Reach out and be rewarded

Last night for no apparent reason I had a dream about the time when I used to go to summer camps, it was a nice dream, I dreamt about the times we were swimming in the pool, talking until late in our bunk-beds and just in general having fun. But I also dreamt about this kid, he was shy and awkward, always quiet and as he was sitting outside the cabin, that was the time I woke up.

I remember we were 13, I remember that kid well, because he taught me a great lesson in life.

I don't remember his name, but I remember how he looked like, I remember his low tone of voice and the way he brought his hand over his mouth every time he smiled or laughed, he was a bit chubby and short legged, but even like that he could run like hell!

He was always the last one to be picked playing sports, and it seemed like he would have preferred not being picked at all, on free time, while everyone was trying to impress the girls or playing pranks to each other, he would just sit in the park alone or in a tree outside the cabin. We were going to be there 20 days and in 4 or 5 days I haven't seen him doing anything else, even at swimming pool he would be under the shade of the big tree alone. Sometimes monitors would go and talk with him, but after a few minutes, he'd be alone again.

Next day, when it was time to go swimming, I saw him sitting alone outside the cabin with his towel in one hand and a big tube of Hawaiian Tropic S.P.F. 50 sunblock on the other. I never talked with him before, but I felt the need to go and talk to him. I've never been the sociable type, so these things are usually hard for me.

I said hi and asked if he cared for some company, he nodded. I asked what he was doing there, to which he replied, he was looking at some ants working and how amazing they were. We sat there for 5 minutes barely exchanging a word and then I asked him if he wanted to walk with me to the pool, he smiled at me and nodded again.

We walked to the pool talking a lot (it was a good 500 meters away), about lots of stuff, he was a very smart and fun kid, he liked video games same as me, and same as me his favorite was 'Pole Position', a really bad game we both played in our Atari 800XL.

At the pool I introduced him to my friends and we continued talking, he told me he liked one of the girls, the same we all liked (as always the most developed one for our age) and that they went to the same school but never talked to each other, I told him I knew the girl and we could speak to her together, he said no need, so we didn't, and of course all the girls were at the other side of the pool, so I was kinda relieved he didn't call my semi-bluff.

We spent that summer camp sporadically spending time together, he kicked my ass at chess more times than I would have liked and he sat with me and my friends for lunch.

2 days before the end of the camp they had prizes, some chosen by the monitors, some by vote from the other kids. There was this prize called something like 'best friend prize', that it would be something like a 'Mr. Congeniality' award in a beauty contest, so we all cast our votes into the urn. When they were counting them, I got 1 vote, first time for me!!! everyone voted for the funny kid, the one who's friends with everyone, the one who would hurt himself doing belly flops at the pool, just to be noted, I think I may have voted for him myself, he was a cool kid and his dirty jokes were hilarious! So after I was the only one in our dorm who got a vote, my friends started teasing me that I voted for myself - hahahaha, at that time I was a bit pissed, but now that I think about it, it was quite funny... hahaha.

So, in the middle of all the jokes about me loving myself a bit too much and being my own best friend, this kid came to all of us and in his normal low pitch voice said "I voted for you", everyone was quiet, so I asked him why and he replied "because in all the years I came to this camp I never had fun, I was always alone and even though I sometimes spent more times with other kids than you, you were the one who reached out to me and introduced me to his friend" then he smiled without covering his mouth and raising his voice said "and shit I've had fun in this camp" we hug and I got a pat in the back from everyone in the small dorm.

Little I knew that such a small thing as a 'hi' and a small talk about ants would make his summer a much better summer, and even less I knew that what he said to me would made me feel so good and proud of myself.

Don't underestimate the value of helping, no matter how small you think it may be, you can make someone's day or even summer. In fact I'm glad I had that dream, it made my day!

My thanks to blogging geeks

As you know now, this is my first ever blog and this is also the second day I write in it, and I find it very difficult to keep focused on one topic only, because my brain behaves like a hyperactive kid running up and down and moving from the seesaw to the slider and then to the sandbox and back. But what I will write about now has been in my head more present than other stuff I want to post about, so I better get it out sooner rather than later...

I made a comment in my first ever post saying I was thinking on doing this for a very long time, and the time was now, well, there are several reasons why the time is now. No, I'm not sick, I'm not about to die (that I know), that's not the reason. I don't have many people I can talk to, and the people I normally talk to, look upon me for advice and as a model to follow (in some cases). I think I'm what many people call a 'nice guy', always helping people, giving advices and writing recommendation letters from scratch to people for new jobs to show them I care and that I remember why I hired them in the first place, this can be a huge task when you had lots of people in your departments and many of them have outgrown their baby clothes and are ready to take on new challenges.

I'm a very positive guy, I never give up and I never let a problem I cannot solve depress me for more than 24 hours, literally, I don't allow myself that. I also try not to bitch about life with the few people who wants to listen to me, because I'm a believer that negative thoughts bring negative things.

I will reveal something here only my wife and my parents know I'm doing. I'm taking classes from 3 different universities online and not just easy stuff, I'm taking a class in programming from Harvard, another one from UC Berkeleys and artificial intelligence from M.I.T., but this is totally not what I want to talk about, but it's slightly related. I've been a manager for more than 10 years now and I'm a happy guy managing people, I love mentoring and transferring my knowledge and experience to people in the hope they will get my job later down the road or better than me. But as a software engineer and assumed geek I also miss the smell of fresh code being brewed in the morning and that's the reason why I started these courses. Two of these courses touch the subject of programming in Python, a very cool programming language that I'm slowly getting to know and like. To make this long story short, I've been reading lots of blogs about Linux, Python and other technical stuff and although the reading was quite interesting, it got me curious about the people who wrote these blogs, because same as me now, they're just doing it as a 'labour of love', no one is paying them, not many people is saying well done, in my case, no one even started reading my blog yet, but they keep on doing it and I wanted to see why and how they are like. Funny enough, I realized they're kind of a community of nice guys, who spend their time trying to help others for no foreseeable reward, but to feel good with themselves and sometimes get a small recognition from their peers. But in some cases I went deeper and I started reading what they wrote about their personal lives, the problems they've been through and they continue going through.

I've been reading about workaholics like me, that now are working less and working out more (I, myself I've been working out a lot more lately), about geeks who became dads and because of that they spend more time with their families (or coding games for their kids instead), about nerdy guys who were happy being nerdy guys, but now because of cancer or other terrible reasons, they are no longer with us or will be shortly gone.
Many of these things I feel deeply identified with, I work extremely hard to be able to maintain my family, sometimes I make lots of money, sometimes I don't, but I always try hard and I always try my best.

I won't give you links to all the blogs I've been reading or talk more in depth about them, but if you're curious, you can see the blog of this guy, Jesse writing about his daughter, he's the writer of one of the blogs I read that convinced me to use my blog as, not only a tool to share my knowledge and love for geeky stuff and management, but also about myself and things that have happened in my life and are still happening, that normally I wouldn't share, not because I don't want to, but because I have no one to share them with in some cases.

I'd say the best example of this is the time my wife was in a coma, during that period (2 months), I slept in a hospital chair, because someone had to be there to authorize any medical procedure that was non-standard, and I'll have to say, that was more than 50% of the things that were done to her. During that time, many people went to visit her, she grew up here in Thailand and since she's such a nice person, there were tons of people who knew her who dropped by to see how she was doing, some of them, a fucking pain in the ass (forgive my French), with questions about funeral preparations, comments like "have you thought of re-marrying?" and other things like that, not counting the innumerable amount of time when I had to repeat the same story over and over again. The most recurrent question was "Does it have anything to do with her giving birth not long ago?", damn!!! That pissed me off big time, but I was able to keep my cool anyway because I know their intentions were good, it was annoying having to defend my little dude, and have to repeat to all these people I barely knew, "no, it had nothing to do with her pregnancy, it was a pre-existent condition that was luckily triggered after Alessio was born, otherwise we would have lost them both".
A couple of times, maybe 3 times, my own friends came to visit, Keenmeng, Kai, Ken, Keith and Handino (damn!!!, lots of my friend's names start with K), a couple of times I was able to chat with one of my childhood friends from Chile, Juan Carlos, but even with them I wasn't able to empty my head, because they had questions and I had to answer them and take care of them, I've got to recognize, I did bitch about stuff and had negative comments about the amputation of my wife's leg, nothing too bad and nothing really to do with her, just about feeling useless and wishing my idea of bypassing the catheter would have occurred to me earlier so I could have saved her leg. I even wished I would have listened to my mom when she told me she wanted to me to be a doctor, but it was all too late, all I could do now, was Google stuff and read medical books to prepare for when Stella was up and I had to explain her everything, and show her that life goes on, even on one limb. Due to my positive nature, I never prepared for what would happen if she didn't make it, in my positive mind, that was not an option, I'd do whatever I could to avoid her not being here anymore for my little dude, talking with the doctors in medical terms, going into meetings with them and tell them about treatments and ideas, sometimes freaking them out, sometimes giving useful observations and other times just pissing them off.
Now looking in retrospective, I think that was my way of coping with all that, keeping myself busy, reading a bit too much, playing way too many brain teasers and sudoku online.

In conclusion, I had a rough time, in some cases I'm still having it. Many things in my life haven't been going the way I wanted them to go, but reading these other guys have made me feel a bit better, I always knew I wasn't the only one with problems, and many times I wondered why the universe was punishing me, if I'm a 'nice guy', I thought of being an asshole for a while, stop helping people, stop playing by the rules, maybe that way I could make more money and be happier, but the truth is, nope, I won't be happier and it's in my nature helping people, makes me feel good with myself, and I'm not doing this to go to heaven, or to improve my karma in next life, because I'm not religious and I don't believe in these things (my mom will flip if she reads this after raising me as a devoted catholic :P). Reading these guys I found out there are many people with problems who are not quitting because they have problems, guys who don't blame god or bad karma or the Newtonian laws of cause and effect or bad luck, they just go on with their lives same as I'm doing because we know life is not easy, and because we know we can maybe change a little corner of the planet for our kids or even just for ourselves, because being negative and bitching about things brings nothing back.
This may sound stupid, but reading about their problems make me feel a bit better about my own problems, reading about them being 'good guys', 'good dads' and in general just 'good people' just for the sake of getting on with their lives put a smile on my face more often than putting some tears in my eyes with a bit of emotion, sometimes putting myself in their shoes thinking 'what if that was my son?'. Fuck, I don't know, I'm used to solve problems and find solutions, these things are hard for anyone, but seem to hit harder on people like me and some of them, socially impaired... When I post more things in the future, you will find out I have lots of troubles expressing my feelings, I can write a business plan like nothing, I can write a quarterly report with my eyes shut, I can design a full new software and a database schema in a few days which another guy would take weeks or months, but I can't say 'i love you' or 'thanks' or take a compliment with the same fluidity, I've got the feeling that's why many other guys a bit like me write blogs, they need an outlet just like me, to express their geekiness and creativity as well as to talk about their feelings.

This post is for you geeks, nerds who keep technical blogs and share your life with strangers in your personal posts, most people may not give a damn about what you have to say, but from time to time someone like me can stumble upon one of your posts and learn, and through your words feel a bit more connected with the world and his own feelings... if you're reading my post and you also stumble upon one of these geeks, say well done to them (if they have the anonymous comment option enabled), I think many of them will appreciate it.

From me, if one of those geeks stumble upon MY blog, just want to say THANKS! Keep up the good work! :)

A glimpse into me and my family

Personal stuff... hmmm... hard topic.

I can start with telling you about me, simple things like my name and where I was born, but I will instead start with telling you shortly what I will do in this section. I will share personal experiences, family stuff, one or two pics of my little dude and personal problems (maybe).

Now the easy stuff. My name is Giovanni Bergamin, I was born in in March 18th, 1977. I've got 2 brothers I love very much but because I moved to Asia, I don't see much, their names are Franco and Fabrizio, I really wish I could see them more, because I really like spending time with them. My parents Enzo and Patricia, also love them loads. My dad, can't stay in one place for more than 5 minutes, he's always on the move, fixing stuff, getting dirty and crying with movies on TV, tough exterior, creamy filling. My mom, she's a party girl, a socialite, always in some party, meeting with friends or charity or in courses to learn new stuff, she's a bit of an artist, painting and writing poetry, I've got several of her paintings and to be honest, I like them quite a bit (not writing this for her, since I know she will never read it, she's what we would call, computer impaired :P).

All of them living in the same country where I was born. I don't think I need to tell you, we were an Italian family living in Chile, I'm sure you can deduct this by the names :)

About my new family, yes, I'm married, in fact Stella (my wife), was the main reason I moved here, she's also Italian and had a successful modeling career here in Thailand (she was also an actress), she works now as a GM for her family business. She's a great person, strong, caring, an excellent mom and a great friend.

In January a bit more than 2 years ago, she gave birth to my son, Alessio on January 2nd, but I will get back to that a bit later, because this is all about her right now, 2 weeks after that, she got very ill, because of complications related to a hyperparatyroidism we were not able to detect in time (even though we tried very hard), she was in a coma for 2 months and because of complications derived from her body rejecting the machine that in the long run saved her life, she lost her right leg above the knee. Now she has her 'robot leg', as we used to call it before, and she goes about her business almost 100% normal. That can give you a good idea on how wonderful and strong she is... I will probably talk about the hospital and things that happen during that time later, when I feel like it :)

My son, we call him piggy, because of the funny snort like sounds he makes sometimes when he laughs. He's the reason I stress myself about everything and also the reason I can relax after a stressful day. He smiles and I melt, do I really need to say more? I better post a picture of him, so you can understand.

I think this can give you a good idea about my family and me, I will be writing more about all of them, but mostly about me and my interaction with them, after all, this is my blog and it's about ME :)