soledad penadés

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I was walking to take the bus when I passed near the hotdog post near Tottenham Court Road station. The powerful roasted onion flavour caught my nose immediately as was expected (I'm a big fan of roasted vegetables!) and then I wondered: why do people depreciate so much these hotdogs, saying they are a major health menace, but then they go to any of those big fast food chains and have the big menu with fries, biggest carbohidrated drink and whatnot?
I mean, at least in these hotdogs you can see the onion being fried, same for the frankfurt sausages, and that's something which you can't see very easily in the fast food chains. Maybe you may think the oil is the key of all the horrors but I refuse to admit that the oil for the hotdogs is less healthy than the other one.

The power of advertising is amazing, without doubt.

So there goes the cakephp + phpbb integration - just commited the files to Subversion and uploaded a tgz package for the lazy ones, some hours ago.

And I don't know if there's expectation about the project or maybe it's just a malfunction in the stats system, but somehow it was one of the most active projects this week. How can it be possible if it was approved two days ago? But hey, it's nice anyway…

It's been a very busy week and it doesn't seem to go down, but surprisingly for most people, I quite like the feeling of being busy, since it doesn't allow you to spend the time procrastinating and thinking about the divine wonders of the Things That I Would Do If…

Among other things, past week mr.doob and me went to the London Flash Platform Users Group Meeting, or shortly lfpug meeting. It was very interesting and I went back home willing to get there soon to be able to download and install adobe flex builder 2 in my mac, as it had just been released that very day and was fresh and risky, as any beta version in this world :)

But I finally installed it yesterday and got almost aslept when trying to compile my simple "hello world" test. Or maybe I was already getting aslept and I thought it was because of flex builder, I don't know. I'll have a look at it later when I sort out more urgent things, I suppose…

We also got escena.org v2 in a usable status (or that I think), when I finally fixed the issues with the Spotlight section (thanks to a trace's suggestion, must recognise). I haven't talked here about the site yet because it doesn't have all the features we've planned for it, but will do when it's in a more advanced status. In any case it seems promising :-)

And in a different topic, just registered on Thursday for my first cakeforge project: cakephpbb, which aims to provide a way of integrating a cakephp application with a phpbb forum. It's something terribly simple, and in fact it has not entirely been developed by me, since it's a result of the collaboration of several people (more of a mash up than anything else). But I've been testing it and already fixed a couple of bugs, and I'm going to provide the documentation for it.

The project was approved yesterday but I won't add any file until monday or tuesday, when I finish the docs (otherwise nobody will be able to use it and it will be a useless project) and get to understand how the cakeforge backend works.

There's more interesting stuff coming in but can't be disclosed yet so you'll have to remain intrigued for a bit more… hope you can stand it :-P

Although Saint Etienne's He's on the phone is one of my favourite songs ever, I hadn't watched the video yet. But youtube still has it!

So there I was having a look at it and thinking omm… this could have been better if she just moved a bit more, and the camera could also play a bit more with the music, and why are they so static?, etc, when I spotted some familiar images in the background. What are those neon lights? I think I've seen them before… then I noticed the lyrics referring to the girl being in Leicester Square. But actually what appears there is Piccadilly Circus - or that I think. What do you think? is it Piccadilly Circus or not? Actually I have the feeling that the streets which have bookstores could also be some little streets near Charing Cross which have lots of bookshops and are as narrow as the ones which appear here.
I can obviously understand it, Leicester Square has way less neon tubes which are very cool for video clips. So maybe they were in Leicester Square ready to record some planes and then found Piccadilly Circus, which is quite near, was nicer and then just thought "nobody is going to spot the difference" :P

PD Super +1 "100% londoner" to Saint Etienne for using a tube map style in their site menu - incredible uncomfortability and pain-in-the-ass site navigation aside…

There's been some speculation surrounding this topic. There's people saying I've left the scene, or that I've become so m3g41337 that I don't even consider going to bcn anymore. There's also more sayings about my health and the possibility of me having mini-soles or mini-traces (and thus not being able to catch a plane) but none of them are true!
The real truth is that…

1. After bcn101 I felt extremely unmotivated to attend bcn anymore.
2. I had taken eight planes during the summer and I was quite tired. If it had been business class with a taxi waiting for me at either side of the travel I wouldn't have minded it at all but it wasn't exactly like that - I began to develop an automatic need for smashing crying children heads as soon as I heard a sob, so I'd better avoid the temptation.
3. Although (1) was not a real reason after the bcnparty organisation was changed, there was another problem - the party began to look nice when it was a bit late for buying cheap plane tickets
4. Trace, which is now freelance, bought his tickets for going thursday and coming back on tuesday. While I appreciate the extreme pleasure of taking some days for a break in the sun, as they refer here to fly to Spain, I just changed to a new job and I prefer to save my little holidays for something a bit less stressing than a party. And yes, I prefer not to travel alone, and no, I wasn't going to fly on Saturday for going back on Sunday.
5. I had also been commuting for around 2.30 hours daily during august so I didn't had much free time for anything else apart from sleeping when I was not working - that didn't help to the I-feel-tired sensation.
6. Because I've been busy I didn't have nothing to release. My only possible production was escena.org v2 and even that took me 3 months to get a semiworking status.
7. And finally I went to Sundown the week-end before Bcnparty. Even if I have went to two consecutive demoparties in the past, I think it's way too much for my accommodated and lazy life style so I decided that it was not for me and maybe next year.

Even though, I still had a look to plane tickets 3 weeks before the party but I preferred to save my quid for something else - which I haven't determined yet but will make sure all of you know if it's appropiate, or remain in the darkest of the secrets if needed.

So don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against bcnparty. In fact I missed so much the fact of going; there are way too many nice memories of nice moments there to be against bcnparty. I spent the whole weekend doing an intensive code marathon for having escena.org ready for bcnparty, as trace details in his blog blog… kind of… work log, while at the same time was trying to get news of the party in #demoscene. And I'm very pleased that there's new people there, both as organisers and attendants. I'm also pleased with the fact that it all went well and everybody is very excited about the future of the party and the spanish demoscene generally speaking.

And now I'm going to fix a couple more of things in escena.org if you don't mind ;)