Work life

If you work freelance, your customers will expect you to be working late and on the weekends.
In fact they expect you to pick up the phone no matter what. (even if there’s a comet heading for earth or a woompa woompa attack!)
If you work for a big enterprise company, they will DEMAND you to work late (and occasionally on weekends).
If you work for a small company they will have tough deadlines and few people so you’ll need to work late.
If you create a startup your partner will expect you to work late.

But do you need to work late? weekends? holidays? obliterate all social life?
There’s always tough times no mater what company/project your in but these can’t be the norm, and it’s up to you to draw the line.

More working hours don’t necessarily make you more productive (and on the long term more happy), so you need to find the right balance between work and play.

Dilbert - Work life

Upgraded Macbook Pro Hard drive

My Macbook Pro is a few years old and my hard drive was starting to feel the weight of the years and constant work so I decided it was time to upgrade from the measly 160gb, 5400rpm, 8mb cache original Hitachi Drive to something new.

The winner of this choice was the Samsung hm251jj 2.5″ drive, with 250gb, 7200rpm and 16mb cache. I wasn’t feeling brave enough to pry open my laptop despite some good tutorials out there, so I went to Distriloc and they replaced the drive pretty quick and painless.

To backup my original hard drive I used Carbon Copy Cloner and it was easy.

In the end the results were fantastic, the machine boots up faster, the drive is very very silent and now I have more disk space to work with.

Here’s some statistics from xbench:

Before

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After

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ruby meetup @ lisbon

Tomorrow there’s a Ruby and Ruby on Rails meetup in Lisbon.

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If you want to meet with fellow rubyists and share some insights, knowledge or simply have a nice coffee then join us at the Liberdade 229 space. If you want to take public transportation, you can take the 732, 727, 720 728 buses that stop nearby (you have to walk a bit but it’s good for you) or the leave at the Marques de Pombal subway station.

You can find more info about the event at the upcoming.org page.

Impressive videos from E3 2009

Here’s some of the most impressive videos, trailers or demos from E3 2009.

The Beatles Rock Band

We all know it’s going to be an instant hit. The trailer animation is fantastic, showing all the phases from The Beatles.

Ruse on Microsoft’s Surface

Ubisoft’s RUSE on Microsoft’s $20,000 touch-screen “Surface”. Now that’s putting it to good use. :)

Splinter Cell Conviction

The visual presentation is amazing. The new aditions continue to make the series fresh and exciting.

Peter Molyneux Project Natal

A glimpse at the next step in video-games evolution. Sony and Nintendo will have to step up their game.

Wallace & Gromit Grand Adventures

Traditional point and click adventure games are a dead genre but some publishers still try to push games with a more modern interface and storytelling aproach.

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Today I bought Wallace & Gromit Grand Adventures on Xbox Live and it’s pure fun. Go try the demo or look at the trailer, it’s worth it.

P.S: And don’t forget that Bionic Commando:Rearmed is selling for 5$ on discount.

Smash!

In a time where the print industry seems to be in trouble, there’s a new Video Games magazine in Portugal.

Smash! Magazine promisses to bring gamers different content from the usual reviews and preview we’ve been customed to. The mag has some good writing, check it out.

Congratulations and good luck!

Ruby nos Aliados

On this weekend I went to Porto to participate on the Ruby @ Aliados event. The goal was to bring the Ruby comunity together to network, trade advices, present projects and share knowledge.

The event was brought together in a very Barcamp-like style, informal but valuable, I guess. There’s some key points to be improved for next time but I think a very valuable step was put forward to atempt to bring people on the comunity together.

There was presentations on BDD, Cucumber, Performance on Rails (by me), Capistrano, lot’s of discussion on topics like IDE’s, deployment, testing and some interesting projects were also presented (like escolinhas.pt).

Looking forward for next time. :)