I usually go everywhere with my backpack. Mainly everyday, since 2006, with the same backpack (a Targus one. Last year it got broken -my bad- and I bought the same model).
When, for some reason, I don’t carry the backpack, I always miss something that I have there (the bottle of water, USB Stick, a cereal bar, etc.).
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Some weeks ago I went to a French grill nice restaurant. Nice as good food, service, etc. In the City of London. It was a cold Sunday, 1pm, so the restaurant was empty. Later one it was quite full, and I guess that on the working days is completely full (lunch meetings and so on).
Well, we were nicely sitting and we ordered. Of course, the waiters helped us with the wine selection and so on. They were very attentive, smiley waiters.
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One year ago I changed the server where Pintant is hosted. Previously it was hosted in a domestic ADSL server, now it’s in a Gandi VPS server.
The server handles Pintant, some other Webs for my family, email, etc. Nothing very exciting and the email bit is the important one.
Before it was in the domestic ADSL because a proper server (in a datacenter), 10 years ago, was very expensive. Nowadays, and thanks to new technologies like Xen and more powerful and cheaper hardware, it’s possible to find quite cheap servers.
Also electricity price is increasing. And years ago the only way to share big files between computers in the office was to have a server. Now there are network hard disks which can do it easily.
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In Catalan we call “centpeus” (100 feet) to that animal that has many legs (similar to a caterpillar). On the Wikipedia I can see that it’s also called “one hundred legs” (not feet).
I like how it sounds in French: “mille-pattes” (pronunced as /milpat/). Means 1000 legs (hey, more than in Spanish or Catalan).
But in Turkish it’s called 80 legs. And in Greek… 40 legs! Even less than in Catalan (and much less than in French, 1000 legs!)
Different languages, different legs. Maybe I should plot a world map with the different legs per language.
In Catalonia we have one saying “eat stalk raisin” (“menja cues de pansa”). We say it when someone forgets something.
I know that in Alicante zone they say “tienes que comer más pescado” (“you must eat more fish”). And in Morocco they say “eat more liver” (see the Morocco entry, Mustapha is who said so).
I’m quite sure that the liver or fish sayings may have some scientific explanation. Not sure about the “stalk raisin”. I like to know what different countries say about the same topic. I should search for some other ones!
When I was younger (or… just young 
) I used to play with hardware. I liked to get old broken computers, fix them, improve them, upgrade them…
After a while I stopped liking hardware (and I prefer software, programming, etc.). My reasons are:
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At Mendeley we do one hackday a month. It’s very cool: we do what we want (vaguely related to Mendeley) to experiment with new technologies, approaches. Free thinking!
During 2 or 3 hackdays i started doing a Calibre plugin to import Mendeley documents into Calibre. And then from Calibre to your ebook… in just one mouse click!
You can find the plugin, instructions, etc. in the Mobileread forum Calibre post.
The code can be found in the Git repository.
License: Chocolate-ware license (more information in the Chocolate-ware post).
In English we say “Good morning” (so, we wish a good and nice morning).
In Catalan we say “Bon dia”. Literally: “Good day”. It seems that Catalan language is a bit more generous than English language: wishing a whole good day! (not just the morning).
But in Spanish… we say “Buenos dias”. So, literally: “Good days”. Not the morning, or the day… many days! This is even nicer!
There is always the possible English variant. Instead of “good morning”… we could say “good moaning”. Because there are lot of moaners, aren’t there?
In my recent trip to Morocco I went to some dunes by… dromedary (so, a camel with only one hump).
The guide said that usually the dromedaries cannot be driven (guided) like a horse. Actually the typical desert image is a person walking and then camels following the person (there is always one walker).
I was riding the first dromedary and then we met another group. The guide chained my dromedary to the last dromedary of the other group. After some minutes I saw that the rope would be untied and that my dromedary would be disconnected from the other one. I was wondering… what will happen? will my dromedary keep walking? Will it start walking to some other direction? Maybe start running?
No! when this happened my dromedary just stopped walking. Good safety system!
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There is a “free software” license called “Beer license” (or beerware). It doesn’t seem to be recognized as a free software license by theOpen Source Initiative.
In one of the Mendeley hackdays I did a Calibre plugin. I wanted to release it, so it had to have a license. I thought to release with some fun-license like the Beer License. But I don’t really drink beer, so it didn’t make any sense!
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