Yesterday was the last day of the 7th edition of GUADEC Hispana, originally to be organized in Chile but due to the disastrous earthquake, it was moved to the city of Corunna, Spain.

Between hacking on OCRFeeder (expect a new version soon), giving a talk about it, attending nice presentations and chatting with people, I had a great time.
Diego’s presentation about Epiphany was simply epic and Mario gave a very complete crash course of git.

I guess there’s a first time for these things but Thursday, while I was giving a demo of the new OCRFeeder’s features, it crashed on me… Never again will I laugh at Mr. Gates and friends when their products freeze out of the blue (nah, it is too funny).
Now that I think of it… was this the first time a Portuguese man gave a talk at GUADEC Hispana?

The presentation was a cut-down version of the one I gave at FOSDEM this year and you can check its slides below (it’s in Spanish):

(thanks to Manuel Rego for reviewing my Spanish in the slides)

Here’s the group photo of the GUADEC ES attendants:

And from next Monday on, I’ll be in Den Haag for GUADEC 2010. My lightening talk about the Predictor Input Method got accepted, so if you’re into this kind of stuff, I hope to see you there.

This weekend we had amazing weather in A Coruña. Usually Galicia tends to be rainy but surprisingly, in the middle of April, it was just perfect.

So what should one do when the weather is so good and the city offers nice food and beaches? Go to a Debian conference, of course!

After having convinced my girlfriend that this wasn’t the last sunny weekend this year, I attended DudesConf, which Igalia sponsored together with other organizations. The “Dudes” here stands for something like Spanish Debian Users and Developers.
It remembered me of when I started attending conferences in Spain (mainly in Extremadura) and also the conferences I organized while part of NEEI (Computer Science Students Organization of the University of Évora) for this was an informal event with a really relaxed environment. I could meet people, hack a bit on SeriesFinale and attend some presentations.
The presentation I liked most was given by the Igalian Berto where he presented myths and facts of Emacs, together with some demos. I thank all the members of the staff for organizing such a nice event.

Here is a picture of the participants of DudesConf:

Later, I skipped the event’s lunch and headed for the beach with Helena. This was the first time we went to the beach, summer style (we had walked in it but all dressed up for the cold). We even got sunburnt…
And this is the picture I get just by walking down the street from my home for 3 minutes, heading to the beach, it makes me feel a lucky man:

Me and my girlfriend spent the last week in London where we stood in Igalia’s amazing flat.

I had only been to London once, about 14 years ago, I was 10 years old, in a high-school trip. Of course, things now seemed much different.

Coming from a small town and living in a small city, I was amazed by the number of people everywhere. It just seemed to much people, in the streets (okay, the main ones), in the subway, etc.

I was also expecting things to be more expensive, maybe because of the GB pound devaluation… This led me to spend some money on books. I love books and I (usually) hate translations. Maybe some publishers are trying to save some money by hiring cheap translators because some of the books I got in Portuguese have some really lame translations. I mean, I’m not expecting every translator to be an expert on the various subjects a book talks about but I expect at least some research of what some terms and expressions mean. That’s why, when possible (when I can read them), I prefer books in their original language.

I think that in a week, we could try very different things in London. We went to museums like the Science Museum, the Britain at War Experience and Natural History Museum; we went to Notting Hill; and we even got stuck in the subway due to the closing of the central line because of the amount of people.
Though, what I liked most was Camden Town and it’s really cool markets and shops where I bought a few t-shirts.
The stables market was amazing!

Another thing a small city boy like me noticed was the pollution, just like every time I go to Lisbon, by night at home you get the difference, in the skin, in the nose, etc. I am really glad that in A Coruña you don’t have such problem (I also didn’t notice it in Brussels).

I also loved to be a in a foreign country and understand what everyone is saying (well, I guess I am not considering my *not home country* of Spain to be a foreign one anymore) as the last countries I have been to are Belgium and The Netherlands.

About the food… we all know that the UK is not the country you go for gastronomy but I loved the cheap and huge English breakfasts.

Now don’t get me wrong but I was expecting my British fellows to be a lot more, how should I put it, snobbish. Yet, every person we asked for directions was really kind, British or not (except for a few suits that might have thought I was selling something when I wanted to know where the hell was HMS Belfast).

So, conclusions about London now that I am not 10 anymore: It is a wonderful city and I am looking forward to go back visiting it but the rush of things in there, the number of people, the amount of time lost in the bus or the tube, etc. makes me like more a city like A Coruña to live in. Yes, I would prefer *much more* to live in London than in Lisbon for example, but some things are best taken slowly, and life is one of them.

By professionalism I mean the things that should define a professional, mainly: professional spirit, methods and ethic.

A while ago my fridge stopped working, no more cold beers, warm yogurt, etc.
After confirming that it wasn’t a settings problem (I set it to maximum cold and still things would be warm) I contacted my landlord to check how we could fix it. I must mention my landlord is the kindest landlord I could ever asked for and promptly told me to contact someone to fix it and that he would pay whatever the cost was. Fortunately I remembered that maybe the guarantee hadn’t still expire and that we could have it fixed with no cost at all for him. So, he searched for the guarantee document, I contacted the manufacturer (Balay, owned by the Bosch Group) and within 3 days we had the fridge fixed.

Now this post is not to prove that guarantee works but rather to tell you that to my surprise, one week ago I received a letter from Balay appologizing for the inconvenience and that they always reach for their clients’ satisfaction, bla bla bla. I was about to do a western origami ball and put it on the non-organic thrash bag (as it sounded like an advertisement letter) when I read in the last paragraphs  that we would benefit from a guarantee extension of 2 more years starting form the day the fridge got fixed.

In a world where most big companies seem to have forgotten about clients’ satisfaction (stupidly, because I think satisfied clients mean money) and put the profit before everything else, I was really happy that Balay, or the Bosch Group, play different.
If one day I am going to buy any fridge, guess which brand I’ll be looking for? This is how you get clients.

Today is my last day of vacations. Two weeks ago I went to Portugal, in the pleasant company of my girlfriend, to visit family and friends. I arrived at dinner time on Saturday, had a quite dinner and although I was really tired I still managed to be until 5 AM finishing a paint I wanted for so long give to my cousin. The following day we had a nice supa-lunch with my family, a good beginning for the busy week that would follow. On Monday and Tuesday we were in Évora to meet with some good friends and my crazy brother. The rest of the week was spent in Lagos, the home town of my girlfriend and a land with some of the best beaches in Portugal.

In the middle of this past week we returned to Coruña as we had stuff to take care of but yesterday we went with our friends Victor, Edu and his wife Silvia to the “Festival de Pardiñas”, a very Galician folk music that started 30 years ago. We were supposed to spend the night in the camp but it had been raining a lot and the humidity and mud convinced us it was better to take the invitation of Silvia’s friend Fernando and sleep at his home which was 10 minutes from there.
The music was nice, we were late for the first band and tired for the last one but we could watch the great performances of “La Belle Image Fanfare” (France) and “Hedningarna” (Sweden). Although I think everyone of my party liked the French folks much more, I really enjoyed “Hedningarna”! Some of its songs reminded me of some metal bands I like from Scandinavia and I think it makes sense…

Now, back at home, I upgraded my WordPress successfully and will watch a movie and relex a bit so I’m all set for tomorrow’s work.