Thursday night

And its time to crunch some numbers in Excel (which I'm finding I'm enjoying more since I've learned to use it better). I've always heard a phrase that whoever tells you they know how to use Excel is lying - and they probably only know about 20% of its functions. That people who you would think know excel, have seen people that really know excel, and those guys say they only know 70% of Excel :) .

Today I ran across (i.e., I chatted a bit with) a good friend of mine who also happened to be my boss over here at the best outsourcing partner in the world, Stream Global Services. I dearly miss him and his personality and will write him a pretty nice linkedin review very soon (wink wink) but I wanted to share his blog to my readers (all 57 of them according to google analytics lol). You will notice that probably there wasn't a person more enthused with Barack Obama's election in 2009 lol

http://politicalmangu.com/

Andres Calamaro - Alta Suciedad

Today I´ll talk about one of the best albums by Argentine rocl/pop star Andres Calamaro. Today I found a playlist on youtube that starts off with all the songs from this record. It is is simply amazing, probably the best in his prolific career.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=753E780EAB8C692F&search_query=andres+calamaro

Really awesome album, even if you don´t understand spanish, you will find the music is perfect.

Also, I must say that while being in the outsourcing industry will always give you more insight into the world market than your regular Joe, I´m now reading a book that should be Outsourcing 101: The world is flat by Thomas L. Friedman. Pretty amazing and I´ve just started it.

This book was an assignment for half the class in one of my IT project management master degree classes. The other half, which was me, got assigned one of the best books I´ve read in my whole life: Juan Enriquez Cabot´s "As the future catches you". It is simply amazing. I haven´t found it on pdf, but I did go and bought the last copy from the Libreria Internacional over at Zapote.

Ebooks :D

Well, one thing you can definitely say about the internet is that now you can access that hot song and its lyrics immediately, instead of waiting; that now you can watch that video that you really wanted to see but no one had, and now you can find that book even if its not sold in your country.

With that in mind I ran across this blog that has links to ebooks.

http://www.timeanhalf.blogspot.com/

I specially liked the finance ones and will check them out for... evaluation purchases?

Going to flash a WRT54G, v6!

Apparently they are tougher. Need to configure it as a wireless repeater while enabling wpa2. I´ve never understood how linksys can sell repeaters (or before when they sold the high gain antennae) at prices that are very similar to the WRT54G, when they could have just enabled the option on them.

well, dig in! http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

** update :D **

I am happy to report that instructions were very well done. I followed this to the letter and now I am off to my parent´s house to install the last part, a wireless repeater bridge :D

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT54G_v5.0_%26_5.1_%26_6.0

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Repeater_Bridge

Google analytics, bleach manga delayed!

With Jorge Ortiz´s help I *think* I added google analytics to my blog template correctly.

Today I was looking for the bleach manga and I learned this week´s has been delayed. Tite Kubo always does that doesn´t he? When the series is at a peak he takes a week off lol. I found his myspace page and turned out finding one of his first mangas, Zombie Powder. Shame that he cancelled it, I was really beginning to like it!

Well now its either sleep or finish my homework on using excel to analyze data :D I really like some of the things I´m learning this trimester, I find it very interesting and enriching as an IT pro. Some of them are using SQL 2005 business inteligence features, learning more about managing costs on projects, and well, about blogging and modern networks :D

Lifehacker for Costa Rica, IT and well.. my life!

Do you know the webpage lifehacker.com ? if you don´t it´s definitely something worth seeing. I think the theme for my blog will be something like that... I want whoever reads it to find useful facts that I´ve acquired throughout my life.

Today I´m wondering about a costa rican phrase used when you are selling an old car. "Vender por partes", sell for parts, is a common social recommendation that you will hear when, say, you want to sell your '0ld and beaten down´ 1991 Ford Taurus. It happened to a friend of mine today - he let it go for around $300. Sure, the transmission was stuck on 1st, the steering hydraulics were making sounds and the a/c was a bit off, but I´m thinking the tires and rims alone are probably worth that!

That V6 would have probably made a lot of fun inside a Toyota corolla (wink wink to another friend). So what was left in the back of my head was, "where do you go when you want to sell for parts in Costa Rica?". People make it sound easy but I would have choked if my friend had asked me that.

Also, pivot tables rule in Excel 2007. I have to thank Luis Trejos for that. He showed me how easy they are. Basically if you have data inside a filter that you want to display, select it all, insert pivot table, and place rows and columns where you want. It´s really powerful :)

First post :D

This is my blog. To show all I know and am reading and learning about - experiment ground, companion, tool for the relentless critic called time. It might be in spanish at times (my native tongue, hooray for Costa Rica!) but really, English is the language of the world.

Hello World. For real :D