American in Spain

Lately around the internet, I’ve been noticing more and more sites, serious respectable magazines and important blogs, switching their comment mechanism to use Disqus. My only experience with Disqus in the past was using it as a disgusting javascript hack to allow comments on a Tumblr blog. It seemed like a strangely useless service, but it has matured a lot in the three years since my initial evaluation. Let’s evaluate the pros and cons of using Disqus on a WordPress blog like this one.
(more…)

Several weeks ago, I got an email from my Uncle Neil recommending a movie to me. He had previously recommended Primer to me, which I loved and watched several times to catch all the intricacies of the time travel, so I had high expectations. Timecrimes is a low budget Spanish film shot here in Cantabria, my region of Spain. If you look at any of the movie posters or trailer (I recommend not watching the spoiler-laden trailer), you might get the idea that it’s a horror flick with a bloody-bandage-wearing scissor-wielding homicidal maniac, but it’s really not at all. It’s more about an average man trying to outsmart himself.
(more…)

I recently read The Greatest Show On Earth, by Richard Dawkins, which details the evidence we have for Darwinian Evolution. Dawkins’ ability to elegantly simplify complex scientific concepts remains as powerful as ever. The reader need not remember or have yet taken high school physics to understand radioactive carbon dating and other fundamentals of how we know Evolution is true. Much of it I already knew, either from school, reading science blogs, listening to science podcasts, or from books. But there were a few bits that were new to me, or exceedingly interesting, so I thought I’d share them.

(more…)

Taking advantage of a surplus of free time this week, I endeavored to watch all of the films nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award for 2010. Previously, I think I’ve never gone into the Oscars having watched more than two nominees, so this is something of a feat for me. They were all good films in their own ways. Some, like the nerdy one about a college hacker appealed to me more than the western or the one about boxing. I made no effort to be objective in my evaluations, valuing honesty over impartiality. Take away from my reviews what you will. You can’t really go wrong spending two hours on any or all of them.
(more…)

I have recently converted my office desktop (the actual desk top, not the computer) to all bluetooth. Over Thanksgiving, I bought the Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple Magic Trackpad. My previous keyboard, the Apple Aluminum Wired Keyboard, was Spanish, and thus had the keys labeled the way Spain labels their keyboards. I use the US key mapping, and my touch typing is good enough for just about everything so that it never mattered what letters were on the keys, but I do sometimes look at the keyboard when performing shift+number operations, and the fact that Spaniards have the open parenthesis on the seven and the close parenthesis on the eight (shifted one to the left of the US keyboard) caused me ceaseless annoyance and confusion. It’s nice to have an American keyboard again.
(more…)

On Saturday, we flew from Bilbao to Munich to Charlotte. There are a few good anecdotes from the journey to share, so I thought I’d commit them to the Internet.

I was expecting extra tight security, as that’s what the US and European media are all atwitter about. In the Bilbao airport, it was early in the morning, and the Guardia Civil agents that run the airport security seemed pretty disinterested. I didn’t even have to take my laptop out of my bag. I had to put the bag that normally hangs from Nora’s stroller through the x-ray machine, but it contained a large bottle of water, a pocket knife, and various canisters of powder. I asked if the stroller should go through the machine too (it has before), but the agent said I could just walk through the gate with it, leave it on the other side, walk back through, and then walk through it myself to make sure I didn’t beep. He then casually glanced under the stroller where the plastic cover was, but didn’t remove it or look under it. There was plenty of space to hide a semi-automatic handgun under there. And off we went to our gate…
(more…)

I have now had an Apple TV (2nd gen) for two weeks and I thought I’d post some thoughts about it. Unlike the first generation Apple TV, this one has no permanent storage on the device. Everything is streamed from an outside source. So all my movies and television shows live in my iTunes library on my computer, which I can browse on the Apple TV and select an item to view. It takes about two or three seconds sometimes to start playing, but then the rest of the video downloads into a buffer while the first part of it is playing, much like when you view a video on YouTube on your computer.
(more…)

When you live abroad, most customs that don’t match your own seem odd at first. Some traditions are pretty clearly worse, but the people practicing them don’t know any better; most are just different, neither better nor worse; and some are hands down superior to the customs in your own country, and it’s your compatriots back home that don’t know any better. Today I’m going to talk about a Spanish custom that falls into the latter category, being pretty clearly preferable to the tradition in my home country. It’s about who buys lunch or drinks or dinner on your birthday.
(more…)

Remember back in 1995, when companies didn’t advertise their internet urls so much, but their AOL keywords. “Find us online with AOL keyword ‘fluffy anvils’!” The reason this worked is that so many people connected to the internet via AOL that some people never even ventured out into the world wide web, but kept their entire online experience confined to AOL’s private servers. Corporations had, and I presume paid handsomely for, their own AOL pages.
(more…)

Recently I’ve been enjoying the genre of popular psychology books. I realized that what I most enjoyed about my college psychology courses were reading about the experiments and studies, especially the ones with seemingly counter-intuitive irrational results. So far in this genre I’ve consumed Predictably Irrational, How We Decide, Outliers and Stumbling on Happiness, which no one took my hint to buy me. One of them, funnily, doesn’t fit that neatly into the genre.

(more…)