After today's lunch, I managed to sit and start translating GNOME 2.8 to Catalan. I still don't know exactly how much is left, but I think I lots of important bits done today. I hope to have most of it done by the end of next week, which would give us a few days for polishing before the final release.

It disturbs me that in the last few months (probably when I started my job at Lliurex), I've had little time to coordinate the Catalan GNOME and GNU teams properly. I really hope I can change this a bit in the near future though. The lack of volunteers to help with translations in these two realms, lately, isn't making things too easy. The Translation Project is getting more and more apps registered for translation, but the Catalan team isn't getting more translators. Actually, some of them have gone missing, even. I guess it's time to call for help again in the different Free Software forums in Catalan.

After coming back from England I upgraded my devel box to GNOME 2.7 from experimental. First I got hit by the gnome-vfs2 bug which would hang nautilus, but after fixing that, it's running smooth. The changes with respect to GNOME 2.6 aren't too big, but fix many of the things that annoyed me in the previous version. I guess the biggest thing in GNOME 2.8 will be the new official apps like GNOME System Tools, GNOME Volume Manager or Evolution.

On Friday at 13:00 I gave up and bought a mobile phone. For years, everyone was urging me to do this, because "they couldn't contact me when they needed to". Well, I guess there were other ways before mobile telephony was introduced, because people managed to date and do stuff normally without them.

So, why the need? Well, I don't really know, but people just started buying phones and at some point, about 2 or 3 years ago (in Spain), everyone seemed to have one, and if you didn't you were annoying, because people would have to call to your fixed line, which is more expensive.

At some other point, the percentage of people with point was so big, that the few of us without a mobile phone would actually expend quite a lot of money when calling people. I find 70% or 80% of my calls were to mobile phones, which is quite expensive. And if I was out, it was really annoying: all the public phones in València are either a) vandalised and broken, b) just not working for some reason, c) charging 1€ just for establishing a link. That, and everyone telling me "dude, get a mobile phone!" provoked my defeat, and now I'm one more.

At least I can say I resisted 6 years before it got too expensive not to have one. The only other friend without a mobile phone is also getting one in the next few weeks.

The little thing doesn't take pics, is not a video camera, doesn't play FM radio or anything real nifty, but I can receive calls. My father got it from free from the telephone company, so I didn't use a single euro to get it. One nice surprise was to find that Alcatel (unlike, AFAIK, Nokia) supports Catalan in the phone's UI. :)

I'll mail people around to distribute the number to my close friends and relatives. If you're reading this and think you want my number, mail me, in case I forgot you in my list.