Every once in a while I think about the future.
One of my worries as I get older is a question I keep asking myself from time to time: Will I remember or someone else remember how things were 2, 3 or 10 or even 100 years ago?
And then I often reply to myself: "Heck no, who'd care?"
Well.. I care, and the fact is that I do have a sort of need to record these tiny pieces of my own life and experiences like so many others do because I'd be really proud if one day my own descendants would be able to read them and probably get some good laughs at reading these blogs or looking at the photos.
It's not interesting to people outside my own family but it does remain as a good way to remember some of the things that we've doing over the years.
On my own case, on previous years I've opted to take a lot of photos and only recently began this blog that follows the photo log.
And even better news: Today I've taken another step and starting filling out my biography.
But it isn't exactly easy to go back and remember some of things that I did on my teenager becayse I was terrible to say the least.
Education wasn't nowhere a priority until I was in my early 19's and all I cared about was having fun and going out to night clubs a lot instead of studying.
My initial times in the military look almost insane if I look back to the things that I did so carelessly that could have got me injured for life so quickly.
Only a few years later did I started to get a grip on responsibility and meet my wife which really opened my eyes to the need of looking forward to get my life projects completed one day.
There's a lot to say and many other things that I'd like to keep for myself but in either case, I've just started writing down this somewhat detailed biography from my early days and posted it on wikipedia to ensure that anyone else can update it a long time after I'm gone.
It's a truly boring read for most but I see it almost like a relief because I can read back some traces of my life and quickly see how things change even when there is still so much to be done.
You can find this page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nuno_Brito
It's on public domain space and if you know me (and I mean that it doesn't matter if you know me either offline or online) then you're welcome to write down any updated information you consider important to add, I thank in advance for any contributions you add to the wiki page.
Thank you.
:)
Cisco - part 1of CCNA was completed
I finally completed yesterday my final exam on the first part of the Cisco Certified Network Administration (CCNA) course.
This was a bit more difficult than expected, I was prepared for the questions and had studied everything that was expected to be asked but there were some topics that simply escaped my attention or didn't made much sense to be the correct answers but after some careful research I always ended up concluding that the exam reply was accurate even thought at first it cause confusion (guess they do it on purpose, right?).
In either case, it's finished. I had a score on this exam of 95,7% that came as my second attempt on this exam.
On the first one I got 75% and the minimum required to pass was 80%, on the second try they increase the difficulty level and you needed to have at least 85% to succeed. There was still a third and final attempt in which you'd have to get at least 90% - if you failed for the third time then you'd be excluded permanently, so it was not easy having this sort of pressure to get good grades.
I can also say that at this precise moment I feel much more confident to work as a LAN administrator and understand a bit better how a LAN works and how to diagnose the everyday occurrences.
It's an amazing world out there. Servers, Routers and Switch's become much more friendly and understandable. I really recommend going to one of these courses if you're serious about a career in the networking field.
Well.. this was part one. Let's see what's reserved for the upcoming classes next October.
:)
This was a bit more difficult than expected, I was prepared for the questions and had studied everything that was expected to be asked but there were some topics that simply escaped my attention or didn't made much sense to be the correct answers but after some careful research I always ended up concluding that the exam reply was accurate even thought at first it cause confusion (guess they do it on purpose, right?).
In either case, it's finished. I had a score on this exam of 95,7% that came as my second attempt on this exam.
On the first one I got 75% and the minimum required to pass was 80%, on the second try they increase the difficulty level and you needed to have at least 85% to succeed. There was still a third and final attempt in which you'd have to get at least 90% - if you failed for the third time then you'd be excluded permanently, so it was not easy having this sort of pressure to get good grades.
I can also say that at this precise moment I feel much more confident to work as a LAN administrator and understand a bit better how a LAN works and how to diagnose the everyday occurrences.
It's an amazing world out there. Servers, Routers and Switch's become much more friendly and understandable. I really recommend going to one of these courses if you're serious about a career in the networking field.
Well.. this was part one. Let's see what's reserved for the upcoming classes next October.
:)
My wife's birthday
Well.. yesterday was a special day around here because my wife celebrated her 24th birthday and it was special for several reasons that made it a very pleasant day as a whole.
For a start, I was working yesterday but nevertheless she went out with friends to have a birthday lunch at her favorite chinese restaurant, later when I arrived home it was time for me to take her out of the house.
We went to get her birthday gifts in the mall. This year, and predicting the needs of our soon to be born kid, I thought it would be wiser to get some very needed domestic appliances that she would never dare to ask even thought I knew for sure how they'd make her live a bit easier on the daily tasks.
One of the gifts was a high-pressure steam iron that can be used to sterilize the baby clothes and the second was a portable mini-vacuum cleaner that will surely come handy since it can also clean up liquid stuff like the ones produced very often on kids of early age if you know what I mean. ;)
I know it is seems a bit strange to offer domestic appliances to a wife but at the moment these were things that we were needing around the house and seemed like a good chance to get them once for all.
Besides, her birthday gifts also included a romantic movie session (thought not too romantic as we ended up watching the newer x-files movie) and a romantic dinner at a fancy restaurant that we had never visited before.
I think that the gift she liked best was the chance to spend a whole day just having fun without any sort of worries.
This is the last year we live or celebrate a birthday on this island, guess we need to enjoy these moments as much as possible since we won't know what can come up next.
We're both getting a bit older but I'm still so happy with her that these special days really make me feel truly blessed for being in her company.
:)
For a start, I was working yesterday but nevertheless she went out with friends to have a birthday lunch at her favorite chinese restaurant, later when I arrived home it was time for me to take her out of the house.
We went to get her birthday gifts in the mall. This year, and predicting the needs of our soon to be born kid, I thought it would be wiser to get some very needed domestic appliances that she would never dare to ask even thought I knew for sure how they'd make her live a bit easier on the daily tasks.
One of the gifts was a high-pressure steam iron that can be used to sterilize the baby clothes and the second was a portable mini-vacuum cleaner that will surely come handy since it can also clean up liquid stuff like the ones produced very often on kids of early age if you know what I mean. ;)
I know it is seems a bit strange to offer domestic appliances to a wife but at the moment these were things that we were needing around the house and seemed like a good chance to get them once for all.
Besides, her birthday gifts also included a romantic movie session (thought not too romantic as we ended up watching the newer x-files movie) and a romantic dinner at a fancy restaurant that we had never visited before.
I think that the gift she liked best was the chance to spend a whole day just having fun without any sort of worries.
This is the last year we live or celebrate a birthday on this island, guess we need to enjoy these moments as much as possible since we won't know what can come up next.
We're both getting a bit older but I'm still so happy with her that these special days really make me feel truly blessed for being in her company.
:)
Electric Scooter
Just bought myself an electric scooter, not the toy-sized ones but rather the real-size-full-speed motor bike with license plate than can actually move on the city road.
This is such an amazing vehicle.
Runs fully powered by electrical energy and has an autonomy of around 70 kilometers (roughly 45 miles) without need to be recharged.
The speed velocity is not so bad either and doesn't stay far behind the other motorbikes.
Why did I bought one of these?
Well.. my wife already has a car and I don't really need that much of a separate vehicle for myself except for my home-work travels that I've been doing over the last 5 years using lifts from my friends that also work on the same place.
This motor bike costed around 1600 euros (~2300 USD) that is still a lower price than the gas-fuel scooters and I get to travel around to everywhere for free..
Someone once said that the difference between boys and men was the price of their toys. Maybe this electric scooter only comes to confirm this rule but nevertheless what people may think - it is so fun to ride this vehicle that you'd surely try to quickly get one yourself just for the sake of preserving the environment. (and have fun doing it)
It's the first time I see such development that isn't a scheme to suck money from interested people but rather a business where a cleaner and ecological solution can beat to ground the traditional vehicle market.
And to be honest, I always liked the idea of freedom from the oil lobbies and this gives things an extra taste.
If an affordable electric car is made available one day, this would just become the ideal vehicle for a cleaner future.
This is such an amazing vehicle.
Runs fully powered by electrical energy and has an autonomy of around 70 kilometers (roughly 45 miles) without need to be recharged.
The speed velocity is not so bad either and doesn't stay far behind the other motorbikes.
Why did I bought one of these?
Well.. my wife already has a car and I don't really need that much of a separate vehicle for myself except for my home-work travels that I've been doing over the last 5 years using lifts from my friends that also work on the same place.
This motor bike costed around 1600 euros (~2300 USD) that is still a lower price than the gas-fuel scooters and I get to travel around to everywhere for free..
Someone once said that the difference between boys and men was the price of their toys. Maybe this electric scooter only comes to confirm this rule but nevertheless what people may think - it is so fun to ride this vehicle that you'd surely try to quickly get one yourself just for the sake of preserving the environment. (and have fun doing it)
It's the first time I see such development that isn't a scheme to suck money from interested people but rather a business where a cleaner and ecological solution can beat to ground the traditional vehicle market.
And to be honest, I always liked the idea of freedom from the oil lobbies and this gives things an extra taste.
If an affordable electric car is made available one day, this would just become the ideal vehicle for a cleaner future.
Long live StarCraft
Funny thing about moving to an OS like Ubuntu - one might feel tempted to move all your favorites things like old time games and StarCraft (released in 1998) has been on this category for a very long time.
I had some free time and decided to use it by playing some multiplayer StarCraft BroodWars edition on my brand new linux box but was admittedly a bit worried about possible incompatibilities with the wine support under this OS.
Turned out to be a senseless worry and for my surprise, WINE could happily run StarCraft straight from the command line.
The only modification required is the need to disable any of my mouse shortcuts that made the screen use a mac-alike exposé effect that would minimize all the available windows (including the one from the game).
So, I just disable compiz before playing and everything else works fine.
I've been following WINE since it was initially released a lot of years ago and some of my reasons to stay away from linux in the first place were due to the lack of support for win32 based programs.
Today, I'm happy to see that most programs I use on daily tasks are either available as open source linux coded programs or run quite well under the WINE layer.
For all the rest, VirtualBox is also an excellent companion that solve the need for 100% true windows compatibility without further worries.
Who would say I'd live to see StarCraft running outside windows one day?
Let the fun continue.. :)
I had some free time and decided to use it by playing some multiplayer StarCraft BroodWars edition on my brand new linux box but was admittedly a bit worried about possible incompatibilities with the wine support under this OS.
Turned out to be a senseless worry and for my surprise, WINE could happily run StarCraft straight from the command line.
The only modification required is the need to disable any of my mouse shortcuts that made the screen use a mac-alike exposé effect that would minimize all the available windows (including the one from the game).
So, I just disable compiz before playing and everything else works fine.
I've been following WINE since it was initially released a lot of years ago and some of my reasons to stay away from linux in the first place were due to the lack of support for win32 based programs.
Today, I'm happy to see that most programs I use on daily tasks are either available as open source linux coded programs or run quite well under the WINE layer.
For all the rest, VirtualBox is also an excellent companion that solve the need for 100% true windows compatibility without further worries.
Who would say I'd live to see StarCraft running outside windows one day?
Let the fun continue.. :)
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