tripu

If Escher had made a music video he would have made this one.

One of my tasks during the development of Smart Zones Beta 2 is the HRM communication module, that allows users to import data about their training sessions to the application. Those cyclist or joggers who use HRM’s know what it means. For the rest, let me briefly explain it.

“HRM” stands for “Heart Rate Monitor”. HRM’s are small portable devices that measure and keep a log of your heart rate, i.e. the pace of your heart beats. Typically, you attach a strap to your chest and it detects the small electrical voltages that your heart produces when it’s working. The other component is a radio receiver that usually has the appearance of a wrist watch. This device computes your current HR, shows that value on its small display, and records the whole sequence of values during your training session. It often polls the strap at intervals of five seconds. The information gathered may be shown in a heart rate graph.

Nowadays you don’t need to be a pro to have one of these gadgets — they are sold with prices around £100 (~ €150) or even less. They are useful to keep your workouts at a high level without overtraining. Also, when you run or cycle, the messages that your body sends to you (about how tired you are, or how intense is the pain in your limbs) are pretty subjective, and highly influenced by psychological factors (e.g. you tolerance and perceptions are not quite the same if you train when you feel like shit). HRM’s, on the other hand, always give you steel-cold measures that you can trust (damn) and let you know in which of your heart rate zones you are putting your heart.

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The article “consumerism” in Wikipedia should contain just #REDIRECT: [[London]].

Since I came here I’ve been curious about Christmas in London. Last Wednesday when I left the office I went by tube to Oxford Circus. At the beginning I thought that there was some accident, or maybe a demonstration on the street, because there were those long queues inside the underground station, and the crowd was pushing trying to make their way up the stairs to Oxford Street.

But, alas! When I went off the station I found what you see in these pictures: an amazing packed tide of people just… shopping. The flow of shoppers coming from Piccadilly Circus via Regent Street was colliding with people walking down Oxford Street. As a result there was that thick and dense swarm, far worse than the worst crowd that you could find in any trendy club at 3am. It took me a few minutes just to turn left, walk 50 metres and cross the road. And that was still nineteen days to Christmas day!

It’s a shame that I’m not going to be in London by Christmas day — I’ve been told that 24th December the evening is a spectacle in that area.

Está bien; es cierto. Lo confieso. No tengo ni idea de quién me ha enviado este libro a través de Amazon.co.uk… :¬)

Bueno, tengo mis sospechosos, pero ningún indicio. Seas quien seas, ¡muchas gracias!

(Una pistita al menos, ¿no? :¬)

I have just finished my read-some-old-presents period. The last casualty has been this “All my friends are going to be strangers” by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry is, among other things, the winner of a Pulitzer prize and co-author of the screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain”. My uncle gave this book to me three years ago.

Even if I’m not as capable of a good review as malglam, here follows a brief opinion on the novel.

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Thanks to the visit of my friends Helio & Puri last month, I went at last to Forbidden Planet, a shop (the shop) for scifi/fantasy/comic/manganime/figure/game-flavoured freaks in London :¬)

It’s blissful, a nerdy paradise. Two pretty large floors full up with books, graphic novels, manga, magazines, figures, games and DVD’s. Fortunately, photos are allowed (as long as you don’t take any photo of the tills [?]) so here there are some images of the interior of the store.

I reassert my early appreciation about London: the best things it has are its parks and its bookshops.

Two weekends ago, I spent part of my Sunday afternoon visiting the Tate Modern museum for the first time.

It’s quite an impressive place. The building that hosts the museum was formerly a massive bare brick factory, with a very tall funnel, on the Southern riverbank. Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge takes off just in front of it, leading to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which is well visible from the entrance of the museum, with its magnificient dome arising above the rest of the buildings of Holborn.

I think I read somewhere that it’s one of the most visited museums worldwide, but I might well be wrong. I just walked through the ground and second floors and decided to leave the rest for another day. As usual, what I liked the most were the Surrealists. Specially Salvador Dalí, Francis Bacon and Max Ernst. And I discovered with delight the work of Juan Muñoz. His sculptures intrigued and moved me as no others.

It was a very cultural afternoon. And that’s more true bearing in mind that the night before I was in a striptease bar.

Last weekend I came back to the Tate Modern again ─ that time with Elena, a friend of mine that I met here in London. She wanted to visit the temporary exhibition on Kandinsky before it got cancelled. We could only get tickets to start the visit at five o’clock in the afternoon, so we decided to cross the river and go to St Paul in the meantime.

If I weren’t a bloody software engineer, I would be a Cathedral. Cologne, Rome, Milan, Seville. London. One of those.

It doesn’t matter if I switch to my mother tongue to have more words to choose from. I have no way to express the deep emotion that always dawns on me when I contemplate such buildings, with their fair tall dimensions, mighty organs and beautiful stained-glass windows. We went up to the dome. Staring at the transept from up there was like staring at the very centre of the Earth. Then we went on to the very top and I took one zillion pictures of London.

The Kandinsky exhibition was hectic (it was the last day). And I didn’t understand much of it. I usually don’t know how to get my bearings with abstract art. Elena says there’s nothing to understand ─ you either like or dislike it. In that case, I guess I didn’t like it.

Kandinsky may be a genius. But going in St Paul’s Cathedral, caressing the dome from within and contemplating from its top so many miles of central London stretching at my feet, that made me feel alive and gave some sense to the whole week.

Even after paying £9.