The Apple Worm

Two of the most nationalistic days I have lived through and been at when they happened, have been around football. Actually very similar in a way because they felt either the most Costa Rican or the most Danish I could have ever felt. One was back in 2009 when I lived in Denmark and the other was  in Costa Rica in 2013. In 2009, Denmark faced Sweden at "parken" which is the name danes call their national stadium in Copenhagen. I had never gone to a big stadium and parken can hold around 39 thousand spectators per game. The winner would automatically qualify to the world cup that was to happen the next year in South Africa in 2010. The pressure was real and although I have known Denmark people and traditions for a long time, I had never experienced their football craziness. We got our tickets, food and of course beer, and when going into the stadium we got out faces painted red and white and as we were on our way in my friends taught me the most important team chants fo...

There are very few things that I would recommend more to anyone than to travel. Every single travel experience has the best kind of secondary effects. Some people tend to feel smaller in the world, some find themselves, some find someone they love (friendship or romantic-wise); all in all, they always discover something new about them and what surrounds them. I have had the great happiness of traveling to very different places around the world, some alone, some with friends and some with family. One of the best times where I felt small was traveling to the south of France to Nice and Cannes and Saint Tropez. We all know how there are different levels of economic classes, but experiencing the gap or rather Large Gap between the rest of the world and the very top is unusual. Me and my cousin went out to meet Cannes were the French movie festival takes place every year. Hoping, in a non-realistic way, that we would maybe stumble upon someone famous or rich or just in general a celebr...

yeah, I LOVE coffee Picture me dancing around like a kid in christmas when he gets the present he asked for. Yes, I just got the iOS 11 public beta on my iPad! Since it is a beta and could brick the device, I only test out the software on my iPad. I work on more important things on my MacBook so I cannot risk my work with macOS and cannot risk my iPhone 7, so the iPad it is. I installed it a couple of days ago and wanted you guys to know what my initial impressions are.  First of all the keyboard! The keyboard on my iPad finally does not need to change to symbols! The pull-down key strokes allows for this blog entry to be written without interrupting my thought process as much to find a number or a symbol. It sounds like a small feature but it Really is not. My iPad is for watching videos, browse the web and social media, and finally to take notes at university, for my blog and podcast. It is a breeze to write out without having to worry about changing keyboards because th...

Remember how I told you guys about how I love to run? Well on Saturday I went to these AMAZING conferences-event called Running Day Costa Rica. It is awesome to be able to wake up every morning early and go outside and run. People take their health for granted most of the time and seem to forget that when you're young, taking care of your body means that later on in life, your body will take care of you. It's one of those things people do not value much until they don't have it. The event was all about the story behind every runner, some were marathon runners, some triathletes and some half and full ironman athletes. Here's what I loved: it did not matter how many kilometers they had under their career; what mattered was the story behind their competitions. A really interesting point of view talked about in the conference was about races: if you wanna play soccer or rugby or basketball or many sports you cannot expect to compete with the elite of that sport unless ...

It feels so awesome to look back at success. It makes me so excited to one day look back and say "I made it". That may seem weird, but my drive has always been uncertainty, the fact that I thought when I turned 25 (which is an age that is super close) I would be in a completely different life. I have made so many decisions that were not "according to the plan" with full determination and faith in whatever is to come. Do I wish I knew EXACTLY what I am going towards? yes. Do I care that I do not know? no. The truth is everyone gets to their place in their own way... Some take a longer route, some a seemingly shorter, but no one takes the same exact road. One of my favorite scenes in the Wonder Woman movie is right after the astonishing trenches fight scene were WonderWoman wins the town back. She looks at Charlie (a sniper soldier) and finds out he wanted to be a singer, and then looks at Sameer and he tells her the truth: everyone is fighting their own battles....

One of the best oscar acceptance speeches I have heard was by Matthew McConaughey when he talked about looking up to God because of the opportunities He has given him in his life. Then he said he looks forward to his family, because they are the ones that taught him to be who he is and who make him thrive to become a man, father, son, cousin and friend. Finally, he explained who he chases after, also known as his hero, which is you in 10 years time. I believe dreams are what keep you inspired and goals are what make the ride worthwhile. Not all dreams become goals and not all goals are accomplished and the faster you acknowledge that reality, the quicker you will succeed and understand why you succeed at some and fail at others. People say the best way to change a dream into a goal is to set a date; I humbly differ. I believe that the best way to make a dream a goal, is to do something about it, enough thinking, enough calculations and excuses. Everyone has a problem, everyone has...

Lots of people say there are 3 things you should avoid talking to people about: sports, religion and politics. So, let's talk about those briefly today just because. The reason that supposedly you should avoid talking about those is simple: sports fanaticism can easily end up in disagreements, religious differences can end up in the worst debates on interpreting life and holy scripture and finally politics sets in some of the worst name calling and stereotyping there is. Politics has a bad reputation of being corrupt and elitist... Until it is not. The truth is that politics is a field that is as wide as the change it entails. Ghandi, Lincoln, Mandela, Churchill and Woodrow Wilson show the best of their field in the way Chavez, Hitler, Mao, Stalin show the plethora of possibilities that lie in the field of politics. I believe politics works at its best when people have a greater goal behind it, when economy growth is not the end but the means towards something. Climate chang...

The picture you are looking at is probably one of my proudest moments until today. See, I have told you about how since I was 4 years old I studied music (specifically percussion) and that made and still does make me very happy and focused. Little did I know that music would bring me to this moment in life: presenting about the Costa Rican Non Profit Organization called Project Daniel  that I have been a part of for about 6 years, in Japan in front of around 200 delegates from 10 different countries from around the world. Explaining my journey towards that moment in a presentation about something that I truly love and am passionate about. When I was a kid I asked my grandpa to buy me a piggy bank, he was all for me saving up money so he got me a quite large one and gave it to me. One day he actually asked me what it was for, and I told him I was saving up to be able to afford having a music band. He laughed and said "you don't need money, you need musicians", lon...

This may be a little controversial statement but I hope people have tolerance towards my point of view. I believe in the same way that guns don't kill people, religion is not a bad thing, what People do with guns and what extremist points of view do with religion is what is harmful for human kind. The worst part about it is the fact that both weapons and religion have proved their damaging use throughout history and yet people continue to be extremist about both. Hugging a sequoia tree When I was a kid, my mom decided she would "sell me into" the idea of meditation that she has been doing for 20 plus years. She sat me down and said I could HEAR, yeah HEAR silence; as a child that was an impossibility, an oxymoron, so as a kid that had to know everything I accepted in a challenging manner. She made me close my eyes, breathe in and out slowly, told me to think about a happy place, about a happy moment, or just focus on my breathing to be able to clear my mind off o...

They say you cannot choose your family, and whoever "they" are, it seems they are kind of right, at least in my case. I say kind of because my dad and mom are and always will be my parents, but here's where the "family idea" changes: when I was a kid I was my grandfather's favorite grandson and EVERY day we would talk, he would tell me stories, we would watch a TV show called Walker Texas Ranger (yeah the Chuck Norris one), I would sleepover, he would take me to music and/or pick me up... he was all over my weekly life. He was amazing, and through him I figured out that you can have more than one dad and mom. I have told you guys in my earlier entries about my danish dad, but really there are people like my uncle whom I run with, that I believe is like a father figure to me in many ways. Many friends later in life I found had no biological father because of different reasons and have always found their father figure somewhere else without looking fo...

Facebook buying Instagram and later WhatsApp, Apple buying Beats by Dre... And now Amazon just paid 13.7 billion dollars for Whole Foods! It is awesome to see these huge companies at work and work more and more towards their vision of the future. Amazon specially has an amazing CEO in Jeff Bezos, he has made his company such a forward thinking success it is thrilling to watch him at work. Amazon is awesome in customer service, it has a magnificent view of the future of retail and proved as much when it introduced Amazon Go. People who innovate have an agenda and you can agree or disagree, but what you cannot do is ignore them. Change is the best way to test people and companies, how companies adapt and take advantage of new opportunities makes all the difference between a good and a great result. Facebook, Apple and now Amazon know as much when going all in on acquiring other companies and paying for their future success. Instagram and WhatsApp were two great examples of addin...

So, The Apple Worm Podcast is out and about and because of it I had a couple of ideas to talk about for today and chose one I have not talked about enough: Music.  I truly believe and practice in my life therapy through music. While running, writing out the blog, studying, in the car, when I'm happy, sad, angry... I must have music as much as possible in my life because it helps my mind to focus. Some of the most inspiring and flat out amazing people I have met and know to this day are musicians (well studied and/or self-taught). I could not be happier to tell you this story, its about being humble and shocked musically and in life in general. I was 15 I think and went to a music camp in Michigan with a scholarship to study percussion with amazing teachers. All I knew was that I had to be there and lessons would be taught and I would live on campus for about a month and a half, I rehearsed the pieces I knew with my teacher back home A LOT of how high my nerves were to pla...

Hey EVERYONE The AppleWorm Podcast is out! Check it out and subscribe on  iTunes  for iOS users and on PodOmatic  for android users! It is all about me getting more to you guys on the content of the blog. There are a lot of topics that I decide to  take out of the daily blogs posts to keep it nice and to the point. These weekly podcasts allow me to let you guys know the thoughts behind the blog entries of the week. So look it up, save it to listen while in your car, in your commute, wherever you can, enjoy and share. Back to the blog: one of my favorite stories about success is about an tourist that came to the Costa Rican province of Limon and got stressed at the attitude of the people who lived there. To give a little context, Limon is a province in Costa Rica that historically was where the entry point of African and Caribbean black slaves, they were not allowed to get to the rest of the country since they were only allowed to live and work in that area of th...

My mom says that when I was a kid there were very few things that would stress me out more than not being able to pronounce a word correctly. Oddly enough, I learnt a lot of my danish as a kid growing up in Aalborg talking to danish kids at my day care, so naturally my spanish (and later my english) was not the best for a 4 or 5 year old trying to juggle thoughts in spanish and danish. Later on in my youth I had the chance to live in Michigan for about 2 months to study music, and ever since that trip I believe ignorance and not mispronunciation is what REALLY stresses me out. Not just from others, but also in myself, when people have absolutely no idea of basic/common knowledge and when I feel that I am the one who ignores entirely something that should be known... I don't know if it's being obsessive or what but it gets under my skin, let me explain with a small story that happened to me. I will never forget this phrase a girl said to me in Michigan when I ...

I am no one to tell you what to do or what not to do, and I hope you have realized that by now in reading my blog and listening to  my weekly podcast (the appleworm podcast) , that I want you guys to know about my journey into becoming successful. My dreams and hopes in life have had and will have ups and downs, so all I can do is humbly tell you guys what I think as a result what I have lived  and am living, and in that process hopefully you guys will find something that interests you or even better, helps you with your life endeavors and adventures. Having said that, the title of this entry is not a title, it is a prescription! I highly recommend people try out Culture Shock to get some perspective as to the world we live in and who YOU are in it. I have had the awesome privilege to try out culture shock many times and every single one is different. It is not something that you try once and then know how every other time will be like. It will enrich your life every sin...

People laugh when I tell them that I love Apple as a company, that my goal is to one day work with Apple (or if it's for Apple as a CEO #dreambig). They look at me and think I am a consumerist because of loving a company instead of listening to what I really mean when I say I love the Company and not the products. Ever since I bought my first generation iPod Nano I fell for the idea behind their products, the sense behind the software, the ideology behind the commercials. Steve Jobs was one of the most passion driven, relentless human beings EVER to walk the earth, and Wozniak was probably one of the only engines capable of channeling the electric fuel Jobs had in him to change the world. Both stubborn in their own way, both ready to make dreams come true, not always getting along, not always making the right choices. Hoping they would maybe make a dent into the universe of someone who bought the Apple II or the Macintosh or the PowerBook or the iMac G3 or the iBook or iPod or...

Sunday has always been a family day in my life. Back home in Costa Rica Sunday means you have to go to church and watch the football games in the afternoon, of course with a cup of coffee in your hand. Over in Denmark it was not, Sunday was more about hanging out with friends because the so-called family days where either birthdays where we would go out to grandma's house, or some Tuesdays where the building where we lived would have a group dinner were one of the families would cook for the others and each week the family to cook would change. When I went to Japan, the family I lived with for a couple of days over in Nagasaki told me that the most important day for family normally is Saturday because Sunday is a day everyone goes their way, be it to be with friends, boyfriend or girlfriend or to just maybe relax and get ready for the week.  I have been a part of many families outside of my own and could not be more grateful for them to open up their lives to me. My danish fam...

So, today is going to get personal... Coffee, rain and te kind of post, enjoy: I remember like it was yesterday, I was with my mom in the Panama Airport, in transit to Newark on our way to Denmark. The TVs around us suddenly started to get A LOT of attention, my mom went to see what the fuss was about and when she saw the TV nearby she held her breath, as if hoping whatever she was looking at was not real... Tears came down her cheeks and I got scared. The news header read "Michael Jackson found dead" and I was as confused as could be. HOW?? How in the world could she be crying this much for someone she never knew, she never met... Oh but karma is a... you know what. Just 2 years later I would find out what my mom felt and 3 years after that again. Michael Jackson died in 2009, Steve Jobs in 2011, and Robin Williams in 2014. Jobs and Williams' deaths hit me harder than I ever thought an unknown human being would make me cry.  Some may think it's stupid, drama...

When I was a kid I was really hyper active and energetic, would not stay put, could not be more of a bother to my poor old mom and dad. One day they discovered the secret to my life: music. My mom was cleaning up the house and somehow I managed to turn on the radio and the music that was on was  Carmina Burana . "IMMEDIATELY my son stoped doing everything except for breathing" or something like that is the way my mom explains what happened. I would not blink, move, speak, I was hypnotized by whatever sounds where coming out of the speakers. Some time after discovering my passion for music my mom had a brilliant idea: lets take David to watch a movie that has an amazing score. And so, we went to watch kid classics like Toy Story, Hercules, Lion King and so on. It worked, but still not as much as just listening to classical music until... One day I saw my mom get way to excited to be true... I was confused, she called all her friends and would smile so much as she spoke. I...

Running is almost therapeutic thing I do that happens to also be exercise. My uncle (the youngest of 9 brothers and sisters my dad has) has been running for at least 18 years and when I turned 17 he challenged me to go do a 10K race under an hour. My family is naturally competitive because of football (more on this later) so I could not say no, the race came around and I managed to make it in around 55 minutes which was great for the bet, but was even better because I discovered I enjoyed it a lot.  Ever since that day I decided to train with my uncle until I could catch up with him and when I did, I wanted a little more and that meant getting in touch with his trainer. She is an over 60 year old marathon runner that was national and central american champion and is still competing and winning in her category. In the most sincere and humble way I look up to her SO much, her way of training is awesome, she makes you set your own goals and knows exactly how to get there. My firs...

Yeah, it happened again! I am so happy to be writing to you guys about non speculation or leaks or whatever, but rather about the more than 2 hour keynote of amazing fun (more about this year's weird experience in a later post). By the time I sat down and did my whole Apple Keynote setup (beats, MacBook, iPad, snacks and 2 cups of apple juice), I was ready for software only and got WAY MORE than that. If I wrote down everything I thought about yesterday when watching the keynote, my fingers would fall off.  So, after thinking about it for a while, here are my thoughts about the main topics Apple talked about yesterday at the WWDC2017 keynote in order of importance TO ME: iOS, watchOS, HomePod, macOS and tvOS. Here we go: The iOS ecosystem is the most important part of the Apple universe of money making hardware, and yesterday proved as much. We are still waiting for the 10th anniversary iPhone, but in the mean time Tim Cook gave us a conference of the environment aro...

McEnergy Convention Center getting ready Yes, I know! I excited just as much if not more than you about tomorrow!!!! The stage has been set and the rumors have been speculated, and now we just have to wait to let reality hit us and happiness shoot though my veins (I say "my" because I don't know if you react in the same crazy way I do). Just to give a little context as to how far I have gone to be able to see the live streams for Apple Events every year, I have taken vacations from work that day, I have asked my teachers at university to change the date of a test or at least to allow me to take the test on an earlier hour or date to be able to make the live stream... and the list goes on... My set up is as Apple as can be, and I am a man of routine: my Mac is for twitter and taking notes, the iPad Mini is where the livestream plays, the beats headphones isolate me from the world around, my iPhone and watch are on DO NOT DISTURB and finally 2 cups of Apple Juice (yes...

Today is the Champions League Final Game !!! I am truly torn for this decision because Juventus is filled with players that I admire, specially Gianluigi Buffon, this legendary goalkeeper is one title away from winning every title he could i his lifetime. However, on the other side is Real Madrid with the costa rican phenomenon of a goalkeeper and national treasure Keylor Navas. Supporting Juventus would mean going against Navas, but supporting Navas would be negating the One title the legend of Buffon is missing. Because of this hard decision that has me divided I decided to not wear Real Madrid's shirt today and be "neutral" by using the shirt of the European team I love with all my heart: Paris Saint-Germain. This french team taught me what it was to fall in love with football when I was a kid and looked at Ronaldinho become the monstrous Brazilian player we all know and love before Barca and Milan. Like I mentioned in a previous post, my country has 2 huge religion...