American in Spain

Several months ago, amongst random meandering thoughts, I realized that there would be a day this year that would match three consecutive numbers on the Fibonacci sequence. For those of you who can’t remember your math teacher’s face, the Fibonacci sequence is the sequence of numbers that starts with 0 and 1, and creates each number in the sequence by summing the previous two. So it goes: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89… You may notice that three of those numbers are 5, 8, and 13, which are today’s date. In the United States and nowhere else. Anyway, this sequence is important throughout mathematics, including the awesomeness of the Golden Ratio and its surprising, but not so surprising when you think about it, occurrence in Nature.
(more…)

Recently I was contacted by InterNations, an organization I registered my expat status with several years ago and have since been diligently ignoring all their newsletters about meet ups in Madrid. They asked if I’d like to do an interview with them and to be featured on their site. I agreed, but then life got complicated, and they ended up having to nag me several times, but we finally did the interview and they published it. They’ve given me permission to re-post it here for your enjoyment. Some of my regular readers might not know my answers to some of these basic questions.
(more…)

88% of people don’t understand this post… (but you probably will)

If you frequent Facebook much, you may have noticed a recent surge – or scourge – of silly little intelligence tests. Most of them start out with a claim that “Most people are unable to do this”, and then provide a pretty simple single-digits arithmetic problem or a word find or ask you to count geometric shapes. These things are so successful, especially with the prefacing text, because they reassure the common believe that everyone has, that they are smarter than most of these other Homo sapiens bozos.
(more…)

Normally, I try not to blog about my gangsta days in Los Angeles or all the rival gang members I popped caps in, but every so often one of my homies from da ‘Hood calls me up to provide cameo cred to a rising rap star, and I take the private jet back to my L.A. stomping grounds. Snoop and I are still pretty tight, but I had a falling out with Jay-Z after Beyoncé found me a bit too fetching. You know how it is…
(more…)

In preparation for our upcoming trip to the United States, I was double checking that everything is in order. After last year’s ESTA debacle, I want to be 100% sure we have my wife’s immigration approval number before leaving for the airport. So I did an internet search for ESTA to search for her approval number. What I found is a system of websites designed to scam unknowing foreign travelers out of their money.
(more…)

Like many of my friends, I rarely watch live television anymore, aside from sporting events. I did, however, watch the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics alone on my sofa. Except it didn’t feel like I was alone, because I had my smartphone, and many of my Facebook and Twitter friends were also watching the same event and making witty comments about what they were seeing. Though separated by vast distances, we enjoyed the spectacle much more than if we hadn’t had the social networks to unite us.

My friends in the United States, however, could not participate, since their Olympics coverage was delayed in a ridiculous prime time ratings power play by NBC. A few of them expressed annoyance at my “spoiler” comments about the event. And sure enough, when it aired in the US, there was a wave of social media commentary as they were witnessing the event. That’s when the idea came to me…
(more…)

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.
(more…)

Remember back when you were a child, and the world wasn’t so complicated and messed up? That was a simpler time, wasn’t it? WRONG. It was a simpler time for you, because you were a child, free to play and almost entirely free from responsibility. We live in the most peaceful time in all of human history. Thinking that things were better in the past is called the Golden Age Fallacy, and it annoys the crap out of me.
(more…)

On Saturday I was contacted, via Twitter, by an American blogger I have been following for over a year now. Her name is Erin, and she lives in Madrid and regularly takes me on fantastic vicarious voyages around Spain and Europe with her blog, La Tortuga Viajera (The Traveling Turtle). Since discovering her blog, I have been impressed by its professional look, and I have copied several of its features onto my own blog. She mentioned, in her Spanglish tweet, that she was spending the weekend very close to where I live. So close, in fact, that not getting together for a chat was off the table. Her weekend was fully booked, but she and her husband found time to stop by my humble burg of Colindres for an iced coffee this morning.
(more…)

Back when the internet first began way back in yesteryear, there were many protocols (i.e. ways of transferring data). There was telnet for actually logging into command shells on remote servers; there was FTP for transferring files to and from remote servers; there was Gopher, which provided a very user-friendly system of menus to navigate to get to various information; and there was HTTP for requesting these newfangled documents with hyperlinks in them. Because of the interconnectedness of these hypertext documents, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau coined the phrase World Wide Web. There was a previous long-standing practice of naming servers by the internet service they provided, so FTP servers had a “ftp.” prefix, Gopher servers had a “gopher.” prefix, etc. So naturally they started naming these “web” servers with a “www.” prefix.
(more…)