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2010-11-13 - Operational Plan Towards 40.

Submitted by acgarcia21 on Sat, 11/13/2010 - 07:55

I'm going to assess the different things I've got going on now at home and at work and try to pull together into a model/story for how I will carry on my next decade of life.

Family

  • Finances 
    • Mint.Com is helping me clear up a blurry picture. Now I can set better goals for my kids educational future and my retiremnt with my wife.
    • Prudential Financial Services - I am having periodic financial reviews with our financial planner to also make sure we're on course.
    • As I turn 40, I have in place insurance,retirement,and social security to ensure my wife and daughters will have what they need.
    • Need to continually optimize planning for the future with the opportunity cost of using the money in the present.
  • Our story
    • We enjoy and are well integrated with our community in Conshohocken and Philadelphia. I am glad to give the girls one place to call home and see what you can do by setting roots down.
    • We are also bringing the kids up to embrace their Filipino culture taking them to restaurants, watching Filipino TV, cultural and charity events, trips to the Philppines.
    • Enjoy sharing our lives with relatives and friends in driving distance, trips to see family abroad, and of course everyone else through Facebook.
    • Melissa has a great influence on the girls' academic scholarship and understanding of medicine/science. Of course, my influence is on the turning them into an elite special force with jedi like skills in web and application development. We rely on Music Training Center for the musical influence though we as a family enjoy listening to all sorts of music. Our strong relationships with frieds and family provide the rest of their influence.

Communities

  • Cognitive Metaphors Filipino Web Internship
  • Philippine American Outreach Program / Joy and Caregiving Foundation
  • Knights of Columbus
  • Conshohocken Catholic School
  • Conshohocken Environmental Advisory Council
  • Conshohocken CYO
  • YMCA Adventure Princess Program
  • Montgomery Country Special Olympics Bowling
  • Pentaho Philadelphia User Group
  • Philippine Energy Market
  • Foreign Trained Dentists
  • Drupal
  • Apple iPod/iPad Development

Work

My profession provides the experience, time, and money I need to be involved in all of this. I look forward to a day when I can bring all of these areas closer together.

NRG Energy - I'm learning a lot about the energy market. It complements the time I spent at PJM. It's an inspirational place to see a company try to change the face of the US energy market in cooperation with government, community, and industry. I'm also enjoying helping to set the project agenda with by business customers and doing everything in my power IT development / communications / relationship building wise to make those projects happen. I'm happy I get to use most every tool in my toolbox here and get to work with other strong players.

3Touchpoints.com - hoping to nurture my venture with my partner Sushant. I've been throwing leads, advising on data warehousing and trying to figure out service offerings around Pentaho, educating myself on web analytics.

Side work - Once in a while, my colleagues or someone new from the internet throws me a side job.  It's always interesting to step into someone else's world for a while an fix a problem/capture an opportunity through IT/management/communications/sales skills you can by age 40 perform in your sleep. Of course, it's yet another opportunity to learn/stretch skills you are not so adept at.

More on this later. This will be a lving article that I will continue to edit throughout the month.

 

 

My Outsourcing Story

Submitted by acgarcia21 on Sat, 05/03/2008 - 18:43

Cognitive Metaphors: Communities By Definition. Know How It Works.

Introduction 

 
Independent Consulting - Phase II
 
        We start our story in the summer of 2006. I had just left my job a local E-Commerce company having walked away from what later would be worth up to $50,000 in remaining options. For most middle class Americans like me, thats a lot of money! If invested properly, it could turn into a lot of things including a college education for my three young daughters. There comes a time in every relationship with your employer where you just can't learn anything more from them and they just won't hear what you have to say anymore. For me, this was one of those times. I took the money I had cashed in on from stock-options, I signed up for 18 months of COBRA health care coverage (COBRA gives you health care at your previous employers rate which is significantly lower than the market price for insurance), and I decided that I would try to  make it as an independent consultant at least for the 18 months that I had COBRA working for me.
 
        I set out to fend for myself armed with a small amount of buffer capital, my education, experience, contacts, and wits. I must mention that in 2006, I had two good friends come to my rescue with paying gigs - Matt Comstock and Bill Dagan. With their help, I was able to stay busy in E-Commerce and Energy Market subject domain contracts in both 2006 and 2007.
 
      As an independent consultant, you get some downtime in between gigs. I used this time to dream. I looked back on my career and how I had grown strong and confident in my software craft, specializing in business intelligence. I wanted to give back to my craft with practical examples of how to improve business intelligence/decision support systems development. I was frustrated with the way things worked and wanted to strategize on how to make things work better. I was reminded of what Bruce Lee did to fashion a style of martial arts that addressed his frustrations with traditional martial arts. I wanted to do the same for my area of expertise.
 
      As a Filipino-American,  I also realized that my own personal successes had not translated into help for my family living in America or even more so for my Uncles/Aunts/Cousins living back in the Philippines. I took the downtime in between consulting gigs to focus on giving back to the things that really are a big part of my identity.
 
Communities
 
     Beginning in 2006, I also started getting more involved with my community in activities. I coaching bowling for Montgomery County Special Olympics. I spent time assistant coaching my eldest daughter's little league softball team. I got involved in the Knights of Columbus. My wife and I also helped out at my daughters' Catholic school. My mom around this time was also starting a foundation and building a 1 room pre-school in the Philippines on land she and her sisters inherited from my grandfather's family. I put together a website for her to help as a marketing tool.
 
      In all these activities, one might think that it takes a lot of time and energy and must drain a person like me who already has three kids to worry about. In fact, I've found that for all it takes away, it gives right back. It gives back in your level of hope and inspiration to see how many movements work without a lot of money. They work well because their stakeholders are united and passionate about the cause and the efficient use of meager resources.
 

      I began to think about how this element was lacking in so many commercial organizations that I had been a part of. Our own commercial organizations had been going through somewhat of a transformation. We had a rough start trying to use resources from India. We had partners who wanted to leave you with the responsibilities of running their business but wanted to pay you inadequate sums of money to do it. Systems grew up in a chaotic brew of reactionary, problem ridden, fear driven, lots of money on the line threatening environment.

 

Outsourcing, In Sourcing, and Open Sourcing

Open Sourcing

      What a difference between the two worlds I was living in - Commercial and Volunteer. I also had been admiring another volunteer movement called open source software. I was involved with a few communities for Java, Ruby on Rails, Google Analytics, Drupal - Content Management, and Pentaho - Business Intelligence. With the help of all the open source and Google crowd, I as a developer could do a lot of things that I previously could only do working with expensive software. I wanted to take advantage of everything the volunteer world had to offer. I wanted to rebuild my ideas for a commercial world into a "learn by example" model. I decided to take my consulting sole proprietorship, Cognitive Metaphors, and make it just that.

     Where would I start? Well, first I still need to feed my family so I continued to turn to the commercial world for independent contracts and later took on a full-time employment position. I had a few pieces to the puzzle in my wife and my nephew (her sisters kid).

In Sourcing

       My wife , by training is a dentist , but because of regulatory non-sense she has no path in the state of Pennsylvania to practice her craft without redoing her whole dental education. We decided a while back that this was not an option for us. For now we'd focus on raising our 3 girls. However, Melissa started really getting into computers doing elaborate DVD compilations of the kids and the school with Apple ILife. She's since embraced Drupal. I saw her as a perfect in-source resource. She was valedictorian of her high school class so I'm glad to have that kind of brain power as part of a small team.

Outsourcing

      My nephew Marc in 2006 started college at 16. They start early back in the Philippines. He happened to also graduate as valedictorian of his high school class. In 2006, I had been married to his aunt for 8 years and he had known that I was a Computer Science graduate. He told me when he started that he wanted to study computer science also - Instant Protege. As his Uncle and also his Godfather (inherited by marrying his aunt), I decided that I would mentor him and he would be the first piece to my study into how outsourcing should work.

      What follows in this living document are the events that unfolded up after that. If you want to read ahead - you can get the raw content in the form of my blog(s). This Drupal book is meant to be a pristene, edited and planned version for entertainment and marketing purposes. 

About Us

Colophon

Our name - Cognitive Metaphors - is something I came up with back in 1994 while taking a C++ class and working at General Research Corporation. I had just read a book by Donald Norman called Things That Make Us Smart. After reading that book, I fell in love with the field of study called Cognitive Science. Let's look at the two words by Dictionary.Com's definition.

Cognitive - Having a basis in or reducible to empirical factual knowledge.

Metaphor - One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol

Put it together and you come to understand that a Cognitive Metaphor is a decision support/information system which in turn is just a symbol to represent what human beings know and are trying to accomplish with that knowledge.

As far a I'm concerned, I invented the term in 1994. However, a cognitive metaphor now has its own wikipedia entry.

Our logo was originally created by my friend Ariel. We modified it to have all the colors of the American and Philippine flags. The EKG signal was also added. It explains our goal to help all sorts of communities bring their online identities to life.

We have two slogans. Communities By Definition is a play on Drupal's slogan Community Plumbing. When they are done, our projects take on a life of their own. They are adopted by the community and grow and thrive into something very real. Know How It Works comes from some advice a mentor of mine, Michael Kamfonas, used to tell me. It means a lot of things but for me, it's a mantra that speaks to trying to see a thing from many different points of view. From there, you build a community website or a decision support system that works the right way any way you look at it whoever you are.

Our team spans Conshohocken,PA, USA (just outside of Philadelphia) and Plaridel, Bulacan, Philippines (just outside of Manila).

 

 Back in 2006, I started to seek out a way to help the town where my parents were born.  I also wanted to build the company of my dreams with mixed U.S. and Philippine resources. This story traces back my steps up to where Cognitive Metaphors is today.