Excelente versión venezolana de un clásico mexicano. Y no, no me recuerda a una cerveza 😉
All posts by chivacongelado
What a difference…
When I moved to Finland to study in the summer of 2000, 8.35 Mexican pesos used to buy one euro (the Finnish markka, still legal tender, was already pegged to the euro, and transition to banknotes would happen one and a half years later). A non-EU student like me needed to show he had 30,000 markka (5,045 euro or 42,000 pesos of August 2000) for his living expenses for the year in order to be granted a residence permit. I had to sell my car and got some help from my parents to reach that sum, but it seemed a better proposition than continuing studying at a private university where the tuition per half year cost 50,000 pesos (5,990 euro or 35,600 markka of August 2000). Furthermore, I didn’t need to pay tuition in Finland.
Today’s rate is 19.1 pesos per euro. Furthermore, a non-EU student now has to demonstrate that he/she has 6,000 euro every year in order to be given a residence permit, so my present-day equivalent would need to get 114,000 pesos every year to be allowed to come to Finland to study (a 271% increase in almost 9 years!). The Finnish Parliament is also evaluating the possibility of adding tuition fees for non-EU students.
I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t expect many Mexican students coming here anytime soon. I guess it was a matter of timing.
Corporate vs. personal blogging
You may have noticed that the rate of new posts in this blog has slowed down a little. Most of it is simply due to the fact that I’m spending a hell of a lot of time working these days (a common joke with my buddy Phil is that we see more of each other during the week than of our wives), so I don’t have that much time to share certain things as when I was studying my masters.
Furthermore, most of the impulses and insights that I have nowadays are related to work, and as you may have noticed I don’t feel comfortable blogging about it externally unless its public, live and water under the bridge (a not-so-uncommon problem). For that reason I have started a Nokia internal blog where I post my thoughts on services, devices, marketing and industry shifts as I see them happening. If you also work for the company and would like to read it, tell me and I’ll send you the link).
This doesn’t mean that this blog will whither and die (on the contrary, I plan to give it more attention now that it has finally moved to its own server and I was able to clean all 800-plus entries), but that I’m still trying to evaluate what focus to give it. Let’s see what it brings, and hope you want to continue reading.
Roll call / Pase de lista
For a long time I’ve wanted to know who my readers are, where do they come from and what kind of stories and insight you would like to read in this space, since I’ve so far only covered whatever crosses my mind (which can be quite varied when you look at the tags).
Whereas Google Analytics and inbound links can give me an idea, it’s of course more human (and the whole point of this blog) to have a conversation with you, dear readers. That said, let’s get started now that you don’t need to register to comment as it was in bloody Vox.
Durante mucho tiempo he querido saber quiénes son los que aquí visitan, de dónde vienen y qué tipo de historias o pensamientos les interesaría leer en este espacio, dado que hasta el momento sólo escribo sobre lo que se me ocurre (que puede ser bastante variado si uno checa las etiquetas).
Aún cuando tanto Google Analytics como las ligas entrantes me dan una idea aproximada, pienso que es más humano (y la razón de ser de este blog) tener una conversación con ustedes, queridos lectores. Con esto, podemos empezar ahora que ustedes ya no tienen que registrarse para comentar como era con el Vox del carajo.
Brand you, part 2
Funny how certain topics tend to resurface every once in a while. A year ago we were discussing the advantages of treating your internet presence as a branding exercise, and yesterday marketing guru Seth Godin gave a great example of why you should do so.
Be yourself but remember: you’re in candid camera.
The middle class will save us, part 2
Some time ago I argued that the middle classes would help the economic and democratic development of emerging countries. Again, the Economist takes this subject on with a special report, and Paco Calderón references it with a cartoon.
Will this positive development survive the current economic climate worldwide?
Trip to Barcelona
I visited Barcelona again a couple of weeks ago to attend an important industry conference. Besides working very hard (so much so that when I came back to Finland I went down with the flu), it was very nice to meet some good people I hadn’t seen in a while.
Speaking Spanish and having some jamón de jabugo were also very much welcome. The pictures of the trip are here.
Dopplr annual travel report 2008
This blog has moved, please update your bookmarks / feeds
This blog has moved to its own domain: www.chivacongelado.com , the new RSS feed being at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/chivacongelado . Why?
After starting in MySpace (of all places) almost 3 years ago, I moved the blog to Blogger to take advantage of better blogging functionality. In March 2007 it was migrated again to Vox so that I could use the more user-friendly interface available there besides being able to post from my mobile device at the time (or so I said at the time).
In reality, I found a pretty user interface, that made very simple to import and display content, but didn’t allow for unregistered comments, trackbacks, statistics, widgets, counters, etc., so the conversation didn’t grow the way I would have expected. To make matters worse, even though their import utilities are excellent their export tools don’t exist, so my content was literally trapped. This, as you can imagine, made me a very frustrated user, especially since their customer service just ignored me.
With the help of a couple of friends I was finally able to free my content, and am now hosting in BlueHost (GoDaddy was out of the question after the cvander debacle). Installing WordPress was very, very easy and you are now privy to the results. The old blog will remain in its old place, but will not be updated from now on. There might still be a couple of tweaks to be done, but pretty much everything is in place now.
Welcome to my home in the web. Mi casa es su casa. 😉
Monocle does Mexico
This month’s edition of Monocle, my favourite magazine, has an in-depth survey of Mexico (running at 36 pages) that features the best in current Mexican design, music, literature, business, media, hospitality and gastronomy.
It is very refreshing to see such a positive portrayal of the Mexican reality, as most international media tend to take the easy route, focusing only on what’s wrong (which we already know) instead of what’s right. Highly recommended!