I would have thought that three years after the start of the war, Iraq would be yet another forgotten war, as it tends to happen when murder, bombings, famine and corruption become the routine in some country or area.

It's been nearly three years since the holy coalition made up of United States and the UK, with a selected group of allies which included the Spain of our beloved Aznar, invaded the country to save the poor iraqi people from the fierce Sadam. After a few months of hard fight against the bloody dictator, Iraq would finally be able to live in peace and Democracy, and the world would understand the goodness behind the reasoning that made the superpowers start the second war in Iraq, against the opinion of the UN security council and an overwhelming majority of the people in the planet.

Today, after years of bloodbaths in different parts of Iraq, we're witnessing the start of a civil war. I hope the mass media stop talking about "the terrorists" now, because what's been going on for the last week is random people against random people. It makes me sick to think how bad the near future looks in Iraq.

All of this happened in the name of freedom, or so they said. And then, it was in the name of the “War on Terror”, because Iraq was infested with terrorists (they never told us how they planned to stop that from happening). In the meanwhile, little they talk about the most wanted man on earth, uncle Osama.

Today's edition of EL PAIS includes a translation of an article by Ahmed Rashid in The Washington Post's edition of February 26, apropos of George Bush's visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan this week. He's Welcome In Pakistan is surely worth a read; I'm sure Miguel will enjoy.

I hope to be back to normal in a week or so.

Right. A week later, my connectivity issues have gotten so much worse...

Yesterday, I was trying to do some of my neglected Debian work at my mother's house (namedly, updating some packages for GNOME 2.12.1), when the ADSL modem lost its link and didn't come up again. As it was a bit late, I just cursed the nth incident with Wanadoo and left until the next day.

Today, when I go back there, my sister asks if I can have a look, because there's no Internet. I suspect that the Wanadoo people have finally freed us and have cancelled our contract as we asked for two weeks ago. I phone and they confirm this is it. I then ask, innocently, if I am free to sign up with any other telco. They say I now need to wait, without any internet service, until the telephone line is freed so any other company can take care of it. That will happen in thirty or fourty days. WTF! I'm sure this can be reported somewhere, it's totally unacceptable.

I've had to come to my father's house, out of the city, to do the most urgent pending tasks, and it'll be a pain to do this throughout the week. The good news is that today I got a call from Telefonica telling me that my modem should arrive at home on Monday, and some other day my own DSL link will start working. Hopefully that'll happen even before I leave to my American adventure. I am sure The Acetarium will be ready for my arrival.

If you're waiting for some upload from me, please have a bit of patience because my current situation is making it quite difficult.

For the last two weeks I've been in the painful process of moving to a new flat.

Actually, it's not so new, as it was where we lived when I was born and until I was 4 or so. We then moved to the Plaça d'Hondures further down Blasco Ibáñez, although the avenue didn't get that far down to the beach. In its place, there was a huge unpaved area full of soil and puddles.

My grandparents had been living there for a few years when they finally came from Sitges to live here, but after my grandmother died, my grandfather decided he didn't want to be in that house anymore, and moved to Godella with my father. Some months later, we've decided that instead of having it closed and unused, I can move in and save some money, while at the same time I start fixing some of the quirks this house has.

The house is big, is in the 5th floor and has tons of sunlight. For me, the change has been fantastic, having swapped a tiny room in the old flat with a quite big room and a double bed. I can even say that I have too much wardrobe space. There isn't much noise during nights. Living on a 1st floor just above the darkest rock/metal club in the city didn't help...

I feared that living where my grandmother died would make me feel sad, but happily it's all the contrary. When I come in, the smell of the house reminds me of her. When I go into the living room, the first thing I see is her empty armchair, but I easily get flashbacks of her sitting there, getting surprised about my arrival.

Kiko has come to live here too for now, and for now we're doing quite well. He's helping me with some cleanups and shopping, but there's a lot to do. I'll have to call my sister to change the light switches and plugs, because they are either broken, too small, or use an ancient standard for plugs which no device uses anymore.

All of this has sucked all my free time lately. We still have no DSL, and only got our new telephone line yesterday (although the old one still worked, too bad we didn't take advantage of that "flat rate" :) Having no Internet access makes me totally uncapable of doing any Debian work at all, more when my main development box is not online anywhere else. I've tried hooking up to the many wireless accesspoints that are all around the house, but they are either too weak, encrypted or just don't work. I only managed to use one of them reliably one night, but had to sit outside in the terrace. I'm glad we still have Spring-like temperatures in Spain, or I would have frozen.

I hope to be back to normal in a week or so.

It's not only a bunch of students with hippy ideals thinking that the Feds could have done a bit more before and after Katrina's hit. It seems the Mayor is a bit fed up of promises coming from DC. The lack of any kind of rescue operation for the people that are starving and dehidrating all around the city of New Orleans and the violent scenes taking place resulted in a quite powerful interview on a local radio. And yes, this comes from CNN.

A small quote from the transcript:

Ray Nagin: I have no idea what they're doing.

Emperor Palpatine says I'm silly because I blame dubya for a massive hurricane basically destroying a major US city. Well, no, and don't put words in my mouth, thanks.

My point is not only that if all you can do is sign a few cheques, at least have the respect for the victims and show up on TV having fun a few hours later of reporting the most destructive natural disaster in your country. Appearing to care a bit about what's going on seems like a good idea, when you're POTUS.

Besides the appearances, there's other stuff you can do before the hurricane hits. For example, you can try not to divert flood-control funds to your little adventure in the Middle East. It's sad to learn that most of the money earmarked to the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA) suddenly got diverted to Iraq when things started to go too wrong around the Persian Gulf.

The ongoing repairs to levees and other flood control measures in the area were not finished when they should have, and now the nice city of New Orleans is a deadly lake. I'm not saying levees and dams are the ultimate solution but they surely would have helped in this case, as the tsunami alert systems in the Pacific help when they need to.

But I guess Jaldhar thinks all the war stuff was really necessary, and the money was worth it. Probably what the American voter really cares about, according to him. I have this utopia in my head, it could have been used for other matters, like fixing some of the social problems in the US that make your urgent rescue operations a problem because with the amount of guns out of control in the US, your helicopters get shot. Or helping getting rid of famine, plagues and epidemies in those spots of the world where the poverty situation only generates what you call "terrorism". Or simply helping your economy to be less polluting, so your country doesn't contribute half of the emissions to the atmosphere that are causing global warming, and, for example, make hurricanes and typhoons like Katrina even more deadly.

This is self-explanatory.

When I saw the images of what's going on in New Orleans, the first thing I thought is that if the news had been talking about Asia or Africa, I would have very well believed those images were shot there. It's obvious that when it comes to extreme natural disasters like Katrina, the first and third world are quite alike.

I hope all our community people in the area are ok, even if not thanks to dubya. Some day he'll realise that saying "God bless you" isn't enough.

During our week around the Pyrenees, our meals consisted on dehydrated pasta, rice and soups, along with the little sandwich bread we could carry, and little more, really. Any extra gram sums up in your backpack and if you carry more than you need, you end up paying with exhaustion.

When I got back to Vàlencia I was really looking forward to eating real food, in a plate. I suspected that with that kind of food, I might have lost some weight, and wanted to find out how much. Unfortunately, I've been forgetting to do get on the scale everyday since, until today.

After 5 days of being well fed (and I have surely regained some of my normal weight), I remembered to weight myself before getting lunch and after going to the toilet. The result was alarming, even for me.

Now I'm so ready to be the Debian Skinny subproject leader!

Note this pic was taken after lunch, naked but holding the camera. On my first measurement, I got something like 53.2kg, way less than my usual 57-58kg range. I should probably get serious about gaining weight, even if that means mdz and moray discrown me in our unofficial "lighter DD" contest.

I got slightly fed up of my long hair and asked my mercyless sister to do something about it. The idea was to have it short everywhere except on the back, but now I think she went a bit too far. Fortunately this is something that will be fixable in just a few weeks.

This is the end of my fourth cycle of long-hair/short hair. Since 9 years ago I've constantly been growing and then cutting it very short every two years. I don't think I'm going to do it immediately again though, as the idea is to let my sister experiment as much as she wants. The only condition is "Remember I work in a government office!".

The real reason for deciding to cut it off (something I had been talking about since March or something) was that when it gets long and it falls at the natural rate, the hairs are so big that I get alarmed very easily because of the volume of the fallen hair when I just pass my hand around my head. As I was getting a bit obsessed about the idea of running out of hair, I just took the quick decision. My scalp also needed it after two years anyway.

No, I don't know what that white spot is either

The bad news is when I told mako on IRC.

19:47 < jordi> I got rid of it all
19:47 < mako> no way
19:47 < jordi> yeah man
19:47 < mako> NO WAY
19:47 < mako> dude, you are vega no more

Duh! I forgot we hadn't done our Vega vs. Jordi comparison. Since our meeting in Sydney, mako has been insisting that Vega, the Street Fighter character, is exactly the same as me. Vega is Spanish, blonde, has long hair and is a bull fighter who climbs to weird places. EXACT MATCH! Even for the bullfighting bit!

Vega or Jordi? Vega or Jordi? Vega or Jordi?

Mako and I tried our best to get a picture of me with a flower or something that would make me look like Vega during one of his deadly fights, but we didn't find any in Sydney, and Helsinki's nude attractions made us forget about it. Now it's too late. I wish I could have my hair back.

A few hours ago my mother told me my grandfather wouldn't last much more, and it seems a few minutes later, his heart finally ceased beating. The news hasn't had a big impact on me as he had been in coma for 14 days already, and even resisted more than we expected.

During the many visits to hospital since he had this fatal stroke, I've had time to think what are the strongest memories from him that I retain. There are two main memories from childhood.

One is when he would place us on his lap, with our backs facing him, and would sing "Digudín, digudán", while he pressed his sharp fingers all over our back, and finally would ask "¿Cuantos dedos hay encima?". That game is probably one of the things that has made me and my cousins laugh more in our lives. Besides, we rarely managed to answer correctly, so he would start again until we did.

The second wasn't so funny. Once, Marta, Borja and I were travelling with our grandparents from our small town Vall de Almonacid to Castelló. Bored and innocent as we were (I don't think we'd be more than 7 or 8 years old at the time), we started to sing "Franco, Franco, que tiene el culo blanco, la pilila azul, qué tío más gandul!", and we only needed two repetitions to get our grandfather yelling at us to shut up. We were totally frozen, and didn't understand what was going on. I have a very clear memory of what my grandmother told us to explain his anger, to the point I even remember her tone as she said this. "No canteis eso porque el abuelo quería mucho a Franco". We tried to argue that we learned the song from him, and for some reason the three of us firmly believed this, but it was totally impossible. The rest of the trip went on in total silence. How could we know the abuelo loved Franco, after all. Actually, who the heck was Franco?

So this was my biggest barrier when interacting with him: our big political differences. He was very conservative and had very strong catholic beliefs. When he had the first stroke, more than a year ago, I went to take care of him and decided it was my opportunity to get some first hand stories of how the Spanish Civil War went in Vall.

He was in the wrong side of the war, as many others who happened to fight for the contender that totally was against their beliefs. Most of the East coast was controlled by the Republic, and Vall was near one of the battle fronts. He never fought in front, by pure luck: he was too young, 14, when the war started, but the Aragonese front was still active in 1939, so he kept getting closer and closer to get enlisted. Just when he was next on the list, the Republic gave up and Franco declared his victory, even if that front never got defeated.

During the war, he was in charge of giving the military their ration of food and tobacco, while he helped digging under houses and streets to build refuges for the population. Every now and then, the sirens would go off, and people would get into the nearest shelter. If they were too far to get there in time, they would go under the stairs of their house or a similar place.

One day, my grandfather was carrying some sand from a refuge to the road, when the sirens went off, and very soon after, the frightening sound of the National airplanes could be heard approaching the town. He hid with others under the bridge that crossed over "El Caño", and waited for the bombers to go away. The sound of one of them got very close, and suddenly he felt how the bridge shaked above him. They went out and saw what happened: there was a huge bomb in a big crater in the middle of the road, just above the bridge. It didn't explode, and thanks to that I'm writing this today.

This was the last day, and maybe the only one, I had a good time speaking to him. He told me about lots of other stories about the war, and when I asked him about what happened to the church, etc., he mostly said the Republicans did what they had to do. But of course, things weren't so dramatic in my village, and even if his family kept in secret many of the valuable items of the church hiding in their house, when it was discovered, there was no repression against them, and actually most of the goods were kept until after the war.

Before his stroke I hadn't visited him for over 5 weeks, and had planned going to Castelló the following Sunday. I can't avoid feeling a bit guilty that I let so much time without visiting, more when I planned sitting again with him after lunch to see if I could learn a bit more about the War. I also wanted to tell him that every now and then, my grandmother comes to mind, which was something that he sometimes asked us about. I was four days late, unfortunately.