Here’s my friend Danilo Campos, as he introduced Hipmunk for iPhone, an amazing app that makes finding non-painful travel options (minimize agony while booking a trip and traveling) a breeze.
I am happy to have found out about this app, but I am even HAPPIER and proud to see Danilo delivering such an amazing pitch to these VCs at Launch 2011. WAY TO GO, Dude!
Just go… thank me later! 
My friend Steve captured this gorgeous HD video of Glen, from The Swell Season, telling a great story about meeting “Lois from New York City” and then suddenly going unplugged to sing “Say It To Me Now” unplugged.
It really was the highlight of the concert and also one of the most amazing live musical moments I’ve been fortunate to witness! Hope you enjoy it as much as we did:
Mi amigo del alma y compadre, Henkel Garcia, da clases en la actualidad en a Bolsa de Caracas y mantiene un Blog sobre Economia y Finanzas.
Aqui comenta sobre los acontecimientos de esta semana que concluyo…
My friend Gustavo, whom I had the honor to meet and work with at Full Sail, recently worked on a project called kickstartmyday.com that he shared with me.
The site offers daily videos designed to get people fired up and thinking about success at the start of each day!
Their goal is to inspire 1 million people to start their day INTENTIONALLY.
This is today’s video: Sometimes success requires more than persistence.
Los Compadres just left. Henkel y Mariana estuvieron con nosotros casi dos semanas (excepto unos dias que bajaron a L.A.) y la pasamos genial: pudimos ir a Napa, Sonoma, el Golden Gate, Monterey, Berkeley y cubrimos las fotos de rigor delante de las empresas mas importantes de Silicon Valley. 
¡Los extrañaremos muchisimo Compadres! La pasamos genial. Se les quiere cantidad.
Guillermo y yo nos conocimos en la universidad, en Caracas. Nos graduamos al mismo tiempo, el en Ing. Civil y yo en Ing. Electrica, y no nos veiamos hacia siglos… hasta nuestra visita a San Francisco a fines del 2007. El tiempo no habia pasado, practicamente (aunque yo tenia claramente menos pelo!) -nos encontramos y hablamos pajita igual que lo haciamos en los laboratorios de quimica el segundo semestre!
El fin de semana pasado nos encontramos en San Francisco para compartir un dia familiar. Aqui nos ven en el parque, con Guillermo a cargo del gran Paquito, su chamo.
Ha sido genial reencontrarnos, mi pana!! Aqui hay mas fotos del fin de semana pasado.
Los Morochos Luis y Rafa son dos de los panas que tengo hace mas tiempo. Entre mis 4 mejores amigos, solo conozco a Henkel hace mas tiempo y solo GIlberto los iguala en cuanto al cariño que siento por ellos.
Desde que llegue a los Estados Unidos en el 2000, Luis y Rafa han estado de vuelta en mi vida de una u otra forma (aun cuando nunca perdimos contacto, viviendo a distancia mientras estudiabamos aqui y luego, cuando volvi a Venezuela para trabajar en Procter & Gamble del 96 al 2000).
Desde el 2003, ambos se acercaron a nosotros de una manera que sera siempre dificil de olvidar. Todos, uno detras de otro, primero yo, luego Rafa… luego Rafa de nuevo, luego Luis, luego Luis otra vez… y luego Rafa una vez mas… llegamos a ser padres. Y estos casi cinco años desde que vivimos en la Florida, nuestros chamos han podido compartir muchos, muchos ratos juntos.
Hoy, a pocos dias de mudarnos a la costa oeste, siento un mar de esperanza e ilusion por las posibilidades que se presentan ante nosotros. Pero no dejo de sentir un nudo en la garganta por la tristeza de no verlos con tanta frecuencia. Se que nos van a hacer mucha falta y confio en que la tecnologia salga al rescate una vez mas, como tantas veces antes ha sucedido, para mantenernos en contacto de la misma forma que antes hicimos.
Entre tanto, solo me resta decirles: los quiero mucho, Morochos… Me considero con orgullo el Tercer Morocho y los siento, junto a Henkel y Gilberto, como mis hermanos.
I am going to miss you guys…
We had a blast last night at the Holiday Party.
I had a chance to share with many of the great friends we’ve made in Full Sail over the course of the past (almost) five years. It was a great way to start saying goodbye.
Also, don’t miss this amazing Chocolate Fountain that was up. In case you are wondering: no, I didn’t indulge! :S
In Spanish “Eres” means “You are it”. I have been tagged by my TuDiabetes friends Landileigh (who just turned 45) and Khurt, so here I go, according to the rules:
1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
4. Tag seven random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.
The seven random/weird things:
1) I love writing Amazon.com reviews. The weird thing about it is that I continued doing it for the longest time (started in 2000), although I wasn’t getting paid for it in any way, simply out of the gratification I got from sharing my thoughts about music, books, movies and gear I had gotten my hands (ears/eyes?) on. I still don’t get paid for it, but now at least I can ask (some) publishers for copies of books I would like to review, so it means I can read my favorite stuff for free without having to go to the library and, at times, before the book gets published.
2) I have never had a pet, other than a few fishes that I knew very little about and ended up seeing die because I was unaware of the fact that you are not supposed to wash out all the water in their aquarium. When I was little, my parents used to say that we would have a dog when we moved to a house. When we ended up living in our first house, we didn’t get a pet, so it sort of lost validity as an argument. Today, we have a betta fish (Santiago’s fish, called “Chapulin”) and I am warming up to the idea of us getting a dog soon.
3) I can’t believe it took me so long to adopt the Mac OS X at home. I never really was a PC advocate, but I kept telling myself the same stories from the olden days to talk myself out of getting a Mac. Now that we are on a Mac workflow at home, I can’t imagine going back.
4) I used to LOVE only pop music back in the day (high school, etc.) I called that period in my life the “dark period” for a while when I had an opposite reaction and stopped listening to pop music cold turkey. I started only listening to prog rock (Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, etc.) and became the most monotonous person to ride on a car with for a very long time, because I had nothing that most people could relate to among the tapes I carried with me. I am happy I changed my listening habits away from only pop… and later, away from ONLY prog (nowadays I go back to it once in a while). These days, I listen to anything I can.
5) I used to write poetry. Between 1988 and approx. 1998-1999, it was my outlet. Not any more, but I miss it: it was like a faucet getting opened and words would spew out of it like crazy. Those were good times.
6) I learned to scuba dive in 1998 (got the basic and advance PADI certification) because I was afraid of depths. I don’t know if I will ever have the courage to jump off a plane with a parachute: I am afraid of the sense of void that such things create.
7) I have made most of my career decisions in the craziest ways:
-I decided to study Electrical Engineering because I read some cool stuff about bioengineering in a catalog from a Canadian University. I later realized I should have studied Systems Engineering but I made some great friends in EE.
-I decided to study my M.Eng. in EE to later discover the internet while I was studying and realized my TRUE passion was the Web. It took me 4 more years to actually dedicate myself entirely to it (starting in 2000).
-I took my first job with Procter & Gamble because I was a “broke” student, I didn’t want to live with my parents until I found another opportunity and they offered me a great package. I spent 4 years working at a diaper manufacturing facility, made some great friends in the process and learned what became the foundation of my management experience down the road.
-I made the career move into Web, right at the time that the internet bubble started to explode. I never was out of a job but it sure was a scary 3-4 years until things became more stable. Today, I don’t fear change: I know it’s part of life.
This is to say that sometimes, the decisions we make, although they may not make much sense always bring something good with them and always lead to great lessons waiting to be learned, great people waiting to be met and new doors waiting to be opened.
So there they are: my seven random things.
I now tag Luis, Rafa , Gilberto , Henkel , Mat , Amy and Rorro .
