Kicking the Bucket ?

In English, the sentence "Kicking the Bucket" means "to die", but this is not what I mean here. Relax! A very famous sentence in Brazil is "Vou chutar o balde!" if literally translated you will get exactly the title of this post, but it actually means "to give up of everything independent of the consequences", "stop suddenly a stressful activity", but not with a fatal intention. So, sentences with similar meanings in English could be "to throw everything up in the air" or "to lose your temper" or even "to go bananas".



I admit that I was about "to go bananas" many times during the last months and the great lesson I have learned was to be able to stop this feeling every time it came out. Nothing would be so valuable for a person than the ability to never give up and keep running even with waves of negative facts around, trying to convince me about the poor perspectives for the future. You most be curious at this stage. Summarizing my heavy journey:

1. business plan: I wrote a business plan of an European Association to manage an open source framework. You don't know how hard is to prove the sustainability of a business, grounded on an open source software. I've learned a lot about how services are important for this kind of business.


2. cost benefit analysis: This cost benefit analysis was even harder than the business plan because of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the framework. The quantitative data was very hard to define, since a multimodal framework is not easy to find out there to provide comparative data and show the advantages of our framework. It is also on the border line of the state of the art, which reduces a lot the changes to find a competitor.


3. exploitation plan: I started this document without even knowing precisely what the hell is an exploitation plan. I initially thought that this is the structure of an organization that will manage the framework, but I was completely wrong. I was obliged to make an extensive research out of my field to figure out what kind of content should be present in an exploitation plan. Hopefully I found good orientations on the web and I could explain how to increase the visibility of the framework, and consequently, the number of adopters and investors.


4. 2 doctoral consortium submissions: In parallel, trying to do some work on my own research, I wrote and submitted my thesis to two doctoral consortia, one in Belgium, which was accepted and presented already, and another one next Summer in Pittsburgh, USA. I'm still waiting for the result of the second one, always optimist ;) !


5. a final report of a national project: the project that has paid my salary since I arrived here until my last seconds of 2008 and doesn't have anything to do with those documents described before, has finished at last. So, I had to write the final report about all contributions we produced so far, in the middle of a battle with the other documents.


6. Writing an European project proposal: this one was the most challenging of all the other previous documents. It demanded more than just text, but strategic abilities. Led by my adviser and co-managed my colleague and me, we made a careful selection of good partners strategically spread throughout the whole Europe Union, with complementarity of competences and interests, considering academic and industrial representatives with potential to produce high impacting results. My main role was to define the whole budget, the schedule, the work plan and coordinate the technological part of the proposal while my colleague took care of the scientific part, the consistency of the whole proposal and for pushing all partners to collaborate.

I've been busy with these things out of my goals, but I don't regret at all because each of them contributed somehow to make me a better person, a better professional, not exactly a better researcher, but this is something that I'm focusing on again now.

Well, I installed an anti-kicking device on my bucket to simplify my self-control as you can see below. From now on I can kick the bucket without any bad consequence. It will just sliiiiiide...