Old Year, New Year
Thursday, January 4th, 2007
For the first time in many months, I really gave some rest to my laptop during my vacations. Last week was spent mostly with family, girlfriend and friends. So, only now I got to do the review of the year 2006:
- started the year looking for a regular job to start after the end of my internship at IBM in Silicon Valley (my internship was going until August, but Visa applications need to be filed by April, so you need to have everything set by then).
- after a few job interviews, got job offers from both IBM and eBay (received both within a 20 minute interval :-)).
- decided to accept IBM’s offer. Although eBay’s offer was economically better, I really enjoy the work environment at IBM, I have most of my friends there, and more important than that, I was proposed new job responsabilities that made me prefer this position.
- presented at some internal conferences about using a Wiki environment in a big scale software testing project.
- presented at NPUC about using Wikis to give power to team members in the creation of an information repository for cross-team utilization.
- hired as a regular employee in March, 5 months before the end of my internship.
- published a IBM white paper on XML Indexing in DB2 9 pureXML.
- decided to accept an opportunity for a 1-year international assignment at IBM Toronto Laboratory in Canada, from August 2006 to August 2007.
- after 18 months in California, I finally enjoyed some vacations in Portugal, visiting some places I hade never been before, like Tomar, Sintra, Evora and Vila Vicosa.
- move to Canada.
- co-lectured a workshop at CASCON 2006.
- visited New York for the first time.
- published a techincal paper in the IBM developerworks website.
- finished another soon to be published white paper also related with DB2 pureXML.
- contributed to the DB2 pureXML demo.
- came home for Christmas and New Year.
Lots of stuff happening, mostly at work. I have the feelling that I could have done more, but I’m still happy with the results. I did more/better than what I was expecting one year ago.
In the personal life, besides the long awaited vacations in Portugal, all the other events where caused by work or work related (look for job, move to canada, trip to NY).
For 2007:
- professionally: improve presentation, communication, organization skills. Find time to invest in side/innovative projects. Read more.
- personally: more local exploring. Sometimes there are lots of interesting stuff in the place we live that we ignore and only later we realize how interesting that place was. Start to read. Save more money (hint: no more gadgets :-)).
Popularity: 44% [?]
Exactly one year ago, I was making fun of some friends in Portugal because they were complaining about the cold and rain and I was going to work every day wearing just shorts and t-shirt. This was December!… in California!
-8C in the middle of the afternoon and in a Sunny day. My "record" was -13C last Monday, but I’m kind of looking forward to the -20/-30s of January. 
