Roberto Carvajal

After 10 years in the freelancer world and in the middle of a mid 20s crisis I am slowly mutating into an independent software vendor. That’s the kind of people that make products out of nothing and sell them directly to the end user and make a living out of it (or try to). It will never happen overnight, I still need to do freelance in order to survive but I can see each day how it makes sense to steer away from freelancing and start a small online store, release products or both. So I have a couple of ideas and options, so far there is one big app that seems totally fine to convert into a product, resell it and provide support. The other is a small iphone game I’m working on, it’s a very specific niche kind of game that I enjoy playing and thinking about the iphone version gave me this gut feeling that I’ll follow. I have absolutely no idea if any of this things will became real products and end up paying 100% of my bills but I know for sure I want to do them and I want to stop living the freelancer lifestyle for a time.

So, I want to document all the development process and learn as much as I can from this first try at making a product and a game so you are going to read more about this as I work on them.

Of course if everything fails, I can get back to freelancing or get a full time job for the first time (“riiiiiiight”)..

I’m a heavy Terminal user and I realize that Apple doesn’t really care about it because 99,9% of their users don’t even know what to do with it, Terminal only exists because Mac OS X is UNIX and it just has to be there. Having said that I still can’t quite understand why if it sucks so much I replaced my fine iTerm in favor of Apple’s solution despite 2 serious issues. Well that’s no longer the case thanks to Ciarán Walsh and his SIMBL plugins to fix the colors and the tab switching!

Please go ahead and follow his instructions:

Customising Colours in Leopard Terminal

Tab Switching in Terminal

Unfortunately I’m broke right now, but I’ll send you a donation (hopefully for beer) as soon as I can.

THANKS.

So Mateo started daycare two days ago.. it’s been hard because he is not used to play with other kids nor to be away from mom, dad or grandparents.. so the first day we played with him for about two hours before we could sneak away.. two hours later he was crying and didn’t wanted to eat, so we had to pick him up, the next day same story only 1 hour earlier.. I don’t know if this will ever work out, I can only hope, my wife is going back to school in one month and our child has to learn how to be away from us in that time.

Besides that, we got a kitten! her name is nini and she is a gorgeous fuzzy thing, we love her :)

Today I’m back to real life after vacations with family and a very good friend, I had the opportunity to tour Jon around the central area of Chile and it was an amazing experience for everyone! we visited everything from fancy restaurants to local “picáa”, full and loud beaches to small and peaceful and everything in between, plus a great weekend in Elqui Valley with a cool visit to an observatory and for Jon it was the first time looking at the southern night sky in one of the best places in the world to do astronomy, I can’t describe how cool that was. I’m just happy that everything went fine and we all had a good time now I’m ready to get back to work with a big smile on my face :)

In today’s society almost everything translate into either money or “stuff”, stuff you really don’t need and I’m really getting sick of it, so I decided my Valentine’s present won’t be in any material form, and I loved it. I cooked lunch that day, wonderful razor clams covered in cheese and a cheap but very good wine, that and a small and sincere note handwritten with my horrible handwriting but with a lot of love and appreciation, everything wrapped in time and attention, to be sincere I think it was the best Valentine’s Day ever.

We had the first night at our new apartment, I liked the silence, no disco, no yelling, nothing.. very quiet!

The painting is halfway there, it needs another layer, we moved a couple of things and everything seems fine, we also got to update our TV contract and now we have a DVR (like TiVO) for free! w00t!

So far so good, looking forward to stay there for at least a year until we can opt to buy a place instead of rent, time to save money and be a cheap bastard for a year :)

Happy Bday honey! love you!!

So Greydon Square made it real, hip hop is part of the global culture, it’s everywhere and now this artist is using it to spread rational thinking.

You can find lyrics and video and links in this post of one of my favorite blogs, AtheistMind.com.

Enjoy!

So I’ve been studying Karate Shitō-ryū for some months now and it’s been great, I feel stronger, faster, I get to lose some fat, not much weight really since muscle are heavier than fat and I’ve gained muscle. I can’t express how much it has helped me to feel more motivated at my business, feeling better with myself mentally and physically, and all that with the plus of self defense. But lately I haven’t been able to train because of a high work load and it sucks, it has gotten so bad that right now I’m starting gaing fat again, my back started to hurt again, I’m getting slower and a lot less motivated, I’m really creating a dependency on working out and excersice, I know it’s healthy and all but I hate the idea that I need it to feel good at all, don’t get me wrong I have plenty of other activities that I like to do but I haven’t been able to do them because of the same thing, and all in all, karate is the one that the pleasure effect last longer and the one that has the most positive impact in my life.

So, long story short, I’m going to try to excel at karate, will not skip a single session and also I’m doing the hundredpushups.com program and hopefully get to do 100 pushups in a row, I did the test and made 23 so I’m starting in the hardest plan. I will record the final 100 pushup video and upload it!

In other news, we’re moving to an apartment next week and a friend from the US is going to visit Chile, it will be his first time in Latin America, I’m sure we’ll have a great time!

Also because we are moving now we decided to marry later, we don’t know when, we’ll setup a new day once we settle.

So I couple of days ago I decided to finally get an office away from home, I love my office at home, I have all my books, a big desk, proper height of the monitor, I can listen the music I want as loud as I want but there is a catch, lately I haven’t been able to meet deadlines, I couldn’t even work enough hours, and I couldn’t concentrate for more than 15 minutes in a row, for me it gets me a while to focus on what I’m doing and really excel at it, normally between 10 and 20 minutes where I read the code I’m working on from yestarday, I get it all in my mind, I figure out what needs to be done next, write down some questions I might have for the client, etc.. and that’s about the same rate I get a phone call to the house, or I hear “nooooooo don’t do that!” or the kid started crying or yelling, or the TV very loud with cartoons, or my son getting into the office with his toys and playing right next to my mouse, moving away my mouse to make room for him to play, or the kid turning off the server I’m working on while it’s upgrading, or whatever distraction any normal home with kids have, so yeah, I did it, got myself a shared office with a friend of a company I used to work and another company, we are 5 people in a small office but we are all there to focus, work and make money so we are all on the same mood and need the same things. So far it’s working very good, in a couple of days I did what I’ve tried to achieve in about a week or more at home, I get to walk there, just one mile walking, it’s close enough, it’s cheap because we share and it’s 2 blocks away from the sea and there are a lot of cool restaurants and stores around, even a place were I can buy fresh fruit on my way back home, I love it.

It’s a house converted to have a lot of small offices so, if I get to expand and hire people it’s just a matter of move my stuff to the next door and there we go :)

Seems like 2009 will be productive!

happy holidays everyone!

Just installed slickr plugin for wordpress, works great!, in a breeze I merged my flickr albums with a great and simple ajax interface. Can’t ask for more.

Check out the photos here and the instructions of the plugin here.