Must be Air Canada

I sit now on a plane seat
Seat number 20C
the plane engines are roaring
and I'm watching TV

Oh, plane just started turning
I guess airport's not far off
I hope that my layover
is not much of a drawl

I come back from Toronto,
where I visited a friend.
Thanks to him I got lodging,
five free nights while I was there.

We also visited Niagara,
an hour's drive away
where we took lots of pictures
and ate some pizza! yay!

I'm landing, now in New York
along with the whole plan.
i see many trees and house-filled coasts,
must be a quiet suburb.

On, now I see some buildings,
they're getting larger now.
And taller, denser, farther too,
I even saw a bridge.

Over a big lake-looking thing,
it's quite a nice sight
wheels on the ground, we're now on land,
our pilot made it right.

I checked, my wait in NY
is no longer than half
an hour so it won't be long
before I'm up high again.

I have to say, this plane ride
was the comfiest one I've had
No ear-pressing or ear-popping,
must be Air Canada.

And now I will stop writing
casue we're about to deplane.
and immigration is still ahead
and I gotta get my green card out and stuff.

Toronto Wishes

Today I wished upon a beach and a lake and the wind and the sky for the world to become a better place. Now, sitting at the island ferry dock, I wish it again. I wish for people to understand themselves better. I wish for the mindless greed for money to disappear. I wish for everyone to understand that they should all repreoduce less - at a much lower rate than the current one. I wish for a clean energy source to appear and be implemented all over the world. I wish for my trip to Europe to be very successful, and that I may learn much from it and make new friendships, great friendships, along the way. And mostly, I wish to be happy =)

Niagara Falls Today!!!

Off to see Niagara Falls today!! I just woke up and now I just gotta take a shower, get my camera ready, get my clothes ready, get the rest of my stuff ready, wait for Marcelo to do the same, and LEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE!!!! cya!!!

Toronto trip so far

So I had an AUS-DFW-ATL-YYZ trip to Toronto today, scheduled as follows:

AUS-DFW: 8:50AM-9:50AM
DFW-ATL: 10:50-2:00PM
ATL-YYZ: 2:35PM-4:44PM

so I prudently arrived at the AUS gate 13 an hour early to avoid any problems and to make sure I got on my plane.

But it was maybe a little bit TOO early. Having decided to stay awake the whole night before, I totally fell asleep 2m away from the gate (seriously, I was on the closest seat beside it), and woke up suddenly at 8:52AM - no waiting passengers around, no plane outside the window, the LCD sign over the gate saying DEPARTED.

Panicked, I asked a guy close to me who seemed to work at the airport whether he had seen that plane leave. He said he didn't know, but told me to go check with the airline counter. I did, and indeed, the flight had left... they gave me a stand-by pass for a later AUS-DFW flight leaving at 9:50AM, arriving in DFW at 10:50AM. I was hoping that maybe if the pilot was in a hurry and there were no plane traffic delays at the destination, the plane would still arrive 10-15 minutes early and would still give me enough time to exit the plane at DFW, and run at supersonic speed through the airport hallways to still catch my DFW-ATL flight at 10:50AM.

This time I did catch my 9:50AM flight. And sure enough, the plane arrived early. It was about 10:43AM when I woke up, and the plane gate had just opened, and other passengers around me were all bustling around, grabbing bags, and eagerly standing in front of their seats, as if it would get them out of the plane any earlier.

I pseudo-ran out of the walkway into the terminal, desperately looked for a flight status screen, found it, and found my flight in the list of departures. It said it left from gate E14. I looked around - I was on terminal A. I asked an airport information guy whether he could call my DELTA gate and tell them to wait 5-10 more minutes for me. He said he couldn't help me, so I ran. Man, I ran. I think I ran at least 1/4 mile before reaching the train connecting the airport terminals. Luckily, the train arrived about seconds later, so I got in. My speed now subject to the train speed, I tried to relax and convince myself that being stressed out would not make me get to the gate any faster. It wasn't easy, especially as I looked out the train windows and saw a DELTA plane roll on the runway, already departing. It was then 10:53AM. I wished for my flight to be shortly delayed by about 10 minutes or so.

Once the train doors opened again, I was the first one out of there, running again at the highest speed I could manage with two unbalanced backpacks hanging on me and a right ankle recovering from a sprain. Gate E14 just so happened to be the second-to-last farthest gate away from the train. That didn't make much of a difference anyway... when I got there, no passengers were waiting there anymore, and the screen at the gate displayed information about a 1:10PM flight to Atlanta - not my flight at all.

Having failed to catch my plane, I walked out to the airline counters and, again, asked to be re-booked. I felt very lucky when they simply told me that I would be able to get to YYZ at 7:48PM instead of 4:44PM - I was almost expecting to hear something like "as this was not the airline's responsibility, you will have to pay a fee of no less than $300 and be rebooked for tomorrow's flight to Toronto at 8:00AM" or something. But no! The comprehensive airline lady at the counter simply gave me two new later boarding passes on the same route as before, and told me "have a nice day" or something like that. I did likewise.

And then I sat down and started writing this blog entry on one of the seats near gate E14 at the DFW airport. I did not manage to finish it though... I had to hastily pack the laptop, its power cable, and my green ethernet cable back into my backpack a few minutes before my flight finished boarding. I was one of the last people on the boarding line. As such, I got a little scared when the gate entrance machine scanned my boarding pass and issued a warning red light and a cacophonic beep instead of the usual green light and friendly beep. I had to go stand at another line and wait for them to give me another boarding pass with a different seat number so that I could AGAIN go into the original boarding line and have my boarding pass accepted by the picky gate entrance machine ("Whew", I thought). I observed that many passengers were having some seat conflicts between each other - they didn't seem to know exactly which one their seat was. It seemed that the airline had reshuffled some of the passengers' seats just before the flight took up. I didn't care much... and as the plane took off I dozed off...

And woke back up in Atlanta. My layover in Atlanta was characterized by being long (around 2.5 hours), by having no Internet access, and by a blond, somewhat-older (mid 50s (both age and birth year)) lady from Kansas sitting down next to me at gate A33 and talking to me the whole time. She talked a lot - asked me where I was from, told me where she was from, told me she was going to Valdosta, GA, told me that she believed in physically punishing children when they did something "wrong", talked to me about a church which she claimed was made up of more than 42,000 people, told me she did not know too much about computers, and initially made me uncomfortable by striking up topics in the conversation in which I had little interest in. I did agree very much on something she said, though - she said that it was nice to find someone who agreed to just sit down and talk for a while, that it was becoming harder and harder to just talk with random people in any place. She said that was due to many people always wanting more money, nicer cars, bigger houses, and being stressed out all the time due to that. She said that when people do that, they don't own their possessions - their possessions own them. That they become slaves to their own possessions, always wanting more, always struggling to keep everything they have and to get more and more and more. I heartily agreed.

As my ATL-YYZ flight finished boarding and I got in at the end of the line, I said goodbye to the old blond lady from Kansas who helped me make my waiting time at the gate a little less boring. She wished me luck and success in my future plans, I wished her the same, and I boarded my plane. A little over two hours later, I woke up in Toronto, presumably at around 7:40PM (EDT).

So then I deplaned directly onto the airport runway, got into a bus which drove me and the other passengers to a building that said "Customs", I got in line to present my immigration papers to the Canadian Immigration Inquisitors, and then I was forced out of the general exit path onto another line, in which a nice-looking girl with full CII uniform revised my passport and green card and asked me very detailed questions about where was I from, where did I work, how did I get the green card, why was I coming to Toronto, who my friend in Toronto was, what was he doing here, what was it like in Guatemala, and told me that she herself had thought of going to visit Guatemala sometime in a tour trip. I told her pretty much the same I tell other people who want to go to Guatemala - that it's a nice place to visit, that Panajachel is awesome, but told her to be mindful that it's not a non-dangerous place (crime-wise). I told her it would be easier for her to blend in with the population because she looked almost Guatemalan - she told me she was ethnically Portuguese, I told her I was going there for the summer, and she recommended me doing the Spain-Portugal-Morocco tour - said Morocco had some beautiful places to visit.

I had the impulse but not the guts (or naiveness) to ask for her phone number so we could get together while I was in Toronto. So then she just gave me back my documentation (passport and green card) and told me I was free to go. I then walked to the baggage claim area and saw an exchange rate booth. I took up the $2 I had in my wallet and exchanged it for canadian dollars (CAD$2.24), thinking it would help me to get on the train to downtown Toronto. She said it wasn't enough for the train, but I told her it was all I had and that I would get some more money from an ATM.

Having no bags to claim from the baggage claim area, I walked outside and looked for an ATM. I found one easily enough. Put my card in, punched my PIN in, asked for CAD$80, and a receipt came out saying "Invalid Transaction". I was puzzled. I tried again. Same result. I tried to get the cash from my Credit Card instead of from my Savings account. Same result. I looked for another ATM and tried the same. Same results. I took out my phone to call Marcelo to tell him I had landed and what was happening to me. My phone showed no reception whatsoever.

So I evaluated my situation. I was alone in Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ), with two banking cards that apparently did not work in Toronto, CAD$2.24 cash in total (not enough for a public transport fare), around 30km away from my destination, and a phone with no reception. It didn't seem right. So I thought the problem about my cards might be that I was not in the USA anymore, and that I should've told my bank I was travelling to Canada. Luckily for me, my banking cards had 1-800 numbers on the back. Also luckily for me, those numbers were free for me from public payphones in the airport. So I called the 1-800 number, dialed a few tones to tell the system I wanted to speak with a bank representative, listened to classical music for about 5 minutes, told the bank representative my problem, he told me my debit card was not linked to my savings account, I had him transfer some money from my savings account to my checking account, he set the restrictions on my card so I could use it in Canada, I thanked him, and then he transferred me to some sort of ATM protection association so that I could remove the same restriction on my card with them. I then listened to classical music for at least 10 minutes while I was being transferred, I then told the lady my same problem, she configured my card in the same way, she put me on hold so she could verify that the restriction was properly lifted, had me wait on the phone for (I PROMISE it felt like at least!) 15 minutes this time, and then she finally told me "OK, you're good to go". I thanked her, she wished me a good night, and I finally hung the sweaty, greasy public phone earpiece up. By that time it was almost 9:20PM.

THEN I was able to withdraw CAD$80 from my checking account. Then I thought of taking the bus to downtown Toronto, but I had a hard time finding it, and I saw an Enterprise shuttle just across the street from me, so I decided I felt not-so-frugal that day and that I would just go ahead and take my reservation a day early (I mistakingly made a car rental reservation to pick up one day AFTER I arrived in Toronto). I managed to convince the shuttle driver that I indeed had a reservation with Enterprise, he allowed me in the shuttle, he took me to the Enterprise office, and I rented a red Economy Hyundai Accent car for 7 days for like CAD$271 (without insurance). Marcelo says it was a good deal. I thought it was quite a ripoff compared to the circa-CAD$185 I had originally gotten for 6 days from the Priceline site, but oh well... it was my own fault.

Then I drove down south and then east on the Toronto freeways until I reached downtown. I found the hotel pretty easily, parked in front, found Marcelo having dinner at the hotel restaurant, asked about hotel parking details (CAD$20 a night) at the lobby, and then went out to drive the car around downtown Toronto. I liked it very much. We then got back to the room and went to sleep, each in his own comfy 3-star hotel bed.

We woke up at around 7:20AM, he got ready for work, I responded to a lot of emails, then we walked down to the building where we works. I bought a banana muffin and a medium coffee for CAD$1.99, he did the same, and then he left to go to work. It was then around 9:00AM. I then looked around - I was in a public underground shopping area, very clean and very business-like-looking, with signs around that said how to get to Union Station. So I ate my banana muffin and drank my coffee, and began walking around to observe some canadian commerces at work. I bought a chocolate milk at a nearby market shop, I bought some kraft paper and a box of 8 crayons at a nearby computer/bookstore shop, and I browsed around some expensive tech-related shops, looking for interesting gadgets or for very cheap prepaid phones. I found none.

I drank my chocolate milk, walked on to Union Station, found no maps of the rail system I could take with me, went back to browsing through the shops, went to the bathroom, and then walked back up to the Toronto streets and back to the hotel (on the way back I observed that the visually-impaired-oriented beepers on the street corners that beep when it is safe to cross the street beep alternatively from both sides of the street, and as you cross the street, one of those beepers gradually gets weaker and farther away, while the other gets stronger and closer. That must be part of the system to help the visually-impaired people safely cross the street). And now here I am, in the hotel room, blogging away, anxiously waiting to finish so I can go outside and explore daylight thursday Toronto. I just have to take a shower first.

March!

2/9ths of today are already contained in the past. A little under 7/9ths of it are still in the future, and right now, I am conscious of occupying a set of immediately adjacent positions in space along with this instant in time.

And now that instant has changed. At least twice.

I just wrote a blog entry about body mass, its psychosocial implications, and an evolutionist supportive argument, but I decided to extend my waking hours today by writing another entry - this one with a more egocentric focus. Easily-describable changes are occurring in my life, and I think they are worth persisting. In the future, I will be able to read it, and this will refresh my memory, and fill my mind and spirit with thoughts and feelings from the then-past, making me smile at least once and producing a sense of nostalgia.

I am now officially unemployed. I believe I have already published this piece of information, but I think it does no harm to do so again. I no longer work at Reddwerks. Colon, left parenthesis, space, colon, lowercase s. I enjoyed working there a lot.

Anyway, this easily-describable change has had drastic changes in my lifestyle:

1. My income flow has stopped.
   
2. I no longer get up in the morning every weekday.
3. I can dispose of my daily 24 hours in whichever way I see fit.
4. I was able to achieve the goals I wanted to in the game I temporarily became addicted to - Mass Effect (and which I now happily declare I am no longer addicted to).
5. It has given me much time to read and study the books that I ordered from Amazon.com under LvA's recommendation.

Writing about books, I have already read one. :) :) :D. That's right! I finished reading Machine Learning, by Tom M. Mitchell. It is an outstandingly well-written book! My congratulations to the author and to the other people who have already read it. I am currently in the process of reading the book The Design and Analysis of Algorithms, by Dexter C. Kozen. Well-written book, too, but I think some of the arguments assume that the reader is familiar with many graph-related problems, or that he/she is pondering most of the logical steps involved in each proof more thoroughly than I am. And I gladly would, except that I still plan to finish this book and two other (longer) books to read before I begin my travelling activities.

Speaking of travelling activities, I fly tomorrow morning to Toronto, Ontario, Canada :D. I'm going to see the Niagara Falls! :D

And I think I'm going to sleep now. I technically spent ALL night awake and now I predict I will slightly suffer during the day for it. For now, to bed. I'm happy I posted some of my current events. G'night!

P.S: Some people say March was named after Mars. Can you believe them?
P.P.S: I forgot to say - as an effect of my unemployment, I now formally release myself from the constraints that I had placed upon my own entries while employed due to the potential negative social effects they may have implied upon other people. Yay!

Human mass

The mass contained in a person's body is usually considered as one of the main physical attributes of that person. Along with body height and skin color, the attribute of body mass is, I believe, a main physical descriptor for human beings. As with most physical descriptors, this attribute presents a strong correlation with many psychological and social factors in a person's life. All the cultures which I have experienced so far perceive body mass as a determinant factor of the body's, and transitively of the person's, quality.

As can be observed in a massive part of current media, "attractive" body images are commonly portrayed on the most visible part of their publications, presumably as "bait" for "potential consumers" to be attracted to the "bait" and obtain the related product. It is a very well-known fact that most of these "attractive" body images share many physical attributes. Most "ideal" female images seem to share uniformly-styled hair and smooth, terse skin under optional pieces of clothing, suggesting a sense of grace and delicacy and a low body mass. The "ideal" male image, though less widely exhibited, seems to include short hair, terse skin, angular corners, visibly strong torso muscles, athletic figure, and a pair of jeans. Despite suggesting a higher body mass than the female "ideal" image, it still suggests keeping a low body mass through the terse skin and tight figure.

I focus this entry on body mass because it differs from the other physical attributes, such as body height and skin color, in one very important factor: body mass can easily change throughout the person's life. More importantly, it changes due to the person's behavior, as a direct cause of physics and physiology. And the fact that people are able to change it is what makes it such a widespread and popular topic among all geographical and social strati (Note that skin color and body height are not as highly-shared attributes in the portrayed "ideal" images as is body mass). Try entering these, or related, search strings into Google and read the first matches for each: "body mass", "body height", "skin color". Which of the entries brought up highlighted, commercial search results? Which didn't? Can you guess why? Why is "diet" related to "body mass"? Explain in 256 words or less.

It is no secret that fat kids get made fun of. Yes, they are. Children usually still openly express their perceptions, unknowing or uncaring for others' offense and suffering. And although social "education" does a pretty good job at obfuscating people's comments related to other people's body mass, it hasn't come so far as to completely hide such an obvious physical attribute. Thus, body mass is still quite a determinant factor in many psychosocial interactions. Most obvious and most popular, sexual attraction towards a person can drastically fluctuate due to changes (most noticeably downward due to mass increases) in the body mass of that person.

Following the highly popular Darwinian theory of evolution, it is only natural for heavier people to be less sexually attractive than their lighter (but still healthy) counterparts. Efficiency plays a major role in (arguably) all of any given specimen's features. The amount of resources available to any specimen, be it food, water, territory, money, or internal body energy, will always be limited, and the ability of maximizing the utility of these limited resources (also called efficiency, which I mean here of both time and energy) is what allows a specimen to extend their lives and, by doing so, more probably reproduce more and more variedly. (In this time of abundant resources (I write only from my own experience - I know there are many places in the world in which resources are not as abundant) and technology, these premises may lose validity (surely economists and evolutionists have discussed this in much more detail somewhere else), but this argument only tries to describe our genetic imperative, which has very probably influenced us for a much longer time than has our current time's exception case).

I think, then, that heavier people appear less sexually attractive because they suggest a comparatively lower efficiency. Let H be a person who weighs, say, 1.5 times as much as a person L. Now consider L and H performing the same kind of movement, such as walking. Say they both walk 1 km each. The energy which L must have used to perform this is significantly much less than the energy H used (I would guess around 1.5 times less).

Hey, it's 4:20! (Random comment).

So L is more efficient than H at moving, in general. Wouldn't he be more efficient at doing mostly everything, then? It's like driving a Yaris instead of a Hummer every day. Of course, it's arguable that a Hummer can go to more places than a Yaris can, but in the most general use case (people transport), both can accomplish the objective with no difficulty, with the only difference that the Hummer burns quite a bit more fuel than the Yaris does.

Hey, it's 4:29! (Random treap).

So now that I've stated this redundant example, I state again: it's only natural for heavier people to appear less sexually attractive than lighter people. Besides efficiency, the possibility of movements available to a lighter person is more varied, and in Life, as with hypothesis spaces, a wider availability of possibilities more probably produces richer and "better" results. (And Life, unlike hypothesis spaces, contains the (I believe) non-deterministic factor of Will, which more probably produces these "better" results).

Hey, it's 4:39! (Random variable).

How is the "ideal" image of a person's success related to body mass, then? Does it necessarily contain the "ideal" body? I mean, can a heavier-than-necessary person consider him/herself totally successful, regardless of his/her other accomplishments in life? Picture yourself in your ideal life - imagine anything you want to, any place, any time, around any kind of company, with any kind of occupation, with any possessions... in which kind of body would you rather live that ideal life? In a supermodel-like, triathlonist-style body or similar, or in a categorically heavier one? In this ideal life, would you change your skin color? Would you change your face for someone else's? What made you come to this decision? What is it that differentiates body mass from height and skin color, then, and what effects does this have on common human psychosocial behavior? Write down your answer in conjuctive canonical form.

P.S: No offense meant to people with body of any height or mass, skin of any color or thickness, or supporters of any soccer team. To soccer team supporters, howevers, I do suggest considering other activities as alternatives to soccer match attendance and shouting. As I said, no offense meant.

Blog Clog

No blog entries yet?!?!? [Generic interjection denoting surprise], I'm not a consistent blogger at all! Imagine how sucky would I be if I were one of those guys who regularly publishes webcomics for a living. And add the fact that my drawing skills are surpassed by very many elementary school second graders'. Yep, webcomic publishing would probably be a bad career choice for me.

Anyway, yeah, I haven't blogged. Redundancy noted. It's not that I'm experiencing blogger's block or anything - I just really haven't felt the need to write as I did before. Huh. Maybe I managed to find peace with my inner self. Maybe my outer self is now a perfect reflection of the real me, and I no longer feel the need to express my hidden thoughts and emotions through this little corner of the WWW. Have I achieved internal honesty?

Possibly. Anyway, I do somewhat miss the blogging habit. I would call it one of my hobbies (one which I cannot easily relate to the products sold at Hobby Lobby). Now that I think of it, blogging isn't the only hobby I've recently neglected. There's swimming, and gymnastics, and meeting random people on the internet - I've done none of those for months now. At least for the whole of 2009! [Generic interjection denoting surprise]! Maybe I just don't feel the need to because I'm content with my life's state as it is right now? Maybe my life's gradient is approaching 0, and with it my life's "speed" (rate of change)? Maybe I'm reaching a stable point in my life? (Danger, Will Robinson, Danger). Hmmm, not according to my short-to-medium-term future plans. These involve quite a bit of novelty :) :D.

I believe I should blog about what has happened these days in order to connect this entry with current reality (or at least with our perception of it). Three weekends ago, I went to the CMU Computer Science and Machine Learning Departments Open House event (or CMU-CSD/MLD OH for short), during which I met a lot of CMU professors, students, and prospective students, went to grad student parties, played Rock Band, turned 25 years of age, sprained my right ankle while ice skating, visited my family in Chicago on the way back, visited Marcelo (G) at his apartment in Chicago which he will change soon, and came back to Austin with my ankle still hurting. Two weekends ago, I accompanied the RW team to Orlando, FL to Disney World! We got on all the rides we wanted to including the teacups, and I got a chance to use my Heely's! (though it hurt to do so because my right ankle still hurt a lot).

And since I got back from FL, my main objective has been to read and understand the 4 books that were recommended to me by LvA. I just finished Chapter 7: Computational Learning of the book Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell (great book, everyone!!). I'm also done with almost half of another book (The Design and Analysis of Algorithms, though I think there must be dozens of publications with that name). I haven't even started with the other 2, but I will. And I'll finish them, too. I hope.

And that's been about it. I also bumped into (metaphorically) Corin at the Randall's store at the end of Walsh Tarlton tonight while getting a gallon of milk and gave her my new number in case she wants to go hang out at the pool one of these days.

(Spontaneous attempt to properly parenthesize that last sentence:

I also bumped into (metaphorically) (Corin) at (the Randall's store at (the end of Walsh Tarlton)) tonight (while getting (a gallon of milk)) and (gave her (my new number)) (in case she wants to (go hang out at (the pool) (one of (these days)))).

Disclaimer: Accuracy not guaranteed.

I also have a 4-page text about a certain topic ready to post here, but it needs to be a little revised. It was written a bit impromptu-style and I'd like it to be of a quality better than this blog's average entry quality (which isn't such a high standard anyway). This is so vague... this must be making no sense at all for the unfortunate bold reader who is still reading this.

Oh yeah, and besides these things, I'm also planning a trip to Toronto with Marcelo (M) next weekend, which contains a trip to the Niagara Falls. I'm going to see the Niagara Falls :D! Cool, huh? Ticket's bought and rental car's reserved. I'm going into some tripping!

Reddwerks rocks

Reddwerks rocks.

(That should be displayed on a T-shirt).

At the end of 2007, I had the strong intention to leave Guatemala. I had spent the whole of 2007 in personal pleasantries and thought that I should start "expanding my horizons" outside of my home country.

That year started out with a family month in Chicago while I looked for a job in the classifieds. I managed to find a job as an English teacher at The Princeton Review, whose main interview I passed thanks to the few lessons on photography that Marcelo had given me. I got paid for several training sessions I attended, and then right before I got to doing any real teaching, I flew back to Guatemala to attend my college graduation.

As many other college graduates might understand, I felt a little lost at that time. I was lucky to have enough money saved in my bank account to live off for the next few months, but aside from surviving, I didn’t have a concrete plan of action. I did not want to start a job in Guatemala for fear I might get stuck there as Newton’s first law predicts. So I decided to look for education opportunities in other countries that would allow me to settle somewhere else and experience Life on broader grounds. I found and applied to three universities in the USA, a master’s program in Taiwan, and a master’s scholarship in Japan, and was rejected by all of them.

I was also leading several hobbies of mine that year. I took up my japanese abacus classes I had dropped more than 8 years ago, signed up for chinese and japanese language classes at a nearby university, and then took up gymnastics at the National Gymnastics Federation. I was doing fine on all of these until I tried to do a full front-flip over a non-soft surface on my second Gymnastics class and broke my left hand. Gymnastics practice was cut off after that, and my rejection to both the Taiwan and Japan scholarships kinda diminished my morale and stopped me from taking any more asian language courses for the time being, though I managed to keep on practicing japanese abacus since it was my right hand that handled it the most. It was also during this time also that I surprised myself by meeting two cute and lovely girls and by forming affectionate relationships with them. One of those relationships actually caused me to travel to Los Angeles and Seattle, together with my mom, to visit the related girl in the former city and to visit an old family member in Seattle, trip in which I could extend into very many details but won’t.

The latter part of that year was populated by a few freelancing application-development jobs I took over and by the yearly japanese abacus tournament in which I came in second place (and in which I developed a crush for the first-place-girl). As the year came to an end, I decided to leave Guatemala as soon as possible. So I started looking for jobs abroad, either as housesitter in Europe or as english teacher in Asia. I had already contacted an education-oriented company and had almost confirmed myself filling the position of an English Teacher in Singapore, when Marcos told me of the need for Java Developers in Reddwerks Corporation, located in Austin, TX. I disliked the idea of coming to the USA, especially when I compared it to my idea of Europe (Singapore was supposed to be my stepping stone towards Europe). I figured all USA workers as being high-strung and stressed-out, whereas I imagined european workers as easy-going, laid-back, and leading pretty-much tranquil lives in a multilingual environment with occasional party-infested weekends in Ibiza. Nevertheless, with the flight paid for, I flew for the job interview in Austin (even if only for the fun of boarding a plane), and was pleasantly surprised. I liked the company environment. People at Reddwerks seemed happy, relaxed, and the office commodities were much nicer than any I had seen before, including those in movies. So I decided to give it a try. It turns out I became one of those happy, relaxed people. I did not know then how much would I end up liking the company.

And now that I re-summarized a whole year of my life, I’d like to move on with this entry’s main topic.

My experience at Reddwerks Corporation was much better than I would’ve ever expected before I started it. Materially, I was endowed. My technical skills and experience grew “by bounds and leaps”. I met unique, amazing people (and by that I mean that they AMAZED me) and they became my friends. In Austin, TX, I found fun, friendship, parties, and love. I got used to living away from my home country (that wasn’t too hard) and to be responsible for my own actions (such as bringing bagels when breaking the build and buying a new engine for my car when I let it run out of engine oil).

The whole experience empowered my finances, my knowledge, my skills, and myself. I considered myself one of those fortunate enough to say “I love my job”. Why? Many possible reasons. Maybe it was the huge 24” (or was it 27"?) screen on my desk. Or maybe it was the CEO-style chair that somehow ended up in my cubicle and that I got to use every day. Or maybe it was the occasional apple sauce I enjoyed in the break room. Or the occasional Starbucks Frappuccino. Or maybe the rest of the food in the break room. Or the huge bathroom with jade-like walls and ample sinks. Or the big comfy conference rooms we got to, umm… have conferences in. Or the occasional free pizza lunches. Or the free water I could just pour out from the tap into my reusable red plastic cup. Or the bouncy yoga balls that many cubicle neighbors used to keep around as backup chairs. Or the big wide windows covering the whole building wall through which I always had a great view of the trees and sky outside. Or my friendly cubicle neighbors with whom I frequently held enjoyable conversations about either nothing, everything, or anything in between. Or the Kisses I got at Elaine’s desk (Hershey’s). Or the dinosaur plant that can survive 50 years without water. Or the other peculiar artifacts at the Reddwerks Museum. Or the internal Verizon card (WLAN Internet baby!) that I got along with my Lenovo x60s work laptop. Or the BlackBerry we got with GPS (later removed) and just about unlimited monthly voice and data service. Or the free medical insurance that I never used. Or the cool, small wrist-held computers I got to develop applications for (and through which I learned not to want to do so again for a while). Or the cool lights that we could tell to light up into whichever text and colors we sophied (second reference!). Or the awesome environment that is Eclipse in which I got to work on daily (I was not a Java developer before. ECLIPSE RULES!).

Or maybe it was the frequent all-expenses-paid trips I got to take throughout the country. It could’ve been the beautiful snowy mountain at Shaver Lake (http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/ShaverLake). Or the luxurious Hilton hotel at Scranton. Or the cute waitress with glasses I met at a Texas Roudhouse in Southaven, MS who I gave my phone number to (with a little help) and am still waiting a phone call from. Or the first baseball game I ever attended with a couple of coworkers (Go Reddwerks! Wait, what?). Or the jaw-dropping, fantasy-like sight of fiery, multi-colored trees surrounding a fast, shiny river during a clear 15F afternoon in the Northeastern United States right during Fall season while waiting for the pizza order for the team to cook (http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/FireTrees). Or maybe the sight of those awesome Colorado mountains I got to see on my way to and while inside Boulder. Or my first snow fight ever which I engaged in with my coworkers just before leaving for the facility. Or the remembrance of how much my hands hurt and stung so much after that snow fight. Or those thousands and thousands of birds we saw flying over the snow from one place to another as a natural wallpaper while we worked on that trip. Or maybe the way in which the finest snow I have ever seen covered all what was before gray, green, and red in the world into a bright, peaceful, RGB=(255, 255, 255) white color all around me, in a way I had never seen before (http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/WholeWhiteWorld).

Or maybe it was just the realization that the lifestyle in these new cities I got to visit was not that different from that on the one I grew up on. Or maybe the money I saved on meals and gas during those trips. Or the overly unbalanced amount of sleep we sometimes lost during those same trips. Maybe it was the fun of seeing each other fall asleep, one by one, after the apparently-ever-increasing hours of continuous work. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the free re-energizing Starbucks breakfasts, pizza lunches, and candy emergency doses that forced our fingers to keep typing.

But it was more probably the bonding that was naturally formed with my coworkers. It’s easy to form friendships with people who share goals with you, especially if one of those goals is to alleviate your own sleep deprivation. I experienced this a little in High School, more frequently in college, and never before as much as in my experience in Reddwerks Corporation. I would certainly say sleep is an effective goal to strive towards (thought perhaps not the healthiest). But even in these extreme cases, it felt really well to be a part of the effort, and then increasingly, part of the solution. It felt greatly (yes, greatly – great is an adjective and should not be used to modify a verb) to have one’s own ideas seriously considered and to see them form an important part of the final product. It was a great incentive to see one’s creations become someone’s else’s tool – it was a stressful experience to see that tool crash before that someone else and have them wait for half an hour while hacking up that dear creation and deeply apologizing for the crash. Stressful but learning. “With great power comes great responsibility”, said Spiderman’s uncle before he died (most people say their stuff before they die), and I’m guessing that phrase can be correctly extrapolated to other size-related adjectives. “With small power comes small responsibility”. With “medium-sized power comes medium-sized responsibility”. And so on and so forth.

Anyway, bonding. It’s also made easier when the people with whom to bond are “bondable”, if you know what I mean (and also if you don’t). No coworker was hard to work with @RW, and many of them reached high levels of bondability. See, that’s also what made Reddwerks so great to work in. The people who make it up were so great to work with! (*cough* like me :P). I’m really not kidding about this - I must’ve enjoyed at least 90% of the time I spent with them. On the personal aspect, everyone in the company was GREAT to work with. In the technical aspect, the level/skill of many people I worked with there was ASTOUNDING. I learned from every one of them. They, being the people I greeted, whose smile I absorbed, whose jokes I laughed at, with whom I shared lunch now and again, with whom I shared a “war room”, tired looks, and body aromas for days on end, made the Reddwerks experience much, much, much, much better than what I imagine it would’ve been like alone. And for that, I feel truly appreciative towards all of them. It was a pretty good ride.

In short, Reddwerks rocks, and it rocks a lot. And I believe that strongly enough to nominate that sentence for a T-shirt. “Reddwerks rocks”. Any punctuation marks around and/or between the sentence’s letters would be fine. And if more exotic phonemes are preferred, then maybe that could turn into “Reddwerks ROX”. Or a more cryptic “RW “ followed by an image of some rocks. Or just the Reddwerks logo and a bunch of rocks on the background!! Or something like that, you know… I think it’s a fact worth publishing.

Oh, P.S: Website for Reddwerks