It’s summer already, and that means it’s hot, really hot. I read somewhere that when the air temperature is above 27ºC, your head can’t evacuate enough heat, and you have various related problems (can’t sleep, headaches, etc).

For me, this is my second 2008 summer. I spent the first one in Costa Rica, in March. It was hot, but I enjoyed napping on a hammock near the beach… that was nice. The curious thing is that some days ago I saw a hammock in a shop window near home, just for 12 euros!

But the problem was: how can I hold it? actually, “where and how”? If I install some kind of hooks in the walls, I’m sure I will destroy some part of the walls when I jump into the hammock. So I decided to invent a way to hold it steadily, without destroying the house’s walls. And today I found it: I bought a rope, and I tied one side to the balcony’s railing and the other side to a wood crossed in the outside of my door. Then I grabbed the hammock to the tense rope with 2 carabiners. And it works!

Happy summer siestas!

Last weekend I went to North Wales to visit my friend (and English former teacher) Vaughan, and we took part in the Welsh Go Open. Luckily we had sunny weather during the sightseeing days, and quite bad weather during the tournament ones. I noticed the quite big difference between the temperature in Wales (around 15ºC) and in Barcelona (27ºC), but it was not really bad.

After visiting some castles and enjoying the green mountains and the sea, he drove to Barmouth, a coastal city. The tournament venue was in a hotel in front of the sea, where hypothetically we were going to enjoy the sea… and we did according to the British Go Association report: I wonder if they know the real enjoyment of the beach; there were only heavy wind and rain. Anyway the tournament, indoors, was really interesting.

I won 3 of 5 games. I’m feeling confident with my game, and this made my moves more serious. I entered as 3 kyu, and in the 1st round I beat another 3 kyu. 2nd round started immediately after the 1st, and I beat another 3 kyu. Then we went to the room, dying of hunger, to eat something. Later we arrived a bit late to the 3rd round, and I didn’t see my opponent level, just the table number. I was near to beat him, and later I verified he was 3 dan! Despite the result I was really happy. On Sunday we had the last 2 rounds, where I forced a 1 kyu to resign, and I failed with another 1 kyu. Vaughan meanwhile won 4 of 5 games, failing just in the last round. A really good tournament for both of us.

This evening Jordi and I went to the first demo of the famous Tenori-on in Barcelona. During the presentation everybody looked at the charming machine intensely, almost ignoring the man who was showing the details. The good part was after the speech, when we had the opportunity of holding this instrument and play a little. Addictive! Easy to understand, with a lot of potential. And really beautiful. The bad part is price: 900€ in Spain (I found it for 876€ in Germany). So it’s an expensive, really expensive toy. Maybe in the future, if they build a new version, cheaper (like the new iphone)… I could buy one.

Meanwhile this visual and touchable thing made me think about multi-touch screens. Immediately I started looking for some music program for my Nokia PDA, founding nothing. Maybe I could do something. Also I thought about the comment from Microsoft, that they will focus their new OS for touch screens (despite I’m a happy Linux user). The tenori-on was not to big, just with the ideal dimensions to hold it with both hands and use the thumbs to touch the buttons… 20×20cm… maybe I could find a second hand 11″ touch screen, and try to program something…

Inspiring in different ways, as you see.

More pictures on my Flickr account.

Yesterday Jordi and I were discussing about a recent Graham article on “Cities and Ambition“. Briefly it says that cities transmit you a message, and depending the city it can be things like: “be smarter” (Cambridge), “get money” (New York) or “change the world” (Silicon Valley). Inhabitants of each city show some of these feelings, and more people come to live and share them.

So what’s the message that comes from Barcelona? After 3 years living here, and through my narrow experiences, I could say something like: “you are shabby, but you can show big things”. A cult for image, physical and on creativity. We/They know we/they are not too smart or effective, but we try to build big things, to do big artistic demonstrations. Hide the garbage and show the gloss. Try to be real European, more brilliant than anybody in Spain (specially Madrid), while you hide numbers on thefts and lead plumbings.

Is this the kind of message I’m looking for? Is that message currently affecting me? Or is this just my interpretation of Barcelona?

While my plants grow and grow, and are eager to the arrive of summer, Rubén told me about a website, a la 2.0, to keep track of your gardens and plants: My folia, where I’ve created my garden profile. There are too few people at the moment, so the magic of 2.0 doesn’t work still. And I’m not sure about their business plan (if they didn’t build it for fun).

Anyway I found it interesting as a place where I can investigate the growing process of a 2.0 website. I’m preparing the launch of my own website 2.0, focused on strategy turn-based games, so every single detail I can observe in other places could be interesting.

Last week I’ve been quite busy. I had a small project in mind. Briefly, the idea is to search pictures that match the songs you are listening to. And present them with some visual beauties.

I named this project as: ImageWorth, try it out!

It gets the “recent listened tracks” list from your Last.fm account, and for every song title it searches for pictures on Flickr. And uses Javascript with JQuery library to show them smoothly.

Regarding the inside: I strongly used Javascript for making it happen (I wanted to practice some js programming). There is a PHP part, which is basically a proxy to let AJAX call directly to Last.fm and Flickr, but it’s quite simple. The heavy work is done in the Javascript lines, which were quite interesting to develop. This time I used only Object-Oriented programming, and this leads to some (a priori) weird things in js. This language has its own way to work with objects, with a lot of flexibility, but this flexibility leads you to keep more things in mind. For example, when you want to bind a function (which is an object in js) to an even, without losing the reference to the original object (this) where you did the binding on. It’s not easy at first, but when you start to understand how it works, the beauty of closures and the incredible amount of possibilities it means… you start to love it.

By the way, any comment about ImageWorth? I hope you like it!

It’s incredible, but my bike was stolen today. Incredible because it was next to the main entrance of the University, in the center of the city, and was stolen at 14:00. How can anybody cut an iron cable, untie it and get the bike without being noticed by anybody? Next to the main entrance of a big building! This says a lot about our society… everybody only looks at his bell ring.

Luckily when I bought it, last year, I chose the cheapest bike (59€) in the shop… I was smart enough to oversee the final result. Actually I bought it because my previous bike was stolen, also (at night, on the street). And luckily my ex-flatmate Alberto left his old bike at home, so I can use it.

Bastards!

Why my hand is full of skin wounds? (No nasty thoughts, please). Because I’m learning to climb.

Some weeks ago I discovered a “climbing gym” near home, a place full of climbing walls. Instantly I decided to join an introductory course: my legs are in shape (thanks to the bike) but my arms and hands are a bit slack, so it could be a perfect exercise for me. The course lasted 3 weeks and the instructor showed us some basic things, like improve our balance, use effectively our arms and legs, and overpass our mind limitations. Because one of the things you discover is that “you CAN do it”… you start to think “no, it’s impossible, I can arrive there” or “I’m already tired, I can’t hold myself any second more”… but such thoughts are just excuses. You try and you success (it’s really easy to say)… well, sometimes. We also tried some interesting exercises: try to climb around with your eyes closed (so you use the nearer holds instead the bigger ones), or use just one arm to climb (”impossible” until you realize that it’s not so difficult).

The course finished and now I’m alone, starting to climb those walls, full of grips (or holds). There are predefined routes: a path of one colour grips, with a beginning grip and an ending one (that you should touch with both hands to mark your start and finish). A route contains from 10 to 60 holds, and normally you use all of them. But, at the moment, I can’t even finish the easiest route (I almost finished it today). Anyway you can lower the level using grips of other colours (cheating). Or you can do a block: a vertical route, from 4 to 10 grips, just made to practise your muscles.

See you on the top!

Update: A week later, I finished my first route successfully. Two weeks later, I’m able to complete 2 routes in the same day… but I’m still feeling like a duck trying to climb!

I’m really busy. Perhaps too much to be unemployed. Or maybe due to this…
- Preparing trips to Madrid (next weekend), UK (June) and Canada (July).
- Managing lots of things in the Go Spanish Association committee. Moreover I’m in charge of the national selection, which will take part in the 1st World Mind Sport Games in Beijing, after Summer Olympics.
- Taking part in a climbing course.
- Finishing some freelance projects.
- Warming up my big idea to develop. A website about games. Looking for designers and funds for this big project. Having interesting meetings.
- Looking for a new flatmate (Alberto decided to abandon the house at the end of this month).
… and I can continue…

While I was flying to Corcovado, in a small airplane, I had the opportunity of looking at the instruments in the cabin. I knew the functionality of some of these flight instruments because I “studied” them when I was a child, from the heavy MS Flight Simulator 4.0 manual.

It’s interesting to discover that when the plane enters in a turbulence zone, or cross clouds, most of the time it gains height! The vertical speed indicator was pointing up and up when we crossed all these thick clouds. You normally think that the plane is going down and down, but actually it’s not true.

So, next time you were in a plane suffering turbulences, remember that it will not fall down… probably.