(Readers from Florida, skip this entry as it's probably insulting that I talk about big storms when that hurricane is approaching your houses :)

On Thursday, there was a big rain storm in València, one of the biggest I've seen in my life. By pure bad luck, I was inside a bar in Benimaclet at 00:15, saying good bye to my friends when it started to rain. As I had to cycle back home and it was raining a lot, I decided to wait until it stopped. 3 hours later, I was still inside the bar, watching how the rain got heavier and the square where it's located was flooding, as the sewers couldn't deal with all the water that was coming in. A few minutes later, the water was so high that it started getting in the bar, but luckily it stopped raining so intensely and the water level started to go down again.

When I got home, I found the living room was full of water, as well as the kitchen. Cleaning that made me go to bed at 4 or so, making me a zombie next morning at work...

Last night I went to Bétera to have dinner with some team mates, and I was able to see the most impressive electric storm of my whole life. The lightnings were continuous, and the storm seemed to move towards our direction. At one point it started raining very heavily, and water started pouring into the house even with the windows closed. The extremely strong winds did the rest: we could see how huge, 20m tall trees around us just broke as if they were matches, with quite bad results for the cars that were at one side of it, which were basically crushed.

It's incredible how small and irrelevant we can feel when nature shows its real power...

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.

Last night I finally went to see Michael Moore's new documentary. I really wanted to see this film, after enjoying Bowling for Columbine and Stupid White Men a lot. And it didn't deceive me. Fahrenheit 9/11 is probably a better film than Bowling overall, and the first part, where he connects the Bushes with the Saudi elite, is very well conducted. The scene with Bush sitting in Florida during the 7 most terrible minutes in the US history, doing nothing and with an empty expression in his face was both very funny and scary. One could imagine this guy is a fool. But that was just too much.

What I didn't enjoy so much was the part where he shows the US troops in Iraq having a bad time. Moore focuses a lot in the American casualties, and sometimes gave me the impression that the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed were second class deaths. There was also a bit too much of patriotism, but as I guess the ultimate goal of this film is (besides making Michael Moore very rich) enlightening a few millions of Americans before the November election, I guess I can ignore it a bit.

In short, there aren't many facts in the film that I didn't know or assumed, but they are presented in a very intelligent way (call it populism or whatever, yesterday I was open to swallowing some of that). I haven't talked to American people on IRC about what they think, but I'd really like that F9/11 helps to kick Bush out of office. As murrayc said, these elections will have a massive impact in the lives of most of us around the world, so here's hoping they come out as most of the rest of the world (I suspect) wants.

I went to the dentist on Tuesday and the doctor insisted on what I've been trying to ignore during the last two years: I need to have my four Teeth of Wisdom extracted.

A pitty, because I never had any kind of pain as they grew in 8 years ago or so and I thought I'd have no problems with them. Unfortunately, they never got to get out entirely, and now they are basically useless for my bite, and a potential risk area for teeth decay. They have pushed the rest of the teeth out of alignment, so I may have to get dental braces to correct this. I'm defering all of this until October, though. I don't want to be bothered during Summer with this...

There were no surprises in the Alps or the time trial, and Armstrong managed to win his 6th consecutive Tour de France. That I initially wanted Ullrich to win doesn't mean I acknoweledge there was no rival for him this year, and he's, without doubt, the best rider the History of Le Tour has know. US Postal is also with difference the best team around right now. Congrats!

Related to Lance, jfleck has been blogging about the Lance Armstrong Foundation and his LiveStrong initiative to help survivors of cancer. It's very nice to see people like Lance spending some of his time in helping others while they go through what he managed to defeat years ago. It's interesting, too, as he's a fierce competitor while riding (this year he has won in time-trials, sprinting, in mountain stages, just conceeding a victory to Basso one day), but is obviously another kind of person outside the cycling world.

During some of the mountain stages, and specially in Alpe d'Huez, you could see people booing at him as he flied past them. That wasn't good either. You might not like his fierceness or the fact that he is now the best rider, but if you don't like it just don't hail or clap. One Spanish diary translated his comments about the Basque spectators in La Mongie as if "they wanted to kill him". This probably wasn't what Armstrong said, but made many people here think he was quite idiot.

Congrats to jfleck, greg and others, too!

It's not a secret that in Spain, most of the people following the Tour, and cycling in general, prefer that Armstrong doesn't win his 6th Tour de France in a row.

Unluckily for us, during the stages across the Pyrenees, he has proven to be the strongest rider once again. We had hopes that after last year's very difficult victory, this year Mayo, Ullrich, Heras and others would be able to beat him in the mountain. All the contrary... Mayo seems to be about to quit, Heras hasn't been seen anywhere near the first groups in the important summits and Ullrich just doesn't seem to keep up with Armstrong. If nothing extraordinary happens in the Alps, Armstrong will set a new record in the Tour, which will be probably unbeaten for decades. Too bad for Miguel's mark...

I know a few gnomies at the other side of the Atlantic will be happy about this, though. ;)

This morning I got an ecocardiogram done at the hospital. The good news is that the potato in my chest isn't exploding anytime soon.

Why I got my heart checked is a longish story. I started triathlon training last year, and these two years are by far the period when I have put most strain on my heart (and rest of my body). Last summer, I was arriving late to a training, and I was cycling fast to get there ASAP. There are about 6 kilometres from my father's house to the sports campus. As soon as I entered the city, I came across a closed traffic light, so I suddenly stopped after 15 minutes of extreme effort. A few seconds later, I started to feel dizzy, my sight started to blank a bit and most alarmingly, I felt my heart skip a few beats: pump-pump, pump-pump, pump-pump, ... pump, ... pump, ... pump, pump-pump, pump-pump.... Of course, I freaked out a bit, but mostly forgot about it when the lights went green and I had a completely normal training session. Since then, I've got the same symptoms 3 more times, so I told my mother and her husband, who casually are cardiologists. Even if they thought that could be quite normal in people doing lots of sports, we decided to do some tests just to make sure. I just don't want to collapse one day in the street. :)

On Monday I was auscultated by Adolfo, and he says he found something strange in the heartbeat sound. I had an electrocardiogram done, which didn't reveal anything bad, but hey, now I know I have 45 beats per minute when resting. Finally I got the ecocardiogram done at the hospital. The equipment they use for this is fun. It's nothing new, it's the same technique as the one used to look "inside" a pregnant woman to check the baby. I could see my heart in the monitor from many different angles, distinguishing the ventricles and valves. The two doctors started commenting something at one of the valves, but I couldn't get anything out of their medical speak. In the end, it turns out my aortic valve has a small fault and doesn't close completely, and some blood escapes when it shouldn't. They say it's nothing I should care about (yet?) and I can continue doing sport normally, but I need to keep an eye, and have it checked every two years, as the valve tends to open more as one ages. Someone else in the team had the same diagnosed for his heart, so I guess this is not too uncommon. This evening, to celebrate, I went to the river to run during 50 minutes.

One of the expected surprises I found when I came back from Pont the Suert was a tremendous amount of unfiltered mail (ie, spam + non-list mail I probably have to reply to). Just one year ago, the alarm bells would have gone off if my inbox reached 40 mails or so. Today, it's probably at 400 mails, some of them that I really should reply but I have no time to. If you're waiting for a reply from me and you don't get it, I suggest you remail me and insist. IRC and jabber probably works better these days, though.

It's not even July and TV news programs are only talking about the high temperatures in Spain. Some southern cities have already hit 50ºC, and I melt just thinking about it. Even worse, it seems Seville had massive blackouts which lasted all day, due to a very high demand caused by air conditioning. I definitely don't want to be in Seville in such situation.

I generally don't mind high temperatures. I will start ranting about the cold weather when Valencia is at 10 or 12ºC in winter, but heat I can handle pretty well. My Athlon, on the other hand, doesn't like heat at all, and just a few months after buying this box, I suffered a few sudden reboots. After removing the metal case, it got a lot better, but when summer comes it's not rare to experience a few reboots...

The other day, Barrapunto had a story about cooling your Athlon, with links to the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO and the athcool utility. I had no idea these things existed. As one may expect, athcool is packaged in Debian, so it was quite trivial to try it out. I'm still quite impressed by the result. With the powersaving mode on, the system temperature got reduced by 12 degrees or so, and now it's quite far from the dangerous "reboot" limit. I'm not experiencing any of the problems the docs talk about (distorted sound, lockups or performance hits). If you've got an Athlon box, I suggest you try this stuff, even if it's just to help your power bill next month.

Bedtime, at 27ºC :)

I got a pair of comments on my last entry which I guessed I could answer in a new post, specially the second one, as Amaya and I had an argument about Valencian vs. Catalan not that long ago.

Anyway, Tommy wanted to know what these exams are about. Basically, it's a test on your knowledge on the Catalan language. The "Mitjà" level was more or less easy to pass for me. The "Superior" level is the same, but with added difficulty to the questions.

The exam, which lasts for 2:30h, consists on reading comprehension, a dictation, writing, grammar, vocabulary and oral expression. Reading comprehension is easy. They give you a text and you have to summarize in 5 lines. The dictation was kind of hard, because my sister and I were sit in the last row, making it quite difficult to hear, besides the text was weird and contained quite a few words I had never heard before. In the writing exercise, they give you two options to write about (200 words). One was "Space tourism", which I picked, I don't remember what the other was. There are a lot of different exercises to test grammar, including filling in the blanks with missing glyphs and rewriting sentences to use pronoms febles. This last exercise is quite tricky in Valencia because our variant of Catalan in the area doesn't use promons febles extensively. Another difficult exercise is correcting sentences. They give you 5 sentences which contain errors gramatical or morphological errors, which you need to identify and correct. In many cases you are convinced there's nothing wrong with it. Others, you identify a barbarism in one of the words used, but it's of no use, as you don't know or remember what the correct word is. How the fuck do you say "corsé" in Catalan? The vocabulary section is quite hard too, because again some words you haven't heard in your entire life. The oral exam is just reading a text with some random subject (mine was about contamination in the food chain) and then speaking a bit about it.

Next, Jaume asked why I called it a "Valencian" exam in the blog entry, when I really mean Catalan. Jaume, the exam is quite localized. The text said "servici" (ugh) instead of "servei", "este" instead of "aquest", and the verbs were written in the Valencian fashion, "traduïx" instead of "tradueix", etc. Even if I know it's Catalan, it was full of the minor differences between the oriental branch of the language and our variant of the occidental branch, which is commonly known as Valencian. I agree I should have put some emphasis on the fact that it's the same language, in the end. I hope this answers your question, I definitely have no doubts on the boring Catalan unity debate. ;)