First impressions of Ping

Posted on September 6, 2010 by hds

iTunes now includes this social network (supposedly) thingy called Ping. I must say, it’s algorithms have a long way to go. Now I’m assuming they know what music I have in my library, on both my computers with iTunes on them. If not, what’s the point. But then, here are the first 6 names on the “Artists we Recommend You Follow” list:

  • 50 Cent
  • Daddy Yankee
  • Juanes
  • Jimmy Eat World
  • Keith Urban
  • Lloyd Banks

Truth is, I’ve heard music from one of those in the last forever (that would be Juanes), and that’s because I was at Andrea’s place on the weekend and we had the radio on. On page three Nine Inch Nails showed up (Trent Reznor has always been an Apple poster boy), but aside from that it’s pretty much crap – even I’ll stick to MySpace to check when bands are playing.

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Tesina, again

Posted on September 3, 2010 by hds

Just a quick note to say that yes, I know I’ve not posted much here recently. I’m currently writing my masters thesis dissertation for the masters in Multimedia that I finished in July (well I finished the classes in July).

I’ll be resuming some sort of normal routine (only part time work and full time study) around the 17th, or possibly the week afterwards.

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Festa Major de Gràcia – wrap up

Posted on August 25, 2010 by hds

Well, the Festa Major de Gràcia is over for another year. For the first this year I participated in setting up the decorations in my street Carrer Progrés. I went along and had a fantastic time, I’ve met loads of cool people and had plenty of practice speaking catalan, even if I was sure I was speaking rubbish half the time.

I’ve finally gone through all the photos I took leading up to and during the festivities. I’ve split the photos into three albums. The preparations are in Preparations for the Festa Major de Gràcia 2010, photos of all the decorations we put up are in Carrer Progrés decorations and finally a bunch of photos from the celebrations themselves are in the originally titled group Festa Major de Gràcia 2010.

For anyone who just wants all the images, I’ve uploaded zips of the files. They’re lower resolution than the originals, but still 1280×863, if you want the full size versions, come to my house with a few DVDs. The links to the zip files are below.

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Off to Lappeenranta and back to Helsinki

Posted on August 18, 2010 by hds

I’ve just uploaded the second set of images from Andrea and my trip to Finland. We went up to Lappeenranta for some relaxing time by the lake before one more night in Helsinki.

The photos are up in Lappeenranta and back to Helsinki.

On another note, turns out that all my recent problems with the site were due to moustache.com.au spawning loads of processes, no idea why though.

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Carrer Progrés

Posted on August 17, 2010 by hds

Versió del imatge més gran / Larger version of the image (5 MB)

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Back to the ’90s: Andrea and Pepe dancing

Posted on August 10, 2010 by hds

As a nice little throwback to decades gone by (I’m feeling older with every word of this sentence), here’s an animated GIF of Andrea dancing with Pepe in Bar Loose in Helsinki.

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Three years

Posted on August 9, 2010 by hds

Yesterday marked three years since I arrived in Barcelona, with a single suitcase (okay two suitcases between two people) and a very rudimentary knowledge of spanish. Nowadays I speak very little english here and have way too much stuff packed into my small room.

Also, the site has some issues, I’ll work out what’s going on when I have some time.

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Architecture in Helsinki

Posted on August 1, 2010 by hds

How could I resist starting with that truly awful gag. Got back from my trip to Finland with Andrea (and Pepe of course) on Friday night. Andrea is already back in Granada having left with her sister and family on Saturday morning. Really, really morning.

We had a great time, Helsinki is a really peaceful city – at least from our Barcelona point of view. After a few days we headed up to the (Finnish) lake district to Lappeenranta and discovered what peaceful really means. We had a wonderful time wandering around the Helsinki visiting all the sites as well as relaxing in Lappeenranta.

I bought a new camera before we went, so I took lots more photos than usual, the first set are already up in Helsinki (part 1).

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New user interface

Posted on July 22, 2010 by hds

You’d just say: “Machine god! I beseech thee, change my /etc/hosts files so that iTunes works the way I want.”

The trick is that the computer does what you mean, not what you say. Which is basically the bit that computer scientists don’t understand that every user wants.

This is an extract from a conversation I was having with Mike Tyson.

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Just imagine

Posted on July 21, 2010 by hds

If you live in Australia or the US or somewhere else equally monolingual, imagine this. You’ve just presented your PhD defence and one od the tribunal members begins speaking to you in a language you don’t speak, oh sure it’s pretty close to your own language, but it’s not.

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