American in Spain

A couple months ago I eBay’d a wireless flash trigger mechanism so that I could take my photography to the next level: off-camera flash. Of course I soon realized that using an off-camera flash is actually really, really hard, at least for someone like myself who still has to look up the term f-stop occasionally. Last weekend, I finally got around to experimenting with off-camera flash on my intended subject, for whom I justified the expense of starting down this road of photogeekery.
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When I moved from England to Spain exactly four years ago, I began investigating how to manage my multi-currency financial situation. All of my assets were in British Pounds, my salary was in US Dollars, and I would be living in Spain paying all my bills in euros. My investigations led me to one of the most respected institutions in all of banking: Swiss Banks. At the time, there were not many banks that had support for multiple currencies, and the ideal of having my £, €, and $ all in the same bank, the tax free interest, and the allure of having a Swiss bank account were too much to bear. I signed up.
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That title might seem a bit odd, but, as you soon shall see, it is really quite apt. I have made another attempt at high speed flash photography. Rather than use a coin this time, I have chosen to use a little turtle that I got in a Kings cake. I’ve also changed the liquid from water to milk. The result is a set of photos with a very playful-looking turtle splashing about in a puddle of milk.
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At work today we found ourselves totally confused by the behavior of one of our EnumMap instances. No matter what we did to it (setting new values, clearing, etc.), when we iterated through the entry set, the values were the same. After investigating the source code for java.util.EnumMap, it became clear that the problem was based on the fact that the EnumMap instance we were working with had been generated by calling EnumMap.clone() rather than using the constructor. I’ve written a test program to demonstrate this bug. It should NOT behave like this!
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When I began uploading this video, there was nothing new to report on the baby-rearing front. Pooping, sleeping, farting, bathing, crying, feeding, etc. But while it was uploading, we had a major breakthrough in breastfeeding! Nora actually suckled bare nipple! Previously, on The Nora Files… This is the first time she has ever extracted anything directly from her mother’s breast without the use of some adapter made of space-age plastic. Her mother and I are ecstatic that our child has learned to do what every other mammal on the planet is born knowing how to do. Congrats to Nora and Marga!
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Yesterday morning, as I was changing and dressing Nora, I was whistling to her to calm her down, as I sometimes do. I was startled when Marga called from the next room, “Be careful with that song! We’re going to the Basque Country this weekend!” “What was I whistling?”, I asked. “That’s the Spanish national anthem,” she replied. Oops. I hadn’t realized at all what I was whistling.
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