Today is El Universal’s 100th anniversary. I’m a proud alumni of El Universal and I’m happy to remain involved in its development. We are working hard to get this company through this transformation era into another 100 years of quality journalism.
For the occasion I wrote a piece which can be read in Spanish at eluniversal.com
Congratulations to everyone in the family of El Universal in Venezuela.
This is the intro to my article:
“Rather than submitting the same contents in each kind of media, the contents should fit in each possibility of supplying information. The challenge is big indeed, because the current change involves the media, the audience and the world. The information is here and users are either active or passive with regard to the news”
I can’t believe it myself. I beat my target time and finished the Marathon without a hitch.
This was my first Marathon and my second race in general since I did a 5K before I decided to run the Marathon. Given that I’ve been a runner for less than a year, I can’t be happier with my results.
The experience was amazing, the course is very beautiful and the cheering was really encouraging. I think I’ve fallen for running, real bad. Can’t wait to run my next one and run in different places.
Seeing my family get excited along the way was beyond description. Unfortunately they didn’t make it in time for the finish line but just thinking they would be there helped a lot.
This Marathon is very hilly, one of the those with most elevation changes in the US. Yes, more than NY or Boston and I really felt it, specially because there are many long hills along the last miles. It did affected my pace substantially so I’m hopeful that I can make a better time at a flatter course.
Getting there. Woke up at 5 am.
Along the way…
The results:
Average Pace 8:19,
10K: 50:43,
Half: 1:45:40,
20 Miles: 2:43:06,
Marathon: 3:38:10
Trying to steer away from getting too cheesy, this is my Oscar speech part:
I thank Valois, José Espinel and Franco who got me on this “doing a Marathon” thing.
To Titi whose support really made this possible in many respects. To my kids, both for inspiring me as for passing time without me while I trained.
To my parents and sister for always believing in me, always supporting me and always being there, even if some couldn’t physically be.
To Meme, for teaching me so many things, specially about enduring, which is what this race is all about.
To the rest of my family and to my friends for your friendships.
I can’t believe it myself. I beat my target time and finished the Marathon without a hitch.
This was my first Marathon and my second race in general since I did a 5K before I decided to run the Marathon. Given that I’ve been a runner for less than a year, I can’t be happier with my results.
The experience was amazing, the course is very beautiful and the cheering was really encouraging. I think I’ve fallen for running, real bad. Can’t wait to run my next one and run in different places.
Seeing my family get excited along the way was beyond description. Unfortunately they didn’t make it in time for the finish line but just thinking they would be there helped a lot.
This Marathon is very hilly, one of the those with most elevation changes in the US. Yes, more than NY or Boston and I really felt it, specially because there are many long hills along the last miles. It did affected my pace substantially so I’m hopeful that I can make a better time at a flatter course.
I’m getting ready for the Atlanta ING Marathon which will be run on Sunday the 29th of March (this coming Sunday).
If you want to show up and cheer me up along the way, here are some tips on how to follow my progress and when I may be in the different cheering locations along the track.
The Marathon starts at 7 am sharp at the Centennial Olympic Park in Downtown Atlanta.
“The Cheering Zone will supply plenty of inflatable noisemakers and “Go Runners!” signs. All you do is provide the enthusiasm and NOISE!
ING Cheering Zone- Marietta Street – the exciting final mile of the race!
Following the Runners Along the Course
Friends and family members of ING Georgia Marathon & Half Marathon participants are encouraged to use MARTA, Atlanta’s rapid transit system, to follow and support along the course. Several key MARTA stations fall along the route of the ING Georgia Marathon to include Five Points, MLK Memorial, Inman Park/Reynoldstown, East Lake, Decatur, Midtown, North Avenue, and Peachtree Center stations. MARTA Breeze cards will be available for purchase at the ING Georgia Marathon Health & Fitness Expo. For more information on MARTA, visit www.itsmarta.com.”
This is a close up of the Start/Finish area:
I’m hoping to finish the marathon around 11 am if all goes well. My expected average pace should be 8:22 minutes per mile, which should help you calculate where I may be along the course.
If things go according to plan, I may be around these times at these key locations (Download PDF):
If I’m not there at these times, things are either turning out too good to be true or not as good as planned…
Out of personal experience I have recently noticed how there are less personal blogs and many are not as up to date as they used to be. I haven’t updated our family blog for a while, mostly since the year started. I stopped blogging due to lack of time. Well, it’s not entirely lack of time but a matter of convenience.
Facebook and Twitter are killing my family blog!
Why? Because it’s so much more convenient to keep our family and friends up-to-date through Facebook and Twitter than through the blog.
When we started the blog in 2001, it was the best way to keep our loved ones up to date, but many things have changed since then.
One great advantage of using Facebook is having unprecedented control on who can see what. If you spend some time tweaking the privacy settings on Facebook, you can control to the person who gets to see what. This is increasingly important to me given the levels of insecurity in Venezuela. It always scares me to travel there and know that there is so much information about us freely available in my family blog.
Yes it’s true that most people don’t know about it but Google does, and thus anyone willing would.
It’s also true that I can set some privacy settings on the blog to control that no sensitive information is freely available (which I have done), but then I have to put the burden on our friends who have to register on the blog to be able to see everything, and who needs another login and password!?
The beauty that most of our friends and family are already on Facebook does take the burden off of their shoulders.
Our closest friends are up to date and our non friends are not.
Perfect, right?
Wrong.
From the security and control perspective it is correct but there is one big problem with abandoning the blog and putting everything on Facebook. In the Digital Media world its called “Data Portability“, that is my ability or lack thereof, in the case of Facebook, to retrieve my information and migrate it to whatever service I see fit. As of now, we can’t do this with Facebook. Everything we publish there dies there. We can’t extract it and republish it anywhere else. If Facebook closes (unlikely but not impossible), everything we’ve published would be toast.
This is not the case with our blog. The data is ours and we have complete control on the server and back it up frequently. I could move the entire content of the blog from one platform to the other any time I want. In fact, this has happened already once when I moved it from Blogger to Wordpress. And also, the Wordpress blog itself has moved a few times from one server to the another.
Thus we’ve decided to keep blogging but only put here the important stuff, the stuff we don’t want to risk loosing, making this our true Family Diary. This blog has always been a good diary for us but it also had a lot of filler that it’s not crucial to “leave for posterity”.
Hence so, the family blog will from now on focus on important events that have happened and that bear some relevance to our lives.
Everything will be published after the fact (for live blogging follow me on Twitter or Facebook). Given that we are going through the parents stage of our lives, there is likely to be a lot of news and milestones from the kids, which most likely will be closed to registered users depending on the sensitivity of the information.
No, we are not that egocentric! We are happy to share our lives with our loved ones as it makes us feel connected but it’s definitively not thought of as responsibility with our fans or anything egocentric like that. Our main motivation is to keep a diary of our lives and share it with our closest friends and family.
At the end, it seems that fragmentation is affecting everything. Now there is a variety of platforms to communicate and each one is ideal for a particular usage scenario. Things are getting more complicated but at the same time, easier, it all depends on how much you want to do.
I recently bought a Netbook, the MSI Wind U100-432 to be precise and I must say I’m very happy about it.
Granted I’m grumbling about having to use Windows XP and remembering why I love Mac OS so much. Nevertheless, the advantage of running full applications when compared with my first netbook, an early eeePC.
My setup is simple. I run Dropbox to synch a folder with the files I’m currently working on and Evernote to take notes.
I also have Firefox 3 with the same Extensions I use on the Mac (No Script being a MUST since I’m on XP) and TweetDeck to remain connected to the Twitterati.
Mostly I don’t worry about local downloads of emails since I use Yahoo! Mail and GMail mostly.
All this really helps me work remotely without much power requirements. I’m wondering if it would get to the point of allowing me to travel with a Netbook and leave my Laptop behind on short trips.
One very good upside of this setup is the cost. For less than $500 I have a working environment even capable of videoconferencing via Skype. This is very attractive specially when thinking of risky places like Venezuela. I would be much less worried about having this stolen than my MacBook.
To make things even more interesting, there are ways to hack this machine to run OS X. That would make it almost perfect, since an Apple version would be the ultimate.
Another very big upside is the battery life. I don’t have precise data but today it lasted the whole afternoon, even with intermittent WiFi and it even helped recharge my iPhone which almost died on me today with low battery.
On the downside, the keyboard is not the most comfortable and the Windows key mappings are a pain since I’m so used to Mac commands now. Also the screen is not so big, so really it’s only tolerable to do work on texts, small spreadsheets and small MindMaps. I wouldn’t do Photography retouching on it or other large scale documents such as Project in it. Not unless it was urgent to do so.
Yesterday I went to the MIT Forum’s Future of Wireless Event.
The audience was mostly suits from the telecommunications industry and the usual Atlanta networking crowd.
The forum itself was very TV like since it was being transmitted live to 26 other locations around the US.
Here are some of my notes. Nothing really groundbreaking or new was said though.
According to De La Vega, AT&T Invested an additional $500M in the 3G network just to compensate for the increased expectation of demand due to the release of the iPhone 3G.
RDLV: “We’re the one subsidizing the iPhone to really get it to the masses”. On why AT&T deserves part of the credit for the iPhone’s success.
On wireless bandwidth: Todays technology can go up to 14.4 MPBS. Already purchased the spectum for 4G. Will use LTE which can go to up to 100 MBPS.
Average per user bandwidth usage is decreasing as mass market adoption of the iPhone increases. First adopters had higher per user bandwidth usage.
World is drifting to LTE although some are stickin to Wimax.
Verizon is also going to LTE.
At AT&T 3G is being lunched also on 850mhz spectrum to improve the reach.
RDLV on Wifi: believe that Wifi is the unifiying force. Just purchased Wayport. Idea is to allow users to switch seamlessly from cellphone data to WiFi.
RDLV: Close to 290 million phones in the US
A whole world of machine to machine communications is comming. Sensor that allow them to know where they are and when to interact with each other. RDLV
RDLV: Would start a company to help devices network with each other and become temporary peripherals.
Many opportunities in emerging markets.
Retail channels are becoming “experience stores”, what they can’t get online.
Loopt is the killer app according to RDLV but Loopt+Twitter would be even better.
I’ve managed to be at a fit level I never could have hoped to achieve. I’m feeling better than ever and I’ve stopped “dieting” to loose weight. I now eat many more calories but I still do count them daily and also I continue to exercise strongly.
The hardest part, according to many, is keeping the weight off. Some studies show that the great majority of people who loose a lot of weight, gain it all back and even end up worse than when they started. Well, I’m determined to prevent that from happening to me. That’s why I keep setting goals to myself. The only difference is that now my goals are not really related to weight but to athletic fitness.
Setting goals makes it more interesting and challenging. That’s pretty much the way I said to myself in January that I would loose weight, now I’ve made the decision to start competing in running and biking events. Thus I will start training for the Atlanta Marathon in March. Let’s see how I do.
So, where am I now?
My weight oscillates between 152 and 155 and that’s where I want to stay. Nevertheless, my body is still changing. I guess I’m loosing fat and gaining muscle weight because my waist keeps getting smaller. When I started this effort I was wearing pants size 36 and now I’m wearing 30 loosely, I even have some pants size 29 that fit perfectly. Even my shoes have changed half a size.
I’m now exercising every day, even if only doing pushups, I do something. My routine is to do a couple of days of strength training and the rest aerobic, either mountain biking or running. Last time I ran I did 7.8 miles in 50 minutes, which is not bad at all but for the marathon I would have to be able to sustain that much longer, maybe around 4 hours for the full marathon.
I went to Caracas for a few days of intense work with El Universal. Mostly I was at the Upfront sale for 2009 advertising space, where they exhibited a video starring me. Also got to work on other aspects of my project and see part of the family.
El Universal in Caracas produced a video with me about their future challenges and how media consumption is changing with the advent of media fragmentation. Here it is.
I have to translate it into english but most will already see the point. It was hard to convey so many details in 3 minutes. The first script I wrote took around 8 minutes, thus we had to chop it a lot.
Today is El Universal’s 100th anniversary. I’m a proud alumni of El Universal and I’m happy to remain involved in its development. We are working hard to get this company through this transformation era into another 100 years of quality journalism.
Facebook and Twitter are killing my family blog!
One great advantage of using Facebook is having unprecedented control on who can see what. If you spend some time tweaking the privacy settings on Facebook, you can control to the person who gets to see what. This is increasingly important to me given the levels of insecurity in Venezuela. It always scares me to travel there and know that there is so much information about us freely available in my family blog.
Entries (RSS)