digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/business_finance/More_Privacy_Lost_To_Terrorism_Swiss_Banks_No_Longer_Secret’;Switzerland has finally given in to the fear of terrorism. From 1934 to June 30, 2008, Swiss banks would not and could not, under Swiss law, give information about where their clients’ money came from to third parties, even foreign governments or the Swiss government itself. Switzerland is a member of [...]

Wow! What a night! Who knew that an optimistic attitude like Podemos would really work? I was wondering the whole time if they would stop using that word for the Euro 2008 coverage if Spain got knocked out of the tournament. But I guess we’ll never know.
We were going to go [...]

Part of finishing up our wedding video responsibilities included choosing photos of each of us as children for the obligatory “before they met” montage. This post is dedicated to the adorable little Spanish girl that became my wife.

Here we are already! 2008 is half over. We’ve actually had 27 of our 52 Fridays this year. I have continued to play 5€ in the ONCE lottery every Friday. I predicted that the most likely final balance would be 31€, sustaining a total loss of 229€. So the most [...]

Part of the wedding package that we purchased with the videographer that filmed our wedding was a “Paseo de solteros” (Singles’ stroll) that involves being filmed in scenic locations where we live walking around holding hands, giggling, smiling, caressing and generally looking “in love” to be placed at the beginning of the wedding video. [...]

My tax situation is very unique. It will be less rare in 40 years, but I’m probably one of the first full-time transatlantic telecommuters. I’m an American citizen working for an American company, which pays me in US dollars into an American bank…….but I live in Spain.
Logically, it makes sense to pay taxes [...]

Recently I’ve been playing around with a pretty cool software package called Apple Motion. Follow that link and check out the intro video to see the kind of professional graphics it can produce. One really impressive trick that it can do is to stabilize shaky video. That’s what we’re going to be [...]

Last Saturday, I was looking out the window at the full moon and noticed another unusually bright celestial object near it. Curious what it might be, I dashed to the computer to fire up Stellarium, the quickest way to identify objects in the night sky. It turned out that the bright object I [...]

On Saturday we went to the beach for the first time this year. The weather was better than any single day of 2007, so we’re off to a good start. The water was pretty icy, but amazingly refreshing after being in the sun for an hour. Nothing like going from uncomfortably hot [...]

It’s Martini season again! There’s nothing better than taking a nice stroll around town in the hot sun, ordering an icy red vermouth, and sitting on the bar’s patio to sip it. Lovely!
If you’re confused about what I mean by Martini (and the word has a very different meaning in Spain than in [...]