo Signature Series Humi-Savor Travel Cigar Case

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Gabriel Saldaña

A few weeks ago I received the Montecristo Singature Series Humi-Savor from Montecristo. It’s a very nice travel cigar case that holds one piece but has the added benefit of having humidity control.

It’s a hard metal case with an internal base and a coil that will adapt to the size of your cigar to hold it firmly inside. The overall length is 8 3/8 inches and it can hold up to a 6×60 sized cigar. The top cover is a hard transparent plastic cap that seals the case tightly.

On the bottom part, there’s a plastic container with humidity pearls that expand when added distilled water. Those pearls will hold the humidity in the case for several days, maybe even weeks.

I loved this gift, specially these days that I’m visiting my parent’s house and can’t bring my humidor with me. This case will protect my cigar from any damage in my backpack and will also keep it fresh for several days until I light it up.

Although I got it for free, I’ve found it on several online stores at around the $25 USD price, which is not bad at all. I really recommend it for travelling smokers. Before having this, I used to save the crystal containers some Cohiba Coronas come in, but one day one of the containers broke and I had glass all over my bag and a torn cigar wrap. The Montecristo humi-savor is a much better and safer way to transport your cigars. If you have other tips for travelling smokers, please share them in the comments.

I plan to receive the new year celebrating with this 75th anniversary limited edition tobacco cigar from Montecristo. What are you smoking for new years?

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Local fashion show at Batiz boutique

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Gabriel Saldaña

A new fashion boutique opened up in my neighborhood. Veronica Batiz, chief editor of Intrend Magazine just opened up her new boutique of haute couture in San Pedro. I got invited via email and I couldn’t let pass an opportunity to shoot some models picutres. I like fashion and I get very few opportunities to be at these events. I’m still not that well connected in the fashion circles.

At this event, while I was expecting professional hired models to walk on the runway, you could easily tell they were all friends of the boutique owner. It was nice to see good local talent. The event was very improvised, but the clothes were very nice and everyone had a good time.

I wish her great success in this new business adventure.

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25th Anniversary of the Nutcracker ballet by the ESMDM in Monterrey

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Gabriel Saldaña

A few weeks ago I was invited to the 25th Anniversary of the Nutcracker ballet by the ESMDM in Monterrey. As I’ve done for the last 3 or 4 years (maybe even more) I’ve been attending to the Nutcracker (and other events) by the ESMDM and took some pictures of it. Instead of just sharing on my Flickr page, I’d like to share them here too.

This year I initially forgot my camera at home, but since the theater is about 5 blocks away, in the intermediate time I ran back to get it. So I don’t have any pictures of the first act this year. Before the ballet started there was a celebration and commemoration of the 25 years of the Nutcracker every winter. It was that they made a plaque with the names of every dancer that participated on the ballet for those 25 years.

At the end, all the ex-alumni of the ESMDM who were at some point part of the Nutcracker cast took a group picture. I think I saw at least two generations of the same family in that picture, that was something nice to see.

I used my Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens with varying exposure times. For these type of events, since there’s low light and little time to adjust your camera, I use the Tv setting and adjust shutter speed as needed depending on current illumination. I still find it hard to find the perfect balance between fast shutter speeds and low light compensation to capture the movements in mid air, but I’ve found that the shutter speed setting and AI Servo auto focus mode makes it easier for starters.

Do you have tips for stage photography? What lens do you recommend for these events? Let me know in the comments.

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Goodbye Christopher Hitchens

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Gabriel Saldaña

Christopher Hitchens

Yesterday (Dec. 16, 2011) I read in the news that Christopher Hitchens passed away after a long struggle with cancer. Although I didn’t know the man personally, nor I’m familiar with all his journalistic work, his books, talks and speeches on atheism and against religion illustrated and influenced me a lot on recent years. I admired his courage and aggressiveness when attacking religion and defending reason. Some may criticize him for precisely this, because people don’t like to be confronted in such direct way.

The world will miss Christopher Hitchens because we need someone as aggressive as him, now more than ever, at these times when world leaders are getting more religiously fanatic than before. We have Richard Dawkins who is very sophisticated, logical and well, proffessor-like to teach about the bad things of religion, we have Penn Gillette who’s very charismatic, tolerant and quite intelligent to be non-confrontational when arguing the subject, but with Christopher’s passing, we now lack the passionate aggressive and straight to the point guy, a role very well filled by Hitchens and for that, he will never be forgotten.

I’d like to share some of my favorite quotes from him and a video of the best Hitchslap moments.

  • “One day a decent candidate for high office will say that he is not a person of faith, and the sky will not fall.”
  • “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
  • “An argument that can be used to prove anything is open to the objection that it proves nothing.”
  • “Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did”
  • “The bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not boud by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured, human mammals.”
  • “…great damage has been done, and continues to be done, by such (religious) people and by such (religious) ideas. You’re better off thinking for yourself and taking all the risks, and I might add all the pleasures that will come from that. The most overrated of the virtues is faith. The metaphysical claims of religion are untrue.”
  • “I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion and organized religion”
  • “religion poisons everything”
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