All posts by Fernando Carrillo Castro

Huge comic book fan, geek by choice
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101+ Bucket list

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I just read The Greatness Guide by Robin Sharma and I loved the idea of the 101 bucket list, I loved the idea since the film but it wasn’t until I read it on the book that I felt the need to make my own list…and make my students do theirs.

  1. Say I love you more than Turk.
  2. Get rip.
  3. Vilain’s arms.
  4. Be more flexible.
  5. Buy a handmade suit.
  6. Do  a snow angel
  7. Go to an Adele’s concert
  8. Be on a bar fight!
  9. Drink again with Juan Carlos
  10. Night out/ movie night with Maria, Patrizia, Johanna, Miguelys y Cristina.
  11. Make my house eco friendly
    • Solar panels
    • Induction kitchen
    • Solar water heating
    • Energy LED saving lamp
    • Garbage recyling
      • Plastic
      • Organic
      • Glass
      • Tetrapak
      • Paper
  12. Go to a horse race and place a bet.
  13. Visit Vegas with my Dad.
  14. Visit Harvard
  15. Visit MIT
  16. Visit Hawai.
    • Eat real Taro
  17. Visit NY
    • Ground Zero
    • Statue of Liberty
    • Central Park
  18. Visit the Great Canyon.
  19. Visit Washington DC as the Lost Symbol
  20. Visit Niagara’s fall.
  21. Visit Sao Paulo’s carnival
  22. Mexico
    • Huasteca potosina
    • Cañon del sumidero.
    • Oaxaca para el Guelaguetza
    • Los Cabos
    • Tijuana
    • Monterrey
    • Yahualica with Emmanuel Oropeza
    •  CDMX
      • 2022, CU UNAM
    •  Cervantino
  23. Venezuela:
    • Medanos de Coro.
    • Fly over the Auyan-tepui.
    • UCV
    • USB
  24. Visit Harry Potter places:
    • Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Florida
    • King’s Cross, London
  25. Visit Netherlands
    • Brownie
    • Tulips field
  26. Cruise to the Greek’s islands
  27. Go to Oktoberfest
  28. Visit Rusia:
    • Kremlin.
    • Siberia.
  29. Visit Istanbul like Inferno
  30. Visit Geneva
    • UN
  31. Visit Dubai
  32. Visit Japan
    • Cherry blossom.
  33. Visit the 5 continents, missing:
    • Asia
    • Oceania
    • Africa
      • Casablanca
  34. Real Madrid match at the Bernabeu.
  35. Zidane’s match at the Bernabeu.
  36. Live somewhere besides MX/VEN
    • Write
  37. Write a book
  38. Write a comic.
  39. Write a new DC multiverse
  40. Write a successful blog about comics and computer science.
    • Learn
  41. Learn how to hold my breath.
  42. Learn how to swim
  43. Learn how to dance
  44. Learn a martial art
  45. Learn how to swallow pills
  46. Learn/Understand music.
  47. Learn to cook like my mom
    • 3 leches
    • Pasta de crema de elote
    • Home made rice
    • Pizza
    • Heat leftovers
  48. Learn to let go.
    • Read
  49. Read the Foundation.
  50. Read Hitchhikers guide.
    • Paperback
  51. Read Rayuela both ways.
    • Not available on kindle, have to find one again
  52. Read 1984.
    • Kindle edition
  53. Read 100 años de soledad
    • Kindle edition
  54. Read to kill a mockingbird.
    • Kindle edition
  55. Read Dune.
  56. Read The stranger, Camus.
    • Kindle edition
  57. Read for whom the bell tolls.
    • Kindle edition
  58. Read my CS complete library
    • Permanent goals:
  59. Be Happy
  60. Read at least 20 books a year
  61. Live up to my potential
  62. Make a difference
  63. Make more mistakes…take more chances
  64. Be as funny and easy going as my dad
  65. Be as good in my job as my mom is at hers.
  66. Be a person that my family can be proud of.
  67. Be a good loser.
    • Spring 17 was a good test!
  68. Be a good winner.
  69. Be a good big brother
  70. Help whoever I can with their list.
    • To all my students: No, I won’t simply just pass you .
  71. Have a relationship with my dad as good as Marshall had with his dad or as good as Rober has with his(Best relationship I have sen in person).
  72. Have a relationship with my brother as good as Scofield and Burrows
  73. Be a good citizen
  74. Overcome the huge disgust to puke.
  75. Be ready…
  76. Don’t be afraid to die
    • Accomplished
  77. Drink a whiskey older than me
    • March 17, 05. For my 17th b’day I had a Buchanan’s 18 bottle.
    • July 31, 05. For my high school prom a friend and I bought a Blue label bottle that was kind of tampered.
    • Before I turn 30 yo I will buy  Ballantine’s 30
      • Not performed, will buy one eventually
    • Before I turn  38 yo I will buy a Royal Salute 38 
    • Before I turn 40 yo I will buy a Ballantine’s 40
  78. October 05 Cancun
  79. 10/05/05 Wilma Be on a cat 5 Hurricane.
    • It wasn’t something to actually put on the list but it was something too big to not put it here.
  80. March-April 07 Ruinas Mayas
  81. 20/03/08 Be at Chichen-itza at Spring’s equinox.
  82. Late August, 07 Find my Claire Underwood/Tracy M/Lillypad.
  83. 05/05/12 Hear an ex-Beatle sing “Yesterday”
  84. 09/15/13 Have a dinner date that ends after breakfast
  85. 09/15/13 Kiss the most beautiful girl in the world
    • What would this list be without one from the movie?
  86. Late 13-Early 14 Date a former teacher
  87. 02/15 Live again with my Mom
  88. 03/15 Live again with my big Brother
  89. 08/15 Live in the same city as my little Sister
  90. 04/24/16 Watch pride and predujice
  91. 05/29/16 Tepa
  92. 10/16 Teach officially at graduate school ( not as a TA)
  93. Movember 16 Grow a lumberjack beard.
  94. Late 16 Read Animal farm.
  95. Late 16 Read How to win friends and influence people.
  96. 4th Q 17 Finish my MBA’s thesis.
  97. Spring break 17 Drink like in the good old days.
  98. 04/13/17 Learn to ride a bike
  99. 05/25/17 Read The Godfather
  100. 04/7/18 Go to a The Killers’ Concert
  101. 07/30/18 Learn snowboarding
  102. 08/06/18 Visit The end of the world-La Patagonia.
  103. July/August, 18 Travel with Abdon
  104.  Sep, 2018 Get married
  105. 2019 Learn to cook my grandma’s meat loaf
  106. July 01,2020 Become a software architect
  107. Jul 20, 2020 Be a Class sponsor/Padrino de generacion.
    1. Words for the Master in Marketing direction, closest I’ve bee
  108. 2020-2023 Do a PhD.
  109. 2020 Dropped Have children.
  110. 2020, Learn to cook/bake chocolate soufflé
  111. 2021, Watched New who Watch Dr Who.
  112. 2021, Organize a get together with my granma’s friends and my dad.
    1.  …I think I did
  113. May 2023, Visit Italy with my Mom
  114. May 2023, Visit the Vatican
  115. Automate my house.
    1. 2022, started
    2. 2023, limited by the poor modem I got, smart plugs and smart cameras on hold
  116. Retire at 35….or at least young
    1. Could do, but I want more; new ETA 40
  117. Dropped
    1. Teach at another university.
      1. 2017, started teaching in business school along with engineering school
      2. 2019, rejected an offer to teach as they wanted me to be a T.A.
    2. 2021 Drink again with my grandpa on his library.
      1. Not feasible
    3. 2017 Date somebody famous
      1. U know who.
    4. 2023, Learn French.
    5. 2023, Learn German

I couldn’t make the cut at 101 so I will keep adding items…maybe I will even add the ones that I already did and didnt put cuz of that.

P.S. If you saw my list, you have to post yours =)

CS, Quotes

The woes of the craft

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“Not all is delight, however, and knowing the inherent woes makes it easier to bear them when they appear.

First, one must perform perfectly. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

Next, other people set one’s objectives, provide one’s resources, and furnish one’s information. One rarely controls the circumstances of his work, or even its goal. In management terms, one’s authority is not sufficient for his responsibility. It seems that in all fields, however, the jobs where things get done never have formal authority commensurate with responsibility. In practice, actual (as opposed to formal) authority is acquired from the very momentum of accomplishment.

The dependence upon others has a particular case that is especially painful for the system programmer. He depends upon other people’s programs. These are often maldesigned, poorly implemented, incompletely delivered (no source code or test cases), and poorly documented. So he must spend hours studying and fixing things that in an ideal world would be complete, available, and usable.

The next woe is that designing grand concepts is fun; finding nitty little bugs is just work. With any creative activity come dreary hours of tedious, painstaking labor, and programming is no exception.

Next, one finds that debugging has a linear convergence, or worse, where one somehow expects a quadratic sort of approach to the end. So testing drags on and on, the last difficult bugs taking more time to find than the first.

The last woe, and sometimes the last straw, is that the product over which one has labored so long appears to be obsolete upon (or before) completion. Already colleagues and competitors are in hot pursuit of new and better ideas. Already the displacement of one’s thought-child is not only conceived, but scheduled.

This always seems worse than it really is. The new and better product is generally not available when one completes his own; it is only talked about. It, too, will require months of development. The real tiger is never a match for the paper one, unless actual use is wanted. Then the virtues of reality have a satisfaction all their own.

Of course the technological base on which one builds is always advancing. As soon as one freezes a design, it becomes obsolete in terms of its concepts. But implementation of real products demands phasing and quantizing. The obsolescence of an implementation must be measured against other existing implementations, not against unrealized concepts. The challenge and the mission are to find real solutions to real problems on actual schedules with available resources.

This then is programming, both a tar pit in which many efforts have floundered and a creative activity with joys and woes all its own.”

Frederick Brooks on The Mythical Man-Month

CS, Quotes

The joys of the craft

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“Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.”

Frederick Brooks on The Mythical Man-Month

CS, Quotes

C’s paradox

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I’m not very fond on C develop but I don’t deny the importance of C on the world

“I don’t think C gets enough credit. Sure, C doesn’t love you. C isn’t
about love–C is about thrills. C hangs around in the bad part of town.
C knows all the gang signs. C has a motorcycle, and wears the leathers
everywhere, and never wears a helmet, because that would mess up C’s
punked-out hair. C likes to give cops the finger and grin and speed
away. Mention that you’d like something, and C will pretend to ignore
you; the next day, C will bring you one, no questions asked, and toss it
to you with a you-know-you-want-me smirk that makes your heart race.
Where did C get it? “It fell off a truck,” C says, putting away the
boltcutters. You start to feel like C doesn’t know the meaning of
“private” or “protected”: what C wants, C takes. This excites you. C
knows how to get you anything but safety. C will give you anything but
commitment
In the end, you’ll leave C, not because you want something better, but
because you can’t handle the intensity. C says “I’m gonna live fast, die
young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” but you know that C can never

die, not so long as C is still the fastest thing on the road.”
From a post on 4Chan