This "update" has been so long in the making that the idea of the website coming back was almost a personal joke. And every year I tried to get something going but at most I managed to post a small note about it coming back. But there was no system to write, and there was no system to publish.
When I take a look at the last entries of the blog, I realize how far I was from imagining what my life was going to become in the following years. But I also realize that besides everything that ocurred, the part of me that have kept me going has always been there. I was not myself outside of the Internet, I lacked confidence in myself, and I am still discovering it.
I am writing this from a very different world than the one I used to live in when I started more than 10 years ago. The weather is different everywhere, violence and chaos are two things that are seen now everyday, maybe things have always been like this, only it hasn’t been this clear due to the limited technology. But we live in a mobile world now, a lot of people carry Internet in their pockes, and a camera...
Unfortunately I didn’t share my journey as I planned to do, but it is ok, it has been a journey of failures, of pain, of tears and even some blood has been spilled. Some functionality of the body has also been lost during the process. It’s funny the difference between your journey and how people sees your journey.
There are some who consider me successful because I have travel the world, because I have accomplised some things that look quite fancy, because I have had the opportunity to live in the most expensive country in the world. And technically speaking, I have delved very depth into server administration, scripting, databases; I have played some with app development for Android, Chrome extensions, and the last couple of years, my world is Machine Learning, and of course making the tools to gather and prepare the ridiculous amounts of data that you need for that one.
And that is what people sees, what they don’t see is that I am technically not just homeless, but stateless, and pretty broke. I haven’t been in my country in years or seen my family, including a new member that I am yet to meet but that I love very much already. I am always moving around, from place to place, carrying a laptop and my notes to keep on working, getting online from public wifi spots, libraries, and of course from friend’s houses many times.
But that is what my journey has been. I learned how to do many things, but I did not value them, I lacked confidence in myself. I made some terrible mistakes and as I result I fell off the system. But the one thing I had to handle first was the depression I fell into after losing contact with my child, which maybe biologically isn’t my child, but in my heart he still is. I have become extremely social, but if feel someone starts getting close to me, I unconciously get away so I am also quite lonely, but I call it solitude.
But enough of it. I have become very mobile, and I have documented everything that I have done in the last years. I think it is time to get all of that information out. Despite everything, I have reached stability internally, and I am happy. I want to share what I have learned so maybe others can find a more, hmm, profitable way to use the techniques, the code and the information that I have.
Oh yes, and more photographs are coming. I documented, I wrote scripts, and I took photos.
And so it begins...
Well, I don't know if anybody still reads the frontal page of this site, I know there are some articles that still bring about quite a bit of traffic, but the frontal page, not so much.
Lets face it, this site never really had the best name, it was a name of an old user account from an old free hosting company that no longer exists. But I was quite nostalgic and I bought it.
Things have changed a lot in the world of Linux and in the world of Web Development, now Linux is incredibly easy, and everything in the Web Development revolves around HTML5 and responsive mobile web development. And as it changed, I changed myself. Some times I really do feel like everything I learned before, the way in which I used to do things, has become completely obsolete. But that is a good thing, isn't it?
I overcomplicated myself with this Web Site, making it increasingly difficult to publish new things, but I do have new things to publish, a lot of them. Also my grammar has improved, and I am now writing this from the United Kingdom.
So, to not make this even longer, all technical articles will be proof-readed, simplified and publish in a new site called codeffeine.com, and a lot of new material will be added there. The motivational articles, and there will be more in the future, will be posted at wakeitnow.com. And this site will be used for my Photography and my personal thoughts and opinions. As for the Spanish material, anything that can be useful will be moved over to www.diezcuriosidades.com and the rest will remain here.
The goal is to improve the designs, the quality and the quantity of the material presented, and to begin offering some Apps as well, coding Apps at Codeffeine, organizational Apps at WakeItNow.
A whole year without publish anything in the website, but what a year. With new businesses, websites, and now engaged, this year was, without a doubt, the best year. But I'll make the next a best year, and I wish everybody a great year full of joy and fulfilled purposes.
I have been doing some additional modifications to the platform-something that I use in this website because Thingamablog, which was the original system that I had in place, just can't handle galleries, not that I know off, and while I considered to just install a gallery system in here, I do have a certain vision and a set of features that I want in the platform of this website. And as this is my personal website I don't mind taking the time to build the system as I like it, even if it results in longer times to post while I build it.
To call the last couple of weeks "hectic" would be an understatement. The one year anniversary of the website came and went, and everything that I was preparing for the day was superseded by the need to eat, by getting sick, running my first 10km race (while still sick), a family project, a friend's project, and the project of a couple of friends. I have been here and there and what little time left I had was directed towards finishing the system of this website rather than invested in the unfinished content.
But I am not abandoning this website, in fact I have several guides that need to be polished and more thoroughly tested in order to publish them. And the personal side of this website is just about to get interesting thanks to a trip that I will be taking very shortly. I am hoping to get some content for the photography section of the website (this trip is the reason it was created). Of course, all of the material will be offered under a permissive creative commons license.
Copyright © Juan Valencia Escalante. Some rights reserved, check the license at the bottom of this page.
This is the old photo that I had in the Contact section of the website. Since I am planing to post a few extra photos I am starting the section with this one, and I will replace it from the contact section with a photograph of me.
I know that this year I haven't post as many new articles as I wanted to, it particularly hit me when I made the new sitemap. With the past month busy writing the Screenplay for this year's Script Frenzy, and this month split between programming a replacement for Thingamablog, making the site Lynx friendly, the big Slackware posts that I am preparing, and learning to use Cinelerra for the cinematography workshop I am currently in, the free time has fly away. I am going to do what I done the last year, posts smaller articles while the big ones are being prepared, so this website doesn't look inactive.
So anyway, why bother to make the website Lynx friendly? In one word: Accessibility.
I was working on a new post covering the issue of using rsync for backups, and its use in combination with cronjobs to automatize the backup process, but I realized that the first rsync post could be much more informative, so I reworked it.
While right now this looks like a regular blog, the idea of this website is to have a series of articles about different subjects, and yes, maybe a little blog updated occasionally, but mostly articles, and some of them can definitely be expanded.
I made a practice of document every new thing that I learn or do for future personal reference. I write what I understand in a way that will be useful to me for later use, and this have been going on for many, many years. This is what I love to do, learn, try, experiment. I have spent so much of my time and resources on this and I barely have anything to show for this. What I have is a lot of .doc, .odt and .txt files lying around in a folder.