In fact, I’m willing to bet this entry isn’t like most of the ones that will take part of this event. For one thing, the ones I’ve read are well-researched pieces on some piece or another of classic cocktail history, with emphasis on glamorous and interesting people you may well have heard of. Here, on the other hand, you’re going to read about the anonymous heroes of Spain, rugged men who support the country from it’s foundations every day. These are the men who are in charge of building roads, bridges and buildings, of working in mines, refineries and foundries, and other hard and despised labour.

How does a hero’s day start, you ask? It’s a hard life out in the obra, as it’s known in spanish. At 7:30 AM they’re already at the building site, and can’t wait to get started. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t open until 8, so there’s half an hour to kill. This is just enough time to pop into a café for a carajillo, strong expresso coffee mixed with a shot of orujo (a grape-based distillate similar to italian Grappa,) to keep them warm. Let’s not forget that most of Spain gets pretty chilly in the winter, and sub-zero (Celsius) temperatures are not unknown in the center and north of the country.

Work begins at 8 AM and throughout the morning cheap beer is consumed to keep the spirit up. As morning merges into midday, cheap wine begins to replace the beer and maybe at around 11 AM our star, the Sol y Sombra, is called for.

Lunch brings with it vino con Casera, a 50/50 mix of red wine and an artificially sweetened soda water (Casera is the best-known brand.) After dessert, they have a range of possible drinks to accompany their coffee. These mostly these include infusions of the previously mentioned orujo, and can also include brandy and pacharán. They can have up to three drinks with coffee, all in the interest of socializing, of course.

The afternoon is taken up with looking at women, cat-calling women, shouting obscenities at women, and of course, drinking. Sometimes, they even work. Afternoon drinks consist of traditional spanish cubatas. A cubata is a generic term for a spirit mixed with Coke. Usually, the spirit is the cheapest one to be found in the local supermarket, and invariably rum or whisky.

Finally, at around 6 PM, the day is done and it’s time to head home, safe in the knowledge that the country and, indeed, civilization, is better off.

So where’s the Pastis angle?

Well, there’s a hint of it at lunchtime, since pacharán is actually an infusion of sloe berries in Anís, the spanish traditional anise-flavoured drink. However, the featured drink today is the Sol y Sombra.

The Sol y Sombra is a mix of Anís and brandy, usually the cheapest available in the café we’re at. To enjoy this drink, you really need to like anise, since the proportions make the brandy almost impossible to taste. Also, it’s served at room temperature, so the full aroma is in your face when you take a sip (or gulp). The recipe is as follows:

• 1/2 part Brandy (preferably spanish sherry brandy)
• 1/2 part Anís

Build in a brandy snifter.

I imagine that the idea behind this drink is to use the brandy to lower the sweetness of the Anís, since it is very sweet, and also to make a stronger drink, since the brandy is stronger than the anís. It’s still a fairly intriguing choice of a drink, until you realize it’s purpose is not to be enjoyed but to warm the body and mind.

Playing around with the proportions, I found that reducing the proportion of Anís to a quarter or less of the total volume, makes a complex and interesting drink where the brandy’s smell and taste interacts with the anise flavour. I like this better than the original.

But then, I’m not a manly man working at a construction site…

Se trata de un alfabeto con un grupo musical por cada letra. Aquí van los mios:

• Alice In Chains
• Bad Religion
• Clash
• Descendants
• Europe (Bueno, también meteré una horterada)
• Faith No More
• Greenday
• Hoobastank
• Incubus
• Jimi Hendrix
• Killradio
• Less Than Jake
• Millencolin
• Nirvana
• Offspring
• Pennywise
• Queens of the Stone Age
• Rage Against the Machine
• Sublime
• Therapy?
• Ugly Kid Joe
• Voodoo Glow Skulls
• Weezer
• X
• Y
• Zebrahead

Y ya está. Ya no más memes, y por supuesto tampoco se lo voy a pasar a nadie…

What’s Good?

Out of the box, Flock comes with full del.icio.us integration for your bookmarks, if you want it. The whole concept of bookmarks has evolved into something called favorites, which you really have to use for a while to really understand. Tagging is also integrated into the browser for bookmarks, blog posts and other elements.

Blogging is also supported as standard, and only a click away. Your blog configuration is auto-detected from the URL, so it’s trivial to set up. In fact, this post is being written from Flock. Of course, feed reading is included as standard.

And of course, since Flock is based on Firefox, the list of good stuff must also include pretty much everything you like about Firefox as well.

What’s Bad?

For starters, Flock is beta software, and has already crashed on me once today. There are also other inconveniences, the biggest of which I have found so far is the lack of an OPML import feature, so if you have your blogroll on disk, you can’t import it to test out the feed reading capabilities. That’s a pity.

Apart from that, I think I just need to dedicate some time to getting to know the new Favorites feature before I can form an opinion, but it hasn’t been instant for me. I still don’t quite get the whole integration of bookmarks and feeds. To top it all off, there is a “starring” feature, which I suspect is similar to what GMail does, but again, the mish-mash of technologies is confusing at first.

Conclusion

Try it. It’s new and different enough to warrant half-an-hour of your time, just to see where browser technology is probably headed. It was even interesting enough to get me to blog about it!

First and foremost, I’ve changed jobs and now work in the professional services division of FatWire Software, still in Madrid. This is a pretty major change in focus, and one I think will be beneficial. I’m not sure how closely reality will follow what is planned, but it’s looking good and I’m quite happy.

If you’re not reading this using an RSS reader, you may also have noticed that I’ve changed the design of the site rather radically. It’s actually deeper than it seems, because I’ve moved everything from Blojsom to WordPress. All of this is what has been keeping me from posting, really, because I needed to make myself finish the move before posting again.

I’m not sure if my professional change will affect the content of the blog, because I’ve always just posted about what interests me regardless of the subject matter. We’ll see how that works out. Anyway, without further ado, let’s just keep on going like nothing happened.. If you have any problems with the new setup, just drop me a line.

I’ve always wondered why that is. I have to say that my impression of Sun is, and always has been, quite favourable. On purely technical merits, the SPARC platform has always been good and powerful, Solaris is the best Unix-like OS I’ve used and I think Java is cool now as well as being extremely innovative when it launched ten years ago.

I could understand it if people got uppity about Java exclusively. I think it’s well done, suited to it’s purpose and is being well managed by Sun, who seem to favour technical merits and usefulness. However, there is the point RMS makes that since Java isn’t Free, nothing done in Java can be considered Free because it requires a non-Free environment to execute. Personally, I don’t lose sleep over this, much in the same way I don’t worry about the BIOS in my computer being closed-source, for example, but for some people I know it’s important.

Still, is this a good reason for holding an entire company, responsable for much more, in low esteem? Let’s consider some of the good stuff:

• They have a senior executive, Jonathan Schwartz, blogging about the company in an open fashion, and writing posts that make it look like they have their heads in the right place over important issues.
• Obviously, they’ve also released Solaris as Open Source, under a real Open license, making it one of the biggest contributions to the OS community ever. Other big contributions include OpenOffice.org and several open standards such as RPC and NFS.
• The SPARC architecture is open, freely implementable by anyone and royalty-free, in stark contrast to Intel’s x86, for instance, where everything must be clean-room implemented in order to compete with them.
• Finally, the Java Community Process is not perfect, but it’s much better than, say, Microsoft’s completely hermetic approach to, well, everything.

So why the hostility? The only thing that can be interpreted as problematic is their acceptance of $20 million as settlement from Microsoft over the whole Java on Windows fiasco. I think geeks everywhere were expecting Sun to stand up to Microsoft and teach them a lesson and what actually happened looked more like Sun being bought off. Now, I don’t know what exactly a court sentence against Microsoft would have achieved in this case, but I do know that Sun is in the business of making money and not of risking everything on a long drawn-out court case. Hell, even Linus himself is not beyond making some easy money.

So that’s my reasoning. What do you think? Have I got it completely ass-backwards?

Así que avisados estáis.

Sin embargo, lo que me ha parecido interesante de este último caso es la forma de infección. Hay que abrir un mensaje que trae asociado un programa y que viene de alguien desconocido. Os suena de algo?

La otra forma de infección que se ha usado ya en virus para móviles es el de propagarse usando Bluetooth a todos los otros dispositivos que se encuentren cerca, una forma de infección también paralela a las formas existentes en la informática convencional.

La razón es muy sencilla, y es que los móviles actuales, sobretodo los avanzados como los que llevan Symbian, no son más que pequeños ordenadores con sistema operativo y todo. Como tal, la forma de evitar infecciones es simplemente seguir las mismas pautas de seguridad que con un ordenador normal. Estas son:

• Deshabilitar Bluetooth: Equivalente a usar un cortafuegos para evitar conexiones indeseadas.
• No abrir SMS/MMS sospechosos: Esto es más dificil porque depende de lo que te deje hacer el software de mensajería del móvil, pero siempre nos debería preguntar antes de instalar un programa y nunca se deberá instalar programas de fuentes desconocidas.
• Cuidado con el eMule: De la misma forma que software para PC puede llevar un troyano, se pueden descargar programas potencialmente peligrosos para móviles también.

No son pasos muy dificiles de seguir, y ayudan a mantener el móvil limpio de infecciones. Recordad que una infección en el ordenador puede significar pérdida de datos y de tiempo pero, como en el caso del virus detectado en Barcelona, en el móvil puede significar el uso indeseado de mensajes o de llamadas. En este caso, ya estamos hablando del dinero contante y sonante que nos cobrará la operadora móvil de turno, y ya empieza a ser un asunto realmente merecedor de cuidado.

Claro que esto es solo un principio, ya que habría que cuestionar las demás razones existentes aparte del precio — la calidad de la música, su originalidad, etc. Pero creo que este paso es positivo porque abre las puertas a una discusión pública con más argumentos e información disponibles.

“I’m thinking about having a Homer Simpson,” I said.

“Donuts and a beer?” She said.

Oh yeah…