Reinaldo's Blog

Hello and welcome. This is a personal blog maintained by me, Reinaldo Bravo. You can add comments to any post or reach me through the contact page. Feel free to subscribe or check out my other online profiles. My latest posts are below. Enjoy.

Picture from: http://www.nutrigrain.com.au/iron-man-series.aspx

While growing up, I changed my childhood dreams a fair bit.

Primary School Dreams

The earliest dream I can recall is wanting to be an iron man tri-athelete. I loved the beach and I was getting far with my swimming lessons at the time.

I then found a passion in books. It seemed logical that I would want to become a writer, like my favourite authors Roal Dahl and Paul Jennings. After being told that I wouldn’t make much money from being a writer, I soon lost enthusiasm for that dream.

It would be a few years before I would create another destiny for myself. I was in year 6, I was elected the school captain for my primary school. It was the year Pauline Hanson made headlines over her controversial views and statements. I had given a speech in class condemning her views and the racism she was promoting. I had finally decided that I wanted to be the prime minister of Australia. It was the same year that I discovered that John Christopher Watson – Australia’s and the world’s first Labour Prime Minister (1904) – was born in Valparaiso, Chile just like me.

High School Distractions

The following year I started high school and different things started occupying my mind. Sports, social life and school work soon distracted me from dreaming any further. I stopped thinking about what I would be when I grew up and I was clueless until the end of high school.

When I was around 15, I realised that I was rather good at using the house computer and I picked up things pretty quickly. Not really impressive, I guess being young and curious helped my knowledge but it made me think that if I found computers easy to use, I may as well aspire to work in IT.

Not as ambitious as my previous dreams but it seemed sensible. There was a large world-wide IT shortage so it was logical. It would be a profession that paid well and I had the capacity to pursue it.

So I enrolled in IT when I started college (college in Australia means year 11 and 12) to try it out. I don’t know why, but I didn’t understand a thing in that class. We did databases, programming – both html and c++, system architecture and other stuff I can’t remember. Those two years were so tedious to get through that I almost lost hope altogether. Convinced that if I studied IT at uni, that I would start from scratch, that it would be different – I stuck to my idea of pursuing an IT career.

After Secondary Education

After switching undergraduate degrees, taking time off from studies, changing from different jobs, it seems that somehow I’m still heading towards the dream of working in an IT-related role.

After all this time, I still don’t enjoy the technical side of IT but the managerial and analytical aspects are of interest to me. I’m 25 years old, I’ve done a fair bit of travel and of living and still have not fully entered into my professional career. There is still time for me to investigate other avenues but I think I’m on track to pursue my latest dream.

Writing, My Real Passion?

Since beginning this blog, I feel that I’ve opened up a connection to my childhood dream of writing. Although I don’t think I’ll become an author anytime soon, It’s quite rewarding to translate my thoughts into words, share them and express my originality.

Somehow, being able to channel my childhood interest of writing through this blog, enables me to find the motivation to work towards my current dream. Now all I need is to get into shape and participate in those iron man competitions that fascinated me all those years ago.

Conclusion

It’s important to encourage children to dream while they’re young but at the same time, you don’t want to accelerate their growth by making them think like adults. It’s equally vital that you let kids dream whatever they want to dream, there should be no right or wrong aspirations. It’s the originality, humility and spontaneity that make children and their aspirations so remarkable. I always enjoy looking back at myself, I just hope the future me does enough to impress the child me of about two decades ago.

I don’t know if I’m alone here but I have 5 email addresses that I care to admit to and probably 3 others that I check from time to time also.

This for me is a problem but how do I let go of them all?

I could keep all the addresses alive and just feed them all into one main address but this issue isn’t about filling up my inbox, it’s about having just one contact gateway.

Can it be done? Read the rest of this entry »

This blog wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t for the plugins, themes and the programmers behind them. I think it’s time that I give credit to the authors of plugins that I use on this blog. All the plugins and themes I use are absolutely free and I recommend every one of them. It makes blogging easier for the publisher and readers. So thank you to the programmers that submit their projects to the wordpress plugin library. It’s the free software/open source software movement that has allowed for ordinary people to publish on the internet without too much money or IT expertise required. Read the rest of this entry »

The Obelisco in Buenos Aires, Argentina

I was lucky enough to visit Buenos Aires in 2005 and there are many great memories to look back on. Here is my experience.

Great things about the city

The city of Buenos Aires is old, elegant, big and entertaining. The biggest feature for me was that the city literally doesn’t sleep! I still talk about how I was able to eat a steak in a restaurant at 2:30am and how I bought a soccer shirt from a shop at 1:30 in the morning!

The people in Buenos Aires are very friendly to tourists and also helpful. They treat foreigners with a lot of respect and you always feel welcome. This came as a surprise to me as I was warned to receive a hostile reception for being Chilean. This myth was debunked early on in my trip! Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever lived in Canberra, ACT, Australia for a substantial period of time, you’d be familiar with the Canberra Centre. It’s Canberra’s biggest shopping mall. Today, I will rant about how I got overpriced at the Canberra Centre carpark on Boxing Day, December 26, 2009.

Upon entering the Canberra Centre car park today, Saturday 26 of December 2009, I paid close attention to the Centre’s rates.  It shows the prices for normal shopping days and then at the bottom, prices for non-normal shopping days.

It clearly states that for Sundays or Public Holidays, there is flate rate of $2.

I was surprised and disappointed when upon paying for my stay today, the machine charged $5.60 for about 3 hours of parking. Now I know today is not Sunday but I’m pretty sure the 26th of December – otherwise known as Boxing Day – is a public holiday! Read the rest of this entry »