I’m back. I landed a few hours ago. The weather, of course, is terrible. Grey, dull and overcast not to mention about 15 degrees cooler than Madrid. Maybe I’ll find out when the next flight leaves back to Madrid. No wifi access in Madrid airport though, well, none that I could find.
I’m glad to back. I enjoyed Spain but it’s getting a bit too hot for me. I wonder for how long I’ll be glad to back. I give myself about a week or so 🙂
Today I spent the day in Segovia. It’s just over an hour by bus from Madrid and two hours by train. Spain has to be the only country I know of where it’s quicker to go by bus than train. Admittedly the buses do tend to go directly to their destination but trains are supposed to be quicker right?
For lunch I had roast suckling pig. It’s a speciality of Segovia apparently so I had to try it. I went to one of the best restaurants in town, or so I have been told, Meson de Candido. Damn it was good! I can highly recommend it. Pig never tasted so good. It’s right next to the aquaduct so it’s not too hard to find.
I have some photos of Segovia that I took but Flickr seems to be misbehaving so I’ll upload them later on in the week.
Speaking of Flickr, I have just received an email from them telling me that they are shifting their servers from Canada to the US, presumably because Yahoo bought them, and that this “will result in speediness, stableness, and happiness”. Here’s hoping. I have been using Flickr for about a month or so now and it is really sssssslow, especially when uploading photographs.
I have just read Steve Jobs´ commencement speech that he gave last weekend at Stanford University. I particularly like this quote from the speech:
You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
Right on! You can read the whole speech here.
Time`s almost up. I fly back to London on the 25th.
No more Spanish lessons for me. Today was my last day. As I couldn`t change my flight I have the whole of next week to do tourist stuff.
Maybe I should change my career.
Finally, I have found somewhere with free wireless Internet access, The Irish Rover. The nearest metro stop is Santiago Bernabeu. However, don’t sit by the window. The signal strength is not good. Upstairs is better but for some reason it’s really dark. Now I can have a pint while I check my email. Makes a change from lattes all the time.
I listened to the Daily Source Code the other day, the first time for a long time. Curry hinted that the new version of iTunes with the integrated podcast directory will be released in around four weeks time.
I bought my ticket from British Airways a while back, online of course. I tried changing the return date of my flight but because I bought my ticket online I wasn’t allowed to change it. Grrr!
What’s next? A 160GB iPod.
I watched Steve Jobs give his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference the other day. I always enjoy watching his presentations. Anyway, he had a couple of interesting things to say. He talked a lot about the switch to Intel processors. What was interesting is that Apple already have Mac OS X running on Intel processors. According to Jobs Mac OS X has been leading a double life over the last 5 years. Since the inception of Mac OS X, Apple have always had it running on Intel “just in case”, as he put it. Apple plan on shipping Macs with Intel inside by June 2006.
The next version of Mac OS X will be called Leopard and will be released around the same time as Microsoft’s Longhorn operating system in late 2006 or early 2007.
What was interesting was that Jobs demoed a new version of iTunes that allows you to search, and subscribe to, podcasts directly from the iTunes store. According to Jobs they already have a directory with 8000 podcasts available for download. There will be no charge for subscribing to podcasts. I find this impressive. When you consider that podcasting first appeared around August of last year (I started listening around October 2004) it’s pretty impressive that a large corporation like Apple has taken notice so soon and have already incorporated podcasts into their products, namely iTunes. Perhaps this is why Apple is doing so well at the moment: it listens to what people want. Microsoft would do well to take note of this.
Now Oracle is at it too: “You can now subscribe, via RSS, to audio interviews with technical managers and evangelists at Oracle about recent technology announcements.”
Surfs up! The next wave is here.
Microsoft has started to podcast.
The other day I was sitting in an Internet cafe using a standard PC to check my email etc. At the top of the screen was a meter that showed me how long I had been using the PC and how much I owed at that point. In other words, if you use half an hour, you pay for half an hour etc. However, when you want to use a wireless connection, for example, here in Starbucks, you have to pay for a fixed block of time up front and you get charged at a fixed rate whether you use all the time or not. I tried a different location and found the same thing. If I think about it, it’s the same in Starbucks in London too. Why don’t they offer metered wireless Internet just like in a standard Internet cafe? Maybe more people would start accessing the Internet in places such as Starbucks if they only get charged for what they actually use. In Starbucks, here in Madrid, the minimum amount of time you can purchase is two hours. It doesn’t normally take me two hours to read my email! In other locations you have to purchase a minimum of one hour, but still. If I only want to check my email I am going to think twice before forking out money for something I am not going to use.
BBC News: Apple ‘to switch to Intel chips’
Today’s movie: ‘Driving through the Basque country’
Got back from the Basque country yesterday evening. Arrived in Madrid around 6.30pm with the temperature hovering around 34 C! The scenery there is amazing. Green is the best word I can think of for describing it. You can check out some of the photos I took of the Basque country here. We did a bit of walking in one the many forests and I also attempted to play Pelota Vasca. I don`t recommend it for the hands. I even learnt a few words in Basque, which bears no resemblance at all to Spanish, but unfortunately I seem to have forgotten what they were.
A bit of advice. If you ever plan on visiting the Basque country, I recommend that you take some form of identification with you. A Spanish friend of mine told me that because the Basque country is home to ETA, the terrorist group, the police in the area are quite fond of randomly checking people for identification. I didn`t take any form of identification with me but thankfully we weren`t stopped. In my defence, my friend didn`t tell me that I needed to take any until we were already halfway there 🙂
I´m off to El Pais Vasco (Basque country) for the weekend. We leave early tomorrow as it´s about a 4 hour drive apparently. I have never been to the north of Spain before so it should be fun.
Why doesn´t my iPod have a simple on/off switch? Answers on a postcard please.