Bones or Teeth!

Personally, I think most of these crime series are on the verge of absolute nonsense. A doctor that solves crimes? a mathematician? Why not a violoncellist? or maybe a noodle cook working in a fast-food court? Anyway. One of the most nonsensical one is CSI: why all laboratories are in complete darkness? Are they expecting to find anything there? I heard once that they looked more like a disco rather than a lab, with all such glooing lights and big boobed girls.

Bones is a classic one, and the creepiest one to my taste. It is a classic one because all its characters are so archetypical that turns out to be as childish as A-Team or the Kight Rider. All espisodes follow the same structure, and the different set of couples are as shallow as the encephalogram of one the corpses laying on their lab. A FBI agent and a brainy antropologist doctor? a couple of geeks, a rat of lab and a kind of compter genious? So clichee! It is so foreseenable that it makes me laugh.

What it is worst, though, in that series, which makes me laugh even louder is the size of the teeth of most of the actors there! In most of the series, the people who appear are so fake: guys tend to be over-sized in gym, while girls' nose-jobs and boob-jobs are terribly apparent. But in this one, it seems like if all of them had had dental implants for free, but dentists run out of teeth of their own size and they had to use teeth which were too big. Completely hilarious!

Chernobil or Facebook

There's nothing on TV, just idiots and a re-run of Bond's Moonraker. I've just watched again another IT Crowd episode, after a documentary on Chernobil disaster, which amazingly seems to have happened a day like today back in 1986, 24 years ago! Wooow, tempus fugit! I was 12 y.o. going on 13. That was my last year in elementary school -- or maybe was it the next one?

Many things happened on these years: my family moved from a tiny apartment to a bigger flat, where I got my own room. We bought, finally, a color TV set, and I won a computer with an essay I wrote about the Roman monuments in my city. It was my first PC, and it was kind of a pain in the arse. I couldn't play at all, since there were no games for such machines. And above all, I couldn't read the instructions, which were in English, nor understand the OS guide book. I was 13, I wanted to have fun playing, and all I had was a log talking about assembler's hexadecimal code. I felt frustrated. Now, things are completely different. Computers are for fun and everyone can use them.

Tonight I was watching IT Crowd's episode about Friendface, something similar to Facebook. It is defined as "basically a disease based on friendship". Roy is re-meeting an old girlfriend (the Joker) with whom he had already split up, and Moss is accompanying Jen to her reunion party where they unrealistically show off in front of her old school girlfriends. It is a bloody mess and turns out to be a total disaster.

I personally don't see much the use of Facebook, besides fucking around or wasting time sneaking around friend's friend's friend's photo albums. Apart from the fact that some people seem not to understand the basic principles of privacy, my main curiosity is to figure out what is the point of having 1500 friends, way beyond human capacity to remember names or faces. What kind of friendship is this? Does it generates any real activity?

I've made some tests and it seems that most people don't even enter into their accounts for months, or they lose their interest soon after the first exchanges of posts. If FB's fiendship is not backed with a previous real and close friendship, it soon disappears. So, what's the point of it on the first place?

Sant Jordi, Amor, Roses i Llibres

Dóna'm la mà que anirem per la riba,
ben a la vora del mar bategant,
tindrem la mida de totes les coses
només en dir-nos que ens seguim amant.

Hold my hand and we will walk along the shore
very close to the sea which is beating,
we will have the measure of all things
just by telling us that we keep on loving to each other.

At least once in a year, something different from drugs and beer is sold in les Rambles de les Flors.

Elkano in Passeig de Gracia

I said once that in this blog I would be talking about Barcelona. I admit that this hasn't happened as often as I promised, since I tend to talk about what happens to me and my circumstances. But today, for a change, I will talk about something about my mother's city.

I was waiting at the station surroundings, wasting some minutes until the moment came to go to the dungeons where this station is located, an infernal and ghastly place, where I try to stay the shortest time possible. Outside the evening was wonderful, inviting me to stay for longer, sitting at some terrace having a drink and, perphas, a talk with one of the many visitor that like swallows in Spring appear in the streets of Barcelona.

I looked up, while standing in front of the mouth of the station, and I saw an unexpected statue. Who was that guy? On its base it is written "Elkano". Elkano? Juan Sebastian Elcano? What is he doing up there? And a little to the right, over the threshold of the main entrance to the building, the answer. Two marble engraved stones, with the same text, in Catalan and in Basque.

Etxe honetan egon zen 1936-tik 1939-arteko gerrate bitartean euzkadiko ordezkaritza katalunian bi herrien arteko anaitasunezko eta adiskidetasunezko harremanak bultzatu eta giza-aldezko ekintza eskergarri bat burutu zuena.

Something like that during the Spanish Civil war, a delegation of the Basque Government was housed here, which closely and fraternally collaborated with the Catalan Government in humaniratian tasks. I imagine those humanitarian tasks had to do with the help to all the people who had to flee from the fascist army from the Basque Country to Republican zone caused by the breaking of the front war line into two pieces and the fall of San Sebastian and Bilbao very early in the war.

At the end of the war, though, the Catalan President was shot dead by the fascists and all our laws, government and language, banned. However, by selling their soul to the devil, they managed to keep theirs, along with their sovereignty and taxes. Even now, April 2010, the flimsy statute that should be ruling the Autonomy -- this humbug that was invented in the 70's to shut up our demands -- is stuck in the Constitutional Court just because it says that Catalan people exist and, maybe, we should be managing our own taxes.

And where is the fraternal and friendly help of the Basques now? Lost, as usual, and minding their own business. So, mutatis mutandis, I'm sorry to say that your people and you, Elkano, can go and get a little lost fishing some bacalao!

A Lousy Chiringuito Called Endesa

There are monkies in the deepest and unknown areas of the Amazon rainforest which would be more precise in giving an estimation of my electric consumption than Endesa. I don't believe in hell out of this world, but there should be one for the delinquents who manage this unefficient and monopolistic chiringuito.

The Shame in Spain is Mainly on Telecinco Frames

Television in Spain is deadly rotten, and the stinkiest channel of all is Telecinco, the sewage of these dregs. Take all it is dead, all it is dreadful, all it is vile and vulgar, low and denigrating, putrefied and narrow-minding, and put it in a garbage bag, let it decompose for some weeks under a tropical sun, and then, maybe, then, you will have a glimpse of the size of the stench such channel spreads over the Hertzian waves. If the whole channel would disappear all of a sudden, the IQ of Spain, as incurable as it may appear to any objective observer, would recover immediately from the present lobotomized brain-mangled retard level to the able-to-breath-without-explicit-assistance coma level.

What does this shit look like? Basically, it is Berlusconi's Italian Tele 5 alla espagnola, which means less bellinas and more Belenes. Belen Esteban is the personification of this channel, or at least of the kind of people who find it amusing, the standard garru-guarras, aka Yolis, Vanes and Veros, and their male counterparts, the garrulators, Yonatans, Frans and Cristians. This TV channel provides them with all they need to be nourished, apart from bread and narcotics, and I'm not sure about the latter.

All I can see in its programming is Big Brother, talkshows about Big Brother, other side programs about people (to use a euphemism commonly accepted) in Big Brother or the like, and more talkshows featuring Belen Esteban and her infra-world. And from time to time, a movie. For example today, they took advantage of the recent release of Tim Burton's Alice and, guess what, they put a 3rd-rate Alice; more cheating the audience with rubbish. I'm waiting for a movie about volcanos, Pompey, plane crashes, or all together, according to their flee-leaped logic.

The other source of TV crap is Cuatro (5, 4, is it like a countdown to A-bomb-like blast of brain nullifying?). While Tele Cinco deals with fishy junk celebrities, Cuatro has democratized the exposure of utter vulgarity and has invented (woow, Spain finally invents something!) a whole new breed of TV programs where total scum explains its pointless life on TV. The origin is the program Callejeros, street dwellers. In their minds, they think, it is a research documentary about the tough lives of common people; in practice, it is just rambling around degraded suburbia interviewing junkies, whores, and all sorts of lumpen. And there have been a lot of spin-off programs, like Callejeros Viajeros, and the like in other channels.

I was not at all any gourmand of TV. I swear I could gobble any kind of junk; but now, after the time spent in Japan, a country with a TV as pointless as Spain (though not as filthy nor rotten) and with the aggravating that I had no clue of what they were saying, I got used to living without TV, apart from some series and movies; in original version if possible. I know, it sounds snobbish and elitist, but my stomach can't digest McTV anymore as it used to do. Am I getting old? No, just an ulcer.

Fuck Telecinco! Fuck Berlusconi!
A Duomo, a Duomo, my Kingdom for a Duomo!

Work in Spain, a Flower in a Desert

Recently, I've been involved in the selection of a candidate to cover a position in the company where I work. It is been the first time for me I chose a person for a job, I must confess; but I also must admit it has been an interesting and tiring experience.

I started working in my present company almost one year ago. I underwent two interviews by Skype, since I was not in Barcelona at that time. Somehow, I managed to convience them about my adequacy without even being personally there. Maybe that was the trick! I remember they asked me to write down a whole report about how I would focus the project they were hiring me to work for.

It took me three days to complete it and a lot of coffees at チョコクロ. I even had to turn down a promising afternoon of crazy fun with the boring and gorgeous "so+adj." girl in order to finish the bloody report on time. At the end, I got the job, though exceptionally I had to be on trial for 6 months, which is the double of what it is normally required in the company.

Now, I was on the other side of the table, and in front of me, the three guys that were selected to have an interview with out of 25 possible candidates who were turned down straightforward for not even fulfilling the most basic requirements we were asking them to get the job. And it was I who had to carry the burden of interviewing them, since I am the only expert in Computer Vision in the company. So, there I was, peppering them with all sort of questions about their knowledge, background, and future prospectives.

First, a Colombian guy with an interesting CV, perfect for what we were looking for. PhD in Computer Vision, international experience in research, command in English, good aptitude and attitude. He is the one who got the position, by the way. It seems kind of an interesting and optimistic guy, runs Marathons and speaks a perfect Catalan with a sweet accent inherited from his particular Colombian Spanish.

The two other guys clearly show how bad the situation in the working market is nowadays in Spain. Both came from the UAB (Autonomous University of Barcelona). I had references of the first guy because he worked by the first Computer Vision spin-off company created within this University. They dealt with the automatic quality control for corks in the bottles of cava. I even use some of his code for analysing blobs in binarized images. That's why I was astonished when I saw his resume applying for the position. It turned out that the recession had bring the company to bankruptcy and he had not being paid for the last couple of months. Shameful.

The other guy was a part-time assistant professor of Computer Science at the same University. He was the least fit for the position. He lacked the basic background, poor reseach experience, almost no real-world struggle, no international exposure, poor English, and what was the worst, a completely misguided attitude towards solving problems. He would probably be a good elementary school teacher, but by no means a cutting-edge professional. The worst for me was the wrong scale he used at grasping the world's measure, the money. He asked a ridiculously low salary. The salary is the measure of your work and it is something that it has to be negotiated. If it is too high, you won't probably get the job, but if you put it so low, it means you don't value your own work. So, I won't buy it.

In conclusion, what is the working market situation in Spain? The traditional sectors, i.e., construction and turism, are nearly dead and, in the case of construction, on its way to the cementery. They must be obliterated from any further serious analysis of a future economic growth in Spain for some decades, if ever. What about technology and science? They would be a possible solutions for the current situation if there were, on the one side, a clear and fair interest on them from the Spanish political and financial world, which has never existed nor will, and a pool of good professionals, on the other side, which pathetically doesn't exist.

As a result, only small private companies, national or foreigner, are able to appear in those areas offering work to highly skilled professionals, national or foreigner. Science will keep being monopolized by the burocratic and intranscendent declining public research institutes and universities, and technology, by huge conglomerates which only provide with monopolized facilities and services at high costs, but with no real innovation. So, I guess I will keep being a traveling engineer for long time, playing my music to those who can pay me, here and there.

London, Under the Volcano

These are just a few of the lot of pictures I took last weekend in London. Every time I go there, it seems I bring the sun with me since the skies are always fulgently blue. Nevertheless, like a spell cast by an envious old witch, just after I left the Isles, this monumental eruption in Iceland, recently renamed as Dustland, appeared and all flights from UK were cancelled. I was lucky, again: last time I travelled to London, the mother of all snow storms stroke the northen part of Catalonia, bringing it back to the stone ages; no electricity for a week.

Portobello Rd. in Notting Hill, with lots of antiques shops and street markets. Lovely and charming, as they like to say in London. Somewhere down this street, I ate some Jolof food, from Gambia. I cried, so hot it was! First time I eat some African food from beneath the Sahara.

I know it is a very silly picture, just like these Japanese tourists routinely take in front of the signs and the billboards showing the name of the places they are visiting. What can I do? Too long living in Japan!

Oxford! Finally, I could see with my own eyes what it was all about. I shared for 6 months the room at work while I was in Sweden with two former Oxford students, a mathematician Irish girl and an electrical engineer, just like Rowan Atkinson. Most of the English I know I got it from them. Today, however, I was just a mere tourist taking pictures in an extraordiary stage and marveling at these phenomenal buildings, the wrapping of Oxford.

I found signs like this in the frontispiece of a number of doors around the central yard of this Oxfordian College utterly intriguing. "Beware, you will learn about Natural Philosophy on the other side!", like a warning before a tunnel advertising you of what you are going to find on the other end side of the hole. "Don't blame us if you learnt anything. We warned you!"

This magnificient ceiling is just in front of the Christ Church College's dinning hall, the one that appears in Harry Potter's movies, though the real one is not as big, but more grounded on the reality and far less sillily magical. What is magical to me is this achitecture. They could manage to build an almost flat ceiling with very few archs using tangencial circles instead. Notice there is no diagonal arch sustaining the squared parts of the roof flanked by groups of four columns. Magic!

This old chap in a bonnet hat was one of the friendly guardians of Christ Church College in Oxford. People were so excited about being in this cloister, also appearing in Harry Potter's first two movies, that he had to tell them repeatedly not to go onto the lawn. I could enter by paying just half of the ticket fare after convincing the funny head of guardians at the entrance I was a student.

This ceiling is just glorious! It spans like a fan from a virtual column which literally hangs on the sky. Amazing!

The symmetry is so perfect here, excluding the clouds, that it seems there is only one side facing a mirror. Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, used to teach logic around here and, as I read, used to look through the glasses of the windows in the library building that stands behind where I took the picture, maybe looking for a smiling pussy cat from Cheshire.

Trafalgar Sq. from the National Gallery's staircase. First on the foreground, Lord Nelson's commemorative column. On the far background, Big Ben and the Parliament. I tried to emulate Turner's stormy skies I had just observed in the museum.

The National Gallery from outside, since I could not take any interesting picture inside. I was warned twice by a Japanese-looking guardian, so I desisted. Later I could see how an Italian girl with a better technique was taking a smuggled picture of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the museum. These cunning Italian girls!

Lord Nelson, the admiral who defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar. He lost one eye and one hand, as it is very amusingly pictured in Blackadder when saying something like "this is the worst idea since Lord Nelson bet his hand on the virtue of Lady Hamilton", who is well-known to have been his famous mistress, or showing him awaking from drunkenness and desperately shouting "I'm blind, I'm blind!", not noticing his eye patch was covering the wrong eye.

London Eye from St. Jame's Park at dusk. The sun was bathing the buildings of the Ministries, but the ducks on the lake were just unaware of it.

And Big Ben, again and again, from near the War Rooms, where Churchill directed the WWII.

パパヤ鈴木〜〜〜大好き！！！

Sometimes, when I get up in the morning I really look like パパヤ鈴木, a guy I really don't dislike. He is so funny! I used to watch him on TV while in Japan, in a program where the goal was to go to some remote restaurant and order the biggest meal they had, and eat it to the last drop.

Belive it or not, he is a dancer, who, I imagine, unhopefully underwent through the same metamorphosis as John Travolta. However, he still dances and sings with his old chaps, the オヤジ. That's a funny song!



Today it was the case. Even after a shower, my hair is so crazy and curly, I got a hairdo!
Papaya's power has come to me!
So, I'll try to dance before going to sleep
今なん時？

Sugar, the Sweetest Thing on Earth

My sweet Aya has sent me this song...



She's the sweetest thing on Earth, isn't she?

I Threw My Sad Nets to Your Oceanic Eyes...

...and almost got drown!

Images of a Great City, The City

The Sun Sets and the London Eye Wheels

The Flying Cathedral or the Wobbly Bridge

I took this picture in the Millennium Bridge, facing St. Paul's cathedral and having the Tate Modern at my back. Doesn't it look like St. Paul were just flying on the river Thames?

I'm more than sure I'm not the first one to take such picture, but I wonder if the architect was concious about the impression he was creating when thinking of a ramp which would go down in between the ramp itself, or it was just a lack of space left by the massive Tate Mordern's monolithic brick building and the need for a gentle slope to get on the bridge without a staircase which prevented him from building a ramp in a more orthodox way.

Seriously, I have my doubts, since this guy managed to design a pretty ugly and scary bridge after all, known among Londoners by the nickname of the Wobbly Bridge, a bridge that wobbles more than the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Who is the architect, then? Norman Foster. He also designed the Collserola's Tower in Barcelona, a huge curved triangular prism hanging from a pole like a mainsail. In the first design, he forgot a way to keep the sail stable, leaving the whole structure free to rotate along the pole. In my first year at university in 1991, I assisted to a lecture given by the group of engineers who had fixed that problem with cables attaching the sail onto the firm ground.

Who on earth needs a castle flying in the sky? Just a swift Laputa, maybe.