Lick the light switch

Every Democrat was pretty sure Al Gore was going to win in 2000. Most polls said John Kerry was going to win in 2004. And yet both times they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just remember how you felt then and try your best so it doesn’t happen again.

There is so much at stake … the US and the world can’t afford 4 more years of a Republican US President. Even if the GOP seems to be defeated, shattered and panicking, Republican voters always end up voting for their guy on election day, while Democrats have great problems closing the deal. It has to be different this time.

We need Obama to win tomorrow, and we need him to win big. And a Democratic wave to get a filibuster-proof Senate majority and a comfortable victory in the House of Representatives, so they can enact a progressive agenda in the upcoming years and restore some of the damage from the last two Bush terms. We also need a solid ‘no’ to Proposition 8 in California and similar ones in other states, so no excuse to stay at your place just because you are in one of the bluest states.

I would like to ask you to do your best tomorrow, but probably Larry Lessig does a better job at it.

Once we are past this, the hard work starts, trying to hold every elected representative accountable, draft better candidates for future elections, spot DINOs, …, but for now, let’s focus on tomorrow. I am hoping for the best, and I wish I could do more about it, but it’s up to you Americans. Do the right thing and leave everything on the road, you don’t want to regret it tomorrow.

It’s been almost a week already since I arrived to Adelsried. I am going to work here for two weeks and a half (according to the initial contract at least). That means I can’t go to Akademy in the end, too bad

The town is quite small, with around 2000 inhabitants, and not much social life, except for the hotel where we are hosted. The hotel is great, probably the best I have ever been to. Great swimming pool and jacuzzi, really friendly staff, nice rooms with big and comfy beds, a magnificent “biergarten” where we have some drinks and dinner every night, delicious food, bikes to ride for free, …

Despite the lack of social life, the town is beautiful, first of all it’s in the middle of a natural reservation, with dense forests completely surrounding the city. Every house has a gorgeous garden with loads of flowers and some interesting decorations. The highlight is this really high pole in the city center with loads of coats of arms, and a pine on top of it. Hilarious

The work is pretty good too, bleeding edge stuff, really good working environment, nice and international workmates and free drinks

And today I uttered my first full sentence in German since lots of years ago!!!

I have just watched The Wire’s last episode. For those who don’t know about it, The Wire is the greatest TV series ever created (Salon and Slate back me on this). It’s been acclaimed by critics, but widely disregarded by the public.

I’ll never forget Jimmy McNulty, a troubled Irish American dipsomaniac murder detective (played by brilliant Brit Dominic West) or Omar Little, a Robin Hood-like stickup homosexual man in west Baltimore. The rest of the deeply portrayed characters of the show are great too, but above all of them, the real starring role belongs to Baltimore. I am sure Baltimore’s reality goes way beyond this show, but I don’t think a show can get more real than The Wire.

Each season focuses on a different topic, such as drug-dealing, unions, politics, the press, always keeping the police department around. The story arcs are really long and complex, The Wire is not the kind of show you can enjoy watching a single episode of, but more like, as its own creator – a former Baltimore Sun journalist – put it, a “66 hour movie”.

Well, I could keep praising it for hours, but lots of people have done that already, even Barack Obama loves it (:P, let’s ride the hype). Praise available in Spanish too Besides, Eliot Spitzer has made wiretaps really popular again these last days

Really, you must see it.

Several of my workmates and I are regular listeners of technology-related podcasts like Diggnation, TWiT or FLOSS Weekly (which BTW is as “weekly” as the Halley comet).

Some days ago we realized that there weren’t similar podcasts in Spanish (or at least we didn’t know about them), so we thought that creating one would be cool.

During this week we recorded our pilot, we had some problems with sound and I spoke a bit too fast, but I think it’s nice overall, at least I would enjoy listening to it

Trying to emulate people like Kevin Rose or Leo Laporte (in the media business since 1991), who create podcasts professionally, is quite hard for amateurs like us, but we’ll do our best.

Be sure to check it at Foocast (sorry, Spanish only, that’s the whole point )

Almost a year ago I wrote this:

I

Past weekend Warp had its first WARPtivity (which, as you may suspect, stands for WARP activity, you know, team building and that stuff).

We (including all partners and almost all workers) spent a night and a day in the breathtaking Ordesa valley. I’m quite biased as I love the valley since I was a child and have enjoyed lots of weeks there, but it’s indeed one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately our regional government (PSOE and PAR, kick them out on the 27th May election) are spoiling most of the Pyrenees, I hope there is something left for the next generations.

We arrived at Torla (a little village near Ordesa) on Friday evening, had a great dinner and some drinks and played table football.

Next morning we woke up quite early and hiked through a nice forest path to the Horse Tail waterfall. After having lunch by the waterfall some of us decided to return by the Faja de Pelay, a higher path above the forest, with awesome sights. As it was still early May, there was some snow remaining in the path, making it a bit dangerous, as there is a 300 hundred meter cliff. Luckily enough we managed to survive and blog it

Hi there! I’m back

I spent a really nice time in the United States with my friends. We stayed two weeks in Boston and New York, and basically did everything we had planned to do and more …

We visited the MIT at Boston, went to several comedy shows, ice skated in Central Park, spent a whole day in the Barnes and Noble book megastore, went to an NBA basketball game, saw Monty Python’s Spamalot musical, discussed politics with fellow Americans, visited the Delaware Water Gap waterfalls, enjoyed an helicopter ride, even watched The Grindhouse in its first day in the cinemas, and well, did lots of other stuff.

Now for the celiac thing … I was somewhat sick during the whole trip, I felt weary the whole day without any reason, so as soon as I got back to Spain I went to the doctor and after some tests that spanned over a week and a quick visit to the hospital they diagnosed me with celiac disease. That means that I can’t ever eat anything containing gluten, a protein present in wheat, barley and rye. It’s quite an inconvenient illness, but nothing more than that, as just following an strict gluten-free diet is enough to keep it at bay. The main drawback is that you have to be really careful when you go out for dinner.

I have already been in sick leave for three weeks because I had lost weight and was a bit anemic, but I’m quite ok again, and I expect to be back at work really soon now

Last weekend my workmate Javi and I attended a Bloodhound Gang show in Sheffield, UK. It was quite cool and we got the chance to see Jimmy Pop and Evil Jared live. I also had the chance to see this amazingly crazy poster at Sheffield bus station.

In unrelated news I’m leaving tomorrow towards the United States, I am going on holidays to New York and Boston for a couple of weeks with a group of friends, I hope it to be great

More than a thousand people took part in the anti-bullfighting demo that every year takes place in Zaragoza. (Spanish)

For those who are not familiar with bullfighting, it’s basically a Spanish shameful tradition, where six bulls are released one at a time to a bullfighting arena. There the bulls are tortured to death, first they’re stabbed on the neck by horse-mounted lancers, then they got planted in their back several harpoon-pointed sticks, and after half an hour of torture and agony, the bullfighter definitely murders the bull with a sword. Does it sound disgusting, cruel and sadist? It definitely is, and I’ve skipped the worst details. (yeah, I’ve got sick just writing this)

We gathered at a square near the bullfighting arena, and then we headed towards it shouting stuff like “torture is neither art nor culture” (as bullfighting defenders usually say that “bullfighting is a central part of Spanish culture”), “murderers”, “torturers”, “sadists”, “you’re cavemen, evolve!”, “if you wanna see blood, slit your wrist” or “you should be ashamed of how you are raising your children” (to people who brought little (5 or 6 years old) children to the bullfight arena).

The demo lasted about two hours and was completely peaceful, which is a great thing IMHO, as it clearly shows which side despises violence and which one loves it.

There have been several good news for the anti-bullfighting movement last years, like several Catalonian towns declaring bullfighting illegal, Barcelona declaring itself an anti-bullfighting city (although it doesn’t have the legislative power to really ban bullfighting), demos in lots of cities and increase in people attending them. If Bullfighting seems doomed, but we still will have to push for a few years to really bury it.

Even if you are not Spanish you can still help abolish bullfighting by taking part in anti-bullfight demos in front of Spanish embassies (there were 17 of them this summer), boycotting travel agents that promote bullfighting, …

So I was having these great holidays in the beach with some friends, getting a tan, swimming in the sea, chasing some fish wearing really-big-nose water goggles, drinking beer by the seaside, … but I had to come back to Zaragoza to take my driving license exam.

I’ve gone to the driving school today to ask what time was the exam taking place exactly, and I’ve been told that the exam has been moved to Monday (can this happen in any other European country besides Spain?). As I only have holidays this week, I can’t attend my exam next Monday, and thus, the whole thing sucks, specially the getting-back-from-holidays-sooner bit.

To keep my karma up and given the fact that I’d some free time to spare as I no longer needed to study for the exam, I’ve visited some bookshops and purchased some books (namely, The Ages of Lulu, Fahrenheit 451, The adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Notes from a Small Island), and then I’ve gone to the park and read for a while (actually, I’ve finished reading Wilt, by Tom Sharpe, which I started reading yesterday in my way back from the beach). I’ve thought about blogging about the books I read, although I’m not sure if I’ll manage to do it.

In the end, it has been a nice day and I’ve come home quite relaxed again.

With regard to free software stuff, Wesnoth 1.2 is going to be released really soon now, as well as KOffice 1.5.2, I’ve already registered for Akademy 2006 in Dublin, I created my first attempt of flake plugin some days ago, …

Woah, tons of time without blogging again, and too much stuff to write about, I’ll be brief

Last month has been great , I visited London for three days with some workmates, then I attended DebConf6 in Mexico, and the two weeks I’ve been in Zaragoza (my home city) since I was back from there have been also great, enjoying a lot with friends.

For Battle for Wesnoth fans, we’re heading towards 1.2 now, which will be our second stable release ever, and should be out in mid-July. Be sure to help us trying out our latest development release, reporting bugs and so.

Today I’ve made a donation to the Swedish Pirate Party, I really expect they can get themselves in the Swedish parliament, and then I should consider moving to Sweden

So that’s all, my three-year relationship with my (ex)girlfriend finished as fast as it started and a bit more painfully

I’m kind of devastated now, but discovering that you have tons of great (old and new) friends ready to help you through it and that FLOSS development still inspires you, makes things look really brighter. In addition, I’m going to finally get rid of long-time procrastinated items in my todo list, like getting my driving license and improving my spoken English.

PS. Wesnoth 1.1.2 is out!
PS2. Oh, I’ve just known about ETA cease-fire, now that’s good news, well, not for all.

Hi, lovely dudes and dudettes.

I’ve just returned from my holidays at Valle de Hecho, a great place in the Pyrenees. I’ve been there for five days with my girlfriend and we have enjoyed them a lot. I would like to show you some photos, but unfortunately I lost my camera (which I had just bought four days before), so I only can show you the website of our hotel.

Today has been my first day at work after holidays. It has been quite nice, running your own company and working with friends is really great.

In other news, we’ve just released the first Wesnoth 1.0 release candidate, and I’m uploading the Debian packages just now. The core of the game (2539 strings) has already been translated to 16 languages, including Latin! We also have a brand new web. BTW, we’re always hiring developers