Winter is coming

Well not really... yet. But I just felt like writing here after a while since it's raining outside which is basically indicating the official end of summer for the Pacific NorthWest. It's a shame that good days are gone already. Hopefully the rest of the year should be quite interesting for me. I'll be travelling to Asia for a month, more specifically Seoul, South Korea and a bunch of cities in Japan, including Tokyo of course. I'll upload one or two pictures when I'm there, although I don't know how many people have actually read this blog so far. That concerns me, did social media really kill the blogs? Oh well, I'm trying to stay away of social media as much as possible. I've never even had an Instagram account, but deleting my Facebook is maybe still too radical, I'll wait a little longer.

This summer was fun, I had decided earlier this year that I was gonna visit California as much as possible since I had never been there before.
In March I couldn't handle the bad weather up here anymore and took two days in LA, which I loved! I even did a tour to the Warner Bros. Studios and got a picture in the Friends sofa. I stayed at Venice Beach, which was also great and drove non-stop everywhere.
In July I went to San Diego for the San Diego International Comic-Con, oh man, what an experience! Me and friend were in line for about 20 hours (of course we took turns though) to make it to Hall H. That's where the most famous TV shows have their panels where they bring actors and the audience has a chance to ask them questions. I saw the Big Bang Theory, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones panels. Was it worth it? I guess so, but I'll go more prepared next year. I missed a chance to get an autograph from the Rick and Morty creators, so that'll be number 1 priority in the coming year 2018.
In August I went to LA once again and from there we drove up to Monterey and then San Francisco. That was quite a touristy trip too, SF was amazing! All this was followed by a 22hs train to Seattle, which I wouldn't recommend since it's just forest all the way.

Now I'm back to work for another 5 weeks and then I'll be leaving to Asia. I've been adding English subtitles to my old cartoon series, Escuadron 37 (Squad 37). I'm also planning on bringing my website back from the death, which may be done in React in a very simple way. And I'll be purchasing a Wacom 13HD soon to start learning more about cartoons development! At the same time I have this unnamed comic with 7 pages so far, hopefully I'll come up with a name soon. As you can see, there are a few projects in mind which I'd love to achieve.

Here's episode 4 of Squad 37 with brand new English subs:

See ya soon!

Landing my job at Microsoft: Part 1

Back in February 2013 I was on my last year of university and had my very first interview ever with... Facebook. Yes, I had a Skype interview with a Facebook employee and I failed it gracefully. Usually coding interviews consist of a few easy problems followed by a bunch of complex ones that hopefully will land you a job at one of these big companies. Turns out I had an easy first problem and for some reason got so nervous or the correct answer just did not come to my mind, I solved the problem but not in the most efficient way. I was so disappointing I had failed that interview after studying and going through books for about two months, that I started uploading my resume everywhere. My aim by the end of my university phase was to leave Argentina ASAP (that's usually the post-effect you get after being an exchange student).

So my resume ended up in a couple of job listing sites and for some reason I uploaded it to the Microsoft Careers site as well. Two months passed by and I got an email from a Microsoft recruiter saying he was going to be in Buenos Aires in three days taking some first instance interviews for a possible future job at the company. I ended up replying to that email after a few minutes and went for that interview on a Friday without going over any books since I could not be bothered about it. I was going to give it a shot, never thought I'd have made it afterwards. I had a chat with the recruiter and he gave me 10 minutes to solve as much as I could of three string matching problems. Then that was it.

They said the results were gonna be emailed in two weeks. Three weeks went by and nothing, so I emailed the recruiter and he said they were delayed but that I had made it and I was gonna be flown to Brazil in the coming weeks for a round of 4 interviews with long time Microsoft employees - that was gonna be the real deal. Basically I had no time to study since I was also dealing with my classes at the time so I just locked myself in my room and did as much as I could.
Lucky enough, one week before the interview, they sent an email explaining how Brazil was too risky at the time because of all those riots that were happening, and the interviews were going to be postponed for later that year -- no date set at the time. That was actually good news! I got myself the time I needed to really get ready for the tests.

The final round ended up being on September 3rd, 2013 in Santiago, Chile. I got in a plane and went to a different country for less than 24 hours, which for South America is NOT common at all -- maybe Europe, not South America. My Chilean buddy Marcelo (who I had met back in 2007 in Fargo, ND) picked me up at the airport and went for a dinner. I ended up at the Radisson hotel (paid by MSFT, of course) and I had the interviews the next morning at the Sheraton hotel which was just 7 blocks away from there. I never felt so stressed in my life, the interviews were too much to handle.
We were about 8 for the morning session and they sat us at this round table where one of the recruiters started talking about the process and how awesome Seattle was. She was right, Seattle is great, except for the rain part -- One of the guys there asked if it was true the city was so rainy and she had to lie saying that wasn't true (lol). After each interview they would gather us back to the round table for a quick 10 minutes break and then the next interview would follow. A curious thing at this point was that after each interview there were fewer and fewer people sitting at the table -- they were getting rid of us, only the best ones (or lucky ones) were making it to the end.
After the last interview we were 3 or 4 left and they called us one by one, I was shaking, I had no idea how I had done. I was quite confident on my first 3, but the last one took me forever to solve and was not even sure it'd be enough. One more thing: between interviews, the interviewers talk to each other regarding how good / bad you did and what weaknesses they found, to maybe test you deeper on those points.

They finally called me and gave me the offer to start working in Redmond, WA on October 2014 IF I could get my H1B working visa. I was gonna have to wait over an entire year to be able to start, but the wait was gonna be worth it. However things did not go as expected at that point in time, but I'll leave that for later.

That's me the day I had my very first interview in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires. I stopped by the Buenos Aires Book Fair afterwards and got a picture with Ernesto.

Moving into Minimalism

For some reason last night I decided to stay home and ended up watching this documentary about Minimalism (http://www.theminimalists.com/). I had NO idea this was actually a thing and that it existed as an idea or movement. I'm just gonna quote their definition and the actual documentary in english with spanish subs:

Minimalism isn't about any of those things, but it can help you accomplish them. If you desire to live with fewer material possessions, or not own a car or a television, or travel all over the world, then minimalism can lend a hand. But that's not the point. Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom.

I could not even finish that documentary and was already picking up old clothes I had not worn in years. The next day I went and donated all of those, kept "only" about 20 t-shirts (I'm still working on that) and threw away hundreds of objects I had kept for over 10 years for no reason at all. It's not like I got rid of every single thing I had accumulated in the past, but I did let go a good amount since they were not serving any purpose.
I like collecting things (have a big collection of old trading cards, some comics and music CDs) and I did not throw any of those away. I'm clarifying that since I've talked to people who refuses to go through this since they justify that "every single object they own has a purpose and is being used regularly". Indeed as the documentary tells you, together with those thousands of videos you can find online about minimalism, the aim is to only keep things that are currently serving a purpose and make your life better and happier.
Since I moved to north america I've been skeptical of buying too many things but I still did every once in a while. I first moved to Canada and got a bunch of furniture when I rented my first apartment. During the following year and a half I did not purchase that many big things, which I'm happy about but still got some stuff. A year and a half after, I moved to Washington state and for some reason moving all of my stuff took an entire and exhausting day (moving only from Vancouver, BC to the Seattle area), I could not believe the amount of things I had accumulated in just a year and a half -- And consider I had got to Canada with only 3 suitcases! I crashed at a friend's house for about 3 weeks until I got my own place and it turned out to be a furnished studio -- The price and location made it worth taking it -- That's when I realized I was not going to be able to bring most of the furniture I used to own. My friend ended up getting my coffee table, TV stand, and even my bed frame. I moved to a studio with a table, a mattress and a mattress base together with --still-- a lot of unnecessary stuff.
Somehow this video has opened my eyes a little, and I hope this is just the beginning to a better life somehow by caring less about things. Hopefully it's useful to you as well.
See ya next time!

Portland and Portlandia

One of my favorites Netflix shows is Portlandia. It's just a lot of fun to me, but I would totally understand if someone does not get it, it's just a very special type of humor. It used to be my coffee time TV show, and I really enjoyed it.
So this show really pumped me to go visit such city, it looked like a nice chill place to go hangout for a weekend. And eventually after making it there, I realized how a good publicity the show had been. Some friends and I went there for a long weekend and right before coming back I decided to stop and get a picture at the "Women and Women First" store, which belongs to one of the most famous sketches in the show. To me they make fun of feminists in a healthy way, nothing to get mad at.

Here's the picture I got:

Women and Women First!

So I got that picture and a lady was inside looking at me and my friend with a non too friendly face. This place is an actual volunteer community center and right after leaving, I decide to google about it and found the following in their blog: http://inotherwords.org/2016/09/28/fuck-portlandia/
Gotta say I felt a little bit guilty after reading this:

That was just what I had done! Anyways, I don't really believe the intentions of the show are those, and as I said, it really pumped me to go visit the city and actually loved it. I've been there twice already. Hopefully they'll come to an agreement someday.

Portlandia statue

PS: The city's got some awesome brunch places, but to be aware of the waiting times on weekends, make sure you watch the Portlandia special brunch episode. It describes it exactly as it is :P

Second reboot.

It's 2017 and this is my third attempt of having a proper blog. Although at some point in my life I did have a pretty nice one, one I started back in 2007 and lasted for years. One day I accidentally deleted all the photos in it, and later on decided to just clean up that whole mess of missing images with horrible text underneath them.
A few days ago I figured out I've been away for too long and maybe it's time to come back somehow. So this will probably be a personal place to post crap I see and do. Maybe not as often as I used to.
As I'm writing here, I'm currently living in Bellevue, Washington, USA. A nice a quiet city right outside Seattle, and somehow I became a Software Engineer at Microsoft. I code for food and try to make things not break in the Windows Store app. I've been here in the US for almost a year now, and before that I had spent a whole year and a half in Vancouver, Canada, a city I miss A LOT. So yeah, it's been almost 3 years since I left Argentina and it's funny how a lot of things change and some not much, but still interesting.
Now, as I said, it's the year 2017, who has a blog these days? Everybody is either on Instagram or Snapchat, not even Facebook much now, I mean, yeah, still a thing, but the social media in general is all around. Blogs kind of died long ago I guess, but it's still a nice permanent way to keep things online forever and ever.

Regarding all the fun stuff I used to make like animations and comics: I'm trying to bring back my old DeviantArt account from ten years ago and will be uploading those old episodes of my online cartoon series Escuadron 37. On the other side, I'm writing a new comic (just 4 pages so far) and will maybe upload things here.
My life is not as fun now since I'm working a lot, don't get me wrong, it keeps me busy which is good, but I won't be uploading those roadtrip photos, since they don't occur as often as I wish :P

So I used to have a blog about whatever which I ended up erasing and became a tech blog of only 5 posts (still there actually). I think I'll go back to post whatever here again, I won't mind if you dislike it, it's fine, that's what the internet is for.

Aaand last but not least, I don't think I'll post in Espaniol very much since, as you can see, I don't have a Spanish keyboard and I'm way to lazy to configure my English one with all the accent marks and special characters.

See you guys around!

hi

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