Home Alone

Today I had to stay home so as to not leave the house empty. It had been a while since I had to do that. I usually go out on Fridays and/or Saturdays (more than likely with Gabrisol). But not this weekend.

This time it was my turn to do it. Although, I didn't really stay alone in the house. Because my brother came home like at 2pm and I was asleep because I had slept like at 8am. So technically I was alone only while I was asleep, which means me being here was pretty much useless haha. But it was cool having a realxing weekend :).

Have a good day :D.

New Phone Ordered

Last Decemeber, or November or something like that I sold my Galaxy Nexus to my brother to help me pay for a debt that I have, and I got a way worse phone as a temporary replacement (the Motorola Defy+) with my contract renewal for free. I was going to use it while I gathered the money to buy a new one. I thought that was going to be like 2 or 3 weeks tops, but I still have that phone so I didn't stick to that plan.

But recently I've been doing some extra work and as a result I'll have enough money to buy the Nexus 4. In fact, I already ordered it, it should arrive sometime next week. I am very very excited about it :).

Going back to a high-end phone is going to be sweeeeet. I know some of you guys wouldn't spend the money to buy something like that, but I like it :D.

Anyway, have a good day :D.

This Can't Be Good

My dad came home today with a bunch of cokes:

The other ones were already in the fridge

I don't drink soda that much at home, but how can I turn them down? How would my dad feel? Yeah, I'm just making excuses, because I love coca-cola :). But Diego is here in my house so they probably won't last a lot.

Have a good day :D.

Growing Wishlist

In the past few months there have been some video games I've been wanting to play but I just haven't had the money to buy any. The last big game I bought was Borderlands 2 and that was back in September (I actually preordered it in August, but who cares). I'm probably going to have money for one game early next month, so I'm kind of torn as to which game buy. Probably StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm...or maybe Dead Space 3...or maybe the new Luigi's Mansion which has had killer reviews (that is of course, if I ever get my 3DS back from Gabrisol).

Also, they added movies to Google Play in México :). This is a screen from my phone:

Now I smell music coming soon :). I really am excited about it.

Have a good day :D.

Books in Google Play

Books finally arrived in Google Play México. I'm not that utterly excited about it, because I already have some books in Kindle but mostly because I like my books in English rather than Spanish if it's a book that wasn't written in Spanish and I think they only have books in Spanish in Google Play.

What I am excited about though, is the fact that they're finally bringing more stuff other than apps to México. What I really want is Music to be available here. As far as I know, the only way to buy digital music is here is through iTunes, and I've had some bad experiences before. I would definitely start buying music through Google Play if it became available. Hopefully it'll be sooner than later.

Have a good day :D.

SEO?

I once titled a blog post "US keyboard vs Latin American keyboard" and apparently people search for that, because that post has gotten more than 10 times more than the next most viewed post, haha.

Check it out:

I really like looking into stats, even if I get like 4 views a post, it's pretty cool :).

Have a good day :D.

Took Their Sweet Time

I hate how some movies take forever to get released in theaters in México.

Case in point, "Silver Linings Playbook" and "Zero Dark Thirty" just got released today in Juárez. I like going to the movies a lot, and for movies like these I like to wait until they come to theaters to watch them. I waited over three months, and they both come out at the same time, that's crazy. It makes it harder not reading spoilers on the internet....so, you better not fucking spoil these movies!!!

Anyway, have a good day :D.

Learning Python Basics

Python is one of the programming languages I read so much about, but have never really used it.

I've been using Codecademy for the last couple of months to take courses on learning different topics from different languages, but so far, I've only done courses from languages I already knew very well (Ruby and JavaScript), because I like to stay fresh and to see how they do things that I might do differently.

But now I'm doing some courses on Python, I just started with the basics like variables, functions, classes and stuff like that.

When I'm finished with more advanced courses, I will make myself write some scripts in Python to get practice :).

Have a good day :D.

I Broke the Chain!

I totally forgot to blog yesterday! I blame my body. I fell asleep at 12am...well before my sleeping time :P.

I had a really nice streak going...

It's going to look ugly...

Anyway, have a good day :D

I Broke Gmail

I was replying to an email and I pasted in some text in the reply, and everything in the page went up a little...so I tried doing it again, and I could manage to reproduce it, haha. Check it, it's not easy to spot at a simple glance:

You'll see that the black bar on top is gone, and the reply box is out of it's container and there's a pending thingy at the bottom. You can see that by the lack of scroll bars on the side, I couldn't scroll the page up. Pretty weird :P.

Have a good day :D.

Falling Into Old Habits

For some reason, I can't seem to last very long sleeping early and waking up early. I always manage at least a couple of weeks when school starts, but little by little I start sleeping later and later each day.

Right now, I'm in that sleeping super late phase. Hopefully it won't last long.

I know it's like 7am, but since I haven't slept, it still counts for Sunday :).

Have a good day :D.

Graph Search

I just got the Facebook Graph Search thingy. It's a pretty cool tool, but I can't really seem to put it to good use. I don't really think they built that tool for the likes of me. Because I can't really think of what to do with the information it gives me. If I find people that like a band that I like too, or that plays a video game that I like, I'm not going to add them as friends or anything. I barely add people that I know from a long time ago.

Maybe I just couldn't think of what to use it for. Maybe in the future I'll find a good use for it... but being optimistic, I do like is the new look it gives to the header in Facebook :).

Anyways, have a good day :D

I Really Like Rice

Mari, Gabe, Mono and me went to a Japanese restaurant. I ordered a big bowl of fried rice...it was delicious. I could seriously eat rice every day...pasta too.

They should make a rice restaurant...OK, not really.

Have a good day :D

I Bid You Farewell

Google decided to shut down Reader....that makes me sad.

I've been using Reader for at least 6 years, maybe more. I had just discovered what RSS was back then, and it seemed a cool thing to keep up with sites. At first I didn't really use it right, I just subscribed to anything that seemed remotely cool, and ended up having thousands of unread items in mere days, which is impossible to keep up with unless you want to make it a full time job. But I got better with time.

And I was making a good job keeping up with the feeds

I don't really go to a website's home page that often. If I find a site that interests me and has good content, I subscribe to it's RSS feed and only visit that site again to read the articles I'm interested in. And I usually find those sites through web searches or from referrals from other sites.

I have read how you can use Twitter and Facebook to consume content, but that's not really my style. I just can't seem to use Twitter when I'm following more than like 10 people that actually post stuff. If I check Twitter one day, and then the next, there's like 3 million tweets in between that I didn't read. As for Facebook...the only content I seem to be able to consume there are pictures with big captions on it, or pictures with quotes.

Anyway...it will be missed...

Also, have a good π day :D.

The Loser Wins

For reasons unknown to me, my favorite football (soccer) club is Bayern Munich.

I was watching the second leg of the round of 16 of the UEFA Champions League between Bayern Munich and Arsenal. I don't usually watch football, but I do watch Bayern's matches of the Champions League when I can.

Bayern lost 2-0 in their home. However, they still advanced to the next round because the aggregate score was 3-3 and they won the tiebreaker with away goals (they won 3-1 in Arsenal's field on the first leg).

I'm glad they advanced, but if they keep playing like they did today, they're going to have trouble in the quarterfinals, because they could face Barcelona or Real Madrid or Juventus.

Anyway....have a good day :D.

Ice Cream Sandwich

For once, I'm not talking about the Android version. I'm talking about an actual ice cream sandwich.

I had one today, and it was probably the highlight of my day...that sounds very depressing. But I fucking love them. Even though the last one I ate was probably 2 years ago, because I always forget that they exist.

It's weird. Why don't I buy them more often? It's not like it's an exotic product, or a season product. You can go to the store any day, at any time and you can get one...if I like them so much, how come I forget they exist?

Well, I guess that's good, because I don't want to start eating ice cream every day.

Have a good day :D

Insomnia

I like the fact that there's a couple of stores that are open all night close to my house, because my sleeping habits are weird and I'm usually awake at 3 or 4 in the morning.

And when I'm working I'm usually drinking some juice, so having a store comes in handy.

This is what an aisle looks like at 3 am in the market

Work on Sunday?

Who works on Sunday? It's the lord's day...lord Sergio, that is.

Okay, I know lots of people work on Sundays, but to me, Sunday means wake up, eat, go to the movies, eat, catch up on my feeds, snack, football (if the season's on), play with the dog, stare at nothing, play a video game and go to sleep (everything between waking up and going to sleep in no particular order).

But today, much like last Sunday, I spent the whole day working. I'm working on a project with Diego (my brother, for the one person out there reading this that doesn't know), and it needed to be good enough for a demo by tomorrow morning.

And I'm not complaining, I'm just not used to it. It's actually cool, because it's the kind of work I enjoy, which is web development. The day flew by, but I think the project is ready to be shown...hopefully.

I know my posts have been lacking pictures, but my phone takes super dark pictures that I wouldn't dare publish here because they're disgusting, but I'll make a better effort in the future.

Have a good day :D

When Will DST End?

Nowadays it's useless, what good does changing the hour actually make in this time and day? Are we really going to use less power because the day lasts longer? I know I won't. I still use my computer, I still charge my phone, I still turn on the light and my TV. Or maybe it does make a difference but I just don't see it. I don't know.

I'm probably just angry about the fact that just I found out DST entered into effect tonight. I mean, if I knew beforehand I would've prepared psychologically, but when you find out the moment it's supposed to change, a whole hour has been taken from you and there's nothing you can do.

It could also be that I like night more than I like day, I like my days to end sooner (I know the days are actually longer in the summer, but come on, 9pm and the sun is still out in the summer? That's crazy).

Anyway, that's just my opinion...

Have a good day :D

Super Hexagon

I recently bought the Humble Indie Bundle for Android 5. It came with 6 games. One of those games was Super Hexagon. And I've been obsessing with it. I could tell you what the game is about, but I'll post a video instead of me playing so you know what it's about, because it's kind of hard to explain. Just know that I'm the little triangle moving from left to right and I'm trying to avoid getting hit.

The difficulty is brutal! That video is of the easiest level. And you "pass" it by lasting 60 seconds, but I lasted "so long" because I've been playing several times a day. In the second level I can only do like 40 seconds and in the third I can't do more than 15. But I like the fact that I can play for 10 minutes and I did like 30 tries, so it's not like I've been playing for hours. And since it's for Android too, I play it on my phone at times.

I really enjoy these type of games. It's not exactly trial & error (because it changes every time), but there are definitely some patterns you can learn.

Have a good day :D

Project 1: Calendar

I could not think of a single thing that happened today that's worth talking about, so I might as well talk about one of my projects. It doesn't have a name yet, it's just a calendar. It's based on this.

The point of the calendar is to keep track of various activities you would like to do on a daily basis, be it for learning how to do something, lose a bad habit or get better at something you already know. For every day that you do the activity, you mark the day in the calendar, it's so simple and a no brainer. But the important part is the consistency, actually doing it every day, make it a habit of doing it. That's the way to really improve on what you already know.

It's not even close to being complete, but it does it's main function already. You can create activities and mark the days when you did the activity. I'm planning a bunch of stuff still, I'll talk about it more when the time comes.

I marked the 7th as having done the blog in advance, so I kind of cheated :P

I would like to mention that +Angelica is helping me with the design. As of this moment, the actual app is hosted on sevaor.com, but it's not going to stay there forever, I'll probably use the domain for something else. And the code is hosted on GitHub in case anybody reading this wants to see it and maybe even contribute to it. I'm using Rails 3.2, but I'll probably upgrade to Rails 4 when the final version comes out.

Have a good day :D

I Want a New Chair

I decided that I want to buy a new desk chair, because I don't like very much the one that I have right now.

This is my current chair.

However, I don't like the idea of going to the store and just buying one, because I'm going to be thinking the whole time that there's probably a better and cheaper one online. In fact, I wouldn't really know where to go to buy a desk chair.

But I'm not sold on the idea of buying it online because I wouldn't be able to try it out beforehand.

Is there a brand that always makes good chairs? Is there something I should look for besides the cost and the shape?

What do you guys do when you're going to buy a chair?

Anyways, have a good day :D

Pulling an All Nighter

People usually ditch sleep when they're either partying or studying for a test or finishing an essay. Not this guy, though. I pull an all nighter because I can, even though I shouldn't.

Last night I didn't sleep the whole fucking night. I went to bed at midnight and I needed to wake up at 7am. 7 hours of sleep is pretty good. But I couldn't sleep. For the life of me, I just couldn't sleep. I should probably have tried reading (a physical book), but I didn't think of it then.

After an hour, I said "fuck it, I'm wasting time," so I started working. Half an hour passed by and it was 5:30 am already... yes, that's how it felt. That's when I started getting drowsy. But I can't sleep less than 2 hours, I will just not wake up, so a struggle began to try to stay awake. I emerged triumphant from that battle :).

I went to school and I dropped dead when I came back home. But I could only sleep 2 hours because I had plans. Waking up from that "nap" was way harder than it is when sleeping just 2 hours at night.

And here I am. It's 9:30pm, I'm going to bed now (I'm pretty sure I won't have trouble sleeping tonight), and I'll wake up when my body and mind say it's okay :D.

Have a good day :D.

Keeping the streak alive

Lately, I've been obsessed with keeping a coding streak.

I discovered a couple of months ago that GitHub keeps track of your current and your longest coding streaks. Being a person who enjoys a little competition (especially with myself), I wondered how many days in a row I could contribute to a project in GitHub. I started on January 14th, and as this picture shows...

...I haven't missed a day :). Granted, some days my contributions have been a little on the weak side, but most days I do make significant contributions to my projects.

This method really motivates me. Time will tell how long I can extend my streak :).

Have a good day :D.

I Couldn't C For a While

No, I haven't gotten lazy writing, I wasn't blind or anything. My laptop's C key didn't work.

I never really though about how important almost every key in a computer keyboard is until today. Especially if you're spend a good portion of your day coding.

I first noticed it while trying to change directories in the Terminal. I typed the command "cd projects" only to have an error message sent back to me "-bash: d: command not found". d? Sure enough, I looked at what I typed and it said "d projets". From that moment, every time I hit the C key and nothing happened, a little part of me died. I restarted the computer a couple of times. Booted Windows. Booted Ubuntu again. It did not work.

Even if it was only a key, it felt horrible. Could this be just the begging followed by other parts of hardware failing? The hard drive? The memory? *gasp* The processor??? It's not a new laptop, but it is by no means that old. I bought it almost 3 years ago.

So naturally, I opened it up. The thought of finding the problem in plain sight was very present in my mind, you know how very little reason you can have when you're freaking out. I had never taken out the keyboard off of my laptop before, so I took off every piece of cover I could find trying to find a big label that said "take off keyboard here" or something like that. There was no such thing, of course. So I had to google it. After finally taking it off, I still believed the problem was going to be right in front of my eyes. It wasn't. The back of the keyboard was all covered up. All I could do was blow on it and clean it.... and amazingly, that did the trick.

Long story short, it wasn't hardware failure, it was probably just accumulated dust. But that was a horrible hour. I actually started thinking that I was going to need to take a separate keyboard with me everywhere I took my laptop.

Anyway... have a good day :D

Third time's the charm...

...hopefully.

This is the third time we're going to try to make this 365 blog. By we I mean, +Jesus Ruiz, +Marisol Chacon, +Angelica Chacon, +Raymundo Gutiérrez and me (I just wanted to mention someone from Google+ :D).

The first time it was kind of successful, we lasted over half a year writing posts almost every single day, but we couldn't manage to do the whole year, which is the original goal. We started in April of 2011 and we stopped in December of the same year.

The second time...was a total failure. I couldn't even manage to do a whole month. I did 11 posts in July of 2012, that's it.

Now this is the third time. Hopefully we can break our record, if not, at least do a couple of months.

A lot of things have surely happened to every one of us in the last 7 months, but let's save all the bits and pieces for future posts, because it gets hard to think of things to talk about every day.

Have a good day :D.