Gang Signs - Geek Style

There is "West Side", there is "East Side" and now there is "Geek Side" I got this image today and I thought it is very appropriate especially during this Tech-Ed week where I spend my time with 6,000 other developers. Enjoy!

Argentino Hasta La Muerte

I was born in Argentina, and although I left it when I was 7 there is always a warm place in my heart for Buenos Aires especially since I have there a lot of family and I visit every couple of years. Buenos Aires is such an amazing city that when you visit it is just like visiting a major city in Europe. The city has a lot to offer in every aspect: culture, food, night life and more. Argentineans are a very proud people (some might confuse them as being snobs ) and they consider themselves more Europeans than South Americans. The title of this post  means "Argentinean Until Death". This is the title of an old Argentinean movie but also a true statement. Many countries don't allow to have multiple citizenship, Argentina is the exact opposite. You cannot lose your Argentinean citizenship even if you want to, which explains this phrase and the typical Argentinean mentality.

This whole introduction is not to convince you to go visit Buenos Aires (although it is very easy today as every US airline offers direct flights from all major cities and this is one of the only places where a dollar can go along way these days), but to share with you something I read this week. Fortune magazine had a special section called "The Road Warrior's Guide To Travel". In this section, they did a one page profile about different "road warriors" (people that travel 150-200 days a year). Each profile was dedicated to a different city in the world and in this profile the person described their favorite hotel, restaurant, things to do in that city etc. The one profile that caught my attention was of course about Buenos Aires. Renato Beninatto is a Brazilian business man who spends about 150 days a year in Buenos Aires. Besides talking about the obvious rivalry in fútbol (pronounced soccer for North Americans) and his favorite places, he had one sentence that I think captures the Argentineans perfectly: "Argentineans are like Italians who speak Spanish, think they're British, and live in Paris"

Another Day, Another Drive

I was working on some Excel sheets last week on my flight back from Denver, when all of a sudden the computer  starts to work REALLY slow. After 10-20 seconds the screen freezes and I got a blue screen. When I tried to reboot the BIOS simply said that there is no hard drive in the laptop . I ran the BIOS diagnostics and got the following error:

Start DST Short Test
Test Results: Fail
Error Code: 1000-0141
Message: No Drive Detected

I researched a little online and I saw that it is pretty common and it means pretty much that you are fu@k3d. After a short online support session with Dell, they sent me a new hard disk to replace the current one. The good news is that they sent me a 120GB drive (the one I had was 100GB), the bad news it that this is a refurbished drive which probably died before on someone else and it's only time before it dies again...

This is the 3rd or 4th hard disk to die on me in the last 3 years. It is really annoying and it always comes in the worse time after I didn't backup in a while. This time I lost a month and a half of documents and emails . Since I travel all the time and the hard disk is very sensitive to all the movements, all I can do is make sure I backup daily or at least weekly until the next time the hard disk dies or until the solid state drives go down in price. Right now the 128GB drives are about $3,220 while the 64GB are about $1,500. I read good reviews on SyncBack which is a  free application that allows you to  schedule incremental backups to make the process a little faster.

Happy New Year!

The Better Z...

I love my Nissan 350Z. It's a great powerful car that is fun to drive (as long as you have your Valentine One on of course...). Nissan revealed the specifications for the 2009 GT-R at the LA Auto Show. This AWD features a twin turbo 3,8L V6 engine that produces 480 HP (This is almost 200 HP more than the 350Z which produces "only" 287  HP). Price is expected to start at $69,850 when it is released, which means that it's more than double the price than the average 350Z, so it probably won't be in the top of list when I trade-in my Z...

Ho well, at least we can enjoy the video:

Technorati Tags: Nissan,350Z,Nissan GT-R,Valentine One

Blogging 1 - 2 - 3

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a long time, but was always worried that I won't have enough time to work on it. after seeing for the last couple of months that my good friend Guy was able to do this, I thought to myself: "If Guy was able to do this, how difficult could that be?" :-) **Guy: Just joking..**

In the past 4 years I've been traveling almost on a weekly basis on business. I always said to myself that with all the experience I got form traveling all over, I should write a book for the business traveler once I retire! Well, since retirement doesn't seem like a realistic option any time soon, I decided to blog about it in the mean time.

I will also blog here about gadgets. I'm a fanatic! I used to actually buy and experience with a lot of them, but as you get older (and busier with work and life) it gets more and more difficult to stay up-to-date.

So... CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW??