Fer's blog

Sunday night we improvised a watch-the-elections-results-party at home. 15
friends watching TV, listening to the radio and reading internet web pages.
With the time and results we also drink a lot of wine and lemon icecream with
vodka (a really good idea from Lu.

Blame esd: We were watching the TV in the hall, and also
listening there to the radio. I got Cadena
Ser emissions via internet, and I’m using a long RCA wire to carry the
sound from my computer to the ROTEL amplifier in the hall. As we want to know
exactly when the result were changing, and the most quick method was Internet,
I did a little script to play a sound in the hall when the results webpage had
changed:

while true; do sleep 15 ;mv res.html res.old; wget -O res.html http://www.elec_gen04.mir.es/congreso/CGF_TOP.htm ; diff -u res.old res.html; if [ $? != 0 ]; then esdplay ~/cuac.wav; fi;done

But esd mixing between mplayer and esdplay was not working!

With the final results we went to Ferraz street (PSOE main office). After that, only my cousing and me were to party. We went to Bar Cock, a fashion cocktail club where we met Juan Echanove. At 3am we went to Why Not?. I drank vodka as mariano does, because I don’t like to mix drinks and I drank vodka with the ice cream. Wow woked up at 5pm of Monday, so it was a really long night.

This is the picture of our banner in the demostration last Friday, published
bu the 2nd Spanish newspaper:

Terrorist act in Madrid. 192 deaths and 1.000 people injuried. Very nervous morning trying to contact my friends that usually get that death-train from Alcala to Madrid. Thery are okey. But no the families of those 192 people. ETA or Al-Qaeda, it doesn’t matter, “NO PASARAN!”.

Trying to get me bussy during the morning I fixed a fix for clock applet. GNOME helped me a lot today, as well as the GNOME people.

GNOME love: People from gnome-love project are doing good things: fixing bugs, implementing new features… and this is only the begining! I’m really happy about that.

Finally fixed an ugly bug on gconf-editor, and as I was so proud and I knew than andersca is a really busy man, I did a release 🙂

Night: Friday went to dinner with some friends, and then went to the fabulous house club “Ohm”, but after one hour, the girls asked for bad music, so we went to Polana. Bad

At Saturday I hosted the birthday party of a friend. It was really funny, with rum from Cuba. After it, went to Penta, a spanish music pub.

And Sunday… more partying. First, beer in La Latina, then went to Palacio, and finally to Kapital Love: Egyptian party, one of the most awesome parties I’ve ever been.

At Monday I got a call for a friend asking for places to go out, he invited me, and gently, I declined the invitation.

Opera: I’m really stupid. A friend of mine gave me two tickets for the opera at Teatro Real:Wagner’s GOTTERDAMMERUNG. When I was there, I realized that the tickets were for next Friday.

Music: As I didn’t go to the opera, I went to buy CDs. I got a really good recording of Bartok’s orchestral works, by Adam Fisher in 5 cheap CDs.

Movies: Watched again La virgen de los sicarios, a South American film: hyperviolent magic realism and homosexuality. And finally watched Lost in translation, so wonderful, so sweet, so kind, so funny, so elegant and so slow. Near perfection again.

The GNOME love day was really great. Lot of hackers helping and lot of people learning how to hack on GNOME. 4 or 5 patches new people in #gnome-love did were included in CVS. Things seems good!

Movies: I forget to metion in my last entry Karate a muerte en Torremolinos a serie Z film I watched last weekend… so goooood. These days I’m doing a Pedro Almodovar restrospective, and I’ve seen La ley del deseo and Que he hecho yo para merecer esto, two of his films from the 80’s. Really good. They are not as technically perfect as the latest ones, but they already show Almodovar’s metaphors and his wonderful narrating language.

Nigth: Wednesday night going out to dinner with some friends to a chic restaurant. Awesome (little) food and lot of wine. Then we went to Chicote (the older cocktail place in Madrid, but now, the most chic and trendy). When you are there at 2 am with Sara Montiel you need to ask yourself lot of things. Then, Le Ki and the classical Why Not?

Last Friday I got really sick. I missed a birthday party and a bigger party on Saturday. I spent all the time in bed reading and watching movies and series: Good bye Lenin (funny!), Master and Commander (so boring that I don’t want to put the imdb link), and Te doy mis ojos (winner of Spanish’s Oscars and a really hard and good movie), more Twin Peaks and Gravitation chapters.

Music: As Sunday morning I was better, and it was the first Sunday I was awake at 9am, I went to the Orquesta Nacional concert, with left hand Ravel’s concert and Stravinski’s Firebird. Every time I’ve gone to those concerts on Friday or Saturday I’ve got free tickets, just waiting in the door, with my face of “pseudo-intelectual-and-progresist-poor-student”. But this time 15 mins before I didn’t have any ticket, so I went to the queue to buy one. At 11:30, the concent began and I had still 20 people before me, and they closed the box office, with ramaining tickets for sale!!! (I could entered 15 mins later, after the first little work). Since I missed Wagner’s Gotterdammerung at Teatro Real because I was in Malaga, I’m feeling sad about music.

Night: As Sunday I was better I went with some friends to the oppening of “Palacio” old/new disco for Sunday early hours. We got free drinks that I coudn’t drink, because of antibiotics. We had also free entrance for Kapital Love (coolest Sunday place after 1am), but we were so tired that we came back home at 12.

Oscars: There was a complot against me. I’ve seen the Oscars ceremony in the last 12 years, but in my new flat I don’t have pay TV. I tried to get Digital+ for one day in lot of different ways, but no one worked, so my last solution was watch them in www.terra.es, but as my cousin was sleeping in my room (because a friend of us was sleeping at him’s with her boyfriend). So not Oscar at all. Better, because 11 for TLOTR: TROTK is insane. It’s not a movie, it’s a third of a movie, and best screenplay and director…. bua…

GNOME: Today I sent the announce for GNOME love day!!!

People are reporting bugs, people are fixing bugs, and people are writing patches… I’m feeling the GNOME love!

Movies: Went to cinema to watch Lost in Translation, but tickets were sold out, so we saw 21 Grams, interesting movie, but I’m a bit tired of 3 stories narrated from different times that finally mix. After Pulp Fiction lot of films do the same.

In the weekend I also saw Requiem for a dream, a vision of drugs, but not the vision I’m used to see. Wonderful music mixing, in a very minimalistic obssesed way.

Spent 3 days at Malaga, for the Open Source World Conference. Met there with lot of spanish hackers: Alvaros (3), Carlos (3), Jordies (2), Alejandro, Arturo, Lorenzo, Jaime, Ismael… Lot of coffees and talks with Miguel. Spanish companies and Goverment is going open source… cool. I improvised a gnome-hispano BOF, with some interesting stuff (“the book”, GUADEC Hispana, …)

Nigth life: I went out on Tuesday at Granada. Always amazing how many people is out Tuesday late night there. Wednesday, at Malaga a quite night (I was really tired), but Thursday was really cool. We finished congress’ dinner at 2am, and I met a friend from Malaga to take a tour at Malaga night. Still impresed how many drugs can take young people in so little time. Back to Granada on Friday, and it was one of our classical nights, at Fondo and Zoo.

Movies: Saw Piedras, an amazing Spanish film, and a classic movie from Almodovar: Atame. This week I need to see two films before Oscars: Lost in Translation and…

Hacking: As I don’t have laptop, I didn’t hack anything until I came back to Madrid, but managed to do a release of bug-buddy, some patched fixing old .mime files and trying to launch GNOME love day

Finally I got back most of my CD colletion I left in Spain when I moved to Lisbon. When I came back to Spain, my friend with most of my CDs moved to Urugay. Yesterday he arrived to Spain, we went out all night, went a 8am to take breakfast, and then I got my CDs. Spend almost all day listening to my “lost” CDs

Hacking: I did a bug-buddy release for GNOME 2.5.4 , the “No name release”. Mostly bug fixes, because the HTTP POST code has to be delayed for next development cycle. The final decission about including libsoup in the release was too late for getting this code in. I think we should try to make new-modules deccision early in the release cycle.

Movies: No movies at all during the weekend. Only watched a chapter of Twin Peaks, the best TV serie.

University: Tomorrow I begin 2nd part of course. New subjects, so I’ll do my best trying to go clasess.

Finally I bought new hardware for my computer. It was painful using gnome+gdb with 128MiB, and also my small hard disk wasn’t able to manage with the full gnome cvs. So I got 512MiB DIMM, a 120GiB HD and a DVD-ROM. The big problem is that my ancient motherboard thinks the DIMM is only 128MiB so I’m running now with 256MiB that’s a big jump for me. In the other hand, I spend too much money, and don’t know how I’m going to live until the end of the month. That’s sucks

GNOME: Finally libgnomeui uses the new GtkFileChooser, which is “good” ™. Funny flamewar after the GNOME “testicles” 2.5.3 release. Beside that, GNOME 2.6 will rock, that’s what really matters.

I tried to watch Pi with some friends at home, but the OV version without subtitles didn’t like them, so we move to Le Cite des enfants perdus, but they didn’t like it, so we move to some anime for the rest of the day.

University: woo, I finished my exams! Finally I have time for everything.

Films: Few film watching past week. Bringing Up Baby really funny comedy from Howard Hawks, and Party Monster, an idependent film with the resurrection of Macaulay Culkin.

Books: I finished A Confederacy of Dunces one of the funniest american books I’ve ever read. And of course I’ve already to read 4 differents books. My rereadind of Cien a