Matt Henderson's Blog

To celebrate the new BJJ brown belt, as well as a couple other things, (and in part due to the breakdown of our 10-year-old Honda), I decided it was about time to splurge on a lifelong dream I’ve had to own a Jeep Wrangler, in particular the new Jeep Wrangler 4-Door Unlimited.

Given that I normally get around town on a Honda Scooter, we realized that our usage of the car was about 99% off-road, on our weekend outings to the mountains. The need Jeep’s going to allow us to get to some of the places we couldn’t before, and it’s gonna be a heck of a lot fun!

We took it for its first spin today, going up and down the muddy dirt roads around Jubrique. Man this thing can get around! I’m wondering how long it’ll be before I’m comfortable enough to try some of the stuff you see on YouTube!

December 14, 2007 was a really big day for me, as I was awarded the brown belt by my brazilian jiu-jitsu teacher, Edson Jorge (of Gracie-Barra). There’s only five belts in BJJ — white, blue, purple, brown and black — so I’m only one step away from the BIG ONE. By no means do I feel like a brown belt (especially since I seem to sometimes still forget some of the very basics), so it’s going to take some getting used to I guess! In theory the brown belt represents the bridge between purple and black, where the student needs to focus on leading and teaching, so those’ll be my objectives this coming year.

On the same day I got mine, my long-time training buddy Mike Rios also got his brown belt. So all in all, it was a very special day!

Last night I was out on a bike ride, from Monda to Tolox. About 8:30 PM, I was on my way back, and had just turned the corner at junction to Guaro. My eye caught what looked like a mouse on the side of the road. As I approach, I saw it was a little abandoned kitten.

I hopped off the bike, but it ran off the road, and into a pile of large rocks.

The United States offers a lot of conveniences and advancements with respect to (certain parts of) Europe, but I find the level of automation and corporate cost reduction a bit disturbing. Most calls to American customer support lines recently are a bit too consistent with my call yesterday to Earthlink:

Earthlink: Hello, can I have your name.

Me: Matt Henderson

EL: Thanks, Matt, how can we help today? We’re here to help.

Me: I live outside the US, and would like to arrange internet and TV service for a house in Georgia that I’ll be visiting this summer.

On March 26, 2007, I ordered a pair of Oakley Half Jacket sunglasses from the UK-based Chain Reaction Cycles, who claim to be “Europe’s Largest Online Bike Shop.” At almost $180, this purchase represented the most I’ve ever invested in sunglasses, but I’d always understood that Oakley made top-quality sports sunglasses, and, hey, if they’re good enough for Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France, they should be good enough for my jaunts around the hills of Marbella.

A bit less than three weeks later, having heard nothing, I

Recently getting access to the alpha version of OmniFocus (which, by the way, is going to be the ultimate GTD application) provided a good opportunity to re-assess my personal productivity.

Over the past months, without being able to pinpoint a precise cause, I’d begun to sense myself becoming less and less productive.

Since I really enjoy blog articles where people present the tools and equipment supporting their work and play, I thought I’d do the same. We’ll start from the top, and work our way down through the details.

On the beach…

Our office is located on the mediterranean sea, in beautiful Marbella, Spain. It’s a wonderful place to work!

It’s kind of cute or weird or funny or something when your music system is about a fraction of the size of your headphones. This is the case with my new Apple iPod Shuffle, and trusty old Audio Technica ATH-ES7 headphones.

For mother’s day this year, I decided to order my world’s greatest mom a little pink (pronounced, “pank” by southern rednecks like me) iPod Shuffle.

Each year in May, for the past 11 years, the Spanish Legionnaires (“La Legión”, a Spanish military wing) organizes the famous, “101 km of Ronda” event, in which the 5,000+ participants endure a 101 kilometer (66 miles) tour through the mountains and sierras surrounding the beautiful namesake city of Ronda.

My wife and I participated for the first time last year, 2006.

My first real job was a co-op position with the Georgia Power Company back during my university days. The company bought us all Macintosh computers (Mac IIs), and I was introduced to desktop publishing with the Aldus PageMaker application (which, today, is known as Adobe InDesign).

I started using PageMaker and the office LaserWriter to prepare and print documents for school — reports, essays, anything really. Like most desktop publishing novices, my documents attempted to use every font, sizing, coloring and positioning option the program offered.