Wednesday, 14th o June 2000
Lot's of fun things going on here. Altamente.com is finally going to get financing. We are going to sign the papers this coming week to the tune of $350,000 in seed capital. Things have gone much better with this VC firm than before. They've been very straightforward and plain speaking. I think this relationship is going to work out very well. Our other business partner (VP of Technology) Philip Wall is going to come down Monday to sign with us. A big thanks goes out the Laura without whom this would never have happened. She's been the hard negotiator and crash course MBA in a week. I swear she knows more about stock and financial planning than an MBA. She kids that THAT degree is next on her list... after she finishes her Ph.d. My little VC stud-ette she is at that *G*.
Olaia is talking up a storm. Her first sentence was "Shoe on!!" Now she's talking big long sentences that are unintelligable. She repeats them so emphatically, and exactly the same everytime, but I'll be darned if I can figure out what she's trying to say. She stomps her little foot in frustration and goes over to what she wants, dragging me by the pant leg and saying "¡¡¡Ven!!... Papi, ¡ven!" which is "come!" in Spanish. It's so cute.
I also added a quote for the day above... I hope they generate a bit of mirth. Most of the ones I have are offbeat and not your typical Barlett's Familiar Quotations.
Monday, 8th o May 2000
Easter Morning and I got this neat hat.
Finally done some updating on this page. Got a new design. How do you like it? The logo sort of inspires an Indiana Jones adventure, don't you think? Well this is the adventure that is my life.
So what's new? Well, before I forget, let's talk about Olaia. That little girl is growing so fast. She already has a pretty big vocabulary. If you want to hear, click here papaya.altamente.com and there should be a link above that says "Olaia Talking." They are particularly cute little snipets in Real Audio that have her saying all of her animal names. She loves cows "MOOOO" and doggies "RUFF RUFF".
Today, we played in her little pool. It's so warm here, and her little face gets so red, we have to put her babe-in-suit on and let her go for a dip. We both played splishy-slash for a while. I made big bubbles with my hands and she added her little perturbations.
She also has a small plastic cup that has a hole in the bottom that powers her Pooh water mill, but she likes to take the plastic cup/barrel off and drink out of it. It's kind of funny to watch her attempt to drink it before all the water runs out the bottom.
Still lots going on with our company Altamente.com. The web page needs some work, but there are lots of other things that we've been working on. I've got all kinds of neat little Intranet applications build and pre-configured for businesses. They are all available over a web page and are build using open source tools with the Postgres SQL database. It is very robust and more than suitable for 99% of SQL database needs. We've got a collaborative calendar, contact manager, message board system, mailing list manager just to name a few. Anyway, I've been hard at work coding away on this for the past few months. This open source and Linux movement is about the most exciting thing that's ever come out of the computing industry.
I'm very excited about the future. Sure we still don't have any money, but I have more of a smile on my face recently as I see the inevitable success that lies at the end of this long hard journey. If you're looking for a good book to give you an overview of what open source world is all about and why there is so much excitement, take a look at this The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It's a geared at least adequately to the lay person and goes into the philosophy and anthropology behind what makes programmers and open source developers tick. An super interesting read!
Monday, 8th o May 2000
Looking for Eggs was so much fun that Easter morning.
Well aside from Olaia and Linux there isn't much to talk about around here. I could probably go on for hours about all the stupid Unix tricks I've learned over these past 5 years, but I, of course, won't. At least all at once. Hehe, I could go on about Olaia as well, oh poor thing just got attacked by a mean ol' fire ant. They hurt!! It was under her diaper biting her butt. Poor thing. She was there politely telling us kah-kah, like she had a poopie in her pants. "Mommy, there's something happening in my pants that I don't like. Do you think you could check." That little smartie!!
Well, I hope you enjoy the new web site... the new look. It's now running off my office/home machine from my Linux firewall box. It's our prototyping computer and is like a Swiss Army knife of sorts. But I realized that since I had it there it would more convenient to put all my personal web pages here so that I could update them more frequently. Uploading to Compuserve was a pain. Half the time their Ourworld server was down and I'd have to wait. Eventually, I just stopped working on it because it was such hassle to do daily updates. Well, I hope this is easier. I open the document in my editor and hit "Save." and the page is live. Pretty neat.
Okay, gotta head out to my geeks anonymous meeting.
Monday, 27th o March 2000
Alexandra and Rihana look what the Easter Bunny brought
Born in the year of the Dragon, these two little precious sweet hearts are destined to be successful, most powerful, smart, and gracious. In China, people have been planning to have their child in this Chinese year of the Dragon so they may be blessed with success. I don't know, maybe Sean and Leila decided, if one blessed child was good, maybe two was better. Of course who needs luck with parents like theirs.
Congratulations Sean and Leila. Better run out and buy another 50,000 pack of diapers. I think SAMS's has them in cases of 100,000. Hehe
Wednesday, 22nd o September 1999
Olaia loves to play with all kinds of things, among them, this funny hat she has, which is a box. I stuck it on her head and thought it looked like one of those silly hats that Europeans wear like the Swiss Guard.
 The Trash Monster |
Remember when I told you about the trash monster? Well here she is, diving into our office waste can. We put the papers back in, put the trash can in the corner, and she finds it and dumps it out anew. It's a constant battle of cuteness.
Funny story: We were washing our fuzzy bathroom/toilet covers (I shouldn't have to tell you who bought them). Laura threw them into the washing machine and away they went. It had been a while since we'd washed them, because; one, they were almost new and two, we had been super busy.
Pulling the out of the dryer, Laura asked, "Hon, did you take the yellow bathmats?"
 Olaia wearing her box |
"No, but I saw it, did you look in the closet?"
"Yes"
I wasn't too concerned. It'll turn up, I thought. A week went by and I started to wonder about the yellow bathmats. Convinced that Laura had put them away, or threw them someplace and forgot, I combed the house. After 15 minutes of digging through closets and corners, I gave up. I was starting to get pretty worried. It had seemed like things were disappearing all the time... little things, socks, underwear, etc.
"Do you think some kid is messing with us?" I asked, knowing full well that this would be right up the Puerto Rican sense of humor. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear of a kid that breaks into a neighbor's house only to rearrange the furniture or some such nonsense. It's hard to get into our house, but it is possible to climb the fence (even though it is high) and open the sliding glass doors, as we usually don't lock them.
Both of us were getting pretty worried. It's creepy to think of someone taking things from your house, no matter how insignificant and especially with little Olaia there. We couldn't think of anything to do.
"Let's see there is this blue one and there is the light green one," Laura said, checking them out and rubbing her head. I was in the other room working on the computer when I heard her let out a laugh.
"Oh my God, Jim. Do you know what happened to the yellow bathmats? I think these light green ones are it. Remember how I washed them with the dark blue ones?"
"Ahhhhh, that's right, and we don't have any light green bathmats." I smacked my head and we both had a good laugh. It was weird that we never bought light green bathmats but we never looked twice at them when they had appeared in our house. Let some yellow ones disappear though and we are full of angst.
I also no longer work for Watson Wyatt. It ended up being a very crappy experience. After wanting me so badly they fired me within one week for "failing to adhere to company guidelines" with respect to the computers. Short story, I installed Linux on a 386 that was in a closet in the hopes of making a nice little print server to fix their print problems. The truth: They were hiring for an assistant position (to be my assistant) and I think they got someone that could do my job and would accept less money. That's what I think happened. It was weird, surreal, and bizarre. I didn't know that kind of thing happened in the workplace. They had a joke there about cakes. It seems the employee turn over is so high that they have a cake a week because someone is leaving. With that kind of rapport I can't imagine the office is successful. Oh well, better to have found out now while OG Consulting hadn't taken a hit from neglect. As it was, I picked it up right in stride and things are going well.
To any of you working for corporate America, I have one question, "How do you put up with the bullshit?"