The first video player that I used had such an accurate clock that the whole family adopted it as the universally agreed reference time. Kind of a clock.apple.com but a bit more homely.

Of course, there were little accidents like when the lights went off if there had been a strong storm, and we had to re-enter the time (it was so complicated to program the date that nobody even bothered to do that) manually, since it didn’t have a backup battery for these cases.

Apart from that, it was reliable and served us well for almost ten years, which is clearly a lot compared with the lifespan of today’s domestic appliances.

The next one was easier to configure and could be done with the remote, instead of having to press little buttons underneath an almost hidden cover in the device itself. We could even program the date and it was very simple! But at the same time that we got that new video recorder, we also got a big TV which came with the impressive teletext technology. And that prevented us from trusting the new video as our reference clock: teletext’s clock became the one and only.

More or less by that time we decided to buy a digital alarm-clock. It even had radio! Woooo! But it soon was unanimously christened as the Infernal Machine. It had a funny tendency to slightly get detuned, so when waking up with the radio function you were welcomed with a cruel mix of top-40 hits modulated with some static noise and interferences. Not pleasant at all.

And it still had more to offer: some months later, it decided by itself that 60 seconds minutes were an irresponsible waste of time and that it should be corrected immediately. So it began to produce its own minutes, and woke us up at 5 or 6am instead of at 7am.

I even chronometered it – its minutes were of 57 seconds only. We felt betrayed: after having put all of our hopes in that little white and graciously curved appliance so that it would help us start the days with a sunrise, it just made us jump in disgust in the middle of the night, specially the first day that happened, when we hadn’t noticed and we really thought it was 7am.

We relegated it to a corner and instead began to use an analogic clock to wake up. It was archaic and didn’t have radio but we could switch a nearby CD player on after stopping the snooze.

That incident had almost disappeared from my mind until I noticed that the microwave’s clock and the oven’s clock were desynchronized. Not only that, but both are late. In this case, they are being far too generous with their seconds, and they always appear earlier than it in fact is.

All these observations allow me to express a very personal opinion: that’s why they wanted to have Java running on every domestic appliance, to be able to connect every day to a clock service and make sure that the device is on time.

Luckily I don’t depend on the microwave’s clock to awake…

Well, not exactly me only, but xplsv as a group. Forgot to comment about that: our application for sitting in Assembly’s oldschool area has been accepted.

So there will be four xplsv’rs in Helsinki next August: trace , blackpawn , sml and me.

Which reminds me of something that I still have to do… :-)

Recently came to my attention that my music was finally related to more artists in last.fm. Their mysterious relationship-calculatronic emitted its verdict and it said I’m similar to great musicians such as Purple Motion, paniq, Yuppster, Bitshifter, Little Bitchard, Aisth and even our very own Herotyc!

Woohooo!! I’m flattered! ^_

So for celebrating this, I decided yesterday to try and create a torrent for my latest compilation, 10 years ago

I failed miserably since I don’t have any tracker service running, nor did I find one kind of tracker service which I could install in a public host (like a simple php script), nor did I want to run the tracker myself in my local computer (opening ports in the firewall and all of that), nor did I want to run Azureus for avoiding the previous annoyances, and finally was too bothered for learning more weird terms about bittorrent and friends.

So I finally have uploaded it to archive.org, so you don’t need to use emule anymore and can just grab the file via FTP or HTTP. Interested? Here’s the 10 years ago page at archive.org

PD: If you know of an easy way of creating torrents which isn’t too much of a hassle please let me know! thanks!!

I was about to go down the stairs into the tube station when a guy with a big suitcase emerged proffering an scandalous Ole, ole y ole! while directly looking at me.

Maybe it was his first day here in London and he hasn’t found out how many Spaniards are already here, which is rare, since you can already find a handful of Spaniards in the Gatwick Express.

This time I was so distressed that I couldn’t come with anything to tell him, and I usually don’t reply when I am in these situations (it’s kind of funny to see them saying things believing that I don’t understand anything).

But I will never forget the face of one of these cheeky guys in Queensway: I was just coming home when someone kind of stamped an advertisement for a chinese buffet in my face and said in Spanish something along the lines of Fucking pick this ad, I can’t stay here all day long!!.

I stopped and asked him (in spanish) what he was pretending to do and why did he say that, because it was very disgusting. Suddenly his face got into a cycling exhibition of all colours in the red spectrum and began to excuse himself while I began to feel like a teacher or something like that, and I didn’t like that sensation, to be honest. But at least he learnt the lesson: don’t swear at strangers!

We’ve been speculating with adopting one pet since some months ago but we’re not sure about how will it cope with us being away for one or two weeks: you can water a bit more a plant but it’s not the same with a pet. Also I’m not really convinced about having a cat or a dog in a flat with carpeted and wooden floors.

But then, the hotel where we stayed in Minorca had a couple of little turtles in the garden. I have always found turtles quite funny and very civilised: they don’t bark and they don’t pee wherever they find handy.

So maybe they are the ideal pet! I still have to look for more info about caring and food and all that before making a decision. I wouldn’t feel well if they suffered!

Also (the geek touch) how cool would it be to call a turtle Logo?