-
Oralia gave me a small plush purple hippopotamus! This makes my day.
-
Isn't the world such a small place. One of the dudes from the streetphoto mailing list is also going to give a talk during next week's CONSOL conference. It will be nice to meet him.
-
Oralia has a big cold and yet she managed to make some delicious chicken meatballs in chipotle sauce. They are not as heavy on your stomach as beef ones, which I guess makes for a good thing.
-
Some photos from last year:
-
On Saturday we had my mother, grandmother, and uncle come to our house for lunch. Oralia made mushroom soup and enfrijoladas de pollo with a delicious green salsa, this time based on chile de árbol instead of the usual chiles serranos. Everything was really good.
My uncle Ricardo is the national Go champion, or rather the title alternates between himself and another friend, Pepe Chacón. I asked my uncle to refresh my memory about Go strategy, as I have known the basic rules for a long time but never really understood the strategy. This time I had a sort of epiphany and now I am itching to play. Today I'll teach Oralia how to play, and since she is pretty good at strategy games there is a very good chance that we'll have fun and get good at it quickly.
-
Yesterday we found a new Arabian food joint in Galerías Insurgentes — it is amazingly good for a food-court kind of place, and their falafel is about the best I have had in Mexico. Their kebabs were not bad at all, either, and the salad was pretty good.
We also got two tiny bedside table lamps which we can use for reading. They have rough ceramic bases and handmade paper screens, and they are really small and cute. One good thing is that they provide better light than the desk lamp that is rather far away from the bed.
-
We are two or three movies short of finishing the Woody Allen section of our video club. If only they would get more of those; they have about half of W.A.'s collection and we have thoroughly enjoyed it.
-
Do you want to move to a town aseptically designed by the media? This is really scary in a William Gibson sort of way.
-
Last Saturday our band got together again for the mixing stage of the recording we did on December. It was not as fun as recording but interesting nonetheless. It's pretty cool to see the sound engineer turn the dull, as-recorded sound of the drums into brilliant sounds, and then combine that with the other instruments. He was using a rather elegant Mackie console and hard disk recording gig. You can't beat custom hardware with motorized knobs for the user interface, but still it would be pretty cool to have something as comprehensive as that in free software.
-
There are many buildings worth sketching in the
historical center of Mexico City. From July 2001.
-
MMeeks is going to be a father! Big congratulations to Julia and Michael.
-
Last night we went to Joakim's birthday party, whereby we had sushi at Miyajima, the small Japanese place by Hans Petter's old house. I had a sukiyaki that was too large for me to finish. It was good to see that circle of people again.
HP and Maru are back from Norway now, and they brought us a trio of very pretty spherical paper lamps. They'll look nice on our living room.
-
It turns out there *is* a bug in OO.o's reference counting functions. Sigh. But the Mandrake package has a patch.
-
Today I switched to Metacity, moving out from Sawfish. This is an important event in my life, akin to learning to make flamed crepes or losing one's virginity.
It is a really nice window manager. It didn't need to be configured at all except for a few weird keybindings that I like.
-
Last Saturday Oralia made soup of zucchini blossoms and chicharrón en salsa verde, and everything was delicious. We seem to have been eating a lot for the last few days. It must be the cold weather.
-
Tonight I will finish reading the last chapter of Alejo Carpentier's La Consagración de la Primavera, one of the most wonderful books I have read. It is an amazing tour through everything that happened in the 20th century in the western world, emphasizing the things that inspired the Cuban revolution. Carpentier was a fantastically cultured person... I wish I knew all the references that he mentions in the book.
-
Periodic minor annoyances in the house that are easily taken care of:
- Oiling the knobs on the stove. They get hard to turn and they are designed in a rather sleek and curvy and unergonomic fashion. But a few drops of sewing machine oil do wonders on them.
- Pushing the pressure lock on the cupboard so it will work again. The little mechanism slips to the left every day or two, so you have to push it back to where it will grab the locking pin.
- Re-setting the bedroom's wooden curtain post on the nail that supports its center section. The post slips every now and then and curves itself.
-
Our building's handymen are still fixing up the two apartments on our floor that got freed up. Maybe the two old men that lived next door did not clean their kitchen very much, because now cockroaches have been appearing once a week or so. We'll have to install some poison traps or something.
-
Vacations seem to have had a good effect on me; reading OO.o code is more pleasing now.
-
Happy New Year to everyone and all that!
Many things happened over the holidays and I'm too lazy to write them down right now, so they'll have to wait.
-
Oralia laying down on the grass.
-
Making orange juice in Tepoztlán, from last July.
