I missed “21 Grams” but loved “Amores Perros”. From the rather poor current catalogue of films I had to pick the new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu. (Which one if not that one? “Night at the Museum”? You must be joking).

Now, people like me, who can't help diving too deeply into films and end up loving almost every piece of cinema as long as it's able to alter our state of mind, people like me should never write about a film in the heat of the moment. Because when the main characters utter the last mighty sentence of their epilogue and that powerful close-up slowly becomes a long traveling, when the image fades to emptiness again and the whole meaning of the story dawns on your mind, when the last chord of strings gently vanishes inevitably taking you down to the ground of a random cinema in a random city, when the end titles start pulsing on the screen… then it always takes quite a long while for people like me to recover and come back to Earth. We would happily ban any talking or gesture inside the auditorium. No communication until everyone is outside of the cinema again and become fully aware that it was fiction, realize that they need to wait for the bloody bus in the cold and remember that such suggestive soundtrack never pops up in their lives automatically as it does on the screen (shame!). Switching back from art to life needs some graduality and care, as scuba divers need slow decompression before putting their feet on dry land again.

Having said that, I hereby resign myself to never being a good film critic.

And having said that as a disclaimer, I must say that I pretty liked “Babel”.

The formula of woven lifesnaps linking distant people as shown in “Amores Perros” has become a recurrent resource in the toolkit of scriptwriters (“Crash” to say one example). And it may seem that Iñárritu has made of it one of his features. In this case the links are weak and barely justify the connection between the four parallel stories. But you are willing to forgive that sin if the single stories are intense enough by themselves. And I think they are.

On the surface, these stories show how tough and difficult communication is between different cultures. Four countries appear (USA, Mexico, Morocco and Japan) and I think that the valuable lesson is that even if every single character behaves in a coherent, more or less right way when analysed in isolation, their reasons and interests clearly collide with others' reasons and interests and cause conflicts which damage all of them (us). How can it be, that being roughly good as individuals the net result of our interactions is misunderstanding and harm? The answer comes in a second read: it is not a matter of different languages, distant cultures and ethnocentrism, but a matter of being human. For the characters within the same country display no less conflicts between them than they do with foreigners (Richard and Susan at the beginning of their holidays, and both of them with the rest of the American tourists; the Moroccan brothers with their father, and their father with the policemen; ちえこ —Chieko— with her father and with the boys of her age).

These stories also show how insignificant events may change your life and even the lives of other people.

It reminded me of Sofia Coppola's “Lost in Translation”. The music by Gustavo Santaolalla fits very nice.

I specially enjoyed the story that takes place in Tokio. I'm starting to see Japan, Tokio and the Japanese language with a different look, and it kind of thrills me because I know myself well enough to understand what that may mean. I can't speak Japanese. It seems so difficult that I haven't but started to learn the very basics which some day may allow me to start learning the beginning of what could be something resembling Japanese. But even those two or three easy words that I caught from the dialogues between Tokyoite characters really excited me. Every time I recognized a “ございました” to put a touch of politeness in a sentence, some “すみません” (“I'm sorry”) or that “アメリカじん” to refer to the couple of characters from the USA… boy, sounds it good!

Cómo odio cuando metes ropa y sábanas a la lavadora y al sacarlo todo descubres que la sábana ha fagocitado toda la ropa… ¿Es concebible algo peor?

La Petite Claudine es uno de los RSS más dulces y estimulantes para el geek ilustrado.

En Santa Maradona le han hecho una entrevista.

Preciosa y lúcida, como siempre. Esta chica es un portento.

«Si te refieres a que cuándo entenderemos que cuando nos preguntáis por el signo del zodíaco en realidad nos queréis follar, te adelanto que ya lo sabemos. Pero es que, si nos hacemos las tontas, antes del polvo nos lleváis a cenar.»

«Hay momentos en la vida de uno en los que se presentan retos algo más complejos que la prima del pueblo o el mando del televisor. Algunos son necesarios, como la tabla de equivalencias de la temperatura, el centrifugado y los colores de la ropa. Otros, como Pynchon, no. Hay quien lo encuentra estimulante pero son pocos y apenas salen de casa.»

«La lencería perfecta no puede ser una tira para envolver paquetes. Mi favorita es de talle bajo, de la que deja ver las caderas y el punto en que la espalda se separa en dos. Como Sigourney Weaver en “Alien” después de esquivar al bicho.»

«De los tres grandes (Batman, Superman y Spiderman), yo me quedaría con Batman porque, a diferencia de los otros dos, sus poderes no provienen ni de un planeta muy lejano ni de una araña radiactiva sino de la sed de venganza y una disciplina ejemplar, que son mucho más fiables. Eso significa que está en perfecta forma las 24 horas del día (y no sólo cuando llama por teléfono o se pone las mallas), que no le viene la regla cuando le enseñan un pedrusco y que no habrá reacciones alérgicas raras. Además sabe llevar un esmoquin, tiene un mayordomo que cita a Joseph Conrad y es un supergeek.»

«En España, el partido socialista dio a entender en campaña que dejaríamos de mantener a la iglesia católica y que los colegios públicos cambiarían la asignatura de religión por algo más apropiado, como talleres de informática, cocina extremeña o danzas regionales. Después ganó las elecciones y cubrió el expediente legalizando la sodomía recreativa. Cuatro curas protestaron para darle colorcillo y todo el mundo se quedó tranquilo con la convicción de que el mundo es un poco mejor.»

¡Mi primer memo, qué ilusión! A instancias de CarlosPC (gracias).

1. Colecciono dos cosas. La primera son postales enviadas desde cualquier parte del mundo por amigos, familiares y conocidos. Suelo pedir a la gente que me envíe una postal cuando va a hacer algún viaje, aunque sea corto y yo ya conozca el destino. Así que por favor no te molestes si nos conocemos solo un poco y te pido que me envíes una postal. Tengo un par de cajones llenos de postales, pero debería recopilarlas y ordenarlas, porque no sé ni cuántas tengo ya. La otra colección que hago es de números de la antigua revista de tebeos de ficción científica 1984, que se editó en España (Toutain, Barcelona) entre 1978 y 1984, si no recuerdo mal. Aún hoy la revista me sigue pareciendo de un gran mérito; si ya es difícil mantener una revista de tebeos, encima de SF… ¡y además en pleno postfranquismo! 1984 reunió a algunos de los mejores dibujantes y guionistas, como Richard Corben, Horacio Altuna y Carlos Giménez. Por cierto, para terminar la colección de números ordinarios, especiales y anuarios me faltan cinco: 10, 24, 25, 27 y 30. Podría comprarlos a coleccionistas a través de Internet, pero no lo hago porque me gusta más pasearme por las ferias de libros antiguos de las ciudades (y también porque el día que termine la colección me va a dar un poquito de pena). Si alguien se siente inevitablemente compelido a regalarme algo, cualquiera de esos números me hará tela de ilusión (toma ya wishlist puñetera).

2. Siempre llevo las mismas cosas encima, y en los mismos sitios. Vale, es una manía. Si llevo la calderilla en el bolsillo derecho del pantalón en lugar del izquierdo me siento raro. Pero tiene la ventaja de que casi nunca he perdido nada; gafas, celular, cartera, llaves; cosas que veo que la gente olvida o pierde con relativa facilidad.

3. Una vez estuve despierto durante cuatro días y tres noches. Unas 88 horas seguidas sin dormir, excepto por una siesta de un par de horas que me eché el primer día. Se me juntó la entrega de mi proyecto fin de carrera con la despedida de un montón de amigos y con un viaje para el que tenía que preparar todo mi equipaje de diez meses. Conforme pasaba el tiempo estaba más y más sorprendido, porque no me sentía especialmente cansado. No tomé nada para mantenerme despierto, pero no tenía ningún malestar ni me quedaba dormido. Fue una experiencia interesante, aunque no pretendo repetirla a mis años.

4. Aprendí a tocar el oboe porque fue el primer instrumento que me ofrecieron en la escuela de música. Sé un poco de italiano porque mi media en la carrera no era lo suficientemente alta para irme de erasmus al Reino Unido o a Irlanda. Pero soy ingeniero en informática porque era lo que siempre había querido hacer y porque mi nota de selectividad fue muy buena.

5. Cuando termine de escribir esto voy a pasar el aspirador por mi cuarto, voy a coger la Northern Line hasta King's Cross y voy a volver a casa corriendo atravesando el centro.

Casi todos los bitacoreros a los que sigo son más viejos en esto que yo y están ya hartos de memes, así que no se lo paso a nadie.

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

After posting two days ago that letter sent to Metro by a (male) reader I feel morally compelled to post the equally slick reply of a (female) reader published today:

“I'm not surprised that the female voice on [that reader]'s sat-nav sent him the wrong way (Metro, Wed). She was obviously so shocked that a man was actually asking for directions.”

Esta noche mi amigo que vive en Terminus ha estado dándome algunos consejos y haciendo pacientemente de Pepito Grillo. Agradezco su buenquerer con el propósito de tardar menos de dos horas en escribir esta entrada. Y de no preocuparme si después descubro que hay alguna flata de hortografía.

Sometimes that pseudonewspaper for commuters called “Metro” really makes me laugh.

Two quotes from today's issue:

“I got a satnav for Christmas but had to switch it to the male voice after the female voice kept sending me the wrong way.”

“Peter Griffin from `Family Guy´ […] and his son Chris while they're looking at some killer whales. Chris: `Dad, what's the blowhole for?´ Peter: `I'll tell you what it's not for. And when I do, you'll understand why I can never go back to Sea World´.”

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.

An application like Smart Zones must integrate with HRM's to let users feed Trainsmart's database with accurate data about their training. The more accurate that feedback is, the better their suggested training programme will be.

Polar, a Finnish company, virtually invented HRM's. At this stage of Smart Zones, I have been working with their IrDA API to make some of their HRM's talk to Smart Zones via an infrared port (or an USB-to-IrDA device). I started working with the version 1.40 of their DLL and later upgraded to version 1.60. Everything worked fine, except that the progress bar that usually was shown during the whole synchronization process (see the image beside) was missing in the latest version. The sequence of commands that I was using was this one:

fnHRMCom_ResetIRCommunication (0)
    fnHRMCom_StartIRCommunication (HRMCOM_PARAM_IRDA, "IR")
    fnHRMCom_ReadMonitorInfo (&psg, &psmi)
    fnHRMCom_ReadExercisesData (hWnd, FALSE)

    for (int i = 0; i < psmi.iTotalFiles; i ++) {
        fnHRMCom_GetExeFileInfo (i, &pef)
        fnHRMCom_AnalyzeFile (i, 0)
        fnHRMCom_SaveExerciseHRM (hDlg, szOutputFile, 0)
    }

I knew that not having that progress bar would be a pain for users since infrared communication is infamous because of its low bandwidth. If a user tries to send data about all his 100 or 200 training sessions in the last year, it may take a few minutes to complete. So some feedback is vital to let them know that the synchronization is in progress. After spending far too long trying to find out why that dialog box was missing in the new version of the DLL, I did what software engineers sometimes do in such circumstances: undo the last changes and try to find out at what exact point things changed so badly. In that case, that meant reverting Polar's DLL to its previous version (1.40).

It worked, exactly as it should. There it was that nice dialog box with its progress bar.

Eventually I discovered that the parent window handle that I was passing to the function fnHRMCom_ReadExercisesData was NULL, and this function is supposed to receive a valid parent window. But even bearing that in mind, I don't understand why it needs another window handle if it works the same without it!

Never mind. Smart Zones is now accepting heart rate data from a wide range of Polar IrDA watches. And more Polar interfaces and other HRM brands are to come in the next weeks — we are pushing upgrades more or less once a week.

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.