ricardocabellov5.5

Wishing the best for everyone!! Have a very productive and creative 2006!! *\o/*

... let the money work for you.

Meanwhile I was looking for a chistmas gift for my father I was on amazon checking some books and I found this book called "papa rico papa pobre". From amazon you can read some pages of each book, in this case the introduction, and after reading it I understood myself a little bit.

I grow up under one of those educations like "save, save, save, don't spend too much, look for the cheaper one". But maybe because I'm lazy (doing things like that) I just tried to find a reason for not doing this. And somehow I had one but I never thought that was in fact a much better way to think. For example:

Issue 1 - mp3 player
You have to buy a mp3 player. Everybody always told you that you have to compare different shops before buy it. You got one shop just in the same street where you live but it's more expensive that buying it in a shop where is cheaper. Don't worry about it. You need it and you don't want to waste time getting the tube/bus and then going back. You need it, you go to the closest shop and you buy it. End of the story. Probably going to that shop that was cheaper you will have to pay the bus or tube to go there, this fact makes the product more expensive, but perhaps including the tube/bus ticket is still cheaper. Doesn't matter, it's 1hour of time your time that you saved.

Issue 2 - Getting a charge of 1 month for just half.
This month Foxtons did charge us for 1month when we only been on the flat for 15 days. Well, I don't care. I will probably lose a lot of time, finding the correct number to call, speaking with the correct person, making my english pronunciation as clear as possible, and probably I will have to lose time of my work because they only answer the phone in working hours. Solution, don't worry about, keep working and you will probably get the money back just doing what you like to do: your work.

Some people did ask me at some points of my life, "Where the fuck you get the time to be able to do all what you do?! Don't you sleep?!" they said.. Well, I certainly sleep much less than other people but the next time I will probably know what to answer. Just without caring about those small things that happens in your life that If you care about It will make you not concentrate in your ideas. I have to chose, or concentrating about having a very fair life where all what I have to pay is what I should, or just continue doing what I like, and probably will get back that money I lost and twice of it probably. The time I would lose doing things like that is time that I will lose of my relax time, If I lose my relax time the relax time will supply the work time.

This way of thinking just apply to the people that does have too many ideas and a lot of things to do. If you have time to watch tv or you got nothing to do. Don't worry, you can plan your day just traveling to get your life as fair as possible

Once again, Apple is kicking the ass of Microsoft in their own Platform. I'm talking about Video Players.

For years Mac (David Notario) was always complaining about Quicktime because wasn't really an open format that you could play with another player and he was always defending .wm9. In fact, when we (he) did all the videos of all the threepixels demos, he didn't want to save them as .mov mainly because that.

But, as you can see, .mov is now a very used video format in for anything. In xplsv.tv for example 90% of all the content is in Quicktime, looks like everyone using mac or After Effects (win or mac) always export as quicktime. And I say "thanks god!". Whenever you try to see a video streamed in a website using the shitty Windows Media Player I get quite angry, my conection sometimes isn't fast enough and the video stops.. and says streaming... 20% 45% 76%... that sucks. I can understand that they do that with a TV stream, but not with a video! Quicktime instead saves all the video information, and you can play it without any stops whenever you want. Somehow, the quicktime player that is used for online files looks more profesional than the shitty windows media player.

Some months ago they released Quicktime 7 with the new HD technology (H.264). This simply rocks! As we have finally internet at home and one of the firsts things I did was to try the speed of it watching a lot of Movie Trailers in HD. And where else to check trailers at this resolution better than Apple Trailers? Again, a very clever move by Apple. So, what I was actually doing was watching all the trailers at 1080p definition. This means 1920x1080 pixels. So I was watching almost in realtime Trailers from internet at 1920x1080 (filling for first time totally my screen (1920x1200)) without resizing anything. Isn't that impressive?! I was even able to see a lot of bad texture mapping in Ice Age 2.

Something I really hated is that I'm not able to download Quicktime alone now, I have to download it with iTunes which I really hate (tho I'm starting to find usefull (the shop for CD previews and because we have some airtports at Spring which can connect directly to some speakers and with iTunes in your computer send the music to play in the speakers).

Talking about the technology, definitelly this has been a very big step that will really change a lot of things from now on. The PAL resolution is just starting the final days now. And again, thanks god! as I went the other day to a Dixons shop, where they had all those super screens and they were just doing a very crap interpolation of the PAL signal. The texture was so disgusting.

Btw, meanwhile writing this post I realized that Microsoft is working in this technology as well but they have the links to an EXE that you have to download and it's actually a zip, unzip and play.. Very useful, isn't it? :D MICROSOFT! LOSERS!!!

Here is a screenshot of my desktop so you can understand easier what I'm talking about.

r08028 - Cath the TechGoblin.mp3
HardTechno
I had that one started from long time ago, I had the idea of playing with random cartoon sounds on it, as there are not too many clown/funny hardtechno tunes out there. The final tune reminded me to Skaven's old track 'Cath the goblin'.

r08028 - Team3670.mp3
Bigbeat/Joke
This week the two design teams at Spring Digital just merged in only one and the mix inspired me that tune. It does kind of show the new sounds I hear now ;)

Enjoy!

The guys of FOEM just released a new 3CD compilation of some of the best underground musics out there!

CD 1: BigBeat, Breaks, IDM, Ambient
CD 2: Electro, House, Techno, Minimal
CD 3: Hardtechno

Download it here

Do you remember Konfabulator? It was a nice program. If i'm not wrong Apple ripped off the idea for his OS. This piece of software had a big boom when Yahoo! decided to buy it and making it free. That was very nice 4 months. But yesterday Yahoo! finalized the process of convert the software. And guess what?! The tool was showing a popup saying that the version 3.0 was ready to download. I was looking on the website to see what they did for this new version, but there was no information on the website (that btw was really slow). So somehow I decided to download it and try it today. It's not Konfabulator anymore, now it's Yahoo! Widgets. That's alright I can understand it, but I won't have a program that crashes (Konfabulator never crashed before) and asks for silly questions and tries to change the default website in my browser for Yahoo!'s one. That's LAME!

Once a while mss.sole surprise me with a very interesting software. First time (that I remember) was with AVG Free Edition that just ends with the virus/antivirus headache, as it just updates daily with the latest virus information. It's just useful and free.

This time was actually a folder she had in her old ACER laptop that I when inside thanks to my curiousity. It was called last.fm and it had a kind of music player inside. It didn't took me too long to realize that with that player I was able to listen music similar to what I wanted to hear. For example, as usual I tried searching for brothomstates but which was my surprise when the program found the artist and provided me with an station with similar artists. I just started to listen a lot of new music in the same style of my choice but all new artists to me. Tried again with mr.oizo, infected mushroom and orbital, and had good results with all of them..  a shame the player didn't found Ronny Pries and Midi Miliz ;)

Nice tool anyway, give it a try (you need to register to be able to download it).

I was thinking those months about the idea of writting all my detailed experience about moving to London. Mainly because there is a lot of people that always ask me about the same things. And a post (or some of them) explaining everything will help.

So the question for you is, in which language should I write it? Spanish of English? Before answering, please think that, this is not only to encourage spaniards to move to other countries, there will be some english friends that main want to read it.

You can give your opinion by adding a comment here, or letting me know by MSN or any other way, you know how to reach me :)

The first mission after I decided to move to London 2 years ago was to find a permanent job. It took me a while, as I had a really poor english level. After 4 months I got the first job (freelance), and after 1year I got the permanent job I was dreaming on. That fact acomplished the first mission.

I guess the second mission then was to get a property here. I've spent just one year renting a flat in Notting Hill, we have been paying the funny number of £1000 a month just for the rent, 250.000 of the old spanish pts. Yes, life here is expensive, but hey! we are paid with the same level in our jobs. As you know, I've booked a trip to USA as soon as I realized that I had a lot of free days left at Spring. But that was quite a bad idea, as some weeks later, the landlor of the flat didn't want to continue the contract with us for one more year, so we had to leave the flat in 12th December. I booked my holidays for 25th of November to 10th of December, so, from the beginning I knew that wasn't going to happen. Mainly because we decided to BUY a property this time.

We've been looking to some properties during the year, checking the offer and all that, and days after we decided to buy a property I found quite a nice one, the same day I was checking the property (very close to Victoria station, on the side of the Westminster Cathedral) and days after we started the process. It has been quite an stressful process, talking with solicitors, with the bank, mortgage advisors.. and all that. I thought I was not going to be ready for that but somehow we did it quite well. We had some problems doing the process but looks like everything went OK. We started in a very big confusion and we now know exactly what we need to do if we want to buy another property.

I really want to thank to my father as he had a lot of patience explaining everything and checking that everything was going alright. For me was painful to translate all the new terms to spanish so he undertood everything, and also at some point we had to translate big forms so he was able to full them (kudos to Sole for doing that). A shame those forms were useless.

So, the last friday, 25th of November, my plane to New York was departing meanwhile I was finally signing the contract to get the flat. That week was perhaps the worst one, as the bank had to do the survey, that means that if they find something wrong, the bank is not going to let us the money and all the money that we already spent were not going to be back. So, we went to the solicitor friday morning (my first day of holidays) and did all the signature, then I went to walk a little bit to the are of Chinatown and bought the book from banksy and also iCon Steve Jobs, checked the movies from prince charles cinema, bought a new head (and happy) waving toy (it actually makes you feel better :D), and after that as it was quite cool (2°C) I went home and went to sleep. On the afternoon somebody was calling me, and I woke up, I had a message on the answer machine that I wasn't able to understand after replaying it 5+ times. It was from the solicitor, it was short and with a kind of happy mood, so I thought that everything went ok. Minutes later, the Estate agent called me to congratulate. So that was the confirmation, the flat is ours! Finally.

The solicitor told us that we will have the keys for the flat next thurday (1st of December), maybe Friday. So, by now i'm just waiting to arrive this day playing all the games I had in queue (quake 4, pes5, most wanted, black&white 2...) and also feeling that my laptop is already crap :'( as the games are a quite slow. I still don't know how we are going to do the removal stuff. But well, that is going to be interesting.

So looks like with this, the second mission here is also acomplished (I wonder which one should be now the third mission, I'll let you know as soon as I know :D). As in any other place we will have to keep paying for the flat for 20 years.. but well, nothing is given for free.

Also, as I do have 2 weeks os holidays I'm doing a list of all the stuff I had to do, probably I will do like 15% of everything in the list (a lot of stuff really).. but hey.. holidays!! o/