He gave me a prescription (GPs never let you leave without one.) for some anti-itch pills. We also bought some bug repellent in the pharmacy. Back in the village, word had spread of my “state”, and everybody and their sister had a household remedy, each supported by exactly one data point of anecdotal evidence. As I type this, my entire left side is covered in a calcium and olive oil (extra virgin!) mix. Marga noted my skepticism and suggested leaving my right side as a control. Not exactly a double blind clinical trial, but better than nothing. Two hours in, and oily side is much more irritating. Not helping my iPhone screen either, I might add.

I won’t be sharing any pictures on Flickr any time soon, I’m afraid. It seems that someone has gained access to my Yahoo account and changed my password. So now I have to try to prove my identity to Yahoo tech support. The main problem being that I’ve had the account for ten years, lived in four different countries, and am sure I updated my account profile a few times, but don’t remember when or where. And they are demanding that I tell them the postal code and country on the account. What a bloody nightmare!

That’s it for now. Plenty of daily pics over on erikrasmussen.tumblr.com!

First of all, you can read accounts of previous years in Extremadura:

Extremadura - 2006
Extremadura 2007 (1 of 3) - Higuera Bullfight
Extremadura 2007 (2 of 3) - Baby in Zahínos
Extremadura 2007 (3 of 3) - Champagne Barbeque

Also, I plan on posting at least one photo and tweet per day to Twitter. I would recommend following this action on my Tumblr page, erikrasmussen.tumblr.com (RSS), where you may leave comments if you wish.

And, as if all this wasn’t enough, I have added a special “Stuff I find interesting” box to my sidebar (you might need to scroll down to see it), where I will be posting links to news articles and blog entries I’ve found interesting lately.

See you in a fortnight!

“Contribute £2.35 per person to balance the 180kg of Carbon Dioxide per passenger on this booking - there are no middlemen and easyJet does not profit from the scheme.” Read more about easyJet’s environmentally-friendly policies.

Good work, easyJet! Every airline, bus, subway, and train service should adopt a similar scheme. The gas station is not really where people want to be spending more right now, but an offer to buy offsets equivalent to the tank of gas might work too. Frankly, I think there are a lot of people out there like me who won’t go out of their way to buy carbon offsets, but that, if given the chance of adding 4% onto a purchase for offsets, will. Carbon offsets are not the full answer to concerns about the environment, but they’re a step in the right direction.

When our newlywed friends Robert and Ania come to visit us in October, their flight will be carbon neutral.

Ingredients

• Day-old bread, soaked in water for 15 minutes or so. About enough to make a ball the size of your fist.
• Peeled tomatos. We only had one tomato, so we peeled it and bought a can of peeled tomatoes.
• One cucumber, peeled.
• Two fried eggs.
• Two large cloves of garlic. This gives it a nice tang.
• Salt
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• Vinegar
• Water, if outcome is a little too thick.

Traditional gazpacho is one of those recipes that grew out of necessity and just blending together whatever people had available. It’s one food where, no matter how you make it, if you serve it to a large group of Spaniards, everyone will tell you exactly how what you’ve served is different from how their family usually makes it. Generally, anything that you’d put on a salad is fair game.

Instructions

1. Blend
2. Serve
3. Eat

The Salad Chefs oversee the addition of ingredients into the blender. Note that I said only one “fist” of bread, and we have two. Adding too much bread was the only mistake we made. The resulting gazpacho was a little too grainy.

Preblend.

The first few times I tried gazpacho, I didn’t really like it. But I think my aversion was more just a general aversion to cold soups, which I have since overcome. One way to trick yourself past the cold soup problem is by serving it in a glass.

Really, if you think about it, eating gazpacho is rather like drinking salad.

When I was a kid, I always thought it strange that my grandparents had a squeegee in their shower stall. When I was visiting, I used to dry the glass in their shower stall after my showers, not because they asked me to, but because it was fun to pass the rubber squeegee over the glass and watch the water all run down to the bottom. It never occurred to me to ask why they had a squeegee in there. It just seemed fun to me.

About a year ago, it hit me that my grandparents’ squeegee was a solution to calcium deposits dirtying the glass. But it took me a year to remember this revelation when I was anywhere other than using or cleaning the shower. Finally we bought a squeegee for the shower!

The results were amazing. Immediately there was a difference in the general appearance of the bathroom with the clean glass of the shower stall. It’s working really well.

The other day, as I was sliding the squeegee down the glass, exterminating the little droplets, it occurred to me that I found this activity very pleasing in a very OCD way. I certainly don’t have diagnosable obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I think that everyone that’s at all neat has some subtle chemical imbalance that, when way out of balance, results in full OCD, but normally just controls how generally neat and organized you are. There in the shower, I coined the term “OCDelightful” for any activity that triggers pleasure for reasons of order and neatness. I’ve submitted it to the Urban Dictionary. When I went to submit its close acronym, OCDelicious, I found, to my surprise, that it is already there! With the proper definition and everything! Amazing.

This is a reenactment, since common decency prevents me from sharing a photo of actual showering conditions.

I think that “squeegee” is one of the most awesome words in the English language. Don’t you?

Here’s my idea for an awesome iPhone app. There should be just a simple app that lets you play games in which the other players are carrying their iPhones and everyone can see everyone on the map. In this simple framework, a wide variety of games can be constructed. The simplest and first to come to mind is Capture The Flag. Imagine with me…

You divide all the players into two teams (we’ll call them red and blue). Each team is given a “flag”. But it’s not really a flag, it’s a bar code. It can be printed or just any UPC symbol off any supermarket product. Each team captain takes their bar code “flag”, takes a photograph of it with his iPhone, and then hides it somewhere, making sure to set the location of the flag into his iPhone via GPS with a tap when he hides the flag. It’s not really hidden, it should be in plain sight at eye level. Once both flags have been placed, the game begins. The red team has to try to capture the blue team’s flag and make it back to their base (where the red flag is hidden), and vice versa. The way you defend your base is to “shoot” an opponent. The way you shoot and opponent is you get within X meters of him and press a “fire” button on your iPhone. X could be 10 or 100 or 1000; it depends on the size of the playing area. If someone kills you, you must go half the distance back to your own base before you become active again. To capture the opponent’s flag, you must simply take a picture of it, the iPhone will match the bar code with the one given at the start of the game for the opposing team, mark your dot on everyone’s map as having the flag, and you run like the wind back to your base. If you get killed on your way, the virtual flag is returned instantly back to the enemy base and you have to go scan it again (and you have to go halfway back to your base to revive yourself). Perhaps when you have the flag, you can’t shoot anyone, so your teammates without the flag must run with you defending you.

But think about it… This can be played anywhere, and on any scale. You can play in the forest behind grandpa’s house, or you can play it across all of Manhattan, or the United States, or the entire globe!

The technology is all there. All that is needed is a little help from an internet server to coordinate locations. It’s probably important that the rules stipulate that items must be at ground level, since the mapping software is still 2D. As I mentioned initially, Capture The Flag is not the only game available once the player-tracking infrastructure is set up. A bar-code-based treasure hunt could work too. You have to figure out the clues, but you can also see where the other teams are and where they are headed. So once you figure out where a treasure is, you scatter your team so the opponents don’t know which location the treasure is in. And of course there are plenty of more possibilities…

I’m not going to develop this app because I’m just not that interested. But I’m posting this because I think it’s cool and highlights the immense possibilities of a geolocated, internet enabled device…and so that I can point back to this when it is finally released and say, “See, I thought of that in July 2008!”

A little research shows that apparently someone had this idea back in 2005, and someone has implemented a simple version of it for other phones. The GPS-enabled iPhone, however, provides a device that contains all the necessary technology.

Well, the second Sandwich Party is this weekend, and I have prepared and consumed my entry. My regular readers won’t be surprised by what they find at the bottom of this post, but perhaps some of the other Sandwich Partiers that happen by will.

My sandwich entry for the July 2008 Sandwich Party is more or less a recreation of the sandwich I order almost every Thursday night when the missus and I go out dancing. Pork fillets, onions, peppers, melted cheese, and mustard. Delicious.

It’s very common here to find these fillets of pork that have been rolled/marinated in garlic. It’s called lomo al ajillo.

Chopped onions.

Chopped peppers.

Camera set up to watch over things.

The final result.

Mmmmmm!!!!

But what does the voice of a pork sandwich sound like?

Music by Jimbo Mathus & Knockdown South.

You can follow other Sandwich Party developments on the Flickr Group or on Jane’s Sandwich Party page.

So I challenged myself to figure out what the rotational ambigram of “bg” was without rotating a piece of paper. I’m rather disappointed to say that, although my brain had immediately recognized that there was one, I went though several guesses involving “p” and “d” before figuring it out. The answer, is, of course, “6q”. And it still took me another hour to realize that “bg” is just a slight variation on the most famous numerical rotational ambigram of all.

From here, I started wondering what rotational ambigram internet domains were available. I thought of suggesting to my Bulgaria-bound friend that he should try to register 6q.bg when he gets there and meets the requirements for getting a country-specific domain. When I was thinking about other domain suffixes with rotational possibilities (the common .org, .com, and .net suffixes don’t work), I realized that, if capital letters were used, Spain’s suffix would work!

I checked, though, and Spain’s domain registrar does not allow two-letter domains, so I can’t register s3.es. Of course any rotationally symmetrical letter can be added in there. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to come up with any actual words that make sense. S3POd.ES? S3Z.ES? And yes, X works, too.

I just thought I’d share some of these incredibly nerdy thoughts that I have occasionally.

I was surprised to see that one of my readers, Ray Tibbetts, had taken a screenshot of my blog as it was down on Monday morning and posted it on Flickr. By the time I saw my blog that morning, it was already up (albeit with the broken Spanish characters), so it was interesting to see what had happened earlier.

This screenshot blows my mind. Get this: During my repair of the character encoding today, I had to blow away the database, create a new one with the proper encoding, and then import the original Monday backup. The import took about 10 minutes. During those ten minutes, my blog was showing the default Wordpress “empty database” screen that asks you to click “install wordpress” and set up your blog.

During these ten minutes, someone from the internet found my blog, noticed that it was a virgin Wordpress installation waiting to be set up, and clicked “install wordpress” and set up the header to point to his money-making affiliate site.

I’ve never been robbed and my website has never been maliciously hacked, so I’m usually not very paranoid about stuff like that (although I do take important security precautions), but it’s good to have the world remind you that there are people out there in the shadows willing to take advantage of you if you ever let your guard down.

The solution to this problem, by the way, was to change the database password setting in the Wordpress configuration file so that it could not see the database while I was doing the import. Still, pretty amazing.

The other thing that happened this week from the server reinstall is that the BITWRATHPLOOB website was completely destroyed. Its database was not backed up before the machine was wiped, and all the posts, pages, and comments were lost forever.

Or were they?

Through a process that I still find difficult to believe myself, through several hours of copying and pasting this week, I have been able to restore all the pages and posts from Google Cache. When Google scans your website for information to index their search engine, a couple times a month, they save an entire copy of each page in their cache. This enables you to find information from websites even when they are down or unavailable. To view any page in the Google Cache, you simply google the full url with the word “cache:” before it. Like so: cache:http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/. If you click on that link, you will see a copy of this website from a week or two ago without hitting my webserver. It’s pretty incomprehensible to imagine how Google has an entire copy of every public web page everywhere stored on their servers. They’ve gotten into more than one law suit about it.

So this is why my blog has been a bit quiet and strange lately, and I hope you’ve learned a few things about the nature of this wacky wacky web. That is what “www” stands for, you know.

This is a fantastic panorama from my grandfather-in-law’s balcony. I made it with two rows of portrait photographs, so it covers a very wide area. View full 12061×5463 (10 MB) version.

The bells in the town church, also seen in the panorama above.

Ribs go on the barbeque.

Three glasses on the table as we wait for ribs to cook.

The new branded coffee cups are very nice.

This symbol is very well designed. It’s both a map of Extremadura, the flag (green, white, and black horizontal stripes) of Extremadura, and a picture of the ubiquitous encina that is all over Extremadura. I’m impressed every time I see it.

Grandpa and his friend, Pedro.

The next day, this was the snack given to us with our wine. They’re these tiny little fish that are fried and eaten whole. Head, eyeball, tail, fins, and all. They’re petty good, but strange eating whole fish.

Now it’s the sardines’ turn on the grill.

The smell is amazing. Too bad my camera can’t capture that.

I forgot my iPhone charger when we left on Friday afternoon, and by Sunday afternoon, it was completely dead. That’s pretty good considering that it was complaining about battery capacity by Friday night.