tripu

This morning I went running in El Retiro Park with my friend Esteban, as we often do. When I came back home, I wondered how big El Retiro is, relative to other parks I know. El Retiro is fairly big — 4 laps around its perimeter sum up ~18.7 km (~11.6 mi), and that proved a great distance when Esteban and I were training for the Madrid Half Marathon. But if El Retiro is first among all parks for madrileños, it is not because of its size but because of its perfect location, the variety and quality of the sights it offers and its lively atmosphere.

To find out how some parks compare among them, I dug up some data in Wikipedia, and when that wasn’t available, in a few other pages, mainly from city councils etc. The image compares the relative areas of twelve parks in different cities of the world. Absolute areas are also shown, in hectare (10⁴ m²). Ignore shapes, though.

Disclaimer: this selection of parks isn’t intended to be comprehensive or representative of anything. It’s just a bunch of parks I love, from cities I have lived in, or at least visited (the exception to this rule is Central Park: I haven’t been to NYC, but I included Central Park as a reference, for I guess it’s the most famous park worldwide). Finally, this isn’t to prove that Madrid can boast about owning the largest park. Casa de Campo‘s eastmost side is as close to Madrid’s official “city centre” as El Retiro, but in justice it could also be called a forest… Sometimes it’s just a matter of labels, isn’t it?

Cinco años y medio, 430 km y unos cuantos grados centígrados separan estas dos imágenes:

E.T.S. de Ingeniería Informática, Granada, verano de 2004

Mercado de San Miguel, Madrid, febrero de 2010

El otro día nos juntamos en el Mercado de San Miguel, aquí en Madrid, unos cuantos compañeros de la promoción 1998–2003 (más bien 1998–2004) de ingeniería informática de la Universidad de Granada. Resulta que un día andando por la Calle Mayor (casualmente, al lado de este mercado) me crucé con Alvarito (quien anda ahora muy ocupado en sus proyectos empresariales) e intercambiamos teléfonos. Por otro lado, la semana pasada LinkedIn me reconectó felizmente con Fede. No solo eso, sino que Fede y otros pocos estaban cocinando un reencuentro precisamente para esa misma noche.

Yo tenía invitados aquel día, pero conseguí pasarme un ratito por el mercado y tomarme un algo rápido con la gente que veis en la foto. Álvaro y Juande aparecieron en el último momento. Creo que de los compañeros que hemos emigrado a Madrid (unos hace ya años, otros —como yo— hace apenas unos meses) al único que eché en falta fue a Rubén (¡que ya tiene una niña, me cuentan!).

Fue un momento de recuerdos. En las caras de los cuatro que estamos en ambas fotos (Juan, Fede, Juande y yo) puede apreciarse claramente cómo somos más viejunos, y también un poco menos pardillos (¿no?). En la foto antigua acababámos de terminar la carrera, o apenas nos quedaba un par de asignaturas, y se ve el careto de satisfacción (y ese bendito sol del verano en Granada). Ahora somos unos currelas y unos madrileños en menor o mayor grado; la mayoría con novia formal (cuando no esposa), coche, descendencia, hipoteca, o una combinación de las anteriores. La mayoría, que no todos.

Ademas, y para rizar el rizo, el otro día revisando mis fotos en Flickr vi que la foto de arriba de 2004 es la primera de mis fotos públicas. Así que ahora mismo estas dos fotos son el alfa y el omega de mi Flickr, y se cierra así el círculo del photostream.

Si a esto le unimos que hace un rato me acaba de decir otro de mis grandes y queridos amigos de la ETSII que este año se casa con toda la parafernalia, en el pueblo de ella, ¡y por la Iglesia! (otro que cae) no puedo no sentirme hoy un poco nostálgico (y raruno a la vez).

¡Salud y núcleos de ferrita!

Otra fotillo de la misma noche

This is a simple recipe that will be obvious for many users of Un*x systems, but which proved useful to me when I needed to fix Grub on my laptop. I’m sharing it here for future personal reference, and in case anyone out there knows even less than I do about booting Linux and about Grub.

This recipe assumes that there is a /boot/ partition containing valid Linux kernels. In other words, it just creates a missing menu.lst file for Grub — it does not deal with other more complicated, lower-level boot issues.

Last time I installed Ubuntu, I somehow messed with the boot loader settings. I’m running Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor; but I also have Mac OS installed, and I use rEFIt to handle both OS‘s. Whatever option Ubuntu ticks by default regarding Grub, I thought it wasn’t the right one for my setup. It turned out that either Ubuntu didn’t know how to install Grub correctly for my partition layout, or I screwed it myself. Anyway.

The system was installed successfully, but once the installation finished, Linux wouldn’t boot. rEFIt detected the new OS correctly, but when it was selected, Grub fell back to its own limited command line.

Now, if I knew more about Grub, I’d be able to find an image of the Linux kernel and boot the system with it, using Grub commands. Then I would edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst myself.

What I did, instead, was the following:

1. Run Linux from a live CD distro. You can boot using the same CD you used to install Ubuntu (but any live distro which includes Grub in its base system will do).
2. Fire up a terminal.
3. Temporarily rename the /boot/ directory:

   $ sudo mv /boot/ /boot.DISABLED

4. Create a symbolic link to the partition on your hard drive that contains the Linux kernels, and call it /boot/ (if your live system did not mount that partition automatically, find the right device and mount it first under /media/, or mount it directly onto /boot/):

   $ sudo ln -s /boot /media/sda3/    # Your device might not be this one

5. If there is already a /boot/grub/ directory, disable it:

   $ sudo mv /boot/grub/ /boot/grub.DISABLED

6. Run update-grub (if it returns an error, you might need to create the directory /boot/grub/ yourself first):

   $ sudo update-grub

7. Restore the original live /boot/:

   $ sudo unlink /boot/
   $ sudo mv /boot.DISABLED /boot

8. Reboot the system and extract the live CD; this time Grub should show the menu of available kernels and load the one that you choose.

N.B. Although update-grub‘s man page asks you to run the command first, then set some options in menu.lst, and finally run the command again, update-grub looks idempotent to me (anyone knows what I’m missing?).

Xirick has been damn fast replying to my previous post. And the pictures he’s used are great to illustrate my changes for the near future.

What Xirick didn’t know is that I already had an analogous counterpoint for my own argument, ready to be posted today. You know, being as contradictory as I am, you can’t post about happiness one day an not try to balance that with sadness the day after. Or maybe you can. Well, I don’t think you can. But you definitely can.

I know: these photos aren’t nearly as good as the ones in Xirick’s post. But my point was to illustrate the differences using only my own photos.

Enough said.

I’m sad because in about four months I’ll be switching from this…

…to this:

From this…

…to this:

From this…

…to this:

From this…

…to this:

…and so many other wonderful things, habits, activities and feelings that I will leave behind. Some of them difficult, if not impossible, to find in other places. Like the amazing architecture, or rather the flamboyant collage of different styles. And the ostentatious buildings, the cityscapes, and that feeling of living in the city, in the centre (not the center) of the world:

And proper winters (with all the nice things that a winter should have). And solvent organisations to work for; in comfy, spacious offices that are within walking distance from many other important places. Organisations that pay what is fair and where you work the time you are supposed to work, full stop:

And those (few, I know) lovely days of summer spent with friends frolicking on the grass, in one of the many parks:

And the institutions, the organisations, the courses, the opportunities, the knowledge floating around. The libraries, the bookshops:

And the rightful lack of modesty:

And the buzz around, the surprises every day, the unexpected events, the festivals:

And the streets, the variety, the peoples. The freedom, the mind-openers. Walking or running the city. Crossing two blocks means leaving Poland and entering Mexico. Run a bit further and you’re in Guinea-Bissau:

And the hub, the connections, the flights, the trains. The freedom again. Having trouble to decide the destination because all the first five countries in the list are close at hand and inexpensive anyway:

And all the friends stopping by, the guests every couple of weeks, friends of other friends who become friends. The parties, the nights out:

And the culture, the music, the big names:

And the events, the conferences, the initiatives:

And most of all, I will be missing these two so much:

Because in about four months I’ll be switching from this…

…to this:

From this…

…to this:

From this…

…to this:

From this…

…to this: