Usando "Mind Maps" en el trabajo

Hace poco días que empecé una nueva aventura en un nuevo trabajo. Una grata sorpresa vino cuando vi que uno de los software preinstalados en mi ordenador era MindManager (http://www.mindjet.com/). Y más sorpresa fue averiguar que varios de mis compañeros usan este SW para tomar notas en meetings.

Buscando algo más sobre esta capacidad encontré este blog: http://steves.blogharbor.com/2006/02/22/how-i-use-mindmanager/

y en él se dice, entre otras cosas, algo interesante: que las notas resultantes reflejan mucho mejor el resultado de la reunión que las tradicionales notas "en serie", que principalmente dan una visión del progreso de la misma.

Espero mi primera reunión para comprobarlo por mi mismo ;-)

English writing practice (II)

Certainly I was not still a kid when I made my trip to Venecia, but it was one of the first without my parents. I was 17 years old, and all my classmates and I got into a bus in Madrid, and started the journery heading for our first stop, Lloret de Mar.

How exciting. I was quite shy back then, and I was starting an adventure.

Unfortunately, the excitement didnt alleviate my  sea-sickness, that I always got when in a car or bus. So the first "interesting" thing that happened in the trip was poor Carlos vomiting on his trousers. With all my class mates looking at me. Great. And I only had 2 trousers for the whole week.

That happened maybe 30 minutes into the road, and for the life of me I can not remember more of the time spent inside the bus. Maybe because I spent it all under a blanket...

Considering the start, the rest of the trip was not bad. Mostly I have broken memories, some of them  just plain stupid. A round snooker table in Lloret, cars with screeching tires in low-light roads, the old cannons outside Montecarlo's Palace.

And then Venecia. My best memories are walking alone, with no particular place to go, just looking and filling my head with the beautiful views. A very special place.

In that same trip we visited several other Italian cities, like Siena, Rome, Florence, Pisa. Probably the second best memories I have is drinking a capuccino with my friend Jesús in the "Ponte Vecchio", Florence.

Later I have visted Italy a couple more times, but the emotion of my first walks in Venecia still remains.

English writing practice (I)

It's time to start writing English text in preparation for our upcoming CAE (Cambridge Advanced Examination). Our American teacher and buddy, Kerwyn, will make the corrections.

I will write down the corrections and analyze them so I don't make the same mistakes again. Some errors are so embedded into our use of English that it's difficult to correct them so they do not happen again. In these cases writing and commenting them will hopefully eradicate them completely.

I started studying English as most kids in Spain, in the school at 8-10 years old. You get to learn quite a lot of grammar, all the irregular verbs, and some phrasal verbs, but you don't get fluency speaking or listening.

It was a good thing for me that I started playing guitar at the age of 16, and being quite into American music I read, listened to and sang (awfully) many songs in English.

The next milestone was applying for an Erasmus grant. I made my final project in Karlskronna, Sweden, where, besides learning a few words in Swedish I improved my English a lot. In Sweden you can ask anyone in English, they will understand you and reply in a very good English (they don't have subtitles in movies, could that be one reason for the excellent level of English in the country?).

After returning from Sweden I got lucky: I found (or better, they found me) an online group to fly flight simulations, with people from all over Europe. The flew, and fly, with mic and headset, and common language is English. This was a great help, as I could listen and talk to native speakers weekly, a huge help for me.

Another factor was that my tutor for my PhD insisted in reading and writing in English, so I got used very soon to read in Shakespeare's language.

As of today, I would rate my English as above par in comparison with most Spaniards, with good reading and writing, not so good listening and still lacking in talking fluency...

Let's see now what Kerwyn think about that last bit ;)

Presentation woes

Things to keep in mind for my next presentation:

• Voice. I don't know if it happens to everyone, but if I am just a little nervous then my voice will show it. Solutions? As with every other matter, a good preparation of both your speech for this presentation and the whole theme you are presenting. Next time I will try something else, cause my speech was obviously a bit broken. I will focus on slow talking and thinking ahead, easier said than made , I'm sure.
• Before the presentation think, again, what you are going to say to this particular group of people. I got the impression that I talked too fast and about too many things, too far out the knowledge of the attendees. For this particular, 5 min long presentation I spent 10 hours for the preparation. That makes 2 hours per minute. And it was not enough. I hope that I will get better at this.
• Looking at the people in front of you. One obvious mistake that I did not make (well, yeah, but just once) is looking at the projector screen. But my visual scan of the individuals...not sure, but probably I scanned many of them too fast. Would it be better if I looked longer at less people?
• Facial expression. I didn't care at all about this. But I believe that it is important. Probably a smile here and there will show to the audience that you are calm and in control of the presentation. (This one is gonna be hard for me)
  

Changes

I bought my first (actually, it was 3in1) David Bowie CD. Just in the right time to hear David singing Changes, when it fits my job situation so well.

C#: Uso del registro de Windows

using Microsoft.Win32;

readonly string REGPATH = @"SOFTWARE\CGS\Services\CGService";

// Editar o crear una clave en el registro
RegistryKey RegKey = Registry.LocalMachine.CreateSubKey(REGPATH);
RegKey .SetValue("InstallDir", installDir);

// Abrir una clave del registro para lectura:
RegistryKey RegKey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(REGPATH);
string installDir = RegKey .GetValue("InstallDir").ToString();

Primeros pasos con Ubuntu Edgy

Una vez instaldo el sistema desde el CD-ROM...

1º- Ajustar resolución de pantalla: editar /etc/X11/xorg.conf