VIP seat.

Today at lunch time, there was a crew working on the building cable TV installation, and the main box happens to be on the outside of the front window of my lunch table.
Having lunch, with the workers crew screaming and pulling cables in front of me, didn’t felt that comfortable. So for the first time (since I can remember), I had lunch in my dorm.

I have to admit, it was definitely different. It felt like I was on a VIP restaurant, with a nice lamp on my lunch table, and air conditioning.

I did have to stand up once, to reheat my meal, as it got colder quicker than usual.

A day off...

Today I took the day off and went to Cerro Azul.

Cerro Azul has become my escape place, now that I am reducing the amount of time I invest on doing exercises.

It is a place that I love for its quietness, its breeze, and the temperature.

Time over there looses importance, although I have a much better daily rhythm when I am over there.

Anyways, there I was today. I left last night, around midnight, and only had dinner, and a few pages of a book, before I headed to bed.

Today, apart from the usual activities (breakfast, spending an hour on the tub…), I invested most of my time on shinning my car.
This time, I applied myself plenty of sun block cream, cause with 19c is easy to burn your skin without breaking a sweat.

Shinning my car, is perhaps the most time consuming hobby that I have (apart from playing need4speed underground).
Today was no exception, as I invested five hours on it (I took breaks for lunch and so).
I find it to be extremely mind relaxing, if it is done just for doing it, as opposed to doing it to get results (a pretty car), although, at the end, when done right, it always results in a pretty car.


A nail.



This is my car. Am I proud or what?


This is not my house.


The sunset was just as I like it.

I am also human.

Today I feel different (than usual).

I have mood swings of rage and depression.

But as negative as these emotions are mark by society, they do serve me well.

Today I have carried on old plans and dreams I had forgotten for a little while.

Seems like these rushes of *negative* emotions, push me forward really hard, and let me face any issues in the way of following my dreams, weird.

Maybe I am angry at myself for not following thru…

Whatever the case, this rage helps me, just don’t get any close to me, I may not be very *friendly*.

Taking a day off.

Today I took the day off. I wanted to try a little experiment.

Instead of working Monday thru Friday, and taking Saturday and Sunday off, I thought about redistributing the free days. That way, I can rest when I am tired, instead of resting a Sunday, from resting the previous day.

So yesterday night, after I got off the office (around 7:00pm), I came home, visited my parents for a “family dinner” (and also to pickup some presents I had there since Xmas), went to the supermarket and by 11:00pm I was on my way to “Cerro Azul”.

Usually I pack my 80liters backpack (full of stuff), but yesterday I packed light, a small cooler with jam, breath, cheese, chocolate, and a big block of ice. A 2 litters bottle of water (the water over there is potable, but just in case, I always carry my own), a book (yes, one of those little collections of pages with letters all over them)… and other irrelevant small things.

Got there by midnight, and it was cold as usual, around 19 degrees Celsius, but it was not as windy as two weeks ago.

To make the story short, I spent there tha night, and today until the afternoon. At that time, I ran out of water and food, so I packed and left (before I became hungry again).

I liked it. I think I will workout my schedule to be Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and take off the Wednesday (and the Sunday of course). Lucky for me, I get special treatment at the office, so it is possible… Life is good…



I found this flower growing literally off the ground.
And was the only one like that all around.
It really got my attention.


This is me.
Ahhh...relaxing at the hammock.


A Grasshopper I saw on the left side mirror (I think he was looking at me).

Another day in Roman's life

The digital camera is becoming a natural extension of my arm.

Today I went with a friend, to practice some rappel around the city (on a bridge and on a hill). Here are a few silly shots.



Sunday 16, 07:12am. Entry to the "Cprredor Sur" (highway).


Getting ready.


Jose Lioo anchoring to his car.


Jose's car. Cool, ha?


This is on a hill, behind CableOnda's parabolic TV antenas.


You see, I was there.


So was my Friend, Mauro.

Kudos for me :-P

I woke up at 3:34am from a very strange dream (witch is way beyond the scope of this blog).
By 4:15am, I realized I just wasn’t going to sleep any more, and had the brilliant idea of going out to ride my bike, and come back just in time to go to the office.

Well, kudos for me, as I had time to bike, see the sunrise and come back in time. Gezz I am a bit sleepy, but I was going to be like this anyways.


And now, the pictures!!!



6:44am, the sun is comming out.


and comming...



It is almost out...


Ladies and gentlements, here I present you, The Sun.

Camping with some friends, Campana.

Showing off my creepy side :P.



6:29am.Basecamp.
Fire lasted all night. (I chopped so much wood).


Yes, this is me, and yes, I was still in Panama.

Toying with a production server.

I think I want to give me a prize for this one.

It was Friday’s afternoon, and I was checking an issue with a customer’s emails.

When I suddenly had the bright idea of typing "cat /tmp/somefile.txt > /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue" and hit enter.

The moment I saw the prompt back, I realized what I had done, and felt such a cold rush emerging from the inside of my body.

At first I tried coping a qmail-queue binary from any of the other servers, but promptly I realized that the Linux versions where different, and that the binaries where compiled different, and therefore it didn’t run.

Having the system pos-customized with 50 virtual domains, and over 700+ e-mail accounts, made it extremely unfeasible to reinstall the software, as it may backfire by messing up the configuration.

The tension in the air could be tasted, as customers started to call, and ask why they get a binary error as they try to send e-mails.

About twenty minutes later, I had the issue solved, and I could finally breathe. That was a great way to end the week, and my coworkers agreed that dealing with such tense issues, makes the rest of the daily issues seem insignificant.

And just in case someone is reading this for technical solutions here is what I did.

Got the qmail-whtever-version.rpm

Copied it to the /tmp/ directory.

Typed this "rpm2cpio qmail-whtever-version.rpm | cpio –idv" and hit enter.

This will extract all the contents of the rpm file (with directory structure) into the /tmp/ directory.
Then it was just a matter of copying the file , assigning the right user/group and sticky permission.

Ahh… life is good (and exiting).

Gmail account giveaway (1).

First one to click the link, takes it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Roman Sainz has invited you to open a free Gmail account. The invitation
will expire in three weeks and can only be used to set up one account.

To accept this invitation and register for your account, visit
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-71b7abc62e-865afe860f-ce720e83f1

Once you create your account, Roman Sainz will be notified with
your new @gmail.com address so you can stay in touch with Gmail!

If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based webmail
service that offers:

- 1,000 megabytes (one gigabyte) of free storage
- Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want
- Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into
"conversations"
- Text ads and related pages that are relevant to the content of your
messages

Gmail is still in an early stage of development. But If you set up an
account, you'll be able to keep it even after we make Gmail more
widely available. We might also ask for your comments and suggestions
periodically and we appreciate your help in making Gmail even better.

Thanks,

The Gmail Team

To learn more about Gmail before registering, visit:
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/benefits.html

(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them
into the address bar of your browser).

A clean start.

I still remember my plan for last year. I was going to go to the Causeway and start running at 11:30pm, so I would be just coming back from Flamenco the next year. Well, it didn’t happen, as I felt asleep, and woke up with the fireworks.

This year, I had no plan. I just went to the Causeway at around 8:00pm, for the last bike ride of the year.

To my surprise, the place was desolated (which I liked). It was windy, the sky was cloudless, I could see the stars, and I could even hear the ocean crashing on the rocks. So peaceful, it was a 20km ride on heaven.

I thought about just staying there until midnight, but as usual, my stomach thought otherwise. So I came back, had a quick dinner and other things (I don’t know how I managed to burn 2 hours so quickly)…

Some nights, when I feel spiritual, I take a candle light shower. It is usually a meditation shower with self-massage. Tonight I was taking one, as the New Year arrived. So I guess we can call it a clean start.

This is going to be a good year.