El Camino

(this was first posted in LinkedIn)

About two months ago my sister told me that she would be doing the final stages of Camino de Santiago and I decided to join her. Seven days of hiking through Galicia, totaling 140 km between Triacastela and Santiago, seemed like a good idea for an active break albeit a bit daunting. Well, it turned out to be an extremely rewarding experience!

As you can imagine, walking an average of 20 km per day gives you a lot of time for thinking, that's the main point of doing el Camino after all. Sure, a lot of the thinking is about that pain developing in your knees while going uphill or downhill, about the pain in your feet (is that another blister in the making?), about the weight of your rucksack with things you don´t need, about why is it pouring with rain, or why leaving at 6:30 am to walk through a pitch black forest lighting the way with your mobile seemed such a great idea the night before (actually, it is).

More importantly, in between all these mundane thoughts you also get time to reflect on what is important for you, talk to other people from all over the world and share your experiences. Pain fades, memories remain. Beyond the physical challenges, the Camino offered me a profound sense of peace. The daily rhythm of walking, combined with the stunning natural beauty, provided a sharp contrast to everyday life.

This is a post of gratitude, first and foremost to my sister for talking me into doing this, and to all people we interacted with and made it such a remarkable experience. I will probably come back to do more stages at some point in the future. This is an experience that I can definitely and wholeheartedly recommend.

Viernes, 31 de mayo

Years in which May 31st was on Friday

1996    Friday

2002    Friday

2013    Friday

2019    Friday

2024    Friday

Censos electorales antiguos

Un poco por casualidad he encontrado los censos electorales de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX de El Toboso y de Alhama de Aragón. Ahora falta conectar las piezas del puzle.

El Toboso: 9 censos entre 1899 y 1921

https://bibliotecadigital.diputoledo.es/pandora/index.vm?view=archivo&lang=es

Alhama de Aragón: entre 1890 y 1955

https://dara.aragon.es/opac/app/results/?q=censo+electoral&ob=df:1&ft=place:Zaragoza+%28provincia%29

Write a book: tick

Yesterday I finished the book I have been slowly writing for the last year or so and now I just have to wait a couple of weeks until the (very) few printed copies that I have ordered are delivered. This is a book strictly for my family, however I want to share a couple of insights.

First off, memories, like love, die if you don´t take care of them. Nothing lasts forever.

Did everything really take place as we remember it? What makes it into such a book? And for the same token, what does not make it into such a book?

Which are the landmarks of our existence? Extraordinary events? Routine ones which are quickly forgotten although they make up for the bulk of our time? Or maybe just the people who surround us?

Well, I don´t have the answers. On the other hand, I do now have a book with 350 pages full of things that came to my mind which I thought were worth writing down for my children. And the feeling I could have written more and with more details. So maybe all I got round to do is writing the first part of a bigger book, maybe one to be completed in fifteen or twenty years if I am still around.

And Happy New Year!

Online "tute"

Did it ever happen to you that you bought a book with the best of intentions and then you never find time to read it? Well, that was me with this book, which you can also read for free in Miguel Grinberg´s famous flask mega tutorial. At some point I went through several chapters but never really put together my own app, or deployed it somewhere.

For me the problem with tutorials is how to get really engaged. In terms of learning experience, there is a big difference between just following steps and actually trying to create something else by yourself (even if still mostly based on the tutorial steps). Because once it is your own persoanl project, you are automatically engaged. My CoderDojo is still paused because of COVID, but something I used to recommend to children (and parents) was to find something that really interests you and then work your way through the problems. A lot of the learning happens when trying to solve a problem.

A few weeks ago, someone at work mentioned pythonanywhere, which gives you the opportunity to deploy an app easily. I just needed an idea. And I had it over Easter. My father and my son often play tute when we are in Spain. However last time we were there was Christmas of previous year, so I had the idea to make an app to play tute. Oh, I hear you say, but there are plenty of web pages which already allow you to play and are way better than anything you can hack in a few days. Yes, but you don´t learn a lot playing with other people´s apps!

So after my very own (and short) Easter of Code, version 0.1 is up and running. We already played a game with my father this morning and it was a good laugh. Hope we do it now from time to time.

Things I have learned:

• I didn´t really know all the rules of tute. Thanks to wikipedians!
• I set up VS Code to debug flask apps.
• SQLite is not great a choice when model changes, as dropping columns seems a bit of a pain when the model changes. I ended up restarting the database a couple of times.
• Page reloads are good enough for us. Ajax or websockets would be better though, even more learning opportunities.
• Know when to take a break. Impossible problems one day are magically solved in five minutes in the morning with a fresh head.
• Styling matters. Thanks to my brother for advice.

Updated April 17th: Code available in GitHub

Genealogy

A long time ago I started putting together a genealogy tree and, to be honest, I didn´t get very far. My wife compiled hers going back several more generations down to the late 18th century, including several photos of people who were born in the 19th century. My side is still work in progress and wihtout going that far back, it has already been a great excuse to talk about old photos and family lore. Of course one of the questions is where to stop such a tree. Should people who have a common great-granparent be listed? Or a great-great-grandparent? Why not? The chart below has close to 350 people and if all the people who share an ancestor would be added, I could imagine a couple more hundred would make it to the tree.

If you have tried this yourself, you are probably aware that a single spreadsheet will not cut it. Things begin to get out of hand rather quickly as the number of people and information grows. So pretty much from the get-go the question was which tool should I be using. I didn´t feel like using a commercial cloud-based service, and I quickly found Gramps, an open source gem (yet another one). On top if it, it is done with python which for me is always a plus, as I can peek in the inside. Feeling adventurous, I decided not to install the Windows version and instead install the linux version on the Ubuntu partition of WSL2 and I have to say, it works like a charm (thanks also to Moba Xterm!)

There are many ways to visualize the tree and, poking a bit, I found one which clearly delineates the families while putting my children in the center of the graph. I saved the relations graph as a gv file and then use that file to generate a png using the neato layout. 

 

Feliz Navidad

Gejagt

Before I go on holidays, I always make sure I have a few books added to my kindle, either programming books or novels. In this case, I was reading one from Cory Doctorow´s novels. Obviously I did not take this photo myself. It was my daughter who did, and true to the serenity project, I was deep into the book and never noticed it.

Sugar 3:0 Diet

La ladrona de libros

Lo fundamental es capturar el momento mágico, así que a veces es mejor pedir permiso después de hacer la foto.

In order to capture the decisive moment, sometimes it´s best to ask for permission after taking the photo.

Historias para dormir

Muchos días, antes de acostarse, les cuento una historia a mis hijos. Ellos me dicen tres cosas que quieren que aparezcan en la historia y yo me la invento. Al final, siempre son dos cosas y la tercera condición es que la historia tiene que ser divertida. Como si inventarse una historia cada noche no fuera lo bastante difícil. Algunas son mejores que otras, pero la verdad es que nos hemos echado muchas risas juntos antes de irnos a dormir. Supongo que en parte también porque están tan cansados que casi todo les hace gracia. La historia de anoche les gustó bastante, así que la pongo aquí para poder recordarla. Mi hija de diez años se partía de risa. El de cinco quería una historia de Star Wars y cuando acabé me dijo, "Vale, pero ahora mi historia".


Ese día el profesor decidió dedicar la hora de Ciencias a hacer una clase de teatro con los niños. Así que les dijo:
- Niños, hoy vamos a dedicar la clase a hacer una pequeña obra de teatro. ¿Qué tema se os ocurre que queréis hacer?

Un chico con cara de travieso dijo:
- Propongo una historia con mis compañeros de mesa, Ramón y Chus, quiero decir, Ramón Dosdedos y Jesús Vaca.

Ante el asombro del profesor, todos los niños empezaron a reírse. Una chica dijo:
- Yo quiero ser la princesa que leía.

El profesor preguntó: ¿Que leía qué?
- "No sé, simplemente la princesa que leía." Respondió la niña entre las carcajadas de la clase.

El profesor empezaba a sospechar que le estaban tomando el pelo pero seguía sin saber de que iba la cosa. Entonces otro chico dijo:
- Profesor, usted permiso ir Dar Váter? - Más carcajadas de fondo.

Y antes de que el profesor pudiera contestar el chico más bajito de la clase, que llevaba una camiseta verde, intervino diciendo:
- Permiso Yo Da a ti

El profesor, un poco mosqueado con tanta broma replicó:
- ¿Pero por qué habláis así? Sí, claro, si tienes que ir al baño, puedes ir.

De repente, un chico  rubio tiró una bolsa de patatas fritas al aire y gritó:
- Look in the sky! Patatas Walker!

El profesor, que no salía de su asombro, replicó:
- Tú, recoge la bolsa de patatas. ¿Y ahora por qué empiezas a hablar en inglés, si estamos en la hora de teatro? 

Para entonces todos los niños se estaban tronchando de risa, y viendo el profesor que así no llegaba a ningún sitio, decidió dejar la idea del teatro y seguir con la clase de ciencias.

- Bueno, vale ya de risas, abrid el libro de Ciencias por el capítulo VII, hoy tocan las Galaxias...

Winter break

I have not done panos for such a long time that I forgot to set the camera to manual. I was shooting with a fixed aperture and only later I noticed that the exposure times would be different (!). By then it was too late to get back and try again. Luckily the values were not too dissimilar and an acceptable result came out.

Misunderstood - not

Estas navidades vi el anuncio de Apple, Misunderstood, y aunque no soy un gran fan de Apple, el anuncio me gustó, así que decidí hacer mi propia versión. Me he tirado todas las navidades haciendo mini videos y luego los he juntado todos en un video navideño. Simple pero resultón. Y claro, estos videos serán un tostón para todo el mundo, pero para la familia son un recuerdo entrañable con un esfuerzo moderado. No es el colmo de la creatividad, pero tampoco se trataba de eso.

Y tampoco es cuestión de meter el móvil hasta en la sopa a todas horas, pero con un poco de tacto se pueden captar los momentos estelares y los cotidianos. Yo me he limitado a secuencias de unos diez segundos, de las que luego entresaco los tres o cuatro segundos para cada secuencia del video. Finalmente he intercalado unas cuantas fotos, incluyendo unas cuantas del Whatsapp, un poquillo de música y ya está, la magia está servida.

Disfrutando de la lectura

El año que viene haré otra exposición aquí en Berlín. La serie nació por casualidad, de una foto tomada hace seis años y medio de una chica absorta en sus pensamientos en la playa. Tiempo después mi hermana me dijo que, a veces, cuando estaba de guardia y era una de esas noches difíciles, se sentaba al ordenador a ver algunas de mis fotos porque tenían un efecto calmante. Siempre me ha gustado leer y me reconozco en toda esa gente que he fotografiado mientras disfrutaban de un buen libro, la mayoría sin darse cuenta de lo que ocurre a su alrededor y, por ende, no posando para la foto. La foto de arriba me la encontré al salir a la terraza. La vi enseguida en mi cabeza y fui corriendo a por la cámara antes de que el instante mágico desapareciera (algo bastante fácil cuando hay niños de por medio).

Supongo que he tardado bastante en reunir esta serie, pero creo que merece la pena imprimirlas y disfrutarlas en papel, aunque sólo sea por unos días. La exposición será del 7 de julio al 16 de agosto, en el mismo sitio que las anteriores, al fin y al cabo una biblioteca es un lugar muy apropiado para exponer fotos de gente leyendo.

I´m really happy to announce that the Serenity series already has comitted dates for an exhibition!. As mentioned a couple of times, I was by no means in a hurry to have this done. In fact, by next Summer the series will have been over seven years in the making, although most of the time I was not even aware of it myself. But I thought it was about time to print some of these lovely photos. If nothing else, it will be a good excuse to take some more photos between now and next Summer. The dates are from July 7th to August 16th, same place as before here in Berlin.

Taking a break in the Alps

I don´t know who brought this bench to this place. But it was just the right spot And facing the right direction.

This is me!

This is the best photo from our holidays. It was taken by my daughter while I was setting the camera on the tripod to do some light painting.

Felices Fiestas

Jaque mate

My daughter has started learning how to play chess at school. We had a go at it some days ago and she still has to learn a few basics. For example, that it is ok to take your opponent´s knight and you do not need to worry about the horse´s well being. And that crying when somebody takes your Queen is not required. I did not foresee that and had to hug her while she was sobbing at the view of her Queen by the side of the board. I was trying to make the point that you should watch where you place your Queen, a chess board is a dangerous place. Luckily for me we did not finish the game, as her brother came with the brilliant idea to swipe clean the board in one single move of the arm...

Luz entre las sombras de la tormenta

Mi pelota