Present Perfect

Today I broke the mold with Zaheer and Christian. We jumped into a taxi to go have lunch and after some indecision settled on Mamita Linda over Ciudad Condal. Lunch was excellent and we were back relatively quickly compared to, say, the Italian place.

As a service to my co-workers, I provide lunch graphs:

Gambito manages to be utter crap for various reasons. First of all, it combines the idea of the traditional Spanish two-dish-plus-dessert lunch with the choose-what-you-want mess approach. In practice this works out terribly. You queue up with your platter and plate and cutlery, and wait for someone to come and give you your choice out of three first plates. That someone continues serving people behind you. You wait for them to finish serving those people, then they move on to the place where you get to choose your second plate. You keep sliding and moving, picking deserts and drinks. Then you wait for the person serving you to be done serving everyone else so he or she can move to the cash register and let you pay.

By this point both of your plates have already cooled down considerably. Now if you are smart you chose a cold first plate, so you can finish a lukewarm second plate before digging into the already-cold-anyway first plate. I hope you see why this unhappy marriage of lunch styles is doomed.

Sadly these graphs show that more often than not the good places can be a big time sink.

I look forward to a reinstated bike lunch to be able to get a wider sampling.

As a side note - can anyone tell me if it really is impossible to just export an OpenOffice chart to an image ? I find it amusing that I can only find answers to this question on Google that say "No - take a screenshot and edit".

Today I broke the mold with Zaheer and Christian. We jumped into a taxi to go have lunch and after some indecision settled on Mamita Linda over Ciudad Condal. Lunch...

In contrast with last weekend's trying-to-get-hacking-done-and-failing-miserably, this weekend was excellent. Even if it started with a Saturday morning alarm ring at 7:40. The reason was simple - we were going snowboarding ! Sofie and Anna came to our place at 8, and we drove to La Masella. Hired skis/boards, got the passes, and up on the slope at 11. We were joined later by Jochen, Christine and Tim.

Kristien had some trouble getting her board to turn. Being a one neuron male, I of course blamed her sloppy technique, but she went back for a smaller board and that fixed her problem much better than I would have.
Most of the slopes were done with artificial snow, and there weren't that many open, but for one day it was just about right, and the snow quality was decent enough. For various reasons (not the least of which the bad snow season this year) I am not going for a full week, so this is my only day of action this year. It did remind me however that I should look into getting info on having a snowboard with a customer design made. And now that we have a designer in the office, it may actually end up looking good as well !

When we got back in Barcelona, I managed to convince Kristien to get out and at least try one of the places we've been wanting to try for a while. We ended up at Mamita Linda, a Cuban tapas place that Daniel Fisher also liked on his visit last week, and it was excellent. The restaurants in Barcelona can be overpriced for the quality, downright bad in any price range, and most of the times they get the snobbish attitude down first before they manage the good food that's supposed to be their motivation for being snobbish in the first place.

I don't recall ever being actually said "welcome" in a Barcelona restaurant. They took great care explaining everything on the menu, they were extremely friendly, it had the feel of sitting down at a family dinner, everything we ate was good to delicious... The waiter asked "la mamita" whether we had finished all of our food, and she proudly said "yes" and he seemed genuinely pleased. They actually cared whether we liked it.

Also, the caipiroska we had was excellent. Serious competition for Miramelindo. Mamita's taste slightly better; Miramelindo's manage a nice thin layer of ice covering the glasses, and somehow get their ice to soak up enough of the cocktail to be worth eating at the end.

Overall, I should probably go again very soon, but a serious contender in the top-five of my Barcelona tapas favourites, and the difference in cuisine for the tapas definitely helps.

After that, we went to Noelle's party, which we were indirectly invited to. They moved into a new place straight on La Ramblas, but the place looks better than that introduction would suggest. Around 2, they started expulsing people from the party on the grounds that those people didn't know any of the three girls living in the place. This may sound strange but stuff like that happens all the time here. Before it happened I was actually considering giving random good-looking guys on the Ramblas the trinity of numbers that would give them access to an apartment full of party-minded girls, but after the complicated shoving-out procedure I decided against it. I have to say the girls handled the expulsion very professionally, as if they do this every day...

We spent Sunday sleeping in late - I can't remember the last time I woke up at 12 - and dove straight into lunch, then headed for the beach and got some sun.  On the way back, we stopped by Ciudad Condal for the Usual Suspects, and then I drove Kristien to the airport.
Did I get anything useful done this weekend ? No, not at all ! Do I feel good about it ? Why yes - yes, I do.

On a side note - favourite Spanish cheese of the moment - Idiazabal.  Why didn't anyone tell me before ?

In contrast with last weekend's trying-to-get-hacking-done-and-failing-miserably, this weekend was excellent. Even if it started with a Saturday morning alarm ring at 7:40. The reason was simple - we were going...

I have hard-earned cash.  I would like to give it to you.  But you are making it very hard to exchange my money for your goods.

 This is what I want.
I would like to know the price and click on a buy button.  I have browsed your Belgian site, your Spanish site, your European site, and your United Kingdom site.  None of those link from Accessories to a buy button or a shop.  What is up ? Do you dislike getting filthily rich ?

In addition, I would like to figure out if the "protective case" you offer for the N800 is as good as the N770's hardcover one that you used to include.  I am a little paranoid about breaking the display of my device.

Any help you can offer me in making you richer as a company is greatly appreciated.

I have hard-earned cash.  I would like to give it to you.  But you are making it very hard to exchange my money for your goods.  This is what I...

Learnt some more about Linux limits today. Had a little fun trying to convince coworkers to paste the following in a user shell:

:(){ :|:& };:

I did clearly tell them however that they should close all documents and programs first.

I'm going to leave you some time to experiment before I write another blog entry detailing the rest of my journey.

In the meantime, I leave you with a spin on an ancient Norwegian joke: