Via Ingeniería en la Red, I discovered a great collection of books online (in Spanish) about technical, historical, human aspects of Civil Engineering. These books are published by the ESTEYCO Foundation. ESTEYCO is  Javier Rui-Wamba’s consulting, one of the greatest engineers of Spain. He is the cause of spreading the post-tensioned slabs in Spain.

There are three very interesting books about Javier Manterola Armisén, Carlos Fernández Casado and Eugène Freyssinet. I meet Javier Rui-Wamba some years ago in a congress, and I’m sure some day we’ll read a book about himself

After two years locked into the fridge, I’m a member of GPUL’s board again. Last Thursday Emilio J. was re-elected as the president of the Coruña Linux Users Group, and I entered in his board with a symbolic position: I will be in charge of the Hermes Project.

But it’s enough to work with the board that will lead GPUL in it’s X Anniversary

The top of the world: last Jan, 11th Edmund Hillary died 88 years old. Everest he conquered is 88 Hm. high.

The top of the mind: last Jan, 17th Bobby Fischer died 64 years old. The chessboard he owned has 64 squares.

Honour for them.

Today I wasn’t able to teach a child (12 years old) how to draw the altitude of a triangle. She could learn it. But she didn’t want do it. She preferred going away to talk with her friends about boys

The beginning was this interview to RMS at BSDTalk. He said:
“I am unhappy with the various distributions of BSD, because all of them include, in their installation systems, the ports system, they all include some non-free programs. And as a result I can’t recommend any of them.”

Some people wrote about it in the OpenBSD misc list. Then RMS replied in the same mailing list starting a flame with a email entitled “Real men don’t attack straw men”.

It was a fun thread until it forked in some absurd sub-threads and flooded a technical mailing list with pseudophilosophy, Draconian debates and insults. It’s very sad and ashaming for people like me that support both GNU and OpenBSD projects. I wish they stop and they get aware how childish is their behaviour.

Or maybe we must lock Theo de Raat, Richard Stallman, Jörg Schilling, Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond (do I forget anybody?) in a 2×2 m. cube that we don’t open until they stop shouting or we see enough blood under the door.

It was by coincidence. Today I had a nice dinner with my friends of the Civil Engineers School Raquel, Olga, the two Silvias, and Nacho (Silvia’s boyfriend) who is an Industrial Engineer. We didn’t meet all at the same time and place since a year ago. In fact, today we missed Juan in the meeting.

They gave me some presents because they couldn’t meet me in my birthday. One of them was the book “Bruce Springsteen on Tour 1968-2005″ by Dave Marsh. It was a meaningful present for many reasons.

Today I celebrated a rare anniversary. 15 years ago, I register for first time to the Civil Engineers School.Too much time.

If it was a mistake, it’s too late to lament. Of course, in these years I didn’t choose the easy way. I rebuilt my mind, and I made lots of experiments following new routes. So I delayed my degree. I hope in 15 years I’ll write they were useful.

But I will never lament the good people I met in these years, in my School, among our neighbourgs of the Faculty of Computer Science, and my mates in projects of the Cooperation and Volunteering Office. It was not wasted time only for meeting them

xkcd comic strip: “Responsible behavior”

(under CC Attribution-Non commercial 2.5)

Black. Oscar Peterson passed away a week ago. Virtuosity and legend of piano remain.

White. Eldar Djangirov, a new l’enfant terrible. My friend Javi Calvo gave me his first album “Eldar” (2005) backed by Michael Brecker. Eldar is an Oscar Peterson fan, and he proves it. Of course, Lady Wicks.

Black & white. Kenny Barron and Brad Mehldau. I recently meet p2p a video file of their wonder duet at Umbria Jazz 1999.