ricardocabellov5.5

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/

I'm adding FCKeditor to my admin system... this is just a test..

Looks like everything works quite smoothly. Writing a post will be less painful from now on.

These weeks I had to bring my laptop to Spring, because I needed to sincronize a kind of animation I'm doing, and my laptop was more useful and had more tools that my computer at work.

One of the days I just forgot my Wacom, so I had to change the one I got at work all the time between the laptop and the desktop. But I get tired of it on the 5 change or so, that was when I just remembered something about one app Carl Gaywood talk me about. I thought he said it was an app only for mac, but I did a little bit of search in google with a query like "share the keyboard and mouse between two computers", and luckily the answer was on the 2nd result.

The answer is just Synergy. With that free application, you can share one mouse within 2 or 100 computers. You need to install it in all the computers, and run it in only one as a server. And you will say, why didn't you used VNC instead? Well, with that program, the only information you have to send is the mouse position, and it works quite easily, when you move the mouse to any of the limits of the screen, if you configured that the screen of the other computer is going to be next to it, well, then the mouse just appears on that screen. This works with multimonitors as well :D. So you could have like 5 computers with 2 screen booths and configure it so you share the same mouse with all the screens. It was like having 3 screens in the same computer.

Ovbiously you cannot copy and paste things from one computer to another like dragging a file, but would be cool if they support that in a version 3.

It's really a nice tool.

It really took me so long, almost 40 years later.. Some days ago I watched the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, I was quite surprised that almost everybody that worked with him finished that angry with him. Also I quite liked some of the shots about 2001, so the next thing was downloading the other movies he did. I already watched Clockwork Orange and Eyes wide shut, both of them were great, but after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey I don't understand how come Clockwork Orange was the one everybody was talking about.. (Well, I guess I can understand it, it's just provocative, but not that much.. )

2001: A Space Odyssey.. you know the soundtrack, you probably have seen some scenes of it, but I'm sure not everybody seen it, or atleast from the beginning to the end. It's awesome, some of the scenes are just great, I'm still wondering how the fuck they did it, some gravitation stuff. And obviously, every old movie that tried to guess how the future was going to look like, usually looks quite weird and oldish, but in that case some of the scenes still look quite modern. Even the design of the eye of the computer is exactly the same shape that the ipod shuffle does have. But Apple is not the one that get inspired, Koyaanisqatsi, Memories and hundreds of other ones had been inspired by that one (as it's easy to see).

As you can see, I finished quite shocked, but I was even more shocked when I went (after the movie) to the profile on imdb, and realized that the movie was done on 1968. Very depressing :'(

One month ago I was really happy when I realized that I had like 24 days for holidays to spend at Spring, that means that in like 2years I didn't have too much relax/holidays (working working working working). So, before losing them, I just planned the holidays/trip to USA but it really was a big mistake, as a week later, the landlord told us that we had to leave the flat on 12th December, I bought the tickets in a cheap way, so I wasn't able to refund them.

In addition to that, instead of moving to another rent flat we decided to buy a flat in London, carzy stuff but we were paying a lot of money on rent, so, I was really worrying of the timming for getting a flat, I was trying to do it in like 1 month and a half, and the estate agent was always saying that was possible. The problem was the mortgage advisor (I'll do a really bad post to thank him and his company in some days, hope they have a nice pagerank ;)), that just delayed everything, and I had to look for a mortgage by my self after losing 3 weeks.. So, the day we were suposed to sign the contract. But guess what, just the day before yesterday we were able to setup the morgage, that means.. that I won't be able to do the trip that I've paid for. And I just hope that I don't lose the flat now because the delay...

Also, if all that wasn't enough, as usual, if you're going to get some holidays, the latest 2 weeks at work turns in to a total nightmare, lots of stuff to do, too much too much...

Sometimes I just wonder, why I just didn't stayed at my parents home where I didn't have to worry about things like that..

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!