The start of the festival season

Today, one of Europe's most famous music festivals starts in Belgium: Rock Werchter.
In 4 days, 58 bands will perform on 2 stages, including: New Order, Snoop Dogg, The Chemical Brothers, Green Day, Faithless, Within Temptation, Rammstein, REM, Keane, Queens of the stone age, and many more.
The festival also means the start of the summer holiday for thousands of Belgian students.

I remember spending several days on the festival area, just relaxing and enjoying the music, amongst 60000 other visitors. Legendary concerts took place there.


When we were visiting Llanes a few weekends ago, we spotted a poster for a summerfestival on the beach in Santander. What a surprise to find Belgian's '2 many dj's' on the list of performers. We just might visit Santander next weekend.

By the way, here you can see the live streaming of Rock Werchter.

Bloggers beware

Apparently, another blogger got fired for things he wrote on his blog. He didn't care much about it though, since he found a better job already. But still.
What surprised me more is that there actually seems to be a word for getting fired for what you write on your blog: you get dooced.

I'm pretty sure nobody of my colleagues knows the way to my blog. I check who has been in here daily (Yes, I know you were here, so you might as well leave a comment!), and as soon as a Spanish IP address shows up in the statistics, I double check the way he or she got here.
Not that I have written anything they can't read. But as long as Bloggers keep getting dooced, I think it's normal to get a little paranoid.

They once found my former blog though. But as it was written in Dutch, they couldn't understand a single word. Before I knew it, the little buggers were using Babelfish to find out what I had written. Luckily, Dutch is such a horrible language that even Babelfish couldn't produce understandable sentences for them. That'll teach them invading my privacy.

Description of a weekend

Visiting Ikea has one disadvantage: You always buy more than what you were planning to buy.
On Friday evening, we decided to visit the recently opened Ikea shop in Asturias, because we had set our eye on a little side table that would fit perfectly into our living room interior.
Almost two hours later, we left Ikea with the table and: a plant, a lamp, bed sheets, table decorations, a cooking alarm clock and a carpet.
We're going to have to prevent visiting Ikea again for a while.
It was already late, and on our way home, we stopped at the Mexican restaurant 'cantina mariachi' for dinner.

On Saturday, we cleaned the apartment, constructed our Ikea table and lamp and looked for a space for the other things we bought.
After that we drove to our favourite mall to check out the pre-sales offers that were already going on there.
We decided to try out the new Foster's Hollywood restaurant for dinner, had a 'plate of everything for two' and ate way too much.
It had been years since I had eaten ribs for the last time.

on Sunday morning, we went over to Mónica's parents for lunch and visited the medieval market of Candás in the afternoon. On this market, people in traditional clothing were selling handmade objects and demonstrating ancient habits.


Back home, our pet fish needed fresh water. While pouring the water out of the fish tank, it slipped out of my hands and broke. Normally, I'm not very clumsy. But after work I'll have to go buy a new house for our 2 little swimmers.

(My pictures on Flickr)

Thank god it's friday

I've been quite busy at work the last couple of days. Therefor I wasn't able to post on monday and thursday.
Clients who need a program urgently but don't have a clue about how they want the program to work, are the worst.

We didn't make it to the San Juan celebrations last night. We were both tired, and Mónica had to get up early today. Better luck next year, when the 23rd of June will be on a friday.

I'm off to enjoy the weekend. We're having bad luck with the weather though. The forecasts say it's going to rain all weekend.
Have fun!

San Juan

On the night of the 23rd of June, Spain celebrates 'San Juan'.
It is the celebration of the arrival of the summer, on the shortest night of the year. On midnight, bonfires are being lit all over the countryside and people dance around them, set off fireworks and go swimming in the sea.
In southern cities like Alicante, the celebration is being held for several days, and beautiful, enormous wooden figures are being created which go up in flames on the night of San Juan.
It is a night full of traditions and superstitions.


These are some of the superstitions of San Juan:

• If you get up early on the 24th, you won't feel tired for the rest of the year.
• If you sit down underneath a fig tree with a guitar on the night of San Juan, you will learn to play it immediately.
• If you write down the things you want to forget and burn the paper on this night, you will have good luck for the rest of the year.
• If you bath in the dew of the night, you will be blessed for the rest of the year.
• If you are single and you look out of the window on the morning of the 24th, you will see the love of your life passing by.
• If you bath nude in the sea, lean backwards and watch the moon, you will be able to work miracles.
  

Update:
I bet this guy sat under the fig tree with his ukelele on the night of San Juan. This makes me want to start learning how to play the guitar again. Wonderful.

Our weekend

On Saturday morning, we packed our bags and left for Llanes, a little touristic village by the coast, known for its beautiful beaches.
We checked into a simple hotel and headed for the beach at Barro, with the finest white sand, to enjoy the weather.
By 6 o'clock in the afternoon, clouds came rolling in, so we headed back to the hotel, showered and drove to the city center of Llanes, to stroll through the narrow, ancient streets with many colorful shops. Later we enjoyed an abundant dinner in one of the many fine restaurants.


On Sunday morning, the sun kept hiding behind the clouds, so we decided to drive back to Gijon and visit the enormous Sunday market. By 4 o'clock we got tired of strolling around and headed home to relax and cuddle up on the couch.
Why do great weekends always go by so fast?

(My pictures on flickr)

Enjoy the weekend

I overslept this morning. I woke up at 9:07, while I normally should be at work at 9:00.
Mónica has to start earlier, so she was already out of the house. But I must have hit my alarm clock in my sleep, turned around and slept on. Luckily it's not a problem. I just called in that I would be a little later.
The thing is that some programs on the Spanish television are a real pain in the...
Yesterday was the final show of one of those reality tv shows, la casa de tu vida (literally 'the house of your life'). Not exactly my cup of tea, because all they do is fight, but Mónica wanted to see who was going to win the house.


While these shows in Belgium normally last about 50 minutes, in Spain they need 3 full hours of discussion, involving all the contestants that were already voted out in earlier episodes ánd their family, to finally announce the winners of the show. Sometimes they literally drive me wild.
And just when I can go to bed and I'm happy that it's finally over, they announce the beginning of the next reality tv show next week. Spanish tv is terrible.
Anyway, it's friday and the weather is great. I'm off for a weekend at the beach. Have fun!

Feeling hot, hot, hot

When it's cold outside, and the air conditioning at work shouldn't be working at all, it feels like we are working in a refrigerator here. But today it's 24C/75F outside, and 28C/82F on my desk.
I have a thermometer within reach, and every half hour one of my colleagues comes asking me if the temperature is still rising.

Yesterday I had another bad allergy day. I was sneezing and blowing my nose all day, feeling exhausted when I finally got home. I collapsed in the sofa and didn't get up again until it was time to go to bed. So today I brought 4 packets of kleenex to work, but although the weather is the same as yesterday, I didn't have to sneeze a single time. Weird things, those pollen.

Been arranging flights and rooms

Let's see, where shall I begin.
The weekend was great. We had 2 beautiful days with lots of sun and high temperatures. So we spent most of the weekend on the beach, getting a tan.
On Sunday afternoon, we had arranged to meet an ex-coworker of Mónica, and her boyfriend. Two very nice people who showed us around in their hometown, Mieres, which we had never visited before.

On Sunday I got the news that my oldest sister, her husband and the two boys will come and visit us in August. So I had to start looking for and writing mails to hotels in the neighborhood, to arrange some rooms for them. Since this afternoon the flights and the rooms seem to be booked and confirmed.
It's the first time that they will visit us in Spain. So they're very curious to see where I live, and I'm sure that Mónica's parents are very curious to meet my sister and the two kids.
And suddenly it wasn't so difficult anymore to decide when I was going to take my summer holidays.

Holidays

We have been asked to decide when we want to take our holidays this summer. That way our teamleader can check the dates and make sure that always 2 members of the team are present.
I said that I will decide whenever the rest of the team has given their preferences, because we probably won't be going anywhere this summer anyway. Mónica has just started on a new job, and won't have the possibility to take a holiday this summer.
Too bad, because we were both longing to go visit Barcelona this year. We have never been there, and Mónica would finally like to meet the girls she has been in contact with over the internet for many years. They have promised us to be our city guides whenever we decide to go.


But with the nearest beach only 10 minutes away, every weekend can be a little holiday if the weather is fine. And we can always go on a weekend trip to Santander or another big city along the coast.
Well, I'm off to enjoy this weekend as if it were a small holiday. I suggest you do the same.

About bikes

I'm thinking about getting a mountain bike, because I should get some exercise. And I could make some beautiful bike trips here, Asturias being a natural paradise and all.
But Spain is not like Belgium, when it comes to bikes. There are no bicycle paths on the side of the roads, and the Spanish drivers are not used to share the road with bikes.
I hardly ever see a bicycle on the road here. Which is a real shame, because it could be a great mean of transport in these busy cities.
I remember when Mónica visited me in Belgium for the first time, she frowned and asked me: "where are all those people going on their bikes?". I thought she was kidding me. But for her, a bike was a sports item, not a transport item. She was stunned when she saw a guy in a suit on a bike.
Anyway, I might go take a look at some cheap mountain bikes. I'm only afraid that in a few months it will be oxidizing in our garage, next to those dumbbells that I bought last year.


Have you heard? Blogging might not save your life, but it might catch your killer. That is what happened to 19 year old Simon Ng, who was killed in May. The police found his killer, because Simon had written in the last post of his Blog that his sister's former boyfriend was visiting. Guess who killed Simon and his sister? His last post already has 2800 comments.
Link to the blogLink to the story

In today's news

Today Shakira launches her new CD 'Fijación Oral'. You might know Shakira from her worldwide hit 'Whenever, wherever'. I first heard Shakira's music when I was on holiday in Asturias, Spain in 1996.
Since then I'm a big fan of her Spanish work. So I'm curious about this new CD.
On Sunday evening, she performed some of the songs at a free concert in Madrid, to support Madrid's candidature for the 2012 summer Olympics.


The first single 'la tortura', featuring Alejandro Sanz, another great Spanish artist, is already becoming a big hit in Spain. (You can see the video here)
The CD that will be released today is completely in Spanish. In November, the same CD will be released in English to the rest of the world.

And today Ikea opens a store in Asturias. The nearest store up until now was in Madrid, about 5 hours from here. This morning, people were already waiting at the doors of the store for the opening. The first weeks it will be almost impossible to visit due to the crowd.

Oh, and on Sunday, we had a perfect day at the beach.

(Click for a bigger view)

By the way

Exactly one year and six months ago I arrived in Spain, my car filled with all that it could carry. The start of a new era in my life.
And today Mónica got offered a new job. Since it is better than the one she has now, she decided to take it and is going to start on monday. That is, if she can get away from her recent job that fast without a problem.
Sounds like we have something to celebrate tonight.

Oh, and when you open your wardrobe in the morning, and find all your clothes on the floor of it because the bar couldn't take the weight of them hanging on it, does this mean you have too many clothes?

About RSS, Atom and XML

Every now and then someone asks me: "Oi Chris! What are these RSS, Atom and XML feed things about, and do I need them on my blog??"
You could start searching on the internet for more information on these site feeds, but most of the time you need to be quite a computer freak to be able to understand what the hell they are talking about.
So let me try to shed some light on this subject for you.

Take me for example. Since I am a full-time computer geek and internet addict, I read about 30 blogs on a daily basis. Yes, 30, at least. You might ask yourself where I find the time to read them all. Well, that is where these feeds come in handy.

RSS, Atom and XML are 3 different standards, but theoretically they do the same thing. They create a basic text layout of your blog entries, so that they can easily be imported into an RSS-reader (a program that can import these texts).
The RSS-reader that I use is Bloglines. It has 3 major advantages: it is free, it can read all 3 feed standards and it is an online RSS-reader. This means you don't have to install it on your computer, and that you can check your favourite blogs for updates on every computer in the world with an internet connection.


So how does it work?
You create an account in bloglines. This is totally free and only takes a minute. Then you go to the 'My Feeds' tag, and click on 'add' to add one of your favourite blogs. You enter the blog or feed URL (for example: http://welcomeatthe.blogspot.com) and bloglines checks if this blog publishes one of the 3 feeds. If he finds one or more, you can subscribe to one of them and a link is added to 'my feeds' (The 3 feeds normally give the same result, so subscribing to one of them should do the trick).
Once you click on the link that is created in 'my feeds', bloglines considers the entries that you see of this blog to be read. Now every time you enter bloglines and that blog link is in bold, this means that there is a new entry on that blog that you haven't read yet.

bloglines also has a notifier. You install it, and it creates an icon in the windows toolbar. By right-clicking on it you enter the e-mail adress in the settings that you used to log in to bloglines. Now every time a blog you subscribed to has a new entry, the icon notifies you of this.
So instead of checking each blog every half hour to see if you guys have written an entry yet, I get notified by an icon when you do. That's the advantage of these feeds.

Tag Time

I got tagged by 3 people at the same time today: Thanks Tine, Lien and Dorien.
The problem is that it was a book tag, and that I don't read books. None. Never. Ever. I wouldn't know where to find the time to read books.
I only read the internet. Your blogs. And some more.
If you ever have a tag about movies, you can count me in!

Reliving my childhood

Tonight, we will be watching Ferris Bueler's day off. And for the next two weeks or so, we've got these waiting to pass the DVD-player: The breakfast club, pretty in pink, sixteen candles, st. Elmo's fire and Class.
Yes, I'm going to relive my 1980's childhood with these "brat pack" movies that I haven't seen in 20 years. Mónica has never seen them at all, as she was still watching cartoons in the early 80's.
I was still pretty young as well, but I had 2 older sisters who were in love with Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy's smile, so these movies were videotaped and watched again and again until the tapes were worn out.


The actors in these movies were being labeled as 'THE' actors of the future back then, but their careers never really got that big. If Andrew McCarthy ever stumbles upon this site while Googling his popularity, he has to explain me why he never became as big as Tom Cruise. But I heard he did many things on Broadway.
I wonder if all these movies are still enjoyable after 20 years. I would of course like to see them in the original version, but since Mónica wouldn't understand much if we did, we will have to see the dubbed versions.

Let's hope for once the forecasts are wrong

Oh lucky us. It's 24ºC/75F outside and the sun is burning. This weekend it will only be 16ºC/61F, and overcast. I'm sure the sun will be shining again on Monday though. Maybe I should take some days off to be able to enjoy the weather. But now that Mónica is working as well, I'd rather wait until we can take some days off together.

The beach was already packed with people the last couple of days. At least we were able to go for a walk along the sea twice this week, after work. How I enjoy living only 10 minutes away from the nearest beach. It has such a relaxing effect. And there are still so many beautiful beaches to explore. And villages. And woods. And lakes. And mountains. But we would like some sun with that.
I'm eager to start taking some pictures again as well. I won't leave the house without my camera this weekend.
I was fooling around with photopaint yesterday, and created this artistic tree from one of my pictures. I uploaded it to Flickr, and within one minute someone tagged it as a favourite. I'm starting to like Flickr more and more.
Have a lovely weekend.

43 things

How I like those nice little internet projects I run into while surfing every day.
Today I discovered 43 things. I had never heard of it before.
I don't know why it gives me this nice feeling. At least I know now that there are 637 other persons out there who would like to, just like me, spend less time fooling around on the net and more time actually working.

When catholic priests turn into businessmen

The last couple of days, we have been confronted with hidden camera images demonstrating the malpractice of many Spanish priests in the news and in Spanish television programs.
These priests are telling couples that want to get married that their church has their own exclusive photographer and that other photographers are not admitted inside the church during the ceremony. The price for the exclusive photographer to attend the wedding is about 300 euros.


According to the priests, it's all about respect for the ceremony and for the church. The exclusive photographers know the course of the celebration, and know where to take place to make the best pictures, without disturbing the wedding.
But in fact, the priests are offered a percentage of the income of the photographers.

The hidden video images we have been shown these days are unbelievable. Wedding ceremonies that are suddenly stopped and photographers that are brutally thrown out of the church by the priests.
"This is the house of God", shouted a photographer. "But I'm running the place", was the answer of the priest.

Forgetting Dutch

Once every couple of weeks I have an online webcam meeting with my parents.
It's easier and cheaper than calling on the phone, and we can at least see each other again. And since the speed of my internet connection got quadrupled two weeks ago, the quality of the sound and the image are perfect.
Last night we had another meeting. But for the first time, I was actually having problems speaking in Dutch, the language that I have been speaking for 30 years before moving to Spain.
I guess it must have been the sudden switch of having to talk in another language, since I am used to speaking Spanish all the time now. But it felt very strange, having to think for seconds and not finding the words I was looking for, knowing how to say what I meant in Spanish, but not in Dutch.
I never thought this was going to happen.


Amie passed me this baton or meme or whatever they are called: If I could be.

If I could be a poet, I could finally express all those feelings that I can't find the right words for now.
If I could be a chef, I would make the most delicious low-calory chocolate desserts for my girl.
If I could be a psychologist, I would finally know all the right words to say whenever someone needs my support again.
If I could be an explorer, I would be able to visit all those beautiful places in the world that I would still love to see.
But I'm just an average programmer, living from day to day, trying to make the best of it all.