First weeks at Openismus

Yay! Almost one month since the last time I wrote. I need to improve this :). There is a convincing excuse though. Since I started my job at Openismus, another evening full-time job came out: the search of my new apartment!. It seemed to be an easy task at the beginning, but now it just turned into a complicated competition. I have just realized that writing in your presentation e-mail that you have something to do with informatics may probably be not that popular. Being non-smoker seems to be another problem too.

At last, things at work could not be better. During the first week we dedicated our time to install Fedora 13 in our computers. Apart from some issues with our keyboards concerning to the language layouts, everything went fine. We learnt to know as well, how the "internal communication system" here works and joined some lists to be up to date with all project's news. Then we started with jhbuild!. That was definitive lots of fun: is there anybody that run it without having to fix at last 2000 errors? ;). Thanks God or whoever, Chris, David and Saint Google were there for support. We actually learnt a lot.

The second week started really good since we finished fixing the jhbuild's errors, and moved on to GTK+. I was busy with this till Thursday. On Friday and Saturday we went to the Linux Tag here in Berlin and attended a series of interesting talks about MeeGo, systemd, Google, Ubuntu and Gnome 3.0. The talks were interesting, but more business-orientated in general from my point of view. However, the best part of this kind of events are the "after-talk-times", where you get to know some people involved on different open source projects or people that work / worked in the same company you do and still did not know. Better chances of socialization came in the evenings with the barbecues at C-Base!.

Well, now it is time I stop writing here and go on learning some GTK+, since I have to present some legible code today.

See you soon!

CERN openlab summer students programme 2010

I wake up and look through the window, the weather is OK, not that bad, not that good. I still do not have curtains because I moved for three months and did not have time to put them or had just better things to do (there are actually always better things to do than this). Next stop: the bathroom. There I wash my face. I go to the kitchen and start the kettle in order to make some tea for having breakfast. I turn on the radio to hear the news. I can not really hear the news with the noise of the kettle boiling the water. Water is ready and I prepare a cup of tea, for one, and to take away. I "take it away" back to my bedroom and turn my computer on in order to check my e-mails and read the news (I did not really pay attention to the ones on the radio, but I like to hear the sound on the background when I am at home, I love to listen to the radio). No remarkable news, no remarkable e-mails... wait.... what is this?. E-Mail topic: CERN openlab summer student programme 2010. I make click on the topic and a new screen shows the content of the e-mail: 

"Dear Patricia,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected as an openlab summer student 2010 [...]" 

More good news for this year, however, at this point I was looking in another direction. I am just looking forward to start my trainee at Openismus on the first June.

Count down... 21, 20, 19...

The count down for moving to Berlin has just started, and the list of things needed to be resolved before doing it is getting bigger and bigger:

01. Bank account cancellation (done) 
02. Cancell city hall registration (done) 
03. Cancell Sportspass registration (done) 
04. HVV Abokarte cancellation (done) 
05. Finding someone new for my room (done) 
06. Selling my room's furniture (done)
07. "Rent" a friend who will drive that car  (done) 
08. Rent a car for moving ( still in process)
09. Packing (still in process)
10. Goodbye parties (still in process)
11. Unemployment registration + fill in of N forms. N definitely tends to infinite (no way) 
12. Others 

 
It is not a bad recount. In the last weeks I have discovered without surprise that German bureaucracy is a lot of fun. Every time a went to the employment office, they gave me as a souvenir at last three different forms (poor trees!!) and had to go at last to three other different places in order to fill in the forms or collect information to complete them (plus side effects: annoying Murray and Kat. Sorry about that). That means, I have been going there every morning for the last week. It might be easier if I just live there for a while I guess.

Good news: my mother is finally visiting me!. After two years in Germany, it seems that it will happen. Well... just if Eyjafjallajökull  does not get angry these days.

I am so excited about everything new that is coming!

Connecting dots till Openismus

"[...] If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. [...]"

Steve Jobs. 'You've got to find what you love'. Stanford Report, June 14, 2005.

One day you wake up and something important that makes a great difference in your life happens. You do not know, but if you look backwards connecting dots in your life, you will realize that in the last years, the whole universe was conspiring to make it happen: learning a new language, deciding to stay in a foreign country, skills...This happens just a few times in life (if you are lucky) and are moments marked with a mental big red cross reminding you where your past ends and the new beginning starts. Moments that have the ability to make you redo your life: new city, new flat, new life... For me, this moment has the name Openismus and here is where I am going to be doing a trainee program for the next year. [Here's Murray's announcement]

Joining the FSO in 2006, at the university where I did my studies , gave me the oportunity to introduce my self in a deepest way in the free software world. Since then, I had gotten interested in the dynamics of open source projects and now I am sure that I am in the rigth place for feeding this interest.

Welcome on board to the beginning of your new life Patri!