Nuno Sousa's Corner

There are moments in your life when your health throws a curve ball at you. It happened to me several years ago and the end result is now on display . I'm at home, recovering from a surgery. I've been at home for almost 4 weeks and I still have at least 2 more to go before I'm considered able to go to back to work. Although the surgery was nothing too complicated this is my second day almost completely out of bed. I'm now able to sit for small burst of time. For the rest of the time I either stand up and walk or I simply go back to bed. I'm lucky. The day after my surgery, the doctor talked to me. I said it clearly: "Only 50 to 60% of these cases don't recover like we would like them to. When they don't recover in the 2 to 3 weeks like we like them to, then the scale is in the order of months. Minimum 2 to 3 months." That scared my, but I was confident because the doctor said that "90% of the success depends on the patient. If you stick to a f

I always intended to write about this subject a while back but never got the change to actually sit and write about it. I think this is the time, so if you're looking for a technical or management related blog entry simply skip this one. Eight months ago I started a diet. I was a "little" overweight and always postponing the task of getting back into shape. I was unable to postpone this any time longer because of my mother. Some times in your life you need a little push in the right direction. This push can come from many sides. It can be an event that occurred to you. It can simply be a loved one or a friend that has a talk with you. In my case it was my mother actually scheduling an appointment with a nutritionist. My excuse for not caring about my weight was always that I would first go to a doctor, a nutritionist, before embarking on a diet. Well, my mother took the next step and actually scheduled the appointment and the necessary blood analysis that I had to

It has been a while since I posted anything on the blog. I've been keeping the shared items going because they are part of my daily reads, but nothing regarding the blog itself. There are many reasons for this but on of them is that I have "moved out" of my parents house. I say "moved out" between quotes because I always go to my parents house on the weekends, but during the week I'm alone on a rented apartment. Why rent an apartment? Because I was tired of not having any time for myself. With the relocation of my workplace I ended up doing 1 hour drives each way to go to work. This meant 10 hours each week. This had a penalty in my life, not only on my health. My day was fully filled without any time to just breath. Now I live a 10 minute walk from my work. Sufficiently far to refuse to go their if they call me, but close enough to walk and leave the car parked all week long... except when I go windsurfing... The end result of all this is that I expect to p

It is true: life can throw you a curve when you least expect it. I have some many reasons to blog about but I haven't found the time to get down and actually write anything. What has happened in my left? A lot... Lets see if I can make a short list of the most important things: I lost over 20Kg of weight (and got back up to shape by actually running over 6km every day); I've made a web site for my family's company (that is online and working without a hitch for a couple of weeks now); I've managed to get Gentoo running on an External USB hard drive so I can use the dead weight computer that the company I work for assigned to me while traveling to work on my things (yes, because that thing must have M$ Win...); I've been promoted; I've shown the guys in my company that simply saying it is impossible and giving up is not the answer; and a lot more... Should I talk about it all??? Well, the Linux part I'll leave for another entry because I want to put up the in

The year has just begun and my laptop decided to bork. It already borked some time ago. The problem was the backlight: it started blinking and the laptop would go to sleep. I search the web and found this blog . I tried to figure out if this was the problem with my laptop, but I was almost sure it wasn't, because even if I connected an external monitor Linux kept receiving spurious lid close events. It turned out to be the board that had the lid closing button. The trick was to find the parts, but I was lucky enough. I called my old boss, who also bought the same laptop as I did and asked her what happened. Well, it turns out that the laptop was going for recycling. Not a moment too late! I asked for it, she gave it to me for free (thank you!!!) and I repaired my laptop using the board of her laptop - which seems to have a broken video card... Today the backlight finally hit the fan. I had been noticing some flickering of the backlight for some days but I completely ignored it and

Welcome to 2008!!! I wish you all a good year filled with health and happiness for you and your family. And when I say "all" I actually mean "all", even those that consider themselves my enemies... When a new year comes along it is usually a time to think about what went well in the last year and what hasn't gone that well and to make some new year resolutions. If I believed in New Year resolutions mine would be to improve my health and fitness. Since I don't believe that making resolutions only once a year I won't make any... My vacations are practically over. I was finally allowed to take a vacations. I said allowed because I actually had to site laws to get them to approve my vacations, but it was worth it: I finally got some time to just recharge my batteries, you know, sleep 11 hours per day, read a book and basically do nothing... Work will start next week and I think it is time to scare the crap out of them. I believe I should be professional to