I was up at 5:25 AM this morning.  We needed to leave by 6am in order to arrive at the rural high school by 7am.  Jorge works in the education department as an organizer of education counselors.  He arranged me to give a presentation of sorts to all of the teachers on web technology and trends, and maybe a bit on of China as well.  I didn’t prepare at all for the presentation because, up until the day before, it was fairly vague.  But, in the end, it went well.  The school is situated in a pastoral setting in the foothills above San Jose.  We met the director, a colleague of Jorge’s that he respects very much, who took us to the room where about thirty educators and teachers were waiting for us.  Jorge gave a brief introduction and we were off.

For the first part of the presentation, I just gave a bit on my background, how I ended up in China, what I was doing there, and what I had been studying lately.  This was almost exclusively in Spanish, which I hadn’t seriously spoke in seven years or so.  But, it went surprisingly well.  As I started to talk more about technology, my skills broke down and one of the English teachers, Julio, kindly offered to help out by translating.  At this point, probably more than half of the presentation was in English.  I mostly talked about what I had been studying lately – Web 2.0 and social internet technologies.  I talked a bit about Facebook, WordPress, and even Tim Ferriss, but the majority focused on Twitter.  Of course, I had no answers for them about how to best use this technology, but I shared some of my plans that I had for the team in China and some theories about how to take advantage of it.  It was mostly about showing them the technology, sharing my observations on the transformation of Twitter, and some rough ideas on how they could perhaps use it in the classroom.  It’s all about enabling communication.  The teachers asked challenging and thoughtful questions, each of which generated discussion:  privacy, open source vs. Microsoft, and how to train people to be creative are just some of the examples.  All in all, the presentation went about an hour and fifty minutes.

It was humbling and inspiring at the same time; here was this small rural school that obviously doesn’t have one tenth of the funding that a school in the US has, but the passion and potential here is tremendous.  It just goes to show you how many people can end up doing great things, it’s just a matter of the opportunities that present themselves.  Jorge and the director, Isabella, obviously have a good relationship and the potential to do great things.

The rest of the afternoon was spent with Jorge touring this part of the valley.  We hit numerous little sites:  a dam, the ruins of the oldest church in Costa Rica (from the mid 1500s!), hot springs, and more churches (each church we visited had Virgin Mary legends associated with them and relics to help prove the legend).  We breaked for a late mid-afternoon lunch in an open restaurant situated up on a hill with a grand view.  Many restaurants are open like this – basically, there’s very little to constitute the walls, so one feels like very close to nature.  While here, enjoying typical Costa Rican food, the clouds burst and dumped a sheets of rain down on the land.  We stayed longer and chatted while waiting for the rain to ease up.  It did an hour later or so and we headed back to Aserri to rest a bit (I also hit the internet cafe) and get ready for dinner at a famous “chicharron” restaurant.

“Chicharrones” are another typical food of Costa Rica – various cuts of barbecued pork served with different types of salsas, rice, beans, and corn tortillas.  Very tasty, of course.  The restaurant was absolutely packed; this was, according to Jorge, one of the most famous chicharroneras in the country.  Later on, three men started playing a giant marimba followed by a “Cimmarone” band accompanied by “mascadas”, typical clowns of Costa Rica.  They roamed all over the restaurant and danced by rapidly spinning back and forth, causing their fake arms to swing around and around.

First of all, I have to apologize for the huge delay in an update to my blog. The last one was significant enough to warrant a decent amount of time before the next post, but this was much longer than I was anticipating. There were those who thought I’d be bored in the short time that I’ve been self-employed. Others suggested I might end up working too much on my blog.  I knew that neither of those would happen.  In fact, it seems like I’m busier now, especially with transitioning to the this new lifestyle.

One thing that I have to specifically mention is that what my friend and former colleague Peter, who quit Microsoft back in July and now lives in Shanghai, told me:  “You will feel a euphoria of having the freedom of setting your own schedule and working on the things you care about.”  That is certainly true; I feel it.  Despite feeling some anxiety during the transition period away from Microsoft, I now can’t imagine going back.  I hope I will feel the same way in six months.

Back in the real world, however, there are several pressing transition issues I have to deal with:  tax issues in the US and China, getting all of my outstanding expenses reimbursed, researching and setting up insurance, planning a move to a cheaper place (now that MS isn’t footing the bill), and a few others.  Here is the list of the various projects I’m working on now:

1. The aforementioned domestic issues, which need to be taken care of as soon as possible for peace of mind.
2. Setup the appropriate and best structures for being self-employed.  This involves lots of emails to lawyers and CPAs in the US.
3. Re-releasing my two shareware applications. I am combining the two apps into a single suite, redoing all the graphics and UI, fixing a few bugs, updating the name to something funnier, buying the domain name, doing some marketing and affiliate programs. My goal is to increase downloads by 10 times.  This should increase revenues nicely.  We’ll see; it will be a learning experience regardless and it’s fairly cheap to do all of this.  It’s been six to seven years, but I have been too lazy and comfortable to touch the code.
4. Re-release my Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto CD.  This has involved redesigning the cover professionally, getting a logo developed, and reworking the orchestral tracks, remixing the CD, and sending the tracks to the US for printing and hosting on CD Baby.  It’s been sold-out for three or more years now and, again, I’ve been too lazy and comfortable to do anything about it.
5. Release two reuseable CMS (Content Management System) websites for two different purposes, both of which are specific needs of mine.  One of them could turn into another side business, but I’m not focusing on that right now.  The other, maybe a little later as well, or just free software.  I’m hoping to outsource these to two projects different local companies in Shenzhen to see how well we work together.  The best company will win the big website I’m working on, which I’m still designing.

Numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 should happen within the next three to four weeks.  That should free up time to focus on #5, which will also give me incentive and time to continue working on my other website idea.

So, what has my daily life been like?  Well, I’m trying to keep it as close to normal, structured life as possible.  I still have my weekends available.  It’s not so busy that I need to eat into weekend time.  So, I’ve been keeping a schedule Monday-Friday that begins around 8 am lasts through 5-6pm.  I’m working pretty hard to spend the requisite time outside so that I maintain the right level of social contact, otherwise, I’m afraid I’d get shiftless and lazy.  So, much of my time is spent working remotely.  There are also frequent lunches and usually activities every single evening whether it be Chinese Lessons, Basketball, or simple dinner with a friend.  So far, it’s working very well.

Here are some of the challenges, none of these is terribly serious:

• The internet is slow in Shenzhen.  It’s quite slow in my apartment at key traffic times.  This causes me to be distracted.  How so?  Well, I start working on a certain a certain problem, using a certain website, and it turns out that website takes a too long to load for my liking, so I multi-task over to another problem, and usually load another website.  Repeat, repeat.  Eventually, I’m bouncing around from task to task.  You’ve probably heard that it takes a lot of time and mental effort to make a switch from one task to another.  It’s true; I can really feel it.  I’m trying to minimize the distractions by:  Batching (like doing all my email only three times per week), and doing as much offline work as possible.
• Lack of focus caused by not adhering to a schedule.  Remember what I wrote above about my schedule?  Well, I’ve been 100% diligent about it when other people are involved.  However, when it’s just me, I tend to slide a bit.  Just a couple of days ago, I realized that this was causing me to lose focus.  By knowing that I have a hard break for a task, I tend to focus because I want to finish as much as possible before my time is up.  Of course, if I’m on a roll, I’ll reschedule an impending schedule item, but usually this isn’t necessary.  This reminds me of the Parkinson Law.
• Instant Messaging is hugely distracting.  OK, this one is easy to fix.  I enjoy chatting with a few US friends in my early mornings and I still allow myself to do this briefly, but if I’m on after 9:30AM China time, I’m often inundated with people who want to chat.  I’m often too nice to tell them I have to go; I usually let them chat until they’re done.  Bad habit, but easily managed by turning off Messenger by 9:00-9:30AM.
• Facebook can be a distraction, though I think it has huge amounts of business potential.  I’ve already made some important business decisions because of Facebook.  But, the other great thing about it though, finding long lost friends, can be distracting too.  I spend a lot of time on Facebook writing long emails with old friends.  I haven’t quite figured out this yet; there seems to be no single solution, but rather just learning to be more brief or only do this sort of activity on the weekend.