Stuff · I still don't have a title

Operation PANTS

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:15:00 +0000

Debian has shown, once again, how a strong community of friends and workmates it is. Here’s a success story, not related to our common duties as Debian Developers. This has nothing to do with packages, mailing lists, PO files or britney runs. This is all about pants, and the ties that bind them.

Let’s introduce this story a little. Four years ago, if memory serves right, I had the pleasure to host Clint in my flat when he visited València for a few days. When he eventually left to go back to NYC, I was at work so I couldn’t help him check he had packed everything in his bag. It took me weeks to realise he had left his yellow pyjama pants hanging behind the door of the bathroom I never use. I couldn’t help making fun about his kidnapped pyjamas on IRC, and unfortunately this has kept going for years. I would go shopping for new speedos with my mom, and wear the pants during the shopping trip, when I needed to sample some jamón ibérico, I would always wear them. When I required lounging in the sun, his pants were a constant companion. The pants became more to me than just pants I found hanging on the bathroom hook. They became a private confidant, metalic objects would fly out of people’s hands and stick themselves to the pants. I once went outside in the middle of the night, wearing only the pants, everyone who I passed in the street got a sunburn. The pants radiated joy, they cooked eggs just by standing near them, weekly they would push out perfectly formed flan that I would enjoy while wearing the pants. People’s monitors would self-degauss when I walked by. I no longer shaved yaks, they simply were shaved seeing me in these pants. The pants were magical. They are so soft, I think they are made out of a combination of baby’s bottoms, astroturf, handlotion, cotton candy, and hair from the hide of the mystical Softasaurus, a beast so soft that if you were to look at it your eyes would soften in their sockets. I am pretty sure that the Torta del Casar from Cáceres is made from the milk of the Softasaurus. As you can imagine, I became attached to these pants, we lived together, we went out together, I would always tell Clint about it of course, but we developed our own special relationship. My girlfriend became jealous.

Of course, I took care of keeping the trousers in a safe place and I always meant to return them to Clint, if I were to meet him again. I did not want to return them, because they were my precious. But if someone came from the US who could bring them back I vowed to hand them over to them to act as a proxy. However, even if it was my best intention, somehow I kept forgetting about it when friends flew to NYC. My idea was to get them posted to Clint by someone in the city, as a nice way of returning the pyjamas… but the pants held some kind of power over me, and it never happened, I don’t understand what happened.

On July 23, I went to Debconf 9 in Cáceres. In the very last moment before leaving, the pants called out to me from the small shrine I kept them in, “take me to my leader!” I could see them glimmering in the candle light, somewhat obscured by the incense I burn there, they were pulsating, I became afraid and knew that maybe I had gone too far. Clearly, it was time to return them, and so Operation PANTS officially started!

During Debconf, the pants began to exert some kind of bizarre magical influence over the attendees. They were afflicted by a mania that frantically lit up their eyes, they sparkled in freakish ways. They would get cold sweats, and shake uncontrollably. Someone puked on the printer, a host of carrion birds circled above the venue and the security guard began carrying handcuffs and a billy club. People would drool on their OpenMokos and emit soft moo’ing sounds. They talked in hurried and hushed tones while always looking at me suspiciously. Something was clearly exerting a strong force. As an example, on the day that Launchpad was released with a Free Software licence, people were crying and hugging each other in the halls. It was like the ring to Gollum, but this was pants, one pair to rule them all. More than once, while someone was eyeing me askance, another Debconf attendee would grab hold of the pants and yank them from my body, laughing maniacally. I would be left naked, without my glorious pants, and it was then, crestfallen and forlorn, that I finally realised that I had hit rock-bottom. I was addicted to these pants, and it was only when I lost them did I know how powerful of an influence they had on my life. I needed help, I was addicted to pants.

I found Micah, and we began to stage interventions to free people from the powerful grasp of the pants. We would find someone, huddling in the corner with the pants, bloodshot eyes, typically with jaundice or some other malnourishment, dried drool on their chin, etc. who was doing some unholy thing with the pants. We would then use the camera flash to temporary blind them by saturating their fully dilated pupils and in that moment, we could take back the pants. We could only touch them with rubber gloves, for fear we would be tainted. Luckily, there were many cameras around, and there is evidence of our interventions that can be used to rebate denials of these happenings. Be careful, for you will find there fellow Debianistas in compromising states, at embarrassing lows in their life, you may find yourself and remember how horrible your pants addiction was, it is an unholy sight. For some this addiction was as if Hell itself opened up began spewing out MORE hells, until the universe, the cosmos and all dimensions were infinite hells stacked on top of each other and they were each individually oozing some ghastly fluid.

Micah took the pants back to NYC, in a hermetically sealed bag, illegally transporting them across international borders. Something happened along the way, Micah could not resist one last chance with the pants. So on a warm summer night in NYC, he took them to meet their rightful owner. Everything was going well. He and his handler (Karl Fogel) met Clint at a nice, quiet restaurant in the Village. They ordered food, and things were proceeding nicely, but suddenly Micah was overcome with a desire he could not withstand. This was his last chance, just one more taste of the pants! What could possibly go wrong, he just had to visit the bathroom for a quick change into the pants, and then he could give them back. He got up, under the auspices of cleansing his hands, went to the bathroom and put on the PANTS. He stood there, shivering in bliss. He exclaimed, too loudly, “They are SO SOFT!”. It was too late, he could not take them off. He left the bathroom, with them on. He returned to the table, and Clint DID NOT NOTICE!

Micah was overcome with guilt and said, “Look what I got from Jordi!” Clint still did not notice, the pants were somehow camouflaged from Clint’s gaze. Micah, was forced to vigorously point to the pants he was wearing and say, “Its your pants!”…

… at which point Clint noticed…

… and Micah was forced to take them off in the restaurant.

― Plot and execution by jordi, micah, nattie, pabs & all the people addicted to the PANTS!

Unread email

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:15:00 +0000

I’ve just come back from my hiking trip in Andorra, just after DebConf. This year’s summer vacation has been a mix of a fun geeky week at Cáceres where I met many old friends, immediately followed by a lovely trip around the Andorran GRP, a hiking route around the borders of the Pyrenean tiny country. The last few days were spent in several Catalan towns like Bellver de Cerdanya, Figueres, Cadaqués and Girona, before getting back to València to sadly go back to work. I’ll try to write about DebConf and Andorra in length in the following days.

The downside of all of this is when you find this in your mail.log:

Aug 13 00:47:05 nubol fetchmail[3047]: 6123 messages for jordi at flatline.sindominio.net (136533726 octets).

Sigh. Please bear with me while I work through this huge pile of spam mixed with a dozen or so of legitimate email. :/

Chimo Bayo... live!

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:17:00 +0000

Wow, in an hour or so I’ll be heading to The Mill, where the unique Chimo Bayo will be performing live. HUA!

Valencian children and foreign languages

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:52:00 +0000

Recently, GozRita unveiled the names of our two Falleretes majors for 2008’s Falles festivities. All the free newspapers did some extensive coverage, with reports on who they are and what they do.

Qué Valencia interviewed the little Fallera major, and then posted this:

Little Victoria learns Valencian

So, Victoria Blázquez speaks English and Valencian “nearly perfectly”. Great! I think having newspapers treat Valencian as if it were just another foreign language that students are forced to learn is a great example of the dark future our language will face in just a few generations.

You might get an email from me tonight

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 23:39:00 +0000

Sometime in August, I said I would watch the Inbox Zero talk later on that day. Well, I finally did today. And I’m ready to mass-murder my (now not so) fat inbox folder and start from scratch, and becoming a good boy.

In fact, I’ve been on probation for a few weeks. While I wasn’t watching the talk (which is pretty insightful and fun, and useful if you also have these horrid mail handling problems) I did roll up my sleeves a few times and worked on reducing the problem. After a few rounds of fighting, things were looking slightly better. I deleted TONS of spam which still was sitting in there. I deleted entire threads of list mail which for some reason wasn’t being filtered properly. I archived a lot of random, misc email. I even replied to some job offers, for a change. I fixed my .procmailrc a little to get rid of lots of useless stuff that appears in my mail. It got better, but not entirely better.

I went from the 6600~ which was probably the figure when I said “Enough!” to around 2580. It’s still a lot, and I can still get rid of a lot more with easy pattern searches in mutt. The good news is that, for the first time in ages, the number of emails in the mailbox has stayed stable for more than a month. I tell you: I’m proud!

So Merlin gets asked in the talk what to do when you’ve been a naughty boy for a long time, and you’ve ended up with this HUGE mailbox you can’t handle anymore. His answer was what some people suggested in blog comments: put it aside, start from zero. Merlin calls it mail-DMZ, and that’s probably what I’ll do in a few hours, admittedly with a sentiment of guilt deep in my chest. And from that point, I’ll have my mailbox be a TODO list. Delete. Defer. Delegate. Respond. Do. Simple!

Other Planet Debian participants like joeyh commented that something that really helps is reducing the number of times you poll for email. For me, that means

set daemon 1800 # Pool every 30 minutes

when it was 5 minutes before. I hope I won’t find myself issuing awaken commands often…

I remember when, more than five years ago, having more than 100 mails made me feel bad and go cleanup. After some vacation, it went up to 150. Then Christmas came along, 300, until I found myself nearing 7000 last summer.

Before moving my junk to a demilitarised mailbox, I’m having some fun replying to some email. The first one in my mailbox is from a member of a Catalan “Mallach” family.

From: Conchita Broquetas <familia_mallach_broquetas@yahoo.es>
Subject: Hola!
To: jordi@sindominio.net
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 16:55:17 +0200 (CEST)

who discovered there was a “Jordi Mallach” other than his brother in the Internet. Apparently we had an exchange on where our families came from (Mallach is all but a common surname… anywhere, and my family has always wondered where it came from).

So that’s more than 6 years ago. I think I’d love to get a reply to some email sent by me years ago which has been sitting for years in a mailbox, because “I need to reply to this sometime”. I think the Mallach-Broquetas are getting one tonight.

If you think I’m dumping random thoughts on a vim buffer, it’s probably due to me feeling sad today. Sorry, but I feel like typing, and I don’t have a typewriter with me. Speaking of sad, nothing beats the next email which sat for some dramatic 6 months in my messy inbox until I found out in the worst of the possible scenarios. Let’s go back to late February, 2004, when I had no job, and I didn’t have a clue on what to do with my life.

From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: New project to discuss
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:33:51 +0000

[...]
I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
[...]

I’m not sure if I totally missed it as it came in, or I skimmed through it and thought ”WTF?! Dude on crack” or I just forgot “I need to reply to this email”, but I’d swear it was the former. Not long after, no-name-yet.com popped up, the rumours started spreading around Debian channels. Luckily, I got a job at LliureX two months later, where I worked during the following 2½ years, but that’s another story. I guess it was July or so when Ubuntu was made public, and Mark and his secret team organised a conference (blog entries [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), just before the Warty release, and I was invited to it, for the same reasons I got that email.

During that conference, probably because Mark sent me some email and I applied a filter to get to it, I found the lost email, and felt like digging a hole to hide for a LONG while. I couldn’t believe the incredible opportunity I had missed. I went to Mark and said “hey, you’re not going to believe this”, and he did look quite surprised about someone being such an idiot.

I wonder if I should reply to his email today…

Inbox Zero

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:26:00 +0000

jordi@nubol:~$ countmail SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR!

SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR MAIL MESSAGES!

HAHAHAHAHA!

I’ll watch the talk this evening.

Dudes

Tue, 29 May 2007 19:21:00 +0000

19:12 < Данило> jordim: btw, you should look up what 'dude' means in Serbian :)
19:13 < Данило> jordim: (old slang for 'boobs', but don't tell anyone I told 
 you that)

(danilo’s name obfuscated in cyrillic so he can’t blame me)

Update:

20:52 < kaol> jordi: dude, you fail at obfuscation

Frenando Alfonso visits València

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 10:02:00 +0000

So last monday, the F1 team “Vodafone McLaren Mercedes <youraddhere>” unveiled their new car, new drivers and all the stuff in València. Many Valencians are still wanki^Wexcited about the event.

Our Great Leader Paco Camps and his Great Team of Consellers prepared a urban racing circuit emulating Monaco, so people could enjoy Fernando Alonso’s driving skillz right next to their homes. To accomplish this, one of the most important arteries of the city was closed during 8 or more hours, during a working day, when transit is busiest. And better yet, 1,200,000€ of public money, our money, was spent to set up a show which basically was a huge advertisement of a private team.

This is València though, the land of “mosatros, més!”, and Valencians are pretty much happy with how their taxes are used, or how the city is quickly becoming a huge circus, after 12 (soon to be extended to 16) years of Partido Popular. I can’t wait for the 32nd America’s Cup!

If anything positive, this show may change the name of the bridge where the Pope did his stuff last Summer (at the time, it was closed to transit during 3 months). Until now popularly called “El Puente del Papa”, hopefully it’ll morph to “El Puente de Alonso”, at least until the next show. If I need to choose between Ratzinger and Alonso, hey, give me Alonsomania!

Phone-before-SMTP

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 18:04:00 +0000

Today I woke up with a strong determination to do some badly needed house cleaning. A series of rushed travels have left a few rooms full of stuff all over the place, after I emptied a bag or two to be able to pack on time.

Just before going to Tunisia, I decided my wallet was way too fat so I got rid of shopping receipts and other random shit I had in it. That included quite a few PGP keys from people I had been collecting in previous travels, and I had forgotten about.

So, armed with my willingness to get rid of all of those dust puppies, first thing I find in the living room is the pile of wallet papers, and my clever procrastinating mind apparently thought it was time to postpone real cleaning; instead I needed to sit down and sign all of those really old PGP keys.

Many of you reading this will have got a few emails from me this morning. It was about time! Some of the silly strips of paper dated back to the Open Source World Conference 2004 in Málaga, when a decent group of Debian Developers gathered in a really small hacking room and talked about some Debian topics.

Signing the keys has let me identify a few non-revoked ids which really should be, as the accounts are no longer valid, etc.; many others have greylisted me for a while and finally accepted my email. There was one mail recipient which may have gone a bit too far with the anti-spam policies, though:

9323170A74B 4007 Sun Jan 14 17:55:38 jordi@nubol.oskuro.net
(host mail-dtag.reichmann.net[62.104.43.214] said: 421 call 09001000057 for admin support (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
 alexander@schmehl.info

Alexander, I’m not doing calls to Germany to send your key, but I can resend if you want, once you open up your mail server… (my tries to knoepix.org also failed).

It seems I have misplaced a few keys from the Ubuntu Summit in Sydney, but I think I know where to find that sheet. More in 2 or 3 years!

PS: dust puppies are alive and well, they managed to survive yet another tough day.

GECS, the GEGL's happy cousin

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 11:52:00 +0000

Via Mako and Mika I learned about the discovery of a living close relative of GNOME’s GEGL. Her name is GECS for obvious reasons, lives in China and she seems to be very happy with her blue daddy.

Cow or goat, equally cute!

(Brought to you by yet another shocking URL posted by mika)

Just because I love trains

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:22:00 +0000

Metro lines I have used:

Got at b3co.com!

My battery visits the West Coast

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 17:54:00 +0000

Apple has announced a new battery recall program. Last time there was one affecting powerbooks, mine wasn’t on the list, although I thought my battery was clearly overheating. This time, things are quite different.

This computer is eligible for the Battery Exchange Program.
This battery qualifies for the Battery Exchange Program.

The good news is I get a brand new battery. The bad news is that I don’t know how much time it’ll take.

New SMS received

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 00:27:00 +0000

Message 1

I am in Spain!
What a fine country.
+1310XXXXXXX
2006/07/16 18:10:18

Dear sender,
I’m happy about you being so enthusiastic about your visit to Spain. I would probably be able to share the moment with you if I had the slightest clue about your identity.
Have a great night at nearly 30°C,
Jordi

Annoying software features

Sat, 20 May 2006 22:51:00 +0000

There are programs that get installed with defaults that annoy me day after day, but I never care to do anything to fix the configuration files across all the boxes where I use it.

For example, emacs in Debian creates stupid backup~ files by default, which after a while accumulate in my homedirs.

It’s so cool when these backups I always grumble at save 2 hours of work, after misstyping “rm” instead of “less”…

Siemens-BenQ mobile and Catalan support

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 14:29:00 +0000

While Catalan in the computer industry slowly advances, thanks to volunteer efforts and Free Software, it’s difficult to see any sign of improvement in other areas of the technology world.

Mobile phones are not an exception. In Catalunya, many people own a Siemens, Alcatel or Sagem mobile phone because they are the only companies that include Catalan as an option for their terminals. When I first got my mobile phone one and a half years ago, I chose an Alcatel, and while the phone was more or less ok, and Catalan was present in the interface, it lacked some Catalan characters like “ò”, “ú”, “í” or “ç” in the input system. The battery wasn’t that good, and it was a bit slow at times, but in general I was happy.

Three weeks ago, I decided to switch to Telefónica’s mobile phone provider, Movistar, because Vodafone has no network coverage in my mother’s town, Vall de Almonacid, where I spend many weekends and vacations, and I was getting tired of my mobile turning into a plastic brick when I went there. I hoped the switch would be painless.

As people talked positively about Siemens, I went for one of their free Siemens offerings: the Siemens AP75. Ugh, fellow Catalans: DON’T DO IT. So, it seems Siemens has sold or merged their mobile division with BenQ. The girl in the shop said one of the cool new features was better battery lifetime. This terminal was advertised as having Bluetooth, Infrared and other goodies.

As soon as I got it (and couldn’t give it back), I found out the extensive language list in BenQ mobile phones doesn’t include Catalan anymore. Actually, it just offers Spanish and English. Had I known this, I would have quickly got a Nokia, which I believe are the best phones out there. But I’m silly enough not to pick the best just to support some practices, in the same way I won’t but nVidia unless they do something about their drivers.

Anyway, ignoring the lack of Catalan fact, the mobile was supossed to be quite good, or so I thought, until I tried to transfer my contacts list via Bluetooth. My mobile phone wasn’t able to find other devices at all, and the interface doesn’t list IrDA at all. What’s the story? Yesterday I had the opportunity to go to the Movistar shop, and I was told a tale about the mobile phone having those features built in, but they are deactivated by the telco.

This is pretty difficult to believe, and googling around, I haven’t seen any proof about the AP75 having any Bluetooth support for anything other than voice transmission (ie, for use with headphones, etc). It plain sucks.

So, dear Catalan readers, if you’re getting new phones, avoid these BenQ-Siemens idiots, as they don’t have a clue about Catalan. Either choose Alcatel, Sagem, or one of the older real Siemens mobiles.

Softcatalà has a Catalan mobile phones Wiki page with detailed information of the current situation. I’ll have to update it to warn about current Siemens practices. In a happy future, Nokia will hopefully support Catalan and things will be a lot easier.

A unexpected defeat

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 10:40:00 +0000

Last week, one of the pedals in my bike broke severily after some weeks of problems. One day, it suddenly fell off the crank, nearly making me fly in the middle of Blasco Ibáñez, a big avenue with dense traffic. Anyway, since Friday I can’t cycle until I find a replacement pedal and crank for my old bicycle, so I had to go back to the annoying Metro.

On Monday, I used the magic card as usual, and so I did on Tuesday. When I left office and headed back home, something terrible happened, though. I went down to the Metro station, and introduced the Blue Gold. Instead of the usual processing sound, I was greeted with a loud beep, and my card went out through the “rejected” hole. The display read very clearly:

BILLETE AGOTADO

Surprised, I tried again. Oh no! I heard the train coming, so I used the emergency ticket and went in. A feeling similar to despair mixed with fear started to form in my chest while I ran down the stairway. During the travel, I thought this was just temporary, and other cancelling doors would accept the Blue Gold as usual.

When I got to the Aragón station, I tried going out with the magic card, with the same sad result. Defeated!

As I suspected, the card wasn’t infinite at all, it just had an awesome number of rides on it (I think, in the end it must have been something like 270 or so), and I ran out on Tuesday, after 13 months of use.

On Wednesday, with my bicycle still broken, I had to go to the Metro again, and instead of just going through the gates, I had to go the vending machine to get one of those normal, ridiculous 10 ride ticket for 5.40€. Today, I’ve already used half of it, and the value of the Blue Gold is showing very clearly.

Ah well, I guess a lottery like that could not last forever…

Visual bomb

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:37:00 +0000

What do you get if you mix religion and the military?

One year of Blue Gold

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:32:00 +0000

Today, my magic metro card is one year old.

When I bought it twelve months ago, I never thought I’d be so lucky. I don’t know exact figures, but I think I’ve done 200 more train rides that it should have let me, and the card should have expired the 1st of February. But it didn’t, and I’ve been using it over and over throught the year. I only was very, very careful when inserting the card or storing it in my wallet so it wouldn’t bend or be damaged in some way… it’s worth a lot of money!

While my primary means of transportation is the bicycle once again, having this handy is a great way to save maybe 25€ every month.

The Blue Gold Rush is eternal, although time does leave marks on it.

The magic card, when I found its magic properties

After some hundred uses…

Go on, my blue friend!

I should find someone with equipment that can copy the data in the magnetic band. That would rock.

Pop!

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 10:53:00 +0000

Steinar, I don’t know if after our little adventure people picked up the phrase and started using it with the second or third meaning in that dictionary. :)

mdz found a great place that explains where this “Pop the trunk” stuff comes from. DO IT.

Fernando Alonso

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 18:47:00 +0000

I am, officially, FED UP OF THIS NAME today. I wish I had a protective bubble that could isolate me from all the Alonsomania tomorrow.

Pornstar day

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:43:00 +0000

Ahoy!

15:27 < Guerrrrin> abrotman: it's not talk like a pornstar day
15:27 < Guerrrrin> thank goodness

Aye, but we could be havin’ a Pornstar tide too!

Domestic pets

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 22:12:00 +0000

When I looked at the definition for “cockroach” in dict.org, I thought I found an entry that was either meant to be a bad joke by one of the WordNet database authors or some kind of easter egg in the dict web interface. It took me three reads to realise my error.

I really, absolutely dislike cockroaches. The thought of having them as my domestic pets made me feel ill.

It's the first time I do this

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:16:00 +0000

But I like this one a bit more than the average. :)

Oh yes

JM International is back!

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:33:00 +0000

Our avid readers had been waiting for this for months. The wait is now over!

Jacobo did it again, and JM International issue #2 has hit the Internet. Enjoy!

NEWSFLASH: Dinosaurs are now extinct

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 09:41:00 +0000

Researchers from the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula have just informed that after many, many years of populating Galicia, dinosaurs are finally extinct in the area.

“It’s a very special moment”, said one of the scientists, “as we had expected this to happen many, many years ago, but the last specimen, a small ‘Fragasaurio’, never gave up”.

Local journalists try to analyze the new situation, as it’s the first time without dinosaurs running around since the Galician autonomy started.

“We… we feel like a void. This land has been ruled by dinosaurs since the late 30’s and suddenly, they are no more!”

Even if it’s expected that some members of the “Friends of the Dinosaurs” tribe will whine loudly about this for a few days or weeks, nothing can stop the Galicians from having new leaders who might bring some changes to the area. Congratulations!

International!

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:58:00 +0000

After dato unveiled the existence of the JM magazine, its editor jacobo got an overwhelming number of subscription requests and inquiries about the dates for a second issue.

I’m sorry to announce that the reason for the delay of the new issue was that JM has morphed into JM International, which now targets a larger audience in the Internet. Oh dear.

The French say "Non"!

Mon, 30 May 2005 02:00:00 +0000

Coming back with Rambonabo from the cinema, where I watched Episode III for the second time (this time I didn’t pay for the ticket), we learned from the radio the results for the French referendum.

I was pretty confident about “No” winning, and I’m happy to see it was by a quite acceptable margin, given how high participation was. I don’t know how the process continues now that a key member has rejected the current text. One would hope France would start pushing for changes in the Constitution with the goal of writing a new version that makes some people that today voted no happy, and that would be voted again. What doesn’t sound too “democratic” is what Giscard says needs to be done: to vote over and over and over again until the “Oui” option wins.

I’m still a bit perplexed at Spain’s results for the same vote. That did suck a bit. Not only for the final result, but for the overwhelming percentage of votes supporting “Sí” in our referendum. Were the 80% of the (not that many) people who voted informed about what’s in the Constitution? Do they know that if they find out a bit later, after it’s approved, that they don’t really like this or that bit, it’s virtually impossible to change it?

27

Sun, 15 May 2005 20:01:00 +0000

Ok, it’s this day again. I feel like last time happened very recently. This last year has been full of new experiences.

Just two weeks before turning 26 I got my current job at the Conselleria de Cultura to work on LliureX. This has been my first “real job”, so there have been quite a lot of experiences involved.

LliureX probably meant the end of my very active triathlon activities. Not long after starting there, demotivation appeared and I started to train less and less, until, in Oxford, I decided I would try to do a “different” season this year. The truth is that I haven’t tried regularly at all, and still haven’t participated in any competition.

Oxford takes me to the third of the big events of the last year. From not having travelled too much in my life, to a sudden burst of travel opportunities throughout the year. It started with Canonical inviting me to their first “official” conference in Oxford, for two weeks over August. I also was in Manresa for a few days during the summer. In December, I was happy to be invited to the second Ubuntu Conference, this time in Mataró, making the travelling not so exciting (just about 400 kilometres away :) but the conference itself was very nice, including Deaths in a bag my first experience with the Ubuntu virus, and the very early morning runs with the incredible kiko.

The 5th of March I went with Carlos to London, for more fun with the Launchpad/Rosetta people. Soon after, on late March, I took my first vacation in years when I went with Brande and Núria to the Telemark, in Norway, where I spent a fantastic week. A full blog entry on that is still being scribbled, *sigh*. Soon after I was hopping into a plane to Sydney, after a crazy travel planning. Before all of this fun I had been a handful of times outside of Spain, so I guess this year really made a difference in that regard.

Other big things happening during the year were me finally moving out to a flat with two friends, now that my economic independence let me do it. The lack of triathlon training, and the free time this provided, might have had something to do with the recent improvements in my relations with the other gender, which has had me quite happy for a few months now.

I’m not looking forward to getting closer and closer to being 30 years old, but if next year is going to be as good as this one, I’ll have little to moan about…

No more wisdom

Wed, 11 May 2005 21:09:00 +0000

Today was the last chapter of a story that started quite ok, then got a bit worse, and ended with the last of my Wisdom teeth extracted.

Again, the operation went quite ok, although this time, the doctor couldn’t just cut the tooth in two and extract both pieces separately… he had to open with a scalpel, take it out and sew the crater. Oww.

Now I sit in front of the monitor, feeling how the pain killers are wearing off, and imagine how long tonight will be… :/ Officially I can’t spit, wash my mouth or eat anything hot. Unofficially I basically can’t eat much for now. It’s great timing, as I have a dinner today, another one with my cousins tomorrow, and in a few days, hopefully a birthday party.

Next steps in my dentist adventure is probably to get some very nice looking bracers. Oh yes!

ANZAC day

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 05:15:00 +0000

Throughout the Ubuntu/Canonical conferences I’ve become used to hearing some Aussies speaking, and learned a bit about their funny accent (yeah, don’t comment about my English accent, that is out of the question). I still have trouble understanding a few words due to the difference in vowel pronunciation, but I thought I was more or less used to the accent.

This morning I went to an Information Desk as soon as the customes dudes let me out, to ask what would be the best way of reaching this hotel at that time. When suggested taking a taxi, the woman said that there would be very little traffic today, as they were celebrating a National Holiday called Insect Day. “Wow, you’ve got a holiday called ‘Insect day’, that’s cool!”, I told her, thinking it’s a day these Aussies dedicate to their wildlife, and wandered off to the taxi area. Just before getting there, I thought “good, at least until now I haven’t had any problem with understanding their accent”…

During the taxi drive from the airport to the hotel, the taxi driver again started talking about Insect Day, and that many areas in Sydney would be closed for the parade. I asked him why the holiday was called like this, and he said he didn’t know the details, but was something related to WWWII (while it’s really related to WWWI). This was puzzling: they have a big parade for Insect Day, which is something related to the World War?

A bit before arriving to the hotel I finally saw a traffic panel announcing blocked areas for ANZAC Day, and suddenly everything made a bit more sense (still didn’t know what Anzac was, but it obviously wasn’t about ants and bees).

End of sprint

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 18:21:00 +0000

The last two weeks have been quite complicated. Very little sleep, lots of stuff to finish at work and the deadline quickly approaching…

I don’t think I have been so stressed in many years, some days I got back home and thought about getting some pills to calm down. Thank you for that, OpenOffice!

So, after our longest non-week-end, the LliureX team has created the ISO of the CD that will be distributed in the Valencian Free Software Congress which will take place in Castelló early next month. To get here, I’ve done around 10 builds of OpenOffice.org in our quest to add Valencian support. The fight was long, and OOo nearly won, but luckily Sergio joined ZuleX’s OOo division in the last moment and we managed to get rid of a small bug consisting in menubars speaking German instead of Valencian.

Besides the OOo headaches, it’s time ditch MozillaTranslator in favour of any of the alternatives available, because MT really, really sucks and fucked my migration from Thunderbird 0.9 to 1.0.

Anyway, it’s been two tough weeks, but I think we got there more or less. After being through this, I guess I cannot envy any Canonical employee two weeks before a Ubuntu release, if they have to work like this before their release day. I guess this happens everywhere actually, but it’s the first time I go through it…

This crazy weekend also held me in València, when I was expected to participate in a round table about translation tools during the III Jornades of Softcatalà in Barcelona, to speak about Rosetta. I’m sorry for not being able to attend, but I tried my best. :/

Now I’ll get back to “normal life”. I’ve got a ton of mail and IRC queries which I couldn’t reply to. Marga et all, please try again now. :)

The Producers

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 18:25:00 +0000

Mark invited the few Canonical people (Matt, Scott, Scott and Carlos, plus me) that were around this appartment to the theatre yesterday evening. We chose to see The Producers, a comedy musical that apparently has had very good press.

We sat in a quite good spot, in the first floor ring, and could watch all the play in detail. Scott was telling me that people at the back seats of the second floor really need to use the goggles available at the seats (of course, for a price, as everything in London), or you can’t even distinguish the faces of the actors.

The argument was nice and we all had a good laughs. I was suprised to be able to follow all the argument without missing anything, as I thought I would have trouble understanding the song lyrics, but the bits I missed (mostly during songs sung by many people) weren’t important to understand the rest.

We got out of the theatre pretty late for the UK, at half past ten, which is even late for Spain. Gladly Scott was around and guided us to a pizza restaurant, where we had dinner before taking the Tube back to Earl’s Court to sleep.

Arriving there at midnight, I still found shit to do at the laptop until 2AM, which made me a semi-zombie for most of today’s morning. It appears I wasn’t too calm tonight again, as Carlos suffered my teeth grinding from 6 to 7AM. I need to get that looked at by the dentist…

One of the things that have surprised me most of London was the incredible amount of teatres and musicals that are going on at the same time… the Underground stations are full of posters with many different shows. You certainly don’t get in València, where we have just a handful of working theatres, and normally plays aren’t musical. Among the advertised shows, you can find many different kinds of shows: from stuff like The Producers to a representation of Winnie the Pooh. Don’t ask me how you represent this live, in a scenario, but it can be both very funny and crappy. :)

Daf, as everything else I’ve proposed during these five days, refused to go see it. He also refused to, from memory, do the following activities with me, who wanted to know a bit more of London:

take the Tube to go to Manchester or Liverpool one of the evenings, “because they are in Zone 1,500 and your card is only for card 1”
climb up to one of those roofs with many chimneys to sing the Mary Poppins song, “because I don’t know that song” (OMG, he hasn’t seen Mary Poppins)
on our way back from lunch on Monday, to sit down in a bench in the street until 20:00 when we would go for lunch. He was unable to give a valid reason to refuse this offer

So thanks to daf this trip to the UK wasn’t more enjoyable that it has been. I will take revenge next week, though, as he’ll be in Valencia at Carlos’ place for a two-week Rosetta hacking sprint. If he proposes jumping off the Micalet with a parachute, I will find a poor excuse and say no.

Guerrers de Xi'an

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 19:11:00 +0000

After being in Barcelona, during the suspicious Fòrum de les Cultures, and after in Madrid, the Terracota Warriors from Xi’an exposition came to València. The entrance is free for everyone, but there are long queues. I was lucky enough to get 3 tickets for a guided tour during the first day of the show, last Friday. These tickets get you a guide who explains the details about all the pieces, and also quite important, gets you past the queue. :)

I invited Kiko and his workmate Marisol to come with me. A few other members of my family also came with their own tickets, including my 93 year old grandfather, who didn’t seem to have many problems to walk all over the museum without getting too tired.

Marisol, Kiko and I enjoyed the stuff, despite our guide being completely unprofessional… if someone was lucky to understand what she was saying (you could only do that if you were straight in front of her) and then asked something to her, instead of just answering “I don’t know, sorry”, she would invent something, which in some cases sounded quite funny.

The figures from the Qin dynasty were quite big and and impressive, while the objects and figures from the Han dynasty were smaller but a lot more varied. One interesting object was a female masturbation toy made in bronze, and quite big in size.

While the exposition was very interesting, for some reason I expected more. I had seen many pictures from the excavation which showed hundreds of big figures in huge trenches, and I thought the exposition would have a big number of them. But there were only a few 10 big Qin figures and another area with more Han stuff. This doesn’t mean by any means that it’s not worth visiting, on the contrary, if you’re somewhere near València at some point from now to April 1st, you should consider finding some time to visit els Guerrers.

Blue Gold never expires

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 14:33:00 +0000

One month ago I blogged about my awesomely b0rked Metro ticket and how I was being able to use Valencia’s expensive metro system nearly for free. I also said that this “gift” would expire at the end of the month, as fees change on January and the old tickets are invalidated.

Yesterday, it started raining a lot in València, and when I woke up today it hadn’t stopped. The rain was heavy enough to make me not want to cycle to work, so I had the first opportunity to find out if the ticket still worked after February 1st. At the station, I inserted my card with little hope, and 1 second later the gates opened. It seems Mako’s prediction about the card being so fucked up that it would continue working no matter the date was right.

This totally rocks. The Metro here is expensive enough that it hurts to take it 4 or 5 times a week. Luckily I’m still on the Blue Gold Rush, and will have no problems with using it until the cardboard ticket breaks apart after too much usage. Others might think I’m stealing, though. :)

Cycling again

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 23:46:00 +0000

Seeing I wasn’t getting the missing tyres my city bicycle is missing, Kiko gave me a bike that was at his parents’ house, and nobody has used in a long time. Thanks!

So I’ve been cycling again for over a week, and it feels great after 2 months. I had forgotten the amount of freedom an old bicycle can provide. No more caring about how late the Metro will be. No more borrowing my mum’s car to go here or there just because when I have to go back there’s no more public transport, no more not knowing how much it will take to get to places…

It’s simply one of those things you don’t really realise you are missing that much until you get back to doing it again, and makes your days a bit more happy.

I need a name for the new bicycle, of course. I will probably stick to something original like the Fletxa daurada, to match the names of her sisters Fletxa verda and Fletxa blanca. If you think giving names to bicycles is silly, well… I won’t argue. :)

Catching up on Sindominio

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 01:29:00 +0000

Lately, my mail problems have not been only my pure lack of time to read it. My main e-mail address is jordi@sindominio.net, provided by Sindominio, an organisation which aims to create a space in the net for social and antagonistic organisations which don’t want to directly depend on a company to do this. Some members of the more than 130 collectives that are in Sindominio participate in the Sindominio virtual assembly, which rules how the project works and what it does. Sindominio has celebrated its 5th anniversary just a few weeks ago.

My lack of time has prevented me of spending time on Sindominio work (mostly admin stuff), and recently, I stopped reading the lists on a daily basis, but on batches every few weeks. This has the big disadvantage that when there’s a crisis (it’s not that uncommon to have the Police call someone in the assembly to ask for some suspicious content in one of the hosted websites), I might not know about it until two weeks later.

Today I catched up on really old Sindominio mail, and learned a few things. It seems that ECN, one of the Italian organisations on which we based our project, is about to shut down. As Miquel explained in his post, hopefully the end of ECN will mean that people start other projects with the same spirit in Italy, or join other existing projects to make them better. I’ve also learned that YOMANGO keeps going without problems. That was great to read about!

Currently, Sindominio has two servers hosted at the Infoespai in Barcelona. Unfortunately, the servers don’t grow but Sindominio keeps adding more and more content, and during the last few months we’ve been having big scalability issues with our older machine, fanelli, despite we moved the mail processing out to the more powerful box a while ago. Right now, it receives mail after it’s been cleaned out of viruses and spam in the other box, ada, and runs an imapd for our users and collectives. It hosts the static web pages server, and other minor services like jabber and IRC. Still, the load is too big for this box, and during the last days, it seems to have crossed the line and we are facing OOM killer genocide every few hours.

The other box has suddenly become quite busy, and results in clamav dying every now and then, which makes our mail get stuck in a huge queue. Thus, I’ve been getting my mail in batches and in weird ordering, which makes it even more difficult to read. While we work on finding out what’s going on with these boxes, there’s talk about buying a really good box for Sindominio, which will require some serious fundraising as we’ve never done.

It doesn’t help that on Tuesday, when I got home, I discovered that my main desktop box had died. Luckily, it was just a burned power supply, which I could replace in a few hours.

I assume I have missed some mails lately. If you are waiting for a reply from me and it’s not happening, please, send it again. Currently, the amount of stuff in my main mailbox is over 1000 mails waiting for action to be taken. Ugh!

This laptop is sweet

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 18:13:00 +0000

I had been thinking about getting a laptop for over one year, but never decided to do it because I had gripes on most of the models I saw here and there, or when I saw a model that seemed to be more or less decent, someone else would come and told me “No way dude!”. So I just kept saving money without knowing what to buy.

Recently, I’ve been travelling more than usual: Málaga, Oxford, Mataró, etc. and during the Free Software conferences I’ve attended I saw more and more people with Apple laptops. Being used to see the normal screens in the average PC laptops, I thought these 15" powerbooks were fabulous, and started to think seriously about getting one. Very recently I finally made up my mind and settled on one of them instead of a Thinkpad, pushed by carlos and sjoerd, with elmo’s approval at Mataró, and sto and Pablo at work, and finally knew what to buy exactly. It would be a 15" Powerbook with a 1.5Ghz G4 and a Superdrive.

During mako’s stay in València, he suggested that he could buy the computer for me in the states and I could get Paula, one of Kiko’s workmates, to bring it back just after New Year. This would apparently save me big money, because the Dollar is currently quite fucked up with respect to the Euro…

On Tuesday, I picked up the laptop at Paula’s house, who told me how one of the idiots at the airport nearly tossed the laptop bag as if it was normal luggage, and stared at her like saying “hey, calm down dude!” when she started shouting at him.

The laptop is a US model, so I either need to get the keyboard replaced (not so difficult) or get used to it, and get a new power cord, as the plug is for the US plug model, and I currently have to use an adapter. Besides the keyboard, the hard drive couldn’t be upgraded in time for Paula’s departure to the faster option, which is a pitty, but it’s not that expensive to replace at some point in the future if I really care.

The first night, I had no Debian install CD to start setting my new system, so I played a bit with OS X. Lovely, but after a few hours, I got the same sensation of unproductiveness that you get with Windows: you have nothing useful installed by default, except for a browser and mail program that you don’t really want to use. And I wasn’t going to bother with Fink so early. So in the morning, I started setting up Debian, and after solving a few issues with X, I’ve got a GNOME desktop up and running. I feel clumsy, though.

14:19 <@jordim> I feel kind of like a newbie these days.
14:19 <@jordim> can't type, can't config X on my own, can't middle click.
14:19 <@jordim> wtf!
14:19 < sjoerd> you just entered the world of !i386 dude :)

But it’s good. :) I need to find a new pcmcia wireless card for now, and need to transfer all my stuff to the new home. I also need to urgently rethink my handling of the stuff I have in /home, because the current incarnation is a big mess, with more than 500 files and directories in the toplevel directory…

I seriously need to rethink my mail handling too, because now I’ll want to have a main mail server and some way to sync the mail into and from the laptop. Given mako advertises his greatest talent a lot, I guess I will ask him for suggestions on how to fix my mail setup. Currently it’s so bad, that my inbox is about to hit 1000 unclassified mails, many of them which need replying…

The Blue Gold Rush

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 18:17:00 +0000

Remember when my bike was stolen two months ago? I was pretty pissed off, and I still remember. :)

The first thing I had to do was buy a 10 trip ticket for València’s Metro system. These tickets are quite expensive, more than in Madrid or Barcelona, but fortunately I normally can go everywhere cycling and don’t use the Metro much. Actually, when the bike was stolen, it had been months since the last time I took it, but I relied on its unreliable system for a week or two while I got a new bike to get going again.

The first days were a bit painful, because there’s not that many trains as in other cities, so it might take either 15 minutes or 45 to do the same distance, depending on your luck with connections and timetables.

After the first week, something changed in my perception of the service. Once I had used my first five trips, I went into a Metro station and inserted the ticket. When it came out, I noticed it had marked over the fifth slot again. That happened a few more times; then the cancelling machines started printing lines somewhere not on the ticket, and finally I got my gift, when on another trip the cancelling machine said I had 128 trips left. Woot! That means free rides for a looong time. The 128 figure is suspicious. Once, I saw one of these machines open, and it was running MS-DOS, so who knows what kind of overflow my card might have caused…

I could take advantage of this when mako came visit València and we shared the ticket for a week. We started calling it the “BLUE GOLD”, and people would look at us oddly inside the train when he said “YOU’VE GOT BLUE GOLD, MAN!”. The effects have gotten better lately: it now never marks anything and when I use it to open the gates to get out of the Metro stations, sometimes the machines go bonkers and leave the doors open, while their display reads Error, allowing people that haven’t paid for a ticket an easy escape from the station. :)

The bad news is that this will end on January 31, as the fees have changed and the old tickets will be obsoleted starting on February. I wonder if I can easily find someone that uses the Metro more than twice a day and sparing the money would help his economy a lot. Or I could try to be selfish and sell it. 51¢ x ∞ sounds like a good deal.

While this happened, I didn’t manage to fix up my new bicycle, and I managed to go through the worst part of winter underground. Hopefully I’ll start riding it again next week, as this has been the longest period of time with me not riding bicycles at all in the last 9 years and you end up missing it.

Videogame player ethics

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 04:29:00 +0000

I have been wasting a few good hours tonight playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 under MAME while others re-edit the Tetrinet addiction that hit Debian a few years ago already. But this is completely offtopic.

A few minutes ago I was working on packaging Freeciv 2.0beta6 for Debian and realised I have refused to do a few things while playing due to ethical issues.

Freeciv is a free clone of the good and famous DOS “Civilization II” game, for UNIX and Windows. The player starts with a small civilisation and the goal of the game is to either defeat all the enemy civilisations or launching a spaceship that reaches Alpha Centauri before any other civilisation. You do this through population and military growth, and technology advances.

At some point of the game, you discover Nuclear Fission, and soon enough your people develops a nuclear bomb. Using a nuclear bomb against another civilisation has a few effects:

your population will be so pissed at you that you might face a civil war or big strikes that damage your economy.
the area targetted by the nuclear bomb will be very contaminated and this will contribute to damaging the global environment.
your enemy will be quite fucked up

Well, it’s a game and all, but until now, I have not been able to use the bomb against my enemies, human or computer-controlled. I haven’t been able because “it is not right”, and I think if I did, I would just quit the game and start a new one. This sense of not being a total asshole while playing Freeciv has also got me to invest more researchers into developing recycling technologies to keep my contamination levels low and not contribute to global warming instead of trying to discover new, more powerful war devices that would help me not being crushed by nearby civilisations.

I guess this makes me a bad Freeciv player. :)

Happy 2005

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 15:02:00 +0000

Another year is gone… 2004 has been quite good for me: a job, another triathlon session, being more happy than unhappy, government change at last, moving to a new house…

But I can’t forget the few things that have been worrying me throughout the year: the horrible situation that some people provoked in Iraq, the 11-M terrorist attack in Madrid, the death of my grandmother (the first close relative I lose), and very recently, the terrible tsunamis in southern Asia.

I expect that things can go a bit better in 2005. There’s a lot of open doors ahead!

Anyway, I wish you all a happy 2005!

cough

Sun, 26 Dec 2004 23:05:00 +0000

I’ve been with a bad cold since Tuesday, one day after Mako arrived to València. It started as a slight throat annoyance and has ended with a total dependency on a variety of pills which has been going for 3 days now.

Despite of this, Mako’s visit was quite nice. I think we managed to let him go after having shown most of what one wants to see in València, and focusing on the historical monuments in the centre.

When he arrived, he had plenty of hours to explore the centre alone, as I hadn’t arrived yet. He (and I, when told about it) was quite amazed about what he found at the top of the Micalet tower of the cathedral. At sunset, apparently everyone up there was smoking pot, which I guess is something you don’t expect too much. On Sunday, we had a Christmas family meeting at my father’s house, and just after that we went with Kiko, Brande and Marta to the Albufera, a quite unique lake we still have just a few kilometres away from València, to see his second sunset in a row. I think I hadn’t seen a sunset in the Albufera, and it was pretty cool, despite the horrible cold wind, and no pot involved.

On Monday, I accidentally left him trapped in the flat, as I forgot to leave my keys with him. Oops! During the morning he would stay at home doing work while I was at office, and in the evening we’d try to do something. We visited the Glop, had tapas for dinner with Carlos, and went for food to a cool Kebab place near the stadium one night, and to the buffet another one. In Radio City, he showed how the American dudes attract the girls, and it worked quite well…

On Thursday, Kike gave us a tour through the centre of the city, and explained (with me as translator) the history of València since the pre-arab era. The explanations were very cool, because we walked into the buildings, and he gave us both architectonic and historic background for the Lonja de la Seda, the Mercat Central or the Cathedral. I don’t know if he did, but I did enjoy the small facts that I didn’t know yet about these buildings.

The last night, I was just too ill to go out, so after a brief visit to Terra, Kiko and Mako went to some Brazilian salsa club where according to the reports, they found HOT women all around.

Hopefully, soon it’ll be our turn to cross the ocean and visit NYC. I’m really looking forward to that!

3 out, 1 to go

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 01:03:00 +0000

Ouch, this time it wasn’t so easy. I went to the dentist again to continue with the wisdom teeth extractions.

First news was that he now wanted to extract the two in the right side, while I thought he’d go one by one. One would probably be quite straight forward, like the other day. The other one would probably need surgery.

As soon as the anesthesia was applied, the doctor extracted the upper tooth very easily, in a matter of seconds. Cool, it was a lot less aggressive than the other day.

The one in the bottom would be more difficult though, as it wasn’t completely out. Instead of cutting through the flesh, he tried to cut half of the tooth so he’d be able to manually extract the rest. Urgh. He started applying evil tools on top of the poor thing, which made quite terrible noises, and worse, a smell of something burning that impressed me quite a bit. I guess I was way too nervous because they had to repeatedly ask me to calm down. As soon as I relaxed a bit, some weird noise or a bit of pain would put my body on defense mode again… and this went on for more than 30 minutes I think. In the end it was out “cleanly”, and I didn’t need any sewing, which is good.

When it was over, I noticed I was still trembling a bit and my legs were humid with sweat (and believe me, it’s quite strange to have me sweating). After so much anesthesia, I could barely speak, because I couldn’t articulate any sound which involves using your tongue…

Eating is a nice exercise now. I can’t open my mouth much, and I must avoid using the right side of my jaw entirely. During the dinner, some bits of food would get “lost” inside my mouth, due to my total insensibility, and I had to look for them a few times using my finger. It was a great spectacle. As I write this, the anesthesia is completely over and I’m starting to feel deep pain in the two craters. The one in the bottom part is quite huge and still bleeds. The taste of blood gets a bit boring after so many hours…

One more time, and all this shit will be over.

Stolen bike

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:43:00 +0000

My 16 year old bike was stolen around 3 hours ago, and I’m really going to miss it… It’s not the first time this happens, as 3 years ago my new bike was stolen just 6 months after buying it, but this one was special. It had been my bike for 16 years, and I’ve been using it as my main urban vehicle for nearly 9 years.

Today we had a triathlon club meeting, and I had to go back to fetch the bike to my mother’s street, where I had tied it to a sign post. When I got there, the bicycle was there. I went up to leave my bag and a chair I was carrying, and 3 minutes later when I came down it was gone. A man in the street said someone had cut the thick lock and run away with it just one minute before, but he didn’t manage to see his face.

Probably it was one of the many drug-addicts that live around the area near the neighbourhood, and will try to sell it in the Sunday market. I’ll be there. Fucking assholes.

No, not again!

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:02:00 +0000

Last night I stayed up until 4AM listening to the SER radio station and looking at websites with live coverage of the US elections. Despite the predictions, at 3:45 or so, the radio started saying things were looking bad, and being completely exhausted, I decided to went to bed and learn the (suspectingly terrible) outcome in the morning.

This morning my mother came in to wake me up and the first thing I said was “It’s Bush, right?”. Nearly two hour laters I still can make up my mind to accept this reality. It’s just not right: how can someone that has fucked up so many things be elected (let’s not talk of re-election because that’s just not true) again?

Some people warn me that this is perfectly possible because the news stories your average american watches on TV has nothing to do with what the rest of the world sees. I guess it’s an edulcorated vision of war, total ignoring of famine in large areas of the world, propaganda about how good capitalism is for everyone, no information about global warming and what is causing it, no images, figures or statistics of how many people, both Iraqi and American are dying in the war, and so on, all mixed with the traditional patriotic stuff.

We appear to be in the same black hole we were thrown into by the US Supreme Court now. I guess we’ll have to accept this and start hoping that maybe George W. Bush starts using his handful of neurons and stops being Cheney’s puppet. From what I read, it’d be cool if Laura Bush started talking a bit about politics at home, maybe that helped a bit too.

Those who have closely followed the elections, is there any kind of promise from the Bush team to regulate/promote environmental policies like vehicles that consume less gas, protection of what’s left of the American forests, etc.? Is Alaska safe still?

I really hope things change in the following four years, even if it’s just a tiny little bit. If not, can you imagine what will be left of the middle east by 2008? Iran, Syria, Lybia, North Korea: are you prepared?

Sorry for the rant, I’m feeling somewhat better now. :/

Anything but Bush

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 23:37:00 +0000

Pretty please!

Tomorrow is the US Presidential Election, and unfortunately only US citizens can vote, although many, many aspects of our lives in the next four years will depend on its outcome. It sucks to be a de-facto US colony and be third-class citizens that aren’t allowed to vote.

It sucks that after these long four years with Bush in office, with so many things done so wrong, half of the Americans are about to vote for him. Seeing this from Europe, it makes no sense at all: their economy is completely fucked, their environmental policies basically don’t exist, and the brightest idea that has come out from the Oval Office during the last term has been the infamous preemtive war policy that all of these nuts have been enforcing.

Americans have been lied repeatedly during scandals like the Enron bankrupcy, the Medicare costs “underestimation” and the long series of Iraq’s WMDs reports and war-related issues, including very obscure contracts for Cheney’s company Halliburton. Unemployment has risen quite spectacularly, and the social differences in one of the most powerful economies are bigger today than in 2000. Despite of this and many other negative facts, people still trust these dudes, when all they look for is to further enrich themselves.

Bush and Cheney have killed over 10.000 iraqi people since the war started. How many of them were “terrorists”? How many were women and children who were bombed in their homes? Where is the promised freedom for Iraq, now that people can’t even go out to avoid being torn apart by some random car bomb on their street? How many people are in prison without official charges against them in the name of this war against terror? What is terrorism, anyway?

If something terrorizes me tonight is the thought of four more years with this dumb ass leading, if leading is the word, the most powerful country in the planet. I really believe the future will be bloody if this madness continues.

And the worst part is that the only alternative, thanks to the braindead electoral system in the US, is only comparable to your average right wing European party. I can’t imagine having to decide between the extreme-ultra-religious-right-wing and the right wing. I’d probably seek for refuge in Canada or Europe… (well, except France was in the same mess not to long ago ;)

As much as I dislike Kerry, I really hope to wake up on Wednesday with the relief of knowing the American people have kicked George W. Bush out of the White House. More than 70% of the Europeans (according to recent polls) probably share my wish… FOAD, Bush!

Defeated by the wind

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 22:41:00 +0000

Yesterday I took the decision to abandon the group and get back early to València, after having completed 200 kilometres of the cycling trip.

The first day was very tough, as we started nearly at sea level and went up to 1.400 metres at some points. Most of Saturday’s journey was climbing up, sometimes during 15 kilometres without a single small rest in the road, and when the bicycle bags were heavy and full of food. We should have tried to find a lighter route for the first day, but it’s quite difficult in that area. We already changed it slightly to avoid climbing the road to Fredes and went to Boxar, discovering that the route to Boxar wasn’t easy either. After lunch and a few more hours of steep roads, we arrived at Morella, which was packed with tourists… we had to open our way through the crowded streets on our way to the square where we wanted to rest. Not long after, we set off for our final destination, Iglesuelas del Cid, and found that the road from Morella to Cinctorres was a lot harder than we imagined. We stopped in Cinctorres for a few minutes to eat some chocolate cookies, which are the secret to keep on pushing the pedals, and continued our way up, after being warned by the people in the town that we had some 6 or 7 bad kilometres ahead until Portell.

After the first 3 or so it was clear we wouldn’t make it to Iglesuelas, as the Sun was quite low already. When we were mostly there, the real problems started for me, as it seems I had too many cookies and my stomach didn’t like it. Also, given the lack of real cycling training in the last too many months, my left quadricep started to get annoyed by the constant activity, and hurted quite a bit. In Portell de Morella, we had dinner and looked for some shelter where to sleep, and found a nice place with a roof in the main square of the town.

At 11 or so the three of us were inside the sleeping bags, but we were too near the town’s bar, and there was a lot of sound. Also, we discovered that the square was used by the young people to meet before going to other towns spend the night, so we couldn’t sleep until they all were gone. At 4AM or so, two girls came back from their night, one of them crying loudly because some boy had been bad to her. They didn’t notice us, so they kept talking loudly and crying, until I kindly asked them to go away, which luckily they did.

A few hours later, at dawn, we got up, packed again and set off to Iglesuelas without having much breakfast. The landscape in this area was beautiful, and after climbing up a mountain, we could enjoy the sight as we descended. I didn’t know Iglesuelas is so cool, it’s full of small palaces, streets made of stone and cool buildings. We had breakfast there and continued our way towards Gúdar and Rubielos de Mora. In the middle of this was Linares de Mora, which we couldn’t imagine would be so terrible.

An hour or so after leaving Iglesuelas, we finally met with Kiko, who joined the group, and started to climb the Puerto de Linares. We started to have strong wind against us, and my quadricep said “enough” after 1 hour of cycling on the steep roads with very cold wind.

When we finally made it, going down to Linares was nearly worse than the climbing, as the wind literally blew us from one side of the road to the other one. I have never ridden a bicycle I had so little control over, it was really scary, but luckily the heavy bags behind us probably made less difficult to stay on top of the bicycles.

At that point, I was completely out of fuel, with a very bad cold and muscular problems in my legs, but above all, my morale was at minimum. I started thinking about the possibility of abandoning, as Kiko’s parents were near the area and could easily pick me up at some point in the road. When we stopped in Rubielos to have lunch and I thought how much I had suffered, I took the decision to end the adventure there, not being too sure of how my legs would react to the third day.

Once I was back at home I’ve realized I took the correct decision because the cold is quite bad and my stomach isn’t getting any better. Too bad I’ll have to deal with some mockery when the rest come back, but I already knew that when I took the decision…

Next year, I hope we retake our plan to do the trip to Mallorca, which will be quite plain and nice…

Crazy cycling trip

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 00:22:00 +0000

Early on Saturday we’ll set off for what will probably be the craziest and biggest adventure ever. Kike, Kiko, Raúl and I will start a cycling trip during all of the long weekend we have in Spain, travelling through four Spanish provinces in just four days.

Last year, we did something similar (Catalan) when we followed part of the route El Cid Campeador took while he conquered all of this land, centuries ago. The experience marked me a lot, because I had never travelled without knowing where I would sleep, or if we’d find something to eat that night. During 4 days and nights, we crossed the provinces of Teruel and Castelló, carrying all we needed on our bikes. In total, we completed something like 420 kms, after sleeping three nights under the stars.

This year, it’s the same story, with a few major differences. The route is different, of course. We’ll go to Vinaròs by car, kindly lifted by Raúl’s dad, and from there, we’ll travel to Ulldecona, Fredes, Morella, Camarilla, Alcalá de la Selva, Javalambre, Ademúz and Requena, where we’ll fetch a train to València. In total, that’s over 510 kms to complete in less than four days, which is pretty crazy.

If this isn’t enough, Raúl is talking about not carrying a camping tent, to save some kilograms in our “luggage”. Normally we wouldn’t use it anyway, but it’s good to know you have it behind you just in case you come across a storm.

And this takes us to the worst part. The weather forecasts say we’re going to be soaking wet pretty soon after we start, and rain will be a constant all over the four days. I can imagine the cold getting inside my wet maillot already and not being able to change clothes… or getting to a village and not finding some dry place where we can sleep.

We’re prepared to do it, anyway. It’s going to be tough, but I’m very looking forward to my first computer-free vacation in the last many months.

Niños de la guerra

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 00:09:00 +0000

This evening I went with Kiko and Kike to see an exposition about the thousands of children from the areas loyal to the Spanish Republic who were evacuated to different destinations outside of Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

I’m passionate about anything regarding this war, and I really don’t know why. At the time of the uprising of the fascists led, the National Labour Confederation, of libertarian socialist ideals had a lot of support in Spain, and led much of the resistance against Franco’s forces in Madrid, Barcelona and València. That’s probably one reason that makes the Civil War so fascinating to me, but there are others, like the stories of things that happened in Catalunya during those hard years, as told by my grandmother, or the awful life the defeated had after Franco won the war and the long dictatorship started.

The exposition has a lot of material regarding the fate of all these children who’s parents sent outside so they could avoid the bombings, hunger and horror of the war. Of the 32.000 children that were evacuated, 20.000 went to France, some other few thousands to England, Wales and Scotland, Belgium, USSR and Mexico. Denmark and Norway didn’t recieve any, but funded a few colonies in France. Other non-official initiatives from Switzerland, USA and other countries also sent money in to help them. Of course, this doesn’t count the many which crossed the French border to exile with their families, which probably would add a few 300.000 more.

You can see American and English stamps and postcards with “Help the Spanish children” messages for fundraising, and assorted objects like dresses, shoes, dolls, etc. which people kept from the day they crossed the border. The exposition is divided into different areas which explain the details of how things went for these children depending on the different destinations.

The kids sent to Mexico and the USSR probably had a very tough time, because it took a long while for them to return to Spain, if they ever did, as Mexico and the USSR didn’t recognize the new Spanish government. Those sent to Russia quickly faced the siege of Leningrad, and those in Mexico lost the government support when their president was replaced. In France, many had to live in refugee camps which were quite bad, and many who were old enough to carry a gun soon went out to fight against the nazis.

Every now and then you could find a letter or two written by a child to their parents in Spain, telling them how well they were being treated, how quick they were learning French, or that they were 10kgs heavier than when they arrived. There was one letter, though, that moved me so much that I was very close to burst in tears. It’s a farewell letter of a man in prison, a few hours before being shot by the fascists. He tells her daugher and wife that he’s innocent and has nothing to be sorry for, and asks them to redo their lives after his death. The letter ends with a “I will die thinking about you”, which made me feel my eyes a bit wet.

There’s a nice website with nice pictures and information about the Spanish exile, if you’re interested. If you’re in València, this is a must see, though.

Moving to Benimaclet

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 23:46:00 +0000

Getting a job meant a few things for me: getting up early, having to do a few things that go against my political views, dealing with cigarrette smoke, a severe cut in your time to do fun stuff, and a lot more. But of course, it had to happen some day, right? Not everything is bad, though. The income has helped me to finally go to live with a few friends, something I really was looking forward to, but couldn’t afford at all.

We looked for a flat in Benimaclet, a neighbourhood which is in the North limit of the city and which had been an independent small town until a few decades ago, when València finally grew enough to make it part of itself. My father lived there for a few good years when I was 8 years old, and now most of my friends, triathletes and non-triathletes, live there, so I really wanted to find some house there.

We were very lucky, and found a nice flat in the area which had renewed bathrooms and kitchen, and enough room for 3 persons and 6 bicycles. I got a bit unlucky in the drawing to assign rooms and got the smaller one. It is really small, and I’ll have to squeeze my brain to get all my stuff in it. I’m already considering buying a TFT monitor because the CRT will just take up too much space (and it’s showing some signs of dying sometime soon anyway), and anything I want to add to the room will have to be screwed to the wall, as just the bed, wardrobe and desk fill up the floor surface.

My flatmates are two of my triathlon club teammates, Kiko and Rubén, which have moved already. I’ve been a bit too busy lately, but will start living there this week. We’ll see how it goes… last Thursday we held an inauguration dinner with different friends, which was quite cool. Hopefully there’ll be pics up on our site soonish.

1 out, 3 to go

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 23:02:00 +0000

Time flies and today was the day.

I went to the dentist to get the first of my wisdom teeth removed. I went in a bit nervous, like a 10 year old, but I was more annoyed than frightened about the removal. I was quite happy of having grown up with no teeth decay and with all my teeth in good shape, and now I had to get some removed even if they are healthy.

Anyway, it all lasted for about 25 minutes, including the short wait for my turn and the wait for the anesthesia to do its job. After that, the doctor started pulling and doing stuff and voilà, it was out, and my mouth full of blood. He gave me my tooth so I can do whatever I want with it. It’s long, and the part that was exposed is cleaner than what wasn’t. I’m keeping it for a while, maybe I get a great idea of what to do with four long Wisdom teeth. I tried to get two teeth out at once, but the doctor said it wasn’t possible, as that would involve both sides of the mouth, and that can get annoying when eating. The next two to go out will involve surgery. That won’t be as easy as today…

The rest of the evening was spent at Kike’s house and trying to go to the bicycle demonstration for the “Day without cars”, but we got to the starting point late and never found them. So, while we looked for it, Kike told me Ferran Torrent is about to publish the third part of the book saga “Societat limitada” and “Espècies protegides”. Not finding the group of bicycles, we moved to FNAC to look for the new book, but it isn’t out yet. I’ll raid the “Tres i quatre” bookstore to get it as soon as it’s out. I can’t wait.

Oh, before the dentist I met Kike and Raúl to plan our next cycling trip during the October 9-12 long weekend. The route is decided, and it’s going to be *tough* once again!