American in Spain

Have you ever left your computer in the shop or with your employer’s IT department for them to fix? You can’t help but wonder, why are they taking so long?

I’ve worked for several IT departments, and I’ve worked with some really nice, competent people, and some really cranky, incompetent people. Being a network administrator is a huge power rush. When I was 16, I was interning at a local government institution and had full administrator privileges across the entire network with hundreds of users. I could view people’s screens or delete their files on a whim if I so chose. Luckily I was a benevolent deity.

After all my years of experience, I now present the secret that the IT department doesn’t want you to know: what they are really doing with your laptop.
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Dear President Obama,

No doubt you are missing that mindless chant of Yes We Can that your followers could repeat incessantly during your 2008 campaign. It was brilliantly open ended. If what “we could” do was elect the first African American president, then yes, we could. But now so many of your promises turned out to be harder to accomplish than expected, so you certainly can’t use the same slogan for re-election. Fear not, however, dear leader, for my three-year-old has written a new slogan for you.
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One day back in July, I was out with my daughter at the school playground and she was playing with a ball. She wasn’t throwing it very well, so I stepped in to fulfill my fathering responsibility of teaching my child how to throw a ball. I explained that you turn your side to the target, and step forward with the opposite foot as you pivot your body and transfer your weight before releasing the ball. Step by step, I pointed out how my body was positioned as I slowly mimicked throwing the ball.
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We have been making slow, but steady, progress on Nora’s counting abilities. She can more or less get up to about fifteen in both languages, and she’s begun to make statements like “There are three cookies on the table” as well. The other day I thought I’d record a video of her counting to mark her progress, and she did very well, despite manifesting her most common errors.
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If you even remotely dabble in or read news about social networking, you may have heard of a recent hoax in which a graphic was passed around by millions of internet users depicting the digital readout from the time machine in the Back To The Future trilogy, with the date being June 27, 2012, the date the hoax image went viral. The creator of the image, a social medial manager by the name of Steve Berry, created the image to promote the Blu-ray box set release of the trilogy. This is not the first time such a hoax image was passed around the internet.
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The internet has pretty much shut down today. Well, most of the sites that make the internet entertaining, such as Fark, Reddit, The Oatmeal and Wikipedia. They are protesting possible US Congressional legislation that could potentially give the US Government the power to shut down any internet site that any corporation claims is violating copyright laws. This “shoot first, ask questions later” approach is rather ridiculous to anyone that takes even the briefest moment to consider the consequences. Learn more here. Anyway, I thought I’d join in the protest by providing a graphic that uses some images to playfully demonstrate what these acronyms mean in Spanish.
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Over the past two years, a song by an Australian group, Yolanda Be Cool, called We No Speak Americano (known colloquially as Papa Americano), has swept across Europe. Every so often a Spaniard who knows that I am both a United States citizen and a father, will think they are being clever and original by calling me “Papa Americano” and singing a bar or two of the hit song. I think it’s cute, and I enjoy the song, so I decided to make it my ringtone. Over the course of the last few months, my daughter has fallen in love with my ringtone, often reminding me out of the blue, “Poppy, your phone says papa americano!!”, adding, “Sometimes.”
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I’ve been very much enjoying the puppet show that is the GOP’s attempt to find a candidate that has any chance of defeating Obama in the 2012 presidential campaign. As the media’s interest in each candidate ebbs and flows, they are each shown to not really be a contender. The most recent fad in the race is the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. As I watch the news coverage, I can’t help but chuckle to myself about the possibility of having a president with the same name as a species of salamander. I figured it was time to dust off my morphing skills and actually turn him into a newt.
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One of Nora’s favorite pastimes lately is having imaginary arguments over the phone, usually with her friends from daycare or her daycare provider, but sometimes with her grandparents. Somehow, she latched on to one poor lad named Rubén and has ceaseless fights with him “over the phone”, perhaps giving a glimpse into boy troubles that await us in adolescence. Just like when she used to pretend to yell at another daycare classmate, I suspect that this poor Rubén fellow is completely innocent of all the charges he’s being accused of on a daily, hourly, and minutely basis, but it’s seems to be all real in Nora’s mind. Unfortunately, Rubén is one of the few kids at daycare that doesn’t have a mugshot next to his cubbyhole, so I don’t even know what he looks like. He certainly has Nora’s attention, though.
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Recently I noticed a minor bump on my left hand, in the center of the palm. It itched a little, but I thought little of it. But then it kept growing, almost until it looked like a little human nose. I made a doctor’s appointment and went in to see my physician. She nodded and asked, “I don’t suppose you spend a lot of time on the internet spewing sarcasm on social networking sites, do you?” Startled by her insight, I relied, “Well, maybe a little, yeah.” “And do you use puns and wordplay excessively,” she continued, “sometimes with an awkward narrative for the sole purpose of a not-that-funny punchline?” “Yep, that’s me,” I admitted. She said, “I thought so. You’ve got a textbook case of Facepalm. I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
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