lifebsideben

When I lived in Sarria (part of Barcelona), Spain, my wife and I frequented the O.K. Sarria (at C. Jaume Piquet, 49), which was a strange sort of Catalan fascimile of an American sports bar. There were baseball caps from American teams, a huge poster of New York at night, and Budweiser signs. Now, you couldn’t actually order a Bud (thankfully), but you could get the best burgers in town. And, giant ‘claras’, which are something like a shandy… traditionally half-lemonade and half-beer, they really quench the thirst on a hot day (or night). However, at the O.K. Bar, they made them a bit differently–half Fanta limon, half dark Estrella Bock Damm beer. That was truly great stuff.

When I moved back to the US, I couldn’t stop from craving an O.K. clara… and tried to find both Estrella Bock Damm, and Fanta Limon, to no avail. The flavors of Fanta (owned by Coke), are determined by the local bottlers/distributors, and after a couple of inquiries, I couldn’t find any U.S. distributors who carried lemon. I tried orange… yuck! I tried Squirt… nope. I tried various lemonades… un-uh. I could never tell if it was the lemon bit, or the beer… because none of the beer tasted like Bock Damm either.

Late in 2004, I went to Dallas on business, and was hanging out in a bar downtown owned by the friend of a co-worker. I asked for a good local beer, and got some Shiner Bock. Whoa! Something pretty close to Estrella Bock Damm! Excellent! It’s not quite the same, but reasonably close. And better yet, I can get it at Safeway!

OK, so now I had the beer. After much searching, I found a Yahoo Store called GermanDeli.com that I could order Fanta from… imported from Europe. I did this a few times, and while I was mightily impressed with the care they took to ship me the cans, each individually wrapped, in a styrofoam cooler, etc., it was fairly expensive. I just knew there must be a better way.

I finally found something “close enough”–it’s San Pellegrino Limonata. Available at finer stores near you (Molly Stone’s and Whole Foods near me), and mix it half and half with Shiner Bock, and you’re in for not quite the exact thing, but a pretty good version of OK Sarria’s famous (to me at least) clara. Yummmm!

Tags: food, Spain

Well, I really tried to get to the ArtFutura show at CCCB on time today, so I could see the panel discussion on weblogging. I ended up missing almost all of it (thanks Transports Metro Barcelona! Thanks RENFE! I appreciate all your confusing-ass signage and refusal to speak in Spanish, only Catalan!) Anyhow, mostly my fault. Instead of walking 1 mile downhill to the FGC train station and taking a 25 minute ride downtown, it was a 30 minute bus ride, walking uphill 1/2 mile, and then waiting for a big ol’ train, long ride into Barcelona, and then a metro 2 stops to downtown.

SO I finally arrive, and the Q&A session is underway. Anil from TypePad/SixApart is there, as is Meg from Blogger, and a Spanish guy, and someone from BoingBoing. From best I could tell, this is definitely not the author of the stuff I enjoy reading on BoingBoing… but she seemed competent for the few minutes of moderation I saw. Meg was given to rambling, and tried to make some point about linking to sites in different languages that was vaguely incoherent. Anil was well spoken as always (disclaimer: he’s a personal friend so I’m likely biased), but the whole panel looked like they could use a good night’s sleep (and I understand this is the case.) I won’t judge the whole thing on the 10-15 minutes I saw, and much of the audience seemed pretty into it, so I’m guessing the overall S/N ratio was high. Next time I’ll learn to navigate the bus system better, and actually see the whole talk, or something.

Watched the presentation from some guys from the UK who did Bjork’s last video, pretty nifty CG animation. Three young guys, it was depressing a bit. But they seemed geniunely creative, so props to them.

Finished off the night with a good Pakistani meal with Ubaldo and Lisette, yum. That makes the mistaken commute hell almost worth it

Tags: blogging, Spain

Hey, remember VisiCalc, the precursor to Lotus 1-2-3? Well, maybe you don’t. I do, mostly as a “business” app that I couldn’t afford (on a platform I couldn’t afford–the Apple ][). And I wasn’t that interested in that kind of software at the time, mostly games caught my fancy when I was trying to get a VIC-20 of my own.
Anyhow, what’s really cool, is that you can download the reference card and a working executable of VisiCalc (for the PC), from Dan Bricklin’s site. And great reading for the geeks is some of the design/programming notes from Bob Frankston’s pages. If you’ve never coded in a memory-limited environment, or in assembly, or for performance, it’ll be eye-opening reading. Lots of stuff that has been ingrained into my habits throws back to those days–including a few habits I’ve had to break to avoid premature optimization. I often think about students who learn Java as their first (does this happen?) programming language, are missing so much of the coding landscape, context which is entirely necessary to building quality systems. Sigh.

Got my my first issue of “ACM Queue” in the mail the other day. I was shocked they actually sent it to me in Spain, for the free intro offer, and supposedly at the same subscription rate as for US orders. Anyhow, it’s decent. A little bummed the first issue I got was the June (maybe the mail is just that slow), but content-wise there’s some really interesting stuff. The focus of this issue is ’storage’ and the interview with Jim Gray was pretty interesting; the article (primary) on physical disk stuff from a Seagate guy (Dave Anderson) was not that thrilling, nothing too new there. But the overall level of the articles is good, not quite up to some of the orther ACM pubs but worth the time. In the end, I doubt I’ll subscribe–I’ll just read the interesting-sounding articles on their free site. As much as for any other reason, I don’t feel the need to have trees destroyed and stuff mailed around the globe, for me to receive this info. On the other hand, I’m not giving up my New Yorker subscription anytime soon

I forgot whose blog I found this link on originally (sorry), but I’ll link to this here too, ‘cuz it’s high on the geek factor: not quite a DIY project, but a nice one-off: a homebrew Segway clone.

Tool links: URL Bandit watched the clipboard and snatches out URLs it sees, handy, especially for blogging…

Tags: engineering, software, Spain

A few years ago I thought it would be great, with all this fileswapping going on (Naptser was new), it would be cool if there was a way to pay artists when you download and like their stuff. A site, where the funds would go to them, and it would at least go easier on your conscience, even if you didn’t receive any kind of legal right to the content you might have received. This is fraught with problems in the Real World, such as the record companies wanting no business in this, what to do with collaborations (divx movies?!), how to make sure the artists themselves get the money, and the ever-present micropayment dillemas. (There’s lots more problems, but that’s the starter kit.)

Lately I’ve been finding this is an attractive idea to me again, but the problems aren’t really solved (maybe SMS helps with the micropayment issue a bit, in Europe, sort of, OK not really.) This is because I realize that I am quickly becoming CD-free, or trying to.

What does this mean? I moved to Europe a year ago; one thing I wasn’t going to take schlep overseas was a few hundred CDs (and especially not their cases). So I bought one of those big album thingys for CDs, and stuffed it with about 100 discs, and carted it over–I also brought my PC, which already had a sizable mp3 collection (probably 80% of which are from discs I own.) My CDs went into storage in the brother-in-law’s basement (as well as the DVD cases, and roughly 100 other boxes of junk.) Once I got to Spain, the first place I lived didn’t have a CD player, so I couldn’t play the CDs… but I could play them on my PC, and also drop stuff onto my mp3 player (a 192MB flash-based thing, good enough for a week of tunes without reloading.) The CDs collected dust. Before I moved I listened to CD-Rs burned of mp3s I owned, in my Aiwa aftermarket car stereo; partly because of the 10-albums to a disk capability, but also because I didn’t want my “original” cds to get stolen.

Later, I moved to a real place, but was never motivated to buy a real CD player (although did end up getting an alarm clock one, but only use the alarm clock functions.) Anyhow, I have this stack of CDs in the cabinet that I never look at or play. The songs are all ripped to mp3s on my or the wife’s computer (she is an iTunes fanatic, I’m windows boy.) Now I pull stuff onto her iPod and listen to it commuting back and forth to work, and no matter what, I don’t really have any use for these plastic disc things. They just take up space. I don’t miss the 500 I have in storage in the US, especially the ones whose content I really like, because the content is duplicated (”backed-up” if you’re reading this from the RIAA) on my PC.

Last week I was watching european MTV (Spanish I think, but we get several variants), and they played a video by some group (turns out one guy) called Four Tet. It was amazing. I searched emule and yah, the latest album is available. The next day (patience with the mule!) I was listening to the album, and really dug it. Great stuff. Before winamp delivered the last track, I was leaving him praise on his website’s comment form, and trying to figure out how to buy the album. Turns out it’s a small indie label (yay) called DominoRecords in the UK, and they have a pretty nice site. Within 15 minutes I had purchased that CD, and one of his previous ones as well. (The Internet is a great thing.)

That’s how I got back to the pay-the-artists-directly-website-is-a-great-idea (but really isn’t) idea. I want the music, and maybe the booklet would be cool, but damn, I don’t want more of those stupid prerecorded CD things. I would be much happier, and I suspect the artist would have been too, to just download the music off their site after I paid, and maybe pdf’s of the booklets. Virtual is good. I have lots of virtual space. Bandwidth is infinitely cheaper than pressing discs, printing booklets, assembly, packing, shipping, etc. I can’t be the only person who is willing to make the change (and if I could get a slight discount on the “license”, that would be great–but the 10 UKP was perfectly reasonable for the great music in this case, anyhow.) There’s no easy way to do this in aggregate, though. Maybe ASCAP and BMI could handle it for some music, since they already pay the artists, but that’s just a start (and methinks the RIAA would squelch this immediately anyhow.) And how do you pay painters, scultors of public art, dancers, and other people who you might want to?

Dealing with the status quo, I believe artists should probably all just have their own websites and accept Paypal donations or similar. It still leaves me with the problem of how I pay Bravo for the episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I’ve downloaded. I guess there will be a DVD set released at some point and I’ll buy that, just as my way of saying ‘thanks’. I can’t get Bravo in Spain, at all, but on the other hand, I had Bravo legitimately for years in the US and there was hardly ever anything decent on the channel, so maybe I’ve already “paid” for it. A problem for another day, and a more creative solution than I can devise now, to be sure.

Tags: big_business, Music, Spain

For whatever reason, I’m fascinated by scams, swindles, grifters, and all that jazz. Always have been. I’ve often thought a great movie could be made about this, with kids being the conmen and perpetrating a myriad of schemes as a way of life. Of course, this really does happen, but the film wouldn’t be ‘realistic’; it would be more as if there were no ‘honest’ jobs, and society (at least for kids) was a constant con game. Read whatever you will about me, from that.
How I got onto the topic most recently, is that I was reading Russell Beattie’s weblog as I ocassionally do, and he had a bit about the Rich Day, Poor Dad author. I knew when I read the book, the guy was less than fully truthful, but John T. Reed really exposes the book’s inaccuracies well. Good reading, wasted a lot of Friday night on his site. (Apparently I’ll do anything for entertainment when the wife is out of town!)
Returning to the generic sham motif, I was completely captivated by the stories of “magazine crews”, about kids that sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door, they are often basically indentured servants and controlled essentially as a pimp controls his stable. Great site to read about it here, specifically the ‘true stories’ pages. About 18 months ago when I was still in the Bay Area [Burlingame], I kicked one of these kids out of our “secure” apartment complex because he was harassing the (mostly elderly) neighbors. He definitely wasn’t on the up-and-up, although now I really feel sorry for the kid, considering what he was probably going through. Here’s some more good links to read up on scams, if you’re also into that kind of thing.

Another thing Beattie’s site makes me think of a lot, is moving back to the Bay Area. Like him, I moved to Spain (me Barcelona, him Madrid) for opportunities here, to learn the culture, live a bit different life, etc. I know I wanted to learn more about myself, too, and definitely have. But the job market here is fairly depressed, and we both have families to support. I miss my adopted home, the Bay Area, and all my friends there; but I love Barcelona. It’s tough. If my contract doesn’t get renewed soon, I may not have a lot of options, however. We have plane tickets back to Detroit (family there) for December, and now I’m really considering buying more tickets to go from there right to San Fran, and see what we can drum up. I’m starting to send feelers out to friends I trust there, too. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say too much in case my current co-workers find my blog! But it’s defintely weighing heavy on my mind now. My apartment lease is also up in December. The prospect of trying to scare up a job in the Valley or SF, from thousands of miles away, is also pretty daunting. I’ll see how things shake out in the next few weeks at work, in the meantime I think I’ll update my resume…

Tags: burlingame, Spain