Posted by Jorge Bernal May 22, 2008
Yes, you read it right, website. I know that sounds like 90s, and today trends are blogs and social networks, but I felt I needed some semi-static place to hold some info about who I am.
It’s not finished yet, I have more ideas for it, but it’s been sitting in my hard drive in a decent state for a while, and I think it’s time to obey the release early, release often motto.
Go there, if you want: www.jorgebernal.info
Posted by Jorge Bernal October 28, 2007
Have you ever thought about getting rid of something, and found yourself wondering will I need this in the future
?
If the answer is yes, you may have your house full of useless stuff, just like me. I found today 15 great de-cluttering tips, and this was the most insightful for me:
Take all your items that you unsure about getting rid of (e.g.
I might need this someday…), put them in a box, seal it and date it for 1 year in the future. When the date comes, and you still didn’t need to open it to get anything, donate the box WITHOUT OPENING IT. You probably won’t even remember what there was in the box.
Posted by Jorge Bernal June 11, 2007
It seems I’m a ruby guy after all:
$ history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10
111 svn
61 cd
44 rake
36 l
32 hg
18 ./script/console
14 rm
12 screen
12 history
12 ./script/server
Posted by Jorge Bernal May 28, 2007
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and talked to some American friends about this, so I decided to share with you some insights into the personal finances in Europe (actually it might be only Spain, or just me).
The original idea for the title was “What’s wrong with American personal finance”, but I guess a positive thinking could help more than just criticism. I usually read some productivity and lifehacks blogs like LifeHacker or zenhabits and once in a time, a money article pops up. The two most common pieces of advice in this field are:
Those two common issues amongst American people were really bizarre for me the first time, and still today I can’t fully understand were the problem comes from.
Simply put, I’ve never paid a single late fee in my life (maybe renting videos long time ago). The most common payment method in Spain for recurrent bills like Internet, rent, phone,… is called domicilación bancaria. I’ve been told there’s something like that in the US, and I’ve found similar concepts on the Wikipedia: Direct debit and standing order.
That is, if I get a new DSL contract I give my bank account number to the service provider and they charge me every month directly in my account. The only chance to get a late fee there is if there are no funds in that account.
So, my piece of advice here is: ask your bank about this possibility and get your bills paid with direct debit
This in fact hit me long time ago, in an episode of The fresh prince of Bel-Air, when Will gets his first credit card and starts spending way more than he can pay. I thought that was a silly joke, but as I discovered later, it seems like the sad beginning for a lot of people.
I have one credit card and I only use it to buy online and when I travel outside Spain. My other cards are debit cards: some Visa Electron and some Maestro. In fact, most of the time my credit card stays at home.
I don’t even know if there are debit cards in the US, but if they exist, you should get one.
I found this cool parody some time ago about getting out of debt:
My final basic trick is that my expenses are much lower than my income, so I can pay them every month.
I think the above video is my conclusion to this: don’t buy stuff you can’t afford and I should add find the financial tools you need to stay away from credits.
Posted by Jorge Bernal May 22, 2007
My decision about 1 year ago to start doing training was a strange move for me. It was totally new and scary field for me, but like I said at the moment, according to my experience all change has been for good. I think I can trust my intuition.
Like Seth Godin said (more than) once:
Safe is risky
I found a short article about How we learn which summarizes my point of view after 5 courses.
10% of what we READ
20% of what we HEAR
30% of what we SEE
50% of what we SEE and HEAR
70% of what is DISCUSSED with OTHERS
80% of what is EXPERIENCED PERSONALLY
95% of what we TEACH TO SOMEONE ELSE
William Glasser
You can never imagine the kind of questions you are going to get from so many different mindsets, so you have to find a lot of answers that you’d never find otherwise.
Posted by Jorge Bernal April 18, 2007
Being well positioned in a search engine Google might be the key if we’re talking about businesses. When we are talking about a personal blog like this, with no direct revenue related to visits, I can’t find more benefits than the confort of being able to told people to directly google my name instead of giving them the whole address.
But today I noticed some black spots on my Google search (Jorge Bernal). First, it seems to be an actor called like me, and a Bernal familiy which is not mine.
But the thing that keeps me worried is the Jorge Bernal mugshot. Anyone who knows me can realize that the guy in that photo is not me, but still. I was really nervous last Sunday when I was at the customs office in Minneapolis Airport, knowing that there was a murderer in the US with my same name.
To whom may it concern: I do not kill people. My only killings are -9, if you know what I mean
Currently working at Warp Networks on MySQL training and developing with Ruby on Rails
I use this blog mostly for technical posts. If you can read Spanish, check Amedias too.
