Life Pattern

Tag: spain

  • Two months without blogging

    Wow, It’s been more than two months without me blogging. But what months… 🙂

    We’ve been to the marvellous Spain. Three weeks was enough time to completely forget my “ordinary” life and all the incomplete things fighting for my attention. While in Spain I’ve deliberately chosen to stay away from computers and then when we returned I still kept away from computers for a while driven by the inertia. I mean Internet connected PCs – you can’t easily avoid computers cause they are everywhere these days – in the camera, in the GPS, in the car, in the phone…

    We travelled around Andalusia and some of Madrid and Valencia regions. We’ve been to Valencia, Mojacar, Granada, Tarifa, Seville, Cordoba, Madrid, Segovia, Avila, Toledo to name few. Overall we traveled about 4000 kilometres. It sounds like great distance but that’s only 10% of the Earth’s circumference. And still it’s quite a lot for three weeks 🙂

    Spain is a big and diverse country. It meant lots of broken stereotypes for me. It’s organized into several autonomous communities and some of them even have their own local languages. For example at the Valencia’s airport there were signs in English, Castellano and Valenciano. Different landscapes, different cultures… We’ve seen wild flamingos, deer, wild boars, great sand dunes, countless beautiful beaches, white villages, castles, the big and modern Madrid. And I can’t find words to describe how delicious the food was.

    From the local news – the 6th annual OpenFest conference – was held on 1st and 2nd of November. I liked only three of the lectures: “WordPress.com – 40 million pages a day” by Nikolay Bachiyski, “28 Months Scalability” by Slavi Nikolov and “Free Hardware” by Radoslav Kolev. In my opinion the main problem was the weak presentational skills of the other lecturers. I know it’s easy to sit aside and criticise, so I’d be better take part and make a presentation for the next year’s OpenFest.

    We used the opportunity to exchange PGP keys on the key signing party kindly organised by Peter Pentchev. There was a pleasant “unofficial after-party” as well, so overall I’d call this OpenFest a success.

    At work I’m currently having fun with things like DRBD, Hearbeat, OpenVZ… My impressions from DRBD so far are that it’s a very complete product. Decent documentation, predictable behaviour. I wonder whether it has something to do with it’s commercial backing? OpenVZ looks quite complete as well.

    I started to use my Facebook account a little bit more because some of my friends use it and it’s rather convenient way to show your pictures 🙂 And Niki invited people to his birthday party via Facebook. Niiice party 😀

    I spend some time learning the Kohana framework + jquery + CSS. I don’t use it for something specific at the moment – just trying to figure out what is it like to create websites with modern tools like these. Most of the time I’m quite busy with system administration and I started to feel too far behind the web technologies 🙂 So far it looks very powerful – nothing to do with the way things were done 5-6 years ago. I’ve tried to make a collapsed tree (ul/li) in which branches are dynamically populated on expansion by ajax – it fit in less than 10 lines of Kohana/Jquery. And it work’s on each browser I’ve tried so far. Impressive!

    И те така те.

    Maybe I’ll write in more details on the aforementioned topics. Or maybe won’t – only time will tell :-P. If you happen to know Bulgarian you can read more about our journey through Spain at Antonia’s blog:

    By the way I’m looking for a book called Getting Things Done: The ABCs of Time Management by Edwin Bliss but I’m left with the impression that this book is out of print. Any ideas where to find it? Especially if there’s PDF or other open format version because I hate to wait for the dead-tree books to arrive. Moreover they are bulky and inconvenient to carry around.

  • Learning Spanish

    Traveling around the globe is one of the most enjoyable activities for us (the other part of us). If I look back through the past few years most of my memories are somehow related to our journeys. Probably I’ll consider myself rich when I have the freedom to travel year round. It’d be wonderful if we manage to make our income location independent some day, but that’s another story.

    So the biggest journey we are planning for this year is three weeks in Spain. We still haven’t decided whether it will be a pure cultural and sightseeing tour of the big cities or maybe smaller cities plus rural Spain plus south coast… Probably something in between.

    One of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to practice it. And the best opportunity for this is while you are visiting a country in which the language in question is spoken. I’ve considered the idea of learning at least some basic Greek or other language and to practice it during our vacations. But eventually I was abandoning it every time because it was important to improve my English first. Now when I feel that my English is on a quite acceptable level* it’s about time to try another language. Yep, Spanish. My aims aren’t too high though. I’m not even considering proper grammar for now. My immediate intentions are to learn 200 words till 15 September and to be able to get the general (be it very broad) meaning from Spanish news, maps, signs, restaurant menus.

    Some facts about Spanish that I find particularly interesting:

    • Everything has gender in Spanish. Some of the gender information is kept even in plural.
    • There are two different “to be” verbs: ser y estar. Although they can often be translated the same way, ser and estar are distinct verbs with distinct meanings and are seldom synonymous.
    • Spanish verb conjugation is much trickier than that of English verb conjugation because endings change for virtually each pronoun for each tense.

    As a matter of fact Bulgarian verb conjugation is quite complex as well. But it’s my native language so I didn’t have any particular difficulties learning it 🙂

    —
    *Although I don’t have the slightest idea where to put commas in English texts. Except probably in non-defining clauses.