mackers.com

Fallas 2008

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:26:11 +0100

The madness has ended.

Fallas 2008 was a good one: 19 days of festivities including 4 nights of fireworks, street parties, paella and setting fire to things. The concluding night saw us moving from plaza to plaza taking in the bands and DJs, buying cans of beer from crusties with freezer bags, talking to randomers, eating churros and chocolate, dodging firework battles, dancing to the music outside someone's window with a thousand other people, drinking chupitos in a Scottish bar at 7am and finally helping the brass bands and firecracker throwers wake everyone up at 8am. Thanks to everyone that came over to help us celebrate. Here's to 2009!

After all that we needed some R&R, so we headed to the mountains near Cuenca for some fresh air and banger-free tranquility.

Time Pope

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:38:38 +0100

Speaking about leap years and generally time befudgery, can you imagine the Y2K-type bugs that would have happened if Cobol had been around when Pope Gregory XIII's calendar reforms eventually caused half of September, 1752 to be done away with? At least we've retrospectively sorted it:

betsie:~ mackers$ cal 9 1752
   September 1752
 S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
       1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Dartmaps to Appear in MOMA Exhibition

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:14:15 +0100

My Google Maps real-time DART mashup, dartmaps has appeared in print in The National Geographic, on the radio on NPR and even on television. All of these were as part of "tech" articles or programmes, appealing mainly to geeks and GIS types. However, now Dartmaps has entered the world of the arty farty. From February 24th 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City are running an exhibition titled "Design and the Elastic Mind", which features Dartmaps as one of its exhibits. From the blurb: The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. I'm not sure how Dartmaps fits into all that, but someone somewhere must have decided it does. The exhibit takes the form of a video recording of the site in action and a short descriptive text. I couldn't make the opening party and I probably won't make it there to see it at all. But if anyone is in the city between then and May 12th, then be sure to pop in and take a gander :)

You What?

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:07:26 +0100

In Spanish, there are at least 48 ways of saying what would suffice in English with the phrase "you were". Depending on who was, when it was and if it wasn't really, we have: Tense Ser Indicative Ser Subjunctive Estar Indicative Estar Subjunctive Singular, Informal Indefinite fuiste N/A estuviste N/A Imperfect eras fueras/fueses estabas estuvieras/estuvieses Perfect* has sido hayas sido has estado hays estado Singular, Formal Indefinite fue N/A estuvo N/A Imperfect era fuera/fuese estaba estuviera/estuviese Perfect ha sido haya sido ha estado haya estado Plural, Informal Indefinite fuisteis N/A estuvisteis N/A Imperfect erais fuerais/fueseis estabais estuvierais/estuvieseis Perfect habeis sido hayais sido habeis estado hayais estado Plural, Formal Indefinite fueron N/A estuvieron N/A Imperfect eran fueran/fuesen estaban estuvieran/estuviesen Perfect han sido hayan sido han estado hayan estado * They sometimes use the perfect like we would the imperfect, so I'm including it for the sake of argument. Some of these are probably never actually used. However, it does show the kind of mental jiggery needed to actually have a conversation about anything that happened before today. [Updated with some corrections]

cerebros

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 01:16:21 +0100

There is no power in my block. There's power in my apartment, just not the common areas. This would be fine, if it didn't also mean that the lifts are out, the water is out (no pump) and the TV is out (no signal amplifier). I feel like I'm in 28 Days Later. You know that scene where Brendan Gleeson is holed up in his flat, having to drink rain water and unable to leave because of the Zombies running amok outside. What's really freaking me out, though is a) the fact that it's halloween and I can actually see several zombies wandering around outside and b) the moaning and groaning coming though the door from the poor wretches that have just climbed 12 flights of stairs.