http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog Thoughts and photos from an American living in Spain. Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:19:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Here goes my first post by iPhone. I'm lying in bed and it's too hot to sleep and I need something to take my mind off my skin. Last night, the first night here, I had trouble sleeping because my feet were itching. I got up at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/08/04/eaten-alive/ 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 ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/08/01/heading-south/ Today, I was buying some airline tickets to give as a wedding gift to some friends who are getting married next month so they can come visit us after their honeymoon. My choices of airline were RyanAir or easyJet, the two main budget airlines in Europe. After recovering ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/07/31/my-first-carbon-offsets/ We bought a new blender recently. Being myself, I bought the most expensive model that didn't come with extra vacuum packing gadgetry thrown in. This, combined with some extra leftover bread from a few days ago, was enough to push Marga into buying some peeled tomatos and a ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/07/30/gazpacho-cold-spanish-soup/ In the bathroom where I shower, we have a glass shower stall. After about a week of use, it gets little dots over it and must be cleaned. These are calcium deposits from the water that remain when the droplets dry. When I was a kid, I always thought ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/07/29/ocdelightful-squeegee/ Yesterday, as I was walking along a street watching my iPhone in amazement as the little blue dot representing my location moved ever so slightly towards the intersection I was approaching, four clothing stores were marked with flags after entering the word "clothing" into the map search. And, with ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/07/28/iphone-app-idea-capture-the-flag/ Last December, I participated in an international blogosphere Sandwich Party, put on by two lovely hostesses, Elsa and Jane, in which all the participants made and ate a sandwich and photo-blogged the process. This concept may seem very strange, but I am absolutely certain that this kind of thing ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/07/26/voice-of-a-pork-sandwich/ The other day, someone found my blog from google.bg. Rather than think, "Oh, that's Bulgarian Google. I know someone who is moving to Bulgaria," the first thought that I had was, "Hey, lowercase 'bg' has a rotational ambigram equivalent!" For those of you that are not typeface junkies ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/07/25/ambigram-domains/ 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 ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/07/24/wacky-wacky-web/ This weekend, we went to Mondragon to participate in some annual festivities at my in-laws' social club, the Centro Extremeño. We really enjoyed the rib feast last year, and it didn't disappoint this year either. And on Sunday there was free gazpacho and grilled sardines. This is a fantastic ... http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/07/21/ribs-and-sardines/