miscelleny

No he escrito aquí desde hace 2 meses. En el caso de que alguien estuviese preocupado no pasó nada, bueno, nada aparte de ser perezoso. Nada mas que la vida normal y cotidiana estaba ocurriendo y así que no merecía escribir.

Pues, en fin, tengo que practicar el idioma entonces intentaré escribir con un poco mas frecuencia y principalmente en castellano antes del inglés.

A pesar de vivir en un pais (es decir el pais) hispanohablante, como vivimos dos ingleses juntos no mejoramos muy rapido. Liz tiene sus clases de español, y tenemos también las películas, los comics y los amigos.

Cool animated Charlie Parker

Una película muy buena es Chico y Rita, la que vimos el sábado. Es una historia dulce y romantica con una banda sonora cojonuda. Hay muchas personas reales al fondo de los protagonistas, músicos de Cuba y Nueva York como Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk y Tito Puente, los dibujos quedaban increíbles. Tengo que decir, tenía algo en mi ojo al final.

Okay, so I haven’t  written anything here for a couple of months. Nothing bad happened, in case anyone worried, there just hasn’t been much going on that I felt merited a post. But I should really keep going at the old Spanish, So, I’ll try and write a little more often and in Spanish first… because, seeing as we’re a couple of English speakers living together we’re not necessarily improving as fast as we could. Liz has her Spanish classes and we’ve both got films, TV, comics and mates to help.

One film we saw recently which stood out was Chico and Rita, which we saw on Saturday. It’s a sweet, romantic story with a brilliant soundtrack. There were a lot of real people in amongst the protagonists, musicians from Cuba and New York like Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and Tito Puento. The artwork was fantastic and, I have to say, I had a little something in my eye at the end…

Although most of the media attention has been given over to el Clásico (also known as one of the most hyped matches of the year) between Barça and Real Madrid– which led to streets filled with chuffed Barça fans, the news which will be having a more personal effect is a little different.

They’ve abolished our apartment.

Well, to be precise, the RAE, the Royal Spanish Academy, guardians and staunch defenders of the mother tongue in the hispanic world, have decided that cuts are in this year. Up until yesterday ch and ll were considered single letters in a Spanish alphabet of 29 letters. We live in apartment 3LL (across the hall from 3L– it’s a big building, apparently it’s pretty rare outside of the big cities). So, instead of saying “elyay, tres elllyaaay” on the phone to telemarketers we’ll now be saying double L.

Earth shattering, isn’t it.

It also makes our scrabble set out of date, although the news was frustratingly unforthcoming about the effect on the scores.

LL Ñ CH RR

Aunque la mayoría de la prensa se fijaba en el clásico (uno de los partidos mas sobrevalorados del año) que acabó en las calles llenas de aficionados felices del Barça, la noticia que nos afectará en una forma mas personal es un poco diferente.

Han abolido el piso nuestro

Ser preciso, el RAE, los custodios y defensores de la lengua materna en el mundo de habla española, han decidido que este año los recortes estan de la moda. Antes de ayer la ch y la ll se consideraban letras dentro un alfabeto que consistía en las 29 letras. Vivimos en piso 3LL (enfrente de 3L– es un edificio grande, no es muy común así, fuera de las ciudades grandes). Así que en el lugar de decir “elle, elle” por el teléfono a las personas que hace ventas por teléfono, diremos doble L.

Qué noticia mas impactante.

También significa que ha quedado obsoleto nuestro juego de Scrabble, aun que no decían nada de eso en el telediario.

When my two and a half year old Bookeen Cybook ebook reader decided to end it all and present me with a screen that looked like a barcode, I was a bit miffed. I really enjoyed reading on the little device, so I called Bookeen and said, can you fix it?

Yes we can, they answered.

Oh good, I said. How much? At this they sucked air in through their metaphorical teeth (a bit like milk teeth only more expensive) and said €150.

Blimey. That’s over half the amount that I had paid for it.

Sorry, they said, not sounding sorry at all, it’s the display chip, it’s got a timer so the minute it goes out of warranty it’s like Schrodinger’s chip, both fried and not fried at the same time and it’s only a matter of time until someone, i.e. you, opens the case and collapses the bibliowave function and Bob’s your monkey’s uncle and well, you can see can’t you, or not, because your display chip is fried, possibly covered in vinegar too.

Blinded by science, and possibly slightly paraphrasing what they said, I put away my fried display chipped ebook reader and thought, oh well.

Until Amazon lowered the price of their Kindle to 108 quid.

Then a little voice started to pipe up, go on, you know you want to, you read a lot, it’ll be great, go on…

Well you can guess really can’t you?

Fried Cybook and shiny Kindle

I got the Kindle, for about what the repair would have cost me. And it’s great. It’s a breeze to buy books from Amazon (less of a breeze to rip the DRM from them and store a local copy but not impossible), a snap to convert books I have already (since the DRM has been burned off them long ago to allow me to read my own books on my own machine) and it even has wifi, and a web browser, that, while slow, actually works okay.

So thanks little voice in my head (and Liz who contributed a few go ons), now what were you saying about another camera?

Cuando mi lector de libros electrónicos Cybook de Bookeen decidió a suicidarse con solo dos años y medio, y me presentó una pantalla que pareció un código de barras, me sentí molesto. Había disfrutado leer en el dispositivo, así que llamé a Bookeen y les pregunté, ¿podéis arreglarlo? Sí, podemos, me respondieron.

Bueno, dije ¿Será cuanto?

En aquel momento aspiraron tras los dientes metafóricos (como los dientes de leche pero mas caros), y me dijeron 150€.

¡Ostras! Es casi la mitad de lo que pague.

Lo siento, me dijeron (pero no parecían así) es el chip de visualización, ese chip tiene un temporizador para que al momento que caduque la garantía es como el chip de Schrodinger, queda frito y no frito a la vez, y solo es una cuestión de tiempo hasta que alguien, es decir, tu, abres la funda y se colapsa la función biblio-onda e ya está hecho y ves, o no por que el chip queda frito, incluso con vinagre (como comemos el famoso fish and chips en Inglaterra).

Parafraseo un poco lo que han dicho. Cegado por la ciencia, lo guardó el lector de libros electrónicos con el chip de visualización frito, pensé bueno, no importa.

Hasta que Amazon bajó el precio del Kindle a 140€.

En aquel momento una pequeña voz empezó a decirme, vamos, venga, sabes que lo quieres, lees mucho, será fantástico, venga…

Pues, puedes adivinar lo que pasó ¿no?

Compré el Kindle y me costó mas o menos lo que me hubiera costado la reparación del otro. Esta bien, es muy fácil comprar libros de Amazon (menos fácil quitar el DRM, para guardar una copia, pero no imposible), es facilísimo convertir los libros que tengo ya (porque el DRM había sido quitado hace siglos para dejarme leer mis libros por mi dispositivo) aun tiene WiFi, y un navegador web que funciona lento pero bien.

Entonces, gracias a la vocín en mi cerebro (y a Liz quien contribuyó unas “vengas”), bueno ¿que me decías sobre una camera nueva?

It started small enough. Just an occasional dripping sound every now and then. At first I thought it was coming from the bathroom sink, which does drip, but it didn’t sound the same. Subconsciously I must have recognised that because I didn’t feel like I’d resolved the problem. A few days later I´m sitting at the computer and I hear it again, this time I don´t rest after seeing that the bathroom tap is not dripping and I go looking for the source of the sound. It turns out to be the radiator in the hall, a small, old-fashioned cast-iron thing. It’s dripping slowly so I put a bowl underneath it, tie a cloth round it to direct the small amount of water and resolve to call the landlord the following morning.

How fixing a radiator should go... if you're from the past

I realise something’s wrong in the morning when I sleepily stand in the hall and notice that my feet are wet. The leak had got bigger overnight and when I removed the cloth I saw that it was coming from a tiny hole in the middle of one of the sections. I went to find the portera and see if we could turn off the heating in our flat but she said that it would mean draining the entire system and that would cost €70 but here, she said, passing me an allen key, you can isolate it with this. As it turned out I couldn’t, it’s too old. There’s no isolator. So I fashioned a plug from some cork and duct tape and called the landlord. He said he’d get someone to phone me and arrange a time. Three days later (he travels a lot) I got back in touch with him and said that no one had called. At this point the tray I had under the radiator was filling up every eight hours (which gave me enough time to sleep at least). We finally managed to track down Ariel the plumber and arrange a visit. Ariel turned out to be an Argentine so we chatted as he removed my duct tape repairs and then stopped chatting to let him whistle through his teeth and say that the radiator was jodido (knackered / screwed in polite parlance). The portera had told me that the system was due to be drained anyway at the end of May so Ariel said he’d try and fix it temporarily and then plan to replace it then. He made the most rubbish attempt at fixing it, the paste he was using didn’t stick, then it didn’t harden, and then when it did harden it didn’t stop the water coming out. We ended up removing his repair and putting mine back. Fast forward to today, he arrives ready to remove the radiator, and then spends two hours on undoing a bolt, finally succumbing to the inevitable and wandering off, only to return with two mates to give him a hand, coincidentally, at this point I get a phone call from another plumber (probably the one we tried to get weeks ago) trying to arrange when he could come… this confused me somewhat. After removing the old radiator Ariel and chums head off to buy a new one, and come back this evening to fit it. Whereupon they realize they need another part. So at the last count it’s taken three people six hours to change a radiator. And they still have to come back in the morning to finish the job. Still, he’s a nice enough chap, I’m just glad he’s not charging me by the hour (or at all).

I entered Jobsworld with the new (secondhand) iMac and apart from the general shinyness and it-just-works feeling I encountered the downside.

My cowon i7 audio player (which I bought because my old rio Karma didn’t play nice with linux) is not recognised at all by the new toy. Not at all, not even as a drive (which the website claims it should be, in very small print, possibly followed by a ‘maybe’ with an invisible tag. We don’t watch a lot of telly, but we do listen to a fair number of podcasts, just going to work I usually walk about four miles a day, and listening to In Our Time is a distinct pleasure.

The rio, the i7 and the ipod touch

So this state of affairs could not continue. At the same time my ebook reader (which was genuinely lovely to read on) developed a display fault, the fault being that the display looked like one big bar code which, when reported to the manufacturer, elicited a gallic shrug and an estimated repair cost of €lots (well, that’s the downside of living on the weeping edge (like the bleeding edge but it’s become infected and all gooey) of technology.

Putting both of these things together I thought, well you’re in Jobsworld, why not go all the way to the light/dark side (delete as appropriate [and as an aside to the aside about sides, is the opposite of the dark side actually called the light side?]). I wandered along to the apple shop and looked at the ipod touch, read up on whether I could use it to read my ebooks (I can but I’ll have to break the law and remove the DRM from some of my books if I want to continue reading them), I could.

I bought one, the cheapest one, 8GB, for about €50 more than the repair cost of my ebook reader.

And it’s good, very good, blimey there’s a lot of stuff there for it. So Liz bought one as well (her little netbook is in the shop (still under warranty) because the flash drive went belly up). I wouldn’t say I’m smitten but I’m certainly have a fine platonic relationship with my apple setup.

Now, any recommendations for apps?

Th'mac

As I mentioned, there is a new toy. Liz is resigned to me spending a little bit of time in front of this beast. Not least because It’s my first taste of the fabled mac OS.  Having dumped windows a few years back and having spent time in the comparative openness of linux it’s like putting on a suit and tie (a nice suit and tie that makes you look good). You feel a little restricted and then you look in the mirror and think ‘damn that’s pretty smart’.

I know that under the hood is a variant of unix, and I can open a command line and play in bash so that’s not a problem, and I know that the programs are there if I want them (Firefox instead of Safari for example). The good thing is that most of it just works (Time machine is a thing of beauty), but therein lies the bit I have to get used to. There are parts I should not mess with. Otherwise it will stop just working and start just not working.

And another thing I learned in the process:

A backup is not a backup if you haven’t verified it.

A backup is not a backup if it is the only copy.

My backup of photos from May last year onwards was corrupted. I only found out when I came to restore it. Now I’m looking for something to recover corrupt archives (heh, makes me think of librarians cackling). Still, it’s not so bad, there are photos on Flickr and most of the stuff I really want is on paper (harder to corrupt a piece of paper), despite that, I did feel rather foolish/annoyed.

I shall not think about it for a while as tomorrow we’re off to do another three days of the Camino de Santiago. So guess what the next post will be about.

I’ve just updated my photo website with a series of pictures taken in the park in the middle of Oviedo. I have a set of prints from this work that I’m pretty happy with, and I’ve got to go out and do some more now the weather is good for park-sitting. Ricardo scanned the negatives and did the hard labour of making them presentable (as they are to appear on the student’s part of his website). I stood to one side and nodded.

I did do the incredibly difficult task of shrinking them and putting them on the server.

I’ve been playing for the last few days getting my new toy (an old iMac) full of my data and learning all about the command button and how we have to do things in Jobsworld… it’s shiny (the mac, or Jobsworld, take your pick).

There will be none left in short order

This week Spring has most definitely sprung. One of the signs here (as opposed to the UK, where Spring seems to be marked by the same shot of someone having a butty in a London park without a jacket) is the sudden appearance of strawberries in vast quantities. Liz cannot pass up the opportunity of fruit, so she bought a crate (no punnets here, just little crates, holding 2Kg) at the frutería just around the corner. We have some requesón (cream cheese) ready and waiting.

Two fine examples of the modern British male

Ricardo (he who is teaching me photographing things an’ such) likes Top Gear, nothing wrong with that, I enjoy a bit of TG too, despite the presence of the muppet, Clarkson. We were chatting the other day (Ricardo and me, not Clarkson) and after Ricardo had said something I made the ‘well, there you are then’ gesture, a combined sideways nod, lip compress and vague wave of the hand… hard to describe but well, there you go… (see I just did it then, gah!).

At that moment Ricardo exclaimed “eres muy pero muy británico” (you’re very very British). He’d seen them doing that gesture on Top Gear, and presumably other british shows too and apparently it’s rather British. I’d never even thought of it that way before.

Now I’m wondering what other gestures are muy británico…

Li’l Che! Originally uploaded by chipzdarsky.

This made me chuckle… checito…