International Orientation is D.O.N.E.

Finally, International Orientation is complete! Not that is wasn’t fun, it’s just over. We had a lot of things going on this week.  For the first time in my life, I went to a ropes course, and it was hard.  We didn’t do much climbing, but we did a lot of swinging and that made dizzy.

So just as I predicted, everyone in the international group is great.  I was able to memorize all the names in the group, so I got a gold star for that, but really everyone is wonderful.  Here is a picture of the group:

CIS

Professors keep scarring us about how hard the first semester is going to be.  I hope is just to we are on our feet, because they just paint it so bad.  The one thing that I like to do, and they say is the hardest is reading.  Over the past 10 years I’ve become much better at reading and learning from the readings, so hopefully it won’t be so bad.  Now for group projects, I’m scared.  I’m not very good at group projects.  I can do my part, and if everyone is good at putting in good work, I’m in; but if we have a black sheep in the group it’s going to be bad.

I’ve had good prep work for my resume, and I think it’s looking good.  Just two days ago I had a friend go over it, and I need to do those changes.  Overall it has been a very good experience trying to polish my resume.

On the home front things are very good.  I have the great blessing of having a wonderful wife.  I truly is a blessing to come from school, and just hear good experiences.  I would be so hard to come home to complaints or home sickness.  Debora is wonderful.  Nicole is doing good too.  She had her first checkup and although she needs to put on some weight, she is very healthy.

This coming week will be MBA Orientation, so the real work begins.  I’m excited, and happy.

ORIENTATION

So this was the first week of orientation, not too many ground breaking knowledge, but all in all fun. I have met now the rest of the international students, not all of them part of the CIS program.  I have colleagues from Canada, India, China, Brazil, Argentina, Italy and Madagascar.  We truly have someone from each of the corners of the globe.  Each has their own perspective and have valuable information to share.

I’ve spent the last week getting to know most of the students, and I have learned a great deal from them.  I’ve befriended most of them and I feel very comfortable around them.  Hopefully we will be better acquainted by the end of orientation.

Here are some new friends from Brazil.
Here are some new friends from Brazil.

Inspiring stories

The other day I read about a new program in the mormon channel called “Conversations.”  It is a radio program interviewing several Apostles and some other people with inspirational lives.  So I signed up for the podcast and downloaded the first episodes.

Today I finally listened to the first episode and what a wonderful experience.  I truly have been inspired by the stories of faith.  I’m now going back and downloading all the previous episodes so that I can listen to them.  Each episode is about 1 hour long, so is perfect for my comute, but make some time they truly are inspirational.

Here is the link for the site: http://radio.lds.org/programs/conversations?lang=eng

And here for the podcast: http://feeds.lds.org/LDSConversations

Bancos de Guatemala

Hoy, como todos los mese me tocó que visitar nuestro sistema bancario. Lastimosamente no tengo consolidados mis tramites en un sólo lugar. Debo de ir de una cola a otra, tratando de hacer todos los pagos. Tristemente cada banco es diferente y cada uno tiene sus fortalezas y sus debilidades. A mi hoy sólo me ha tocado experimentar las debilidades.

Mi único consuelo es que ente màs me tardo, màs fria estará la Coca Light que me esta esperando en la oficina.

That age

I believe I’m now at the age were I have to say no to certain milk products 🙁 No more pastrami swis cheese burgers for me. And to think we just met.

Facebook’s Pictures Pet Pieve

I seriously love the way I can share pictures on facebook, it really is a great way to interact with family and friends. I love to upload pictures from my phone or my camera. I’m not a great photographer, ok I’m NOT a photographer at all, I just take pictures. Most are family pictures, me, my wife and daughter Nicole. I like to share those pictures with my friends.

My wife also likes to take pictures, mostly from her iphone, and almost exclusively of Nicole. My wife started taking daily pictures of Nicole’s outfits and accomplishments and uploading them to facebook. We put privacy setting such that only our friends can see the pictures, but not all of my friends are also my wife’s friends on facebook. I have college friends, and previous coworkers where we don’t overlap. So then facebook’s privacy setting start to break. We don’t want to share our pictures to all the friends of our friends, we want to share them with all the friends of our husband or wife.

The options are to post on both our profiles, but that defeats the purpose of everyone posting comments on the same pictures. Also my wife and I have the same friends on facebook, so to most of our friends they will see we are posting things twice.

The solution, not yet implemented by facebook, have shared albums. This way, we would get the best of both worlds. We would act as 1 entity, and say we want only the collection of OUR friends (all of my wife’s friends and all of my friends) to see our pictures. Same would be for videos.

I’ve posted this on the facebook feedback, let’s see if it’s implemented some time.

A day without my computer

So I forgot my computer today at my home. What was I to do. My wife had driven me to work, so there was no way to get home. So I decided to do an experiment, see if my backup solution was adequate. I borrowed an old machine from IT, and logged on.

1) All work files are stored on a server, here in my office. So all current documents were readily available.
2) Email I have 2 account. One is on an exchange server, and current email is stored on the server. I do a weekly backup, and stored both locally, on an external disk, remotely. I didn’t have the local copy so I went and used the one on the external disk. My other account is on gmail, so I didn’t have to do anything, webmail rocks.
3) Some files that I only had on my laptop, had not yet been backed up, so I turned to my faithful MOZY backup. I went to the online service, logged in and did a web restore. I selected the files that I needed and in a few minutes I had them.
4) My local backup was even good to listen to some music during the day.

In the end, I realized that my laptop is not more than a thick client, only used for processing, but not storage. If I were to loose my laptop I would lose my configurations, but not my important files. Although I realized today, that I should include my desktop in the backup. I had to search the web for some files that I had downloaded recently. So tomorrow a few clicks and Mozy will go at it.

BTW, and so excited that I won a full year free with Mozy, they rock!

Back to posting

I’ve been away for some time, and I would like to come back to posting. Not sure if I’ll post in english or spanish, I will decide on the way. What I will do is post some stuff with back dates so that the pictures come out in cronological order.

thanks all.