Barcelona: “we are shabby, but we try to show good image”

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?

You can even find “plants 2.0”

Laurel with new leaves 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.

ImageWorth: Mix your songs with pictures

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!

Bike stolen, again

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!

Learning to climb

To grab or not to grab

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!

Busy days

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…

Watching instruments in a plane

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.

Chatty pilot

A boring squared 1st world

Some years ago I went to Syria, and when I came back, I felt that Europe is a too squared place. Too perfectly designed.

Internet here!Last Thursday I arrived to Madrid, from my 2 week trip to Costa Rica. In that country people have enough money to live, but not to choice among lots of things. So “functionality” is more important than “design”. They use, for example, iron surfaces as roofs, because mud tiles are more expensive, and (in their opinion) they are less durable. That’s the reason San José (the main city) is the ugliest city I’ve visited. Luckily, their natural environment adds an incredible amount of beauty to that lovely country.

I came back to Europe, and suddenly I saw around me a too designed world. The new Madrid’s airport building is really cold designed, soul-less. Designed to be beautiful. But with a enormous lack of functionality. I’ll not speak about the bizarre behaviour of the bathroom hardware. I’ll speak just about the benches, as an example. They are specially designed to not let people to lie down (we don’t need an airport full of people sleeping, it’s ugly, right?). They have armrests for every seated person, with precise dimensions. [I found a way to lie down however, joining to benches facing each other. It was funny to see, when I woke up, that some people copied my idea.]

Most of the time, in my ex-office, designers fought against programmers… Beauty or useful? The average point is the solution, Aristotle said. The problem is that in Europe things are over-designed, over-beautiful. Of course we need some good looking things to make us feel good. But, do we really need all this sick detail-focused over-design in our world? It seems that we lost our souls long time ago, our simplicity, our nature.

Report #6 from Costa Rica

I spent my last two days near Arenal volcano (about 2 km from it). I saw rocks falling down all the time, day and night (when it’s even more impressive, due to the red light colour). I saw more animals, specially colorful birds. Pura vida!

Today I’ll come back to Spain. I took a bus to come back to San José, and after having lunch I’ll fly, 11 hours, to arrive tomorrow to Madrid. See you!