It’s that time of the year again. Time to head south to Extremadura to fry sweat bask in the un-air-conditioned summer heat for two weeks. This year, I hope to take advantage of the very minimal light pollution and cloud cover in the rural area where we will be staying and take some [...]

You may have noticed some weirdness on this blog this week. On Monday evening, some of my coworkers, for solid business reasons, had to reinstall the server this blog runs on. They backed up the database, reinstalled the operating system, restored the database, and brought the blog back up. The only real [...]

On July 14, 2008, three days after the official international launch date, I purchased an iPhone 3G.
Click the play button below before continuing.
\n
I went to check the iphone.movistar.es page to find the local dealers in Bilbao and Santander that were selling iPhones to call them up and check if they had any available. But [...]

What’s the deal with the iPhone in Spain? Well, I’ll tell you. Today is July 11, 2008, the international iPhone 3G launch date. And there are no iPhones in the stores in Spain. The local Telefonica outlet in my little town has no information whatsoever about the iPhone. Telefonica is [...]

For whatever reason, cramped space, climate change, low rainfall (aka. negligent watering), etc., the cactus is flowering late this year. In anticipation of the flowers, I took my photography up to the next level by purchasing a real professional tripod. One of the problems I saw in the Cactus Cam videos from 2007 [...]

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 the Financial [...]

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. [...]

So I go away for a couple days, come back, and see two withering cactus flowers and three brand new flowers open towards the heavens! They’ve started appearing a month later this year than last. They’re still just as beautiful as ever. I’ll have to keep an eye out for future flowers [...]

Today is the second birthday of this blog. When I went back to look at my first post just now, I noticed the link to my previous blog. It was broken, of course, but I’ve repaired it temporarily for those that are curious. It was done in iBlog, which is disgusting next [...]