Sick… again!

I´m sick… again! Autumn is finishing and it´s getting quite cold down here (28ºF/-2ºC). I catched a cold after after a weekend of parties and now I´m blogging from bed.

Good news is I don´t have much to study, so even though I lost some classes, I can catch up. My grades for the first tests did fine and the second round starts in 20 days, so if I had to pick a week to be sick, it would have picked this week.

Bad news is I won´t be able to go to Computex… but we are sending someone, I have to catch up at school and Computex starts in 10 days. The only problem with being sick, even if it´s in a “loose” week, is I didn´t have time to review some stuff I have around. So I´ll have to get well ASAP and keep track of some things.

Final Stats for April

April is over and just like during March, here you have the stats for this month.

ChileHardware was read by 505062 different people. Is not as much as our all time record achieved during March, but at least I know why. Our international bandwidth sucks, all our alien readers have to share crappy 128kbit access. I also know the solution, and we are looking for a dedicated server in the United States… My mind is on The Planet, but we still have to decide.

TecnoSquad on it´s side broke it´s record once again, with 38552 unique readers. Not bad at all considering April is a short month and Easter Holidays where awful for websites, but again we are having international access problems. The good news is TecnoSquad runs on WordPress and it´s much lighter than ChileHardware, I think we are moving TecnoSquad in the next weeks, ChileHardware will have too wait at least one month.

My Workplace

This is where all the magic happens. I´m not trying to look cool, just to be sincere, this is the truth. In the first picture you will see where I do all the hands-on. In the corner you have the benching rig, this is a computer I´m not able to use day to day, it´s just for reviews and experiments and it´s specs change day to day. At it´s side you can see a huge 21″ CRT monitor, it can handle high resolutions needed for VGA reviews (unfortunately a 30″ LCD monitor is not on my priority list for now). The computer just beside it is an old PowerMac G3, in it´s best times it was used as an Mp3 server, nowadays is just garbage… The other computer you see – only the screen in the picture, both computers are under the desk – are used for writing, just plain writing.

The other desk is my room, here I do the business job and studying. A mess because I´m on my exams… So that´s the awful truth

 

New altitude record on a car

This is way to funny not to write about it. On March, Chrysler sponsored a crew of 20 people, 7 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited 2007 and half a million euro budget to achieve the altitude record on a car at Ojos del Salado, Chile. The german team achieved 21,804 feet on their factory stock Wranglers and installed a “Jeep Parking Only: All others don´t make it up here anyways”. Last weekend a two man army on a modded Suzuki Samurai SJ-413 1987 broke the record, achieveing 21,942 feet. But the hillarious part is they found the Jeep sign on the floor so they cut the “All other don´t make it up here anyways” and took it home as a souvenir. I´m sure the guys at Chrysler are way too pissed about their PR stunt being broke just a month later with a 5 thousand dollar budget

¿Where are the feats?

As some of you might noticed, I´ve been quite away from blogging during the last days. I´ve been having some drinking fun, studying and posting news. So I´ll make a brief summary of what I´ve been up to.

Weekend

Weekend was great, on Friday night we went out for some drinks, nothing too fancy but it was enough to format my brain from all the study done during the week. On Saturday we went to see some friends to their first soccer match on one of the many females leagues here in Santiago. This was quite fun, mixing afternoon wine and – one week old – easter eggs with female soccer is always great. After the match, “our” team won 2-1, we celebrated with a nice barbeque, unfortunately once again my camera left me alone with no batteries. After the barbeque, which finished around midnight we went to a friend´s birthday till 5 AM. Partying in Santiago can be a tough job

On Sunday my grandfather and her wife came in for lunch, after lunch I went for our weekly Sunday Night Poker, with no success. The loosers – including me – left early and catched Mark Wahlberg´s Shooter at the local theater. Really bad movie, but at least we had a laugh.

Studying
I´m doing a great job at school, I received my marketing grades up to now, 78% and 90%, not bad at all. In to more weeks I have some exams, so wish me luck. I´m looking forward to do my practice job at the end of the year, so I really need to aprove all my courses, which shouldn´t be too hard. I´m still deciding if I´ll work here or in the United States, I have some job offers at great companies in the States but I still have plenty of time to decide.

Working
This week is Beijing´s IDF – Intel Developer Forum – I´ve been working hard keeping track from here of what´s happening over there and up to date we´ve published something over 10 different stories. On the other side, we published a new review today, comparing MSI´s P6N Platinum with ECS´ NF650iSLI T-A, both based in NVIDIA´s nForce 650i chipset for Intel processors. The first one turned out to be a great overclocker achieving 450MHz on FSB.

The rest of the week should be smooth, I just need to finish a couple of reviews – just writing – and build up my new rig. All the parts are already here – the only one who is not ready is the Biostar motherboard which BIOS chip was wrecked but it´s on the way -, I only have to decide on the case, build, install and ready

How to waste a lot of money

Yesterday we went to IBM´s Software Day 2007. This is an invitation IBM makes to key people in large coporate organizations, IT professionals and media, where they try to explain why buying one of their excellent but extremely expensive business solutions is a must inside their companies. This is usually a big event, where they spend a lot of money, but if things go well, they can pay all the event with just one new client.

Unfortunately things didn´t go to good. The invitation was at 6 PM, a time when most of the people are starving after work, luckily I´m not most of the people and had a muffin at a coffee shop 30 minutes before, because there was nothing to eat before the event, just natural juice.

The first demo – which was supposed to take 25 minutes – took 45 minutes and was terrible. Instead of using a test server and logging from the event to show some real demonstration it was a crappy fake image over html demo. In 45 minutes they didn´t say anything worth, my buddy Juan Pablo part of ChileHardware Staff works over Rational Software – which was the demo about – and almost cried. The product is excellent but they made it look like crap.

After this demo we went out for a coffee break, and trust me, it was really a coffee break, only coffee. This was 8 PM, and still nothing to eat, considering the event was going really bad and we where starving we decided to leave. I may respect a company that makes an event with a great product on a low budget, what I cannot understand is a company that makes an crappy event with no food spending a huge amount of money.

New site in the list

We´ve finally launched a proyect we had in our head for some time now: MexHardware. MexHardware is a hardware site for mexican users, where they can know each other and we can throw in some content with the help of some really nice mexican people we´ve known in the internet. One of the owners is mexican, which will give it some national NDA, the other two owners are my partner from ChileHardware and me. We didn´t have a great welcome in Mexico, because we are chileans, but things are more calm know (that was why I was so busy and didn´t have time to post).

On the other side, we have two new potential direct advertising sales for ChileHardware, both of them are current clients who will stay with us. This should be a good money injection to complete some things we should have done but didn´t because of the lack of cash. One of them is hiring a professional designer to give a facelift to our websites, at least the CMS is already working and working on the design shouldn´t be much of a job but is definitely a need. The second part are a lot of small expenses we should made in the past too, but adding them up, they turn out to be quite expensive.

Once the new designs are done, it´s over with new websites for now, we want to consolidate the traffic ChileHardware has, and start building up traffic for TecnoSquad and MexHardware. We started an advertising campaign which I hope works out. This will be a tough job, but I love it, it´s like the first day of school once again.

That is all for know, my fingers hurt, first time they do, but I´ve being writing quite a lot, too many e-mails and articles. After a bad luck rush I think things will start to build up

Content: Something Fresh

Tomorrow I´ll fly to Buenos Aires, Argentina for MaximoLAN. I´ll meet several hardware manufacturers and try our latest content evolution: video content. Internet is going far beyond letters, it all started with pictures and the new revolution is video on demand. We think that´s the future: broadcasting news and coverage through video, and that´s exactly what we will do. 

We already setup an FLV streaming module and a friend lent us a professional videocamera. Nicolas who is the man in charge of all reviews is also an aspiring film director, he will be in charge of the camera and post edition. I hope everything comes out as planned, we have our first sponsor and is a big name in the hardware industry, we plan in shooting at least four broadcasts, wish me luck.

Santiago 101

As I promised, I´ll be posting some pictures of Chile. I´ll start with Santiago, Chile´s capital city and where I live. I took this photos today while driving to and from school, this is not really Santiago´s typical pictures, but more the places I see day to day. Keep in mind Santiago is a huge city, one of the largest in South America. Santiago, has it´s own World Trade Center, which is part of the financial district of the city, called informaly Sanhattan. Sanhattan has a couple of big buildings, and two more are being constructed right now. One of them will be the biggest one in Chile. According to Wikipedia, this is downtown, according to Chileans, downtown is far down from this area, at least 3 or 4 kilometers. Just a walk away, 15 blocks or less, you can find Pedro de Valdivia. Pedro de Valdivia is a rather old street, where you can still find stone streets and big trees, is definitely worth a walk if you are around. In Pedro de Valdivia you can also find some budget hotels, although in it´s best times, it was a street for rich people, that is why you can see some really nice old houses. Nowadays those buildings are used as offices or even embassys. Even though stone roads are a bit romantic, you can have a bad time during rain, unless you drive like Colin McRae, which I do (lol!). In the picture at the left you can find one of our newest public buses, they carry fancy led signs and are white (they used to be yellow). People say the new transportation system sucks, it seems they changed 7 thousand buses for 5 thousand new ones, I wonder why it sucks…

Coming back home, I was harrased by a group of traditional journalists, it seemed they wanted to kidnap me. Is not an easy task being part of the indie media and part time blogger in Chile. I managed to escape, but I´m sure they will try this again

Breakfast of Champions

Last year after Intel´s Editors Day, at Salta, Argentina, we where supposed to have a last night at Buenos Aires where we had plans for some bar hopping. Unfortunately our flight from Salta to Buenos Aires was delayed, and we had no time for nightlife nor going to the hotel, so we had to be in transit for 6 hours at Ezeiza waiting for our flight back to Chile.

This is when we had the Breakfast of Champions at the Duty Free shop: Vodka shots at 6 AM. I´m the director and camera guy. Check out the lady screaming, “No!” at the end of the video