This morning, I took the "Grau superior" exam for Valencian. As expected it was damn difficult. It actually was less difficult than I thought, but difficult enough for my sister, me and other 3 friends to have no expectations on passing. After the exam, we started talking about some of the tricky questions and was a bit depressing, heh. This is the highest level of Valencian, and they are not permissive at all with spelling mistakes, etc. I think it's enough with 3 spelling mistakes in a 200-letter writeup to make you fail all of it. Anyway, I had not prepared it at all, I expect to do it again in November after we've studied a bit. Studying this level is difficult though, many of our problems come from lack of very extense vocabulary, which you can't really help by studying a text book. You improve vocabulary by using the language every day, reading books, and so on. Even if it's difficult, I love the language. :)

Following up a bit on Murray's piece on the European elections, let's have a brief look at the brand new Constitution which was approved yesterday (MJ Ray already blogged a bit about this). So, do you, European citizens reading this, know a single thing about this document? Not me, at least. I have no idea what this apparently very important document talks about, and how it affects us in our everyday lifes. I suspect it's quite full of numbers, quotas, freedom limitations and so on, but it's quite interesting that the major part of the population isn't aware of this. It's quite frightening that on some countries, it'll be imposed by their government. Actually, nobody talked about testing it in referendums until Tony Blair announced he would do that. Then, the Spanish PM and others also expressed their support to this idea, but they only started discussing this a month ago or so, when the text was mostly finished.

If we end up getting a chance of voting about the Constitution, I think it won't be too surprising if it doesn't pass in some of the 25 countries. I suspect the text is vague or ignores completely many social aspects of our different regions. Just to name one, it is impossible for a Catalan citizen to express themselves in their mother tongue when dealing with EU bureocracy. Isn't that discrimination?

My grandmother died on Monday.

Even if this had been expected by us since her health got worse three weeks ago, you couldn't give up hope with my grandmother. She had been fighting rheumatoid arthritis for over 30 years, and had overgone some grave health problems when even my mother thought she had no chance. This time it was too much, and a complication with her lungs has taken her away. She didn't suffer at all, as she mostly fell asleep as she dimmed down, and was surrounded by her sons and daughters. It's the first time I lose a direct family member, so it's being quite difficult to accept it. Now my worries are with my grandfather who is now alone, after so many years of common life. Luckily, both of them have strong catholic beliefs so it's probably easier for them to accept the death of a relative. It's not so easy for the rest of us...

Thanks for all the lessons taught, all the good moments shared with your grandsons. I'm going to miss you, abuela. :(

I'm getting old...

FWIW, I like jfleck's blog entries and I would like to be able to read them in Planet GNOME. Many people think, and I agree with them, that the Planets contents don't need to be related to what the planet community is about, but about what the individual community members do in general, computer related or not. John's writings about Global Warming and of course cycling are nice to read. I should write more about triathlon. :)

Claxon hell has stopped a bit in Valencia after two horrible days, with thousands of people collapsing the city and annoying us who don't care much with continuous car horn noise. The bad thing is that it's quite likely to happen again if Valencia wins the UEFA Cup as well in little more than one week. Aaargh.

I really want a real Spring. Since the season started, it has been raining intermittently every few days of decent weather. Come one, this is not what Spain is about!

We have ordered DSL, ending the era of a 56kbps link to the Internet at my mother's. I hope Wanadoo isn't too crappy.

FUTBOLEROS = VIVIDORES

(As Rubens puts it)

Sooo, when you say you prefer Valencian, do you mean it's a variant of the Catalan language, or a completely separate language? People around here are still puzzled by your previous statement on the subject ;)

Oh, and why do they call it Catalonian when they really mean Catalan?

A few hours after asking for help to get the hackergotchi head jdub was requesting, jacobo mailed me a candidate which I really like. jdub, Keybuk, feel free to add/replace my current image with this one! (smaller version available here). I didn't have to give jacobo a photo to extract my head from, he even went ahead and found a suitable one (in tbm's Malaga gallery). Many thanks, jacobo!

As I hadn't written in a while, the stuff I wanted to reply to or write about had piled up. Unfortunately I have forgot about a few things, but these are fresh enough for me to remember and comment.

So I finally got the job I had been orbiting around for some months. It's quite Debian-related and while I have been in the office for a pair of days, the first impressions are good, the workmates are friendly and the work is interesting. I'm now working for the local government's Conselleria de Cultura, for the Lliurex.net project. If you remember LinEx in Extremadura, it's more or less the same idea applied in our area. Good stuff, but it's too early to say more right now.

I'm quite shocked at Amaya's latest blog entry, where she questions that the Valencian language is in fact Catalan, or at the most, a minor variation of Catalan. Apparently during her talk in Castelló, she asked the audience if a user list for Valencian Debian users existed, when we already have debian-user-catalan, and she was amazed when people told her "no, no, no". Amaya, *I* am amazed that being a linguist you have this view on the subject. Maybe you're just not informed enough on the subject. The only social group who supports this point of view is the Valencian right-wing nationalists, which have quite fucked points of view on a variety of other subjects, and their argumentation makes no sense at all. I guess the answer is in any Iberian history book. What is clear is that this stupid debate in the Valencian society is just weakening the Valencian language a lot, and as I see it, Spanish is quickly taking over the minoritary, native language in many aspects of life. Also, what is left of Valencian use is very contaminated with Spanish barbarisms and incorrections, which only takes a language to its spiral of death. Luckily, recent reports of the use of Catalan in Catalonia are a bit more encouraging and show that the health of Catalan in that territory is getting better every year.

Yesterday, Catalunya celebrated Sant Jordi, which is also el dia del llibre. My parents have the habit of presenting me with books. This year I got yet another book by Ferran Torrent, Un negre amb un saxo, and Toni Cucarella's Quina lenta agonia la dels ametlers perduts. I'll start devouring them as soon as I finish reading Sacco & Vanzetti, which is very interesting.

jdub, I wish I had a hacker head, but I really suck at GIMP or any image manipulation program. :) I'm glad to accept help though.

It's been a while since my last post. After posting it, I got a few mails on the subject (some in agreement, others trying to explain me the situation in the eyes of the people in the other camp of the conflict). I also had a quite interesting IRC chat with Jody, which also helped me understand some facts in the current situation of Jews in general in the world. Jaldhar Vyas also wrote a paragraph on the matter. I won't comment too much on it, because this topic has been discussed to death during years, but just dismissing the accussation of "state terrorism" by Israel just because their attacks are "specific" isn't too accurate. For me, a bomb going off in a public bus and an entire army going into Jenin's refugee camp and destroying houses with their inhabitants inside is equally non-selective. The difference is, the first actions are performed by radicals, while the second was done by the army of a supossedly democratic and civilised country.

In the last two weeks, I've spent most of my weekend in duathlon activities, racing first in Silla, and then in Alicante. Next week, the triathlon season starts, when sea water is quite cold still. Luckily I've got my Orca wetsuit this year, so I'll probably suffer a lot less than last season.

I've also doing some work on the experimental GNOME 2.6 Debian packages, which are quite ok right now. The major issues are caused by a few packages missing from experimental, as they are held in the NEW queue of incoming.debian.org. Hopefully that'll be solved soon, but while we wait, we've created an APT repository which should soon contain all the packages that are needed to run GNOME 2.6 smoothly and are not yet available in the archive. One major issue before we even consider trying to drop the stuff in unstable is to do the gconf transition correctly: the goal is to move schemas files out from /etc. Joss has a plan to manage this both for GNOME 2.6 and GNOME 2.4 (in case it's the version that is finally shipped with Sarge).

Tomorrow I'll be gone to my town until Monday, I really need to stay away from computers for a while. During the vacations, we need to train quite a bit to prepare the upcoming triathlon and the many successive races in the next weeks. Too bad the weather is getting bad again...