Finally after fourth months, I have an approved proposal of final degree project. It has been a hard struggle because my first proposal (a cultural-artistic complex I had been conceiving the last years) was rejected. I could explain how absurd is the law in Spain about professions and their scopes, but I merely say you only can do what the law forces you, not what you are ready for. Hackers won’t survive

(It was deeply sad to  realize how civil engineers put artificial limits to the Civil Engineering knowledge development too).

About the project, I’ll draft a intermodal (metropolitan rail bus) station at Betanzos, a strongly medieval city in Galicia betwen the big cities of the region, Coruña and Ferrol. I’ll try to design a Gothic inspirated but with actual concrete forms (economical, functional) structure for it.

I think I’ll get along with Mr. Eduardo Toba, the civil engineer, and lawyer, and poet that will supervise my project. Let’s cross the fingers…

The week before Akademy I attended to a course about a Civil Engineering tool called Istram Ispol. It tries to be a killer-app for road and railway projects. It really has a very interesting lot of features, but I really was dissapointed in the second hour of the course, and I was progressively getting angry to the end.

It’s not (only)  a problem it’s not free software, I knew it before registration. The GUI is absolutely horrific. Istram was developed originally in the princpilpe of 90’s for Unix platform, then they jumped to Windows (and they are proud of this action ¿?). So it has now a GUI built mainly in VisualBasic with important wreckage of something similar to X/Motif. Different menus behave in different way with the same actions on them, even there are buttons that behave in different way depending on the point where you press on with the mouse. And the documentation is so poor it’s near imposible to the mean user doing something useful without a training course.

AkademyEs recovered me from the trauma and brought me back the faith in the existence of people capable of build good GUI’s for daily human tasks. That week I didn’t get tired of repeating the same  phrase: “this UI seems programmed by drunken with cheap vodka monkeys”.

GPUL was candidate to organize next summer the international Akademy and Guadec. We lost in the competition in favor of Canarias Islands candidate. But we won at least the competition to organize the Akademy-ES last November.

It was a chance to meet again with part of people that came to Coruña to Guademy I. We had three days of high level technical speechs and discussions about KDE in general (with some pleasing exceptions like Ismael Pernas from Dygra Films showing us the work of rendering process with free software).

For me, Akademy-ES was a chance to break my own record of how many hours I can survive without sleep, of course (that Saturday night I went to the Solidarity Party). But Akademy made the desire of taste KDE grow in me. Last months I worked hard with Gnome at the ESF (Engineers Without Borders-Galicia) office in Coruña, and now I began to install KDE in some desktops at the Cartolab.

And no. I have not forgotten the faith in the command line. But I need a soft, beauty approach to free OS’s for the people surrounding me.

Since October, 30th I’m the new president of GPUL. It has been necessary because Emilio went some months to investigate at INRIA in Grenoble. He needed holidays too because the great,, amazing work he made leading GPUL the last three years. I only wish I’ll be able to maintain the modernization he began in the Association. It’ll be a challenge for José Millán to replace to our panzer against administration, Chema, as secretary.

With the new configuration we’ll face next months the celebration of the 10 years of GPUL along this academic year. We’ll try to reduce the mean age in the Association in order to reach the 15th anniversary

I hadn’t written about the Portiño since Summer, I think. I waited to know how was the evolution this year. I can write now it’s good and improving: the rookies of last year aren’t now rookies and they got the respect and love of the children. We have new volunteers that are doing a wonderful work with them. Lots of fresh ideas come from everybody and we try to run them. I have a personal target too: I want they learn to express themselves better on the paper.

The traditional Solidarity Party in the final November to get funds to projects with children of the OCV was a total success again. Adolfo, the veteran co-ordinator of the Bañobre project, is the main responsible of this success.

In December we took part with the people of the Portiño in a protest against racism against our loved town. The motto was “Portiño: 47 años de convivencia de payos y gitanos” (Portiño: 47 years of white and gipsy people living together).

And near to Christmas we celebrate a party with the children. Everybody, children, parents and volunteers got a fun time

Now we’ll try to finish these months with one activity outside the town…

I really love this game

I know this blog is a bit abandoned this months, but I am very, very busy.

I begin to write because I wanted to share interesting news for the people arround, and to let my friends know about me. I failed at both points, and I’m grateful for the interest of people that asked me for it.

(Sanchi, I know one poem in two months is not much, but it expressed perfectly my mind. Add to it some songs by The Cure.)

So I’ll try now to update it again.

From the classic Greek epi-phanos, “light that reveals”. It’s Christ’s light coming to the world revealing love in our hearts that we try to bury.

(Nothing to do with the wild shopping to forget what unhappy we are)