This complete stranger just opened her doors to me and invited me to stay. She is either incredibly generous or incredibly crazy.
I’ve been back in Madrid now for a couple of days. I’m staying with an Ecuadorian girl named Mariela whose roommate is out of town for a couple of weeks. The [...]
It started sprinkling about half an hour ago and now it’s a full fledge rain. I don’t think I’ve heard thunder before in Spain but it sounds pretty close.
For my birthday next weekend, I’m going to Milan to see the Formula One race at Monza. Air Europa has dirt cheap fares [...]
It’s been almost exactly 10 days to the minute since my last entry but I’ve been busy enough to justify the shortage of writing. Yesterday being my birthday, I was just outside of Milan staying with my cousin Laura, her husband Etorre and their two very cute Italian children Marta and Frederico. My [...]
I’ve wasted my Sunday today doing more or less nothing. Some hacking away on the API for Pukka and some research for trips to see WRC Espana at the end of October and the southern coast of Spain in the next week or two but it took more time than it should have. [...]
My apartment is in a central zone known as Chueca. Chueca is a great neighborhood. Although it’s the “gay” area, more than that it’s very diverse and has lots of trendy restaurants and bars. In Madrid, I would say trendy means “non-Spanish”. Gabriela, who turned 27 Friday, always eats Spanish food [...]
Yes, I have food. It sounds like such a simple task: acquire something to eat. But then you throw on top of that not speaking the language very well, not knowing the neighborhood very well, not knowing where to look to find that kind of information (like Yahoo?) and finding a well-stocked grocery [...]
Being part of the motorsports scene, I’ve wondered long and hard how major car manufacturers financially justify participating in Motorsports as a competitive level. Some builders such as Ford do not. Outside of the possible R&D benefit where technology and experience gained from racing filters into the production line-up, there are relatively few [...]
This week I did very little. I mean I accomplished a lot, but it was centered solely around Pukka. I don’t think I went outside yesterday. That’s OK; sometimes you have to be productive and I solved a number of problems not the least of which was figuring out how to do [...]
Apparently Saturday is the new launch day for websites. C|Net relaunched their site (at 1024×768 no less) as did Ebay. The new C|Net site certainly is sexy looking but I haven’t used it enough yet to know if it’s working. C|Net is one of those sites that I have used pretty much [...]
The weather here makes me not miss San Francisco much. This time of year, when most of the northern hemisphere is enjoying warm sunny weather, San Francisco is hidden beneath a layer of fog. It might be 65F in the city while 5 miles to the East, South or North it will be [...]
What I thought was my phone being delivered actually did come today. It was a care box from Jennifer with a bunch of bathroom-related things that I had apparently lost forever on our trip from Santorini to Athens. There is aspirin, a nail kit, a little sewing kit, a couple bars of soap [...]