soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Or things left by the summer… It's the title of the most known song by "clyde pop", an spanish pop group. Their first cd is relatively fresh (dated november 2003). I had listened that song more than one year ago; finally they have updated their web with new content and two songs extracted from their first album. Two new members in the group (and girls, by the way), strong melodies and melodic guitars, remarkable voices, as in the first song I listened to. Quite interesting for the rainy afternoons and so… Take a look ;)

It looked as a simple task: make a simple html prototype of this possible web. It then converted into a horrible nightmare of html delicatessen: ooooh we must convert this png into gif because it would be smaller… why don't we make the border of the tables fancier? … oh let's put px instead of % … no… better put % instead of px, and no pt … and by the way let the tables use the 100% of screen width (even if I repeated once and once that reading small 10 px text along a 21" screen is like making a harakiri). Finally it ended like it started, gracefully, as a simple prototype. Remember: don't even let the prototypes convert into final applications (specially when the deadline is very very near you); don't go into unneccesary details and focus only in the really functional things…

My laptop had crashed some weeks ago. I brought it to the vendor to get it repaired. Past week an unknown number appeared some times in my cell phone, and each time it rang I could not pay it attention. At last, past friday I could be able to pick it up and then … surprise! my laptop was repaired.
I hardly could believe it. Liso's laptop had the same problem that mine (that is, any kind of program that used the gpu more or less intensively made the screen go completely crazy, appearing lots of shit in it… First it only appeared when the computer was a long time running, but finally it even appeared when using just the notepad!! Don't laugh - it's the crude truth) and, as I was telling, it had to be changed the entire motherboard because the graphics card was almost burnt. It was just one week since I left the laptop in the repair house… it was very strange because in Liso's case, they spent more than three weeks to repair it.
But I went and took my laptop and asked them which was the problem in their opinion, of course. Laugh: the bios. They had updated the bios! Can you believe it? I turned the face, completely sceptical, and said … what?…. That guy was sunrising and telling it without any kind of shame! I couldn't stand it anymore, so I took everything, and went home, in the pouring rain… desiring that it was the last time that I had to repair the laptop.
I arrived, pluged everything, and then I turned it on. Windows begins opening stupid dialogs about new hardware found. What the f……? what had these people done to my computer…? I was beginning to get angry… But I hadn't still make the computer pass the-definitive-test: play a demo!
So I clicked on spontz_dieanderung.zip … executed it and everything was ok. Die Anderung is loading… it was like a kind of illusion … and it only lasted the loading time, because just when the demo started, the computer turned crazy again. Lots of shit!!! Arghhh! And then, only then, I was really really angry…
After a complete weekend to meditate, I decided to use Die Anderung for my profit. How? Well, I have taken back the laptop to the shop and I have showed to the guy in the repair shop which was the problem. He looked at the screen like saying: you babe… hahaha … what are you going to demonstrate me? bahhh … until the shit-screen has appeared. His face has changed the colour, has stop talking nonsense and then I had pressed ESC.
The windows desktop was a mess, it was almost impossible to distinguish the windows from the background. Shit, shit, shit! And I said him: do you understand _NOW_ which was the problem?. He still had some incredulity inside, so he reboots the computer to verify it's not a software problem… …. AND EVEN THE BOOTING SCREEN APPEARED CRASHING!
We… we … well… mmm … yes, I think this _is not_ a software problem… it seems to be something more serious…
So I want to thank Sp�ntz, because without their demo, I would still be with a crashed laptop just because that clumsy guy did not believe me - and did not make his work, by the way!
I hope that the meaning of die Anderung is like a kind of premonition and I had my laptop with the entire motherboard replaced very very soon!
And once again … Thanks, Sp�ntz! you rule!!!!!

That's the title of marlango's first single (if I'm not wrong). I'm really happy. It has been a long since spanish music market had something really interesting to offer to my ears (more concretely, since I listened to kindergarten).
Now I have found this group and I will recommend it to you without any kind of doubt. Very well worked melodies and lyrics - nothing to compare with those boring and excesively typical spanish shitty songs that we are used to suffer. Great arrangements, complex atmospheres with lots of nuances - that's what I call a real production, superb!
Is it not strange that almost 50% of the band is not spanish? It's composed by a very well known face: the singer Leonor Watling -also actress-, and two great musicians: pianist Alejandro Pelayo and trumpetist Oscar Ybarra.
Now it's the time to enjoy the ride ;-)

Past friday I could make a project -or experiment- that I had in mind for so long. I bought a cheap Geforce4 MX440, agp 8x with 64mb of RAM. And I changed my old ATI RageIIC/4MB with the brand new card!! The best of all is that … it worked!! Now I can view a lot of demos (specially the ones that really take profit from the accelerated hardware), while I wait for my laptop to be repaired. For the curious people, my old computer specs are: Pentium II 350 MHz, 192 mb RAM, 32GB hd, sblive! and some more peripherals that do not make sense in a graphic benchmarks talk…
The installation and setup was so quick. Just take away the old card, plug the new and it was immediately detected by w98 (oh yeah! old flavour! ;)). I installed the drivers and everything was working instantly.
Of course, then I wanted to test it … so I went to my demoscenedemos folder and clicked over one random file. The chosen one was "kunetsu", by mac, sml, drkami and others (I don't remember exactly all the members, it was released at some mekka&symposium party, maybe 2001). After a relatively long loading time (just understand it: it's a pII!!) compared to the ridiculous amount of time spent when I played that demo in the Pentium4, I was hoping a system failure or something like that, but IT WORKED!!
I couldn't believe it! So I went for more demos! This way/stravaganza worked almost ok, excepting the first scene with lots of arrows: maybe they were too many arrows for my little pII. Great test too: Medium/einklang.net. It also worked very well. Variform/Kewlers did it too (and I hadn't played it for months so this was a delicious benchmark, nothing to compare with the boring benchmarks that I am used to execute in the work and some serious tasks. I also tested some other demos and intros: please the cookie thing/aardbei (I love that orange color!!) and vip2/popsy team. Last one made my processor suffer a bit in some scenes!!
Then I went for some more: the loser/tlotb. If the computer could play it, then I would consider myself completely satisfied. And … do you guess? it worked!! woah! tlotb's engine is incredibly optimized. I was astonished by the overall performance of the demo. Yes, it didn't pass very well the particles scene with the daemon in the center (I think it only got 15 fps or so), but what about the rest? lots of vectors moving and interpolating in real time!! incredible!
And that's all about my last experiment. Stay tuned!
Of course, you can download all these demos and intros from pouet.net