We keep hearing about fast change, radical change, unexpected change, need-for-change… We ARE at a time of change, internationally. Economical crisis, at a global scale as it is the present one, prompts immediate, decisive change - be it voluntary or not.

So, are you afraid of change in your company or in your own life?

It is natural, I say, that we feel insecure when things turn to be different around us, but there are several traps to avoid, at a personal and professional level, in order to REALLY survive change and make progress.

Imagine your company decides to undergo a radical reorg prompted by crisis. This is actually one of the best things an organization, big or small alike, can do to face external change - to change themselves and adapt quickly.

Organizations, like people, must be swift and decisive when the need for adaptation comes or risk perish and be forever forgotten in the limbo dot-coms and other business bubbles go lurking until complete oblivion or erasure from existence.

How would managers in an organization see change, in the above case?
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Thanks to all folks that may have been visiting this site during the times I was taking care of the upgrade. They may have just had to read a “please come back” message, because the site was down.

Anyways, It’s up and running again, this time with an upgraded wordpress version behind it. The template is another story, for I have not had the time to customize it to my liking yet, and I’ll take my time with it. For now, I am happy I could do all this in LESS THAN AN HOUR!!

Once again, thank you for your patience, folks!

-Sergio

There’s no more waiting, the guys from Dreamhost where this blog/site is hosted sent a huge “humpf!” my way because, apparently, I am a security hazard for them with my old, old WP installation
Folks that know me say I am conservative, perhaps a tad too much in what concerns technology hehehehe. The truth is something else, though. I am a procrastinator, that’s what!
Anyways, this time around I am going to do it. I’ll have to go through the bore of adapting a new template as well, because I am taking the opportunity to “clean up” the site looks a little bit. When I am finished, I will share the experience here with a step-by-step how-to dedicated to you folks that would like to do the same and don’t have all the programming knowledge that is often necessary. Cool?

Meanwhile, please bear with the occasional downtime that the site may suffer as I go through this upgrade.

Thanks and Cheers to y’all!

-Sergio

There is no denying it, it’s all over the news now and no one in perfect judgment can ignore reality: recession is here, countries do bankrupt and companies all around the world will be in trouble and letting people go because of it - or, simply, taking the excuse to make a profit from not having to pay as much as usual in salaries…

The bottom line is: the ones that need a job to bring food home and pay their bills are the ones that ultimately suffer. All of the sudden there will be thousands, millions of qualified professionals as well as others less skilled, looking for the same: a job, or a income. It’s, more than a financial crisis, a job crisis.

Personally, I went through three major recessions and at least as many job “crisis” thase sent me strugling for survival. That, in the last 20 years.

Did it make me stronger? Yes. I feel much more confident and prepared.

Did it make me ready for future crisis? NO, no new recession brings exactly the same problems neither will it flow exactly the same way.

Can I give advise about it? LOL! I certainly can, but there will never be guaranties that ANY advise will work, only common sense, effort and a lot of preserverance, as usual. Well, at least in my experience that is so, and that’s just what I can share here: my thoughts and experience.

- I read somewhere that the word for Crisis is the same as for Opportunity, in Chinese…

When a job crisis hits you, you have the opportunity to… well, first, not to let yourself fall irrevocably!

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“Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe.”

— Sumner Redstone

While I don’t picture myself as a successful guy, so that quote actually doesn’t relate entirely, I had my quota of experiences and attempts that, huh…  err, failed. I do try to build upon my experience and now that age is taking its toll (hehehehe), I find myself doing a lot more introspection about “what went worng” and “what could I have done better” regarding all my aventures in adulthood-land.

I am particularly interested in keeping track of what did not go right with whatever attempt to create a business or going into some work project, job or venture. So, I decided to start a series of articles on that subject, here at serso.com.

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Notwithstanding that I was firmly intent in keeping this blog fully bilingual, after trying so many plug-ins, add-ons and so on for WordPress (and after trying to take time to write one myself), I came to the conclusion that the effort was, well, fruitless.

Amongst many a reason for deciding to drop the idea, and a few more I could come up with, only two stand to be enough for my decision:

1. It’s easier to write in one language and keep consistency; one of the excuses I find myself uttering for not posting is that “oh, then I’ll have to translate, it’s too much work… to have it good enough, I must spend double the time, or more, in each post”. A known procrastinator of all things personal, the less excuses I give myself to push schedules, the better. And I like blogging, so let’s make an effort this time…

2. I already have a Blog in Portuguese. My Insonia also suffers from lack of attention because of my guilt feelings about not writing here. So, there it is my opportunity to also keep that blog consistently updated and keep up with the quality of my writings in my mother language.
Note that I am truly bilingual. Though I am Portuguese, and that is the language of my parents, I did learn English since I was little. As such, I do have a justification, right?
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Back in the early nineties, as in 1990 :), I hadn’t heard the term “telecommuting” yet. In reality, I hadn’t heard of anything that mattered for real, anyways.

I had tried to work from home, though. Not as a telecommuter, but has in having my business based there, saving in overhead costs with office rental and so on.

In 1989 I had equiped a whole room at my new apartment in Rio de Mouro (Sintra, Portugal) as an office. There were 3 PCs, one “portable” Sinclair (read: I used to take it with me), one that had two floppy drives 5.25 where I ran accounting applications I developed (basically, glorified Lotus 123 sheets) and one Amstrad with a 10 MB hard drive where I kept the more space needing applications and data, all running MS DOS and Windows, can’t recall the exact versions. We’re talking the most advanced machines here, the Amstrad was a 386 that had cost me about 3000 Euros!

Of course, I needed a typewriter as well, because those awfull Epson printers did not have enough quality for my taste, so I bought from Xerox a Typewriter (with memory, it would store pages of documents and templates), a Fax machine and a Photocopier.

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‘Just found out that there are indeed people scrumming in Portugal. This is excellent news for someone like me, someone who has seen frustrated all of his honest attempts to use ANY methodology whatsoever.

Scrum is a process, a tried and proven way to improve efficiency in development and not just that. I subscribe to it has beeing a true helper for any team.

There was also this managemnet concept called XPM (Extreme Project Management) which I tried to implement in a results driven organization but you guessed it: the business owners preferred the old and tried method of the whip, coupled with the Captain Kirk concept of management*
Knowing this, one would understand why I am not actually a believer in the idea that implementing processes that are rational, proven and efficient - albeit having acronyms that are somewhat funny - will ever be successful in this country’s business environment. Business owners and chiefs, the real big players here, seem to simply be stopped in time and very, very retrograde (not just conservative, they seem to dislike or mistrust even what was “new” back when!).

But I heard GuestCentric Systems is going fully Scrum, at least. So, congratulations guys, thumbs up!! However, let’s realize they are not exactly “from” Portugal, are they? LOL!!!

Well, pardon my bitterness, all of you well intentioned and forward thinking portuguese friends and unknown scentient forms out there, but since I arrived in 2005 there’s very little I have seen around here that could make me change my opinion. But I am still here, still trying, still strugling. And, chicken!, doing exactly what I am commanded to do. I need to put “the bacon” on the table, although I was never a Pig in Scrum anywhere I worked for.

Nevertheless, consolation and vindication is coming my way in unexpected forms. Imagine that the company I work for, indeed does have expertise and people like Andre Torgal that do know how to Scrum for real!!!

Cheers to you all!

* A simple and irrational way to get things done. Kirk asks the question to his Chief Engineer, Scotty: “How long to have it repaired, Scotty?” to what the Engineer replies “Putting all resources and effort to it, Sir, the best I can do is to have it done in two days…” to what Kirk commands, with no hesitation: “You have TEN minutes. Get it done.”

As you might have already noticed, I integrated BBPress with WordPress, right here. It was not easy, nor straightforward, unlike folks around the web might have had you believe it.

I will open a discussion in my forum about this, as I will post an article describing what I had to do to make it work. In the end, it was all about lack of clear and updated information on the part of those bbpress blokes, but I finally found out that you should not try to integrate the latest WordPress with BBPress ’cause of cookies integration. It was simple, after all and I had to downgrade my WP version to 2.5.1 and all was well and yes, straightforward from then on. What wasn’t simple was to find out about it!…

My project involves a lot of customization of BBPress and I will make it public domain here. My code and such will be published under some shareable license as well.

Cya around

Guess what: my template decided to act erractically right after i did… nothing!
It’s true, it simply doesn’t respect my choice for what page is shown HERE or not. I guarantee you that I had nothing to do it it (lol, of course I simply did something that I can’t remember or pinpoint just now… but I will).

Anyways, if you see something strange happening in the home page, it is simply because I am working on it and it will soon be stable.

Thank you and cheers!!

- Sergio