Why I blog
(This article appeared in the Latino Afinity Group Newsflash in April 2015)
In the edge of the cyber sphere, alone, unbothered is a small window that peers into the comings and goings of our family. FamMijangos.com was born a little over 2 years ago, with the purpose of preserving our family’s history, to have a central place for family and friends to connect with us, and to be a window for the world to peer into our daily life.
My family was generating about 30 GB of images and videos a year, many memories were recorded and then forgotten. For Christmas 2012, as a gift to my wife, I purchased the site FamMijangos.com, short for Familia Mijangos (Mijangos’ Family). I brought in a few posts and pictures from other blogs we were doing and centralized them to one location. From that point on we have tried to preserve our history, where we go, what we do, the mundane, and the extreme. Family History is important to us, and sharing it has become delightful.
My parents and siblings are scattered from Hawaii to Atlanta, and in Guatemala, we have friends all over the world. With changing platforms and technologies that come and go, we needed a central repository for people to connect with us. Constantly adding posts has enabled us to keep in touch with our family and friends. We have been able to reconnect with past acquaintances, and strengthen the bond with others. The site is our digital home, and provides a window to the outside world.
Although there are configurations that would make the site invisible to the world, we chose to have it as a public window to the world. This makes us conscious of what we write, which images we share, and what things we keep private; but we don’t want a fake portrait of our life. We want this to be the history of our lives, for our children know how we were; the happy times and sad times. In other words, to keep it real.
I enjoy writing and putting together all the components of a website together, but the real value is in opening an old post and showing my little girl a video of the first time she held a butterfly. A picture is a thousand words, but sometimes you need five more words to know the context. So come and visit our little corner of the internet, we’ll keep a light on for you at FamMijangos.com
Week 16 – 365 Photo Challenge
Wow, I missed 3 days this week 🙁
Week 15 – 365 Photo Challenge
I missed 2 days again, but really liked the first image, where my girl is looking through the window, it looks even better on Black & White.
A Grade is Not Enough
I’ve been reading a lot on scores and measuring systems this week. I’m trying to come up with some KPIs for a new process in the area of Innovation.
Look at this scoring system when trying to rank things based on Up / Down votes.
It’s called Wilson’s Algorithm, read more here. It is actually pretty good and providing a Score based on limited knowledge. A Score is just a Score, it does not provide any context.
Looking at some of the scores in the NCAA Men’s Basketball bracket, does not tell you much on how the game was, and few things on the individual teams. Look at the following comic:
A score needs to be a way to explain a set of attributes and their relationship on each other. It is easy to explain a score on an exam, % of questions answered correctly. This becomes tricky with behaviours, a score needs to correlate with particular attributes.
We get lost in the Score, while failing to understand it’s meaning.
Still Busy
Last week was still very busy, and I belive that it will continue this way for a while. Our tiny group at work has been put in the spotlight, and thus there is a lot of things going on.
Again I missed a day on my 365 Challenge, but I carry on. I’m posting this on a Monday rather than Friday, but I carry on. There is no need to stop due to increased work or obligation; just recognize that there will be ebbs in our time.
