Envelope / Develope

I was raised in countryside, by my grand-parents, a busy family, growing vines, cultivating fields with corn, potatoes and grains. My parents brought me back in the city when I was 5 or 6. They visited me during the week-ends but mostly I was living in a village, in the rhythm of the seasons. I still remember waiting the bus who came from city and hoping my parents are getting off it. I was loved by an extended family - my grandparents, my grand-aunt and other relatives. Although I stayed there for a few years, everybody knew I will live in the city, when the school years were to start, so, somehow they handled me differently. I caught all the bad and the good from people surrounding me, in Romania's countryside of 80s: - I was drinking wine at 4 and suffered an alcoholic coma - I learnt how to curse like an adult, with colorful language. I remember, after coming back to the city, how atrocious I cursed an adult. He was totally struck by the contrast between my age and the sti...

I always tried to take the good part from everything that happened to me: life events, encounters with people, traits of people, unexpected circumstances. I was aware that in some conditions the dark sides of anyone can get out and spoil your day. You may confront them, fight against the current but in the end if they cannot master the evil parts by themselves is hard to counter-balance the turn of events.There is no rationale in their behavior, most of the time is an ingrained believe, preconceived ideas reinforced by biased judgement, mixed with anger. Even assisting as a spectator to the dark side exhibition leaves you tarred and puzzled. It happened with my uncle, a smart military officer whose life was consumed by alcohol, with some relatives when certain events where unfolding (family reunions) and the list can continue. You cannot avoid people because of the dark corners of their life but you can dance around them to not provoke the daemons. The whole problem is to be ...

Adriana and I were joking about me moving to Michigan and finding a partner there. As a software engineer I can work from anywhere. After a few questions about my priorities, I enumerated some of the required criteria about a third person in my life:   "Adriana, we are an active family. I play tennis, ride road bikes, swim and in the winter skiing is the past time. I don't have TV, books are important and education is a major priority for me. Any woman in my life has to be pre-approved by Emma, wholeheartedly, with enthusiasm."    I have a lot of mini hobbies and I enjoy spending time on them: - reading - hiking - photography - cooking (by necessity) - wine making - growing a garden - writing on the side - and quiet time.    The must have qualities, for a woman, from my point of view: - smart  - presentable - enjoying a hike - independent (I want my free time) - enjoying a book - enjoying adventure and ad-hoc decisions - good parent w...

In one of my technical wanderings I stumped on Paul Graham's " Life is short " essay. The real title should be "eliminate waste and bullshit from your life", which happens to be one of my rummages for a while. It so happens to look at my interactions with other people and introduce in them a third person (me, as an observer to my interaction), then or later and ponder at the time what is bringing me the whole discussion with them, is any joy of having time around them? Sadly for some of my social interactions there is still a lot of waste and technical verbosity which does not fulfill my goal for authenticity and meaningful conversation. Unfortunately some of my conversant counter-parts are totally unaware of the deep habits they are living their life, or the mental representations we are rounding whenever we talk. The same blurbs are starting well in advance, you have heard them several times. It might be as well my not-confrontational style, to not cut the bu...

Dating around fifties I met this surprising middle age single woman. In incredible shape, independent and recently grand mother. And it blew me away. I wanted to hug her, just to feel the pulse, the vital force pushing a single mom to look as she looked, warm, smiling and not bitching about her life. It is rare not to blame life or people around you for your failures. When you survive life's blows and come back smiling you have me in your corner!! For some inexplicable reason all my personal achievements diminished and were dwarfed by her accomplishments. And I am a widowed dad, and everybody says I am doing an incredible job, proud of my little girl and of our efforts to live a meaningful life - whatever that means for us. But her questions are giving me pause, sometimes. Recently Emma, my daughter, came back from school with a sad face saying "we are the only ones without a normal family" and suddenly the onus was on me - why can't I find a...

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash    Hey Marci, Just to rephrase you, I cannot say exactly where are you in my book but definitely in the 5 nines based on BMI and how you look. But these factors may not be on my conscious criteria when I meet women. For sure I don't meet women who cannot enjoy an outdoor activity - and people around me know that - and not having the BMI within acceptable norms. Even then, sometimes the spell bursts when they open their mouth.  I half-jokingly accepted Adriana's challenge to see other women in US just because my sieving rate is quite high. More so, I don't actively do it (maybe I should?), I let things/life unfold. What I can definitely say is that you impressed me and it is not happening frequently (maybe because I am a Sagittarius). And even in those rare cases my rationale/analytical mind constructs hypotheses why I should turn around and keep looking, which I did after our first encounter - and the dist...

You stop and look back, in time.  I have this image in mind, where the portrait of a person is taken when she is half-turning her body towards the camera. It seems like her life is going forward and the portrait is just a step-back in time, literally. It froze that moment, where the spirit is paused but the life continues without you really participating. It is not my contraption, is a signature of many ads and commercials, but the significance seemed fit for my post. Do you have doubts about your life, about your decisions which were not yours, in reality? The agency problem came back to me when my daughter announced she is making her own choices, from now on. She's six. Tough to argue! When was the worst case of day-dreaming in your career, what was the decision made out of fear or just inertia pushed you in? How did you escape, do you (now) recognize the pause in the brain waves and do you jump in a repetitive mechanics of your body, just to get rid of the obsessive feeling...

Duolingo is a nice application I used to open everyday, until I felt betrayed by the games the company is playing but also because I reached a plateau where my level was not advancing at the same pace. From that moment I reached back to normal books to continue my quest of learning another language. On the way I identified the real reasons the app is failing for large categories of people - learning is not the same for everybody. So here is my journey and the house of cards motivation collapse which lead to a "meeh" kind of approach for this type of application. My native language has a Latin origin, that means it is close to Italian, Spanish and has many similarities with French. I decided to learn Spanish and jumped on the bandwagon with the lessons every single day. And here I hit some of the app learning problems: the subjects of the sentences are of no value for real life giving me points or gems is a real turn-off; gamification is for certain group segments if I c...

Microsoft just announced that the digital library they launched when eBooks were in vogue is closing the service, with a whimper and a small print saying that they will reimburse the buyers (which if you don't know, some of them already lost their devices and books). For me, besides the physical act of discovering and buying a book, it has a network effect starting to unfold: I read the book and post about it I recommend the book to my friends and sometimes they borrowed it from me (SOME friends, not any...) sometimes I write small ideas or thoughts spurred by ideas presented in the book I hope that my kids will enjoy some of the books I bought With an eBook, the problem seems to be that the usage period is your lifetime or the lifetime of the service ( the minimum of them). Yes, you may be able to borrow your book to friends, for limited periods and you can copy and paste, in case you need some content from it. But the bottom limit is that you are paying for a period of ...

I was feeling small, in the diner, in Bath, New York. I am a 6.3 feel adult, 210 pounds, so not that small. But all people around me where in a different category. I started to have a queasy feeling that food might be one of the culprits, or maybe the hard work. Looking at their hands, work was out of the question. Is the same food in all North America that we consume, isn't it? I asked for the menu, for breakfast, and then I understood why. The "Specials" had at least 10-12 ingredients, meat was present in different ways - bacon, sausage, lard, salami, veal, chicken. The plates where large and prices cheap. Food was plenty but nutrients in it were missing. It was a systemic problem in a three days trip at Watkins Glen area, upstate New York - cheap food, no much variety, mostly from frozen bags/containers and not much flavor. I remember eating a salad, in full summer, and it didn't have any sweetness in vegetables. I felt like ordering cooked carton in each di...

After a few years of not paying attention to my sport life I decided to see how well I fare measuring what can be collected with a sport watch sensors - heart beat, distance, speed, pace and (bonus) my sleeping patterns. After a few deliberations I acquired a Garmin Vivo Active, first edition and started to use it. On that path I discovered some shortcomings which became annoying and funny sometimes: for sleeping you had to start/stop the cycle in order to have a relevant time frame after running a few laps, sometimes, I forgot to stop the timer and jumped in a car and drove home. The smart watch could not detected the speed change and sometimes I ended up with a few good tens of kilometers on my running book. My friends called my "the unknown Ethiopian champion runner of Toronto" whenever an update of the firmware occurred, my customized screens disappeared the wake-up function/ring is effective only if you sleep with the watch; there is no sound but mostly a trembl...

Or read the small print before you buy  I am in the same cohort of adults as you, probably: with limited time for vacations, I am planning almost every day for seeing, sucking up scenery, tasting food or wines or having fun in a memorable way. Rarely there is a moment where playing by the ear is on my schedule. Often times I am forced to improvise as my plans are totally screwed by inevitable mishaps. And here comes one of my reality encounters with what is a map in our days and how different than reality it is.One hand driving, one eye on map and one eye recording the imagery, brain where are you ? In today over-scanned/over-visited/over-blogged/over-you-tubed world to be driven in a dangerous or unknown place by the technology seems like a dystopian event. And still, that happened to me. Garmin has an interesting policy regarding their own GPS devices - the maps are free for LI(F)E. What is not known, but hidden in the bottom of the license agreement, is that the l...

            I was reading " The case against Google " from which several things I never imagined were revealed. Google won the search engine war just because, for one reason, at the time Microsoft was battling a monopoly lawsuit with USA and refrained on hurting Google by using the same tactics used with other competitors during the precedent years.             The complains about unfair treatments are not coming form users, who are totally unaware of the subtleties of the search engines, but from the companies which are getting users through the search engine. The Shyhook, Yelp, Getty museum examples are eye opening!  If your customers are arriving at your site via Google search, the single pipe could always derail them and sink you page rank. What is next, for your business?             Why only the EU had the nerve to fine Google with 2.1 billions for monopolisti...

The small electronic gadgets are everywhere in your life, and I will enumerate just a few of them, most of us for sure have them around the house: smart remote controllers (like Logitech TV remotes) digital cameras wireless routers smart TVs SAN/NAS - array of hard drives to back-up your data smart watches mobile phones tablets, mobile devices GPS devices audio/video recorders or players media players or recorders smart toys for your kids (game consoles, game pads, etc...)                  One of the aspects of almost all of them is that at their "heart" there is a system running, like a small engine. The engine is built on two parts - hardware and software. The hardware part is most of the time fixed, you cannot change it, in best of cases you can upgrade it (that will make a subject for another post). The software part is the subject of this post, for companies building the product is calle...

In my post " when your money is on the line " I took a hard stance on people adventuring to overpromise on goals. Hard to argue or engage if you want to foster innovation or have a innovative working environment. If you are familiar with the normal psyche of the modern being, people are more apprehensive of losing money than going through other unpleasant experiences, so my advice with "money on the line" can lead to a cautious and timid teamwork. Failing-fast and learning from it seems to have a second life in the media. Short cycles, constant monitoring of the results and adapting as you run gets more thumbs up and is preferred today - or agile development. My question is if not somehow "failing-fast" is a continuation of "quick reward hunting" that the society is promoting? What do you learn from failing fast (and quick thinking) that changes you for finding success? Is the time between failures enough to adjust your inner metric to ma...

Coming across an article in NY Times - How to get your mind to read.  The blame is on the national education programs but mostly on the emphasis that context sometimes became the substitute to reading skills. Comprehension falls mostly on System 1*, for most of the skimming thorough type of reading. When the text needs System 2* then the cracks in comprehending what you read skills are showing off. The conclusion of the article "profound changes in how reading is taught, in standardized testing and in school curriculums" is futile, the real issue is to propose a solution which proved successful. To blame the constant barrage of low quality "information" spread on daily news is also an easy target. The reading level,I assume, is at the level of an 8th grader.  What if the access to quality information becomes more of a System 2 kind of effort? Why the student will try to achieve proficiency when the whole media is just bending over to be getting their attention? ...

I was part of multiple business decisions in which we, as a business unit, were promising different things and some of us knew they are not going to happen. When you execute and someone is telling you that is possible to finish the project (which you know is impossible) something is shaken in your core believes. It is a doubt that there is something that you are not able to perceive or that someone can drive you/your team to peaks not even imagined. Or is the prosaic version, "we will see when we reach that point, for now let get the work started". Often times there is the resignation "we did as much as possible, but this is the result", or the sudden enlightenment that in the new context, there is only one way out. Either way, there is a crack in the reality as perceived by you when a group of people are engaging you (among others) in endeavours you have doubt they will be fulfilled. In some organizations they are talking about managing risk, and the risk bein...

Just watched the movie "A monk with a camera" and then read some of the comments. An image is an image and has its own footprint into your experiences and reverberates into your soul. I am totally oblivious on buddhism but was intrigued by the title and then decided to give it a try. I was not let down, because there is emotion, there is humbleness and there is the strive to follow the path of a westerner into buddhism. Based on circumstances you could not have predicted the future of Nicholas Vreeland as becoming a highly regarded monk, based on family upbringing even less. It proved, that life has its own signs and bumps and incredible turns, just not be a spectator, participate and do more than a leaf blown by the wind. The movie has cinematic qualities because images captured by Nicholas Vreeland have simplicity, power dynamism (even in portraits) and a historical background which is still mysterious for majority of viewers. It helps to add iconic images of well known fr...

That is about a posting in Money Sense - a financial publication from Canada, similar to Kiplinger. They try to answer what to do if you are starting to invest today, having all your funds in C$. The main question is, should you change it in other currencies or is it enough to just invest in C$. Should you buy US$ ? Yes, if you believe in the dynamism of the US economy, or of global companies trading in US versus Canadian economy. Yes, if you see more economic growth in US/world than in Canada. No, if you believe that Canada will yield more growth through its efforts than US. No, if you believe the Canadian policies will stimulate the economy in the right direction. There are questions, regarding diversity and significance of the companies you are buying in C$. How large is the Canadian economy in the global economy? How diverse is the Canadian economy? How global is the reach of the Canadian companies in order to shield you of any local downturns? My personal view Fo...

The message is very simple, from the book "Weapons of math destruction", by Cathy O'Neil - our current models used to cut through the data deluge are efficient but biased. People modelling them are biased and there is no incentive to improve them, even if there is collateral damage. Companies selling AI tools are not incentivized on making the "magic-formula" public, open to debate. The users discover the defects after years and after people's life are affected. For the majority there is no feed-back mechanism, or no way to correct the wrong-doing. The book does not offer a solution to the existent AI used in crunching  data. We are biased, but there is hope: openness, dialog and analysis of the results, especially for people who are affected by the algorithms.  Reading the book I remember reading about Google - where they did not know how to use the interviews and post-mortem analysis of the people hired in order to get the right formula of picking the...