Manu Chao - Rainin' in Paradize

Manu Chao is back! This time, sharper than ever. Something is telling me "Hold on for some big action", to be launched by him this autumn. In the world, a lot has changed since 2001 when his last album was released. Now, at last his pleasant tunes and clear messages should spread again, we all needed this.

In Jerusalem, in Monrovia, Guinea-Bissau, today it's raining...

In Monrovia, this no good place to be
Weapon go crazy, it's an atrocity

In Palestina, too much hypocricy
This world go crazy, it's no fatality

In Baghdad, it's no democracy
That's just because, it's a US Country

In Fallujah, too much calamity
This world go crazy, it's no fatality

Go Maasai go Maasai be mellow, Go Maasai go Maasai be sharp

Manu Chao announced a new album to be released on 4 September 2007. After the year 2001 it is his first studio album performed in Spanish or English. Together with the release, a worlwide tour is starting with the announced venues in the North Europe. The Music Video for the launched single "Rainin' in paradize" is directed by Emir Kusturica and available for view and download at the new official site.

Metrorock festival

It's been a while since I haven't hit any good gig, so I went to see the Metrorock festival, along with Chesko, Mario, Cris & Tito (thanks again guys for taking all the initiatives, hence getting me to know some really good bands :) It took place in Parque Juan Carlos I, one of Madrid's finest parks.

What I disliked was a relatively high price of the ticket, I guess also the pervasive presence of the brand Coca-Cola as the main sponsor can't be aligned with the state of mind of the public present there. Anyway, the list of performing bands was satisfying, their performance was great and all in all, my impressions after the event are really good.

After having a small botellon we entered the venue and first band from our "to see list", Canteca de Macao were already on the stage.

La OMC contra la Pachamama.
la sociedad anónima, la propiedad privada.
La OMC, el FMI, la Pachamama,
la opinión pública: la concha de tu hermana.
La OMC, el FMI, la Pachamama,
un Estado Palestino, ?dónde coño está Osama?

Chesko was then insisting we stay closer to the stage to be able to see better La Excepción. They come from Pan Bendito, Carabanchel. Hehe that's my barrio! :) Passionate performance with strong lyrics, big style!

La Excepción

(sorry a Lo-Fi clip, well it's just for an illustration)

Eventually I had to leave out Bad Religion (which I initially wanted to see), as they played on another stage. Anyway, enjoying the show of Muchachito Bombo Infierno and Los Delinqüentes couldn't have been missed.

Los Delinqüentes

...Quiero decirte que harto de humo
Yo me voy de la ciudad,
Voy a banarme en la playa y
A despegarme del alquitrán,
El pescao ta vendío y tengo los pies mu blancos,
yo me voy de la ciudad,
Voy a sentarme en la arena,
Voy a sentarme en la arena a cantar.

Ay que me dejen cantar alejao de la ciudad

BOINC & distributed computing for climate predictions

Let your idle computing power be useful!
Millions of computers connected to the internet are often left turned on while we're away and during that, they're usually not used for any other tasks except of i.e. downloading... Additionally, all the modern household computers possess high computing power and memory capacities, which are never fully used while performing our average tasks like browsing the websites, writing emails or documents.

Therefore - why note use the idle computing power to cure diseases, study global warming, and do many other types of scientific research?

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
Also known as BOINC, is currently the most popular volunteer-based distributed computing platform. It's a non-commercial open source software that lets you donate your idle computer time to science projects in a safe, secure and easy way. Runs on Win, Mac, Linux systems.
Platform is used by a wide range of distributed computing projects, such as:

• Rosetta@home — predict and design protein structures to fight diseases such as Cancer, Malaria, HIV and Alzheimer,
• Malaria Control — clinical epidemiology and natural history of Plasmodium falciparum malaria,
• World Community Grid — advance our knowledge of human diseases,
• Climateprediction.net — tries to produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century,
• Einstein@Home — search for spinning neutron stars (pulsars),
• SETI@home — Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence

Climateprediction.net
Based on BOINC platform, is a project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. It aims to do this by running hundreds of thousands of different models using the donated idle time of ordinary PCs, thereby leading to a better understanding of how models are affected by small changes in the many parameters known to influence the global climate.

It's easy to get started i.e. the GridRepublic website can serve as a good entry-point. There you can simply pick a project you're willing to donate your idle computing resources and install the required software. Later on you can optionally a computing team of your choice.

By the way - recently, a volunteer initiative has been launched by the researchers at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park aiming to tap strong computing power of Sony Playstation 3 consoles. BOINC-based molecular dynamics simulation is optimized for the PS3 cell processor and is achievieng stunning results (1 PS3 processor equivalent to almost 20 average other PCs used in the grid) www.ps3grid.net

An short video on BOINC volunteer computing (Spanish)

Treasures from the Sunny side of the Alps

Tomorrow it's Slovenian Statehood day. Since I'm abroad this means no day off for me :/ Nevertheless, I can write some nice post for the blog.

Recently, I've met a number of people, either friends or people I just got to know, saying they are thinking of making a trip to Slovenia. It's appealing to hear about such intentions and I'm always glad to help, at least with giving hints on what is for sure not to be missed while visiting the green country embraced by mountains, hills and the sea.


"How far would you go?" is the heading of a booklet that looks nice and I would surely recommend taking a look at it. It's available for download in several languages, even in Spanish, where "¿Hasta dónde iria?" Holds the title.

The website www.slovenia.info has become a good reference for tourist-related information, I am sure the Wikipedia entries can be of good use too. You might find lots of nice photos browsing your favorite photo sharing community while at the same time I'd warmly recommend you take a look at some of these astonishing photos.

Surely, I have lots of places to recommend. Following is just a short list:

1. In Bled, climb one of the hills above the lake, enjoy the scenic view from the castle. Another option is simply taking a walk around the lake. When you decide to take a break, you might want to give a try to the famous dessert called Kremna rezina. If of some reason that appears to you as a cliché, there's a rumor of a locally famous place where they serve over-sized burgers (hm actually they were Spanish guys - Jorge & others who told me about it with lots of enthusiasm :) , so you can ask around to find it.

2. If you continue your way towards Bohinj you will find yourself enclosed by a mystic mountain valley. Many myths talk about this place, one of them says that the Turks, mighty conquerors in 14th/15th century turned around when they had tried to invade Bohinj, because they thought they reached the end of the world.

Once there, rent a canoe and paddle right to the middle of the lake. You'd be overwhelmed by peace and calmness of the surrounding nature.

I strongly recommend taking a short walk up the hill at the western end of the lake to reach the Savica waterfall. The spring of river Sava Bohinjka is also one of the scenes from the famous historical epic poem The Baptism at Savica, written by France Prešeren.

By the way, you might find this name familiar, yes it's the poet you can always meet on the 2 euro coin. Each value of Slovenian Euro coins has its own design and understanding the depicted symbols can be a way of getting to know some important parts of Slovenian history and its heritage. Triglav, the highest Slovenian mountain (featured on the 50 Eurocent coin), can be seen throughout the north-west part of the Country, also from Ljubljana, and under especially good weather conditions even from the Slovenian coast.

3. Heading to the north western corner of the country will bring you to the town Kranjska Gora, famous by winter sports, also by closely situated Planica. There you can climb to the top of the K-185 ski jumping hill and imagine the thrill of this sports discipline.

From this area, there is great trip you can make in summer to reach the otherwise relatively remote perl of Slovenia - the valley of river Soča. You will need to ascend to the mountain pass Vršič. It's quite popular to climb the hill by bicycle, however others usually decide to go by car. Don't hesitate to make some stops on the way to admire the surrounding mountains, i.e. view from the lake Jasna.

When you reach the other side, you are entering the Soča valley, historically marked by one of the biggest fronts in World War I. There's a lot to see and experience in the area, from the historical sites, to the traditional summer Reggae festival and there are many ways to do all kinds of sports like mountain biking, canoeing, whitewater rafting etc.

Hint: Around Bovec, take a walk to see the majestic waterfall Boka, while trying out Canyoning at any of the surrounding canyons is almost a must ( lots of fun, better than any aqualand!!! :)

Bicicletada & Spanish property bubble

Bicicletada
Last week I spotted a poster about a manifestation pointing out a relatively evident an ascending issue in Spain - rising of property prices, which is by belief of many regarded as a dangerous economic bubble.

I liked the idea of manifestation in the form of a cyclist gathering, and above all I thought of it as nice Saturday bike trip through the streets of Madrid so I decided to go there and check out the spirit.


2nd video

On that Saturday the weather was more or less rainy and so was the number of cyclists gathered at the starting point - Nuevos Ministerios, not really impressive (around 50 or so).

By the way, if you have thought you can expect a lot of sun in Spain in spring time, especially towards summer, let me catch you by surprise you and prove you wrong. In fact, as a total opposite to the weather across other parts of Europe this year weather in Spain has been extremely bad, with some lowest temperatures compared to the 100 years average. (I think I could write more about it in some other post. Climate changes in Europe? Probably yes... )

¿Que pasa... que pasa? ...que no tenemos casa!
¡...tu.. tambien.. estas hipotecado! ...tu.. tambien.. estas hipotecada!
¡...estamos sin la casa.. por culpa de la Caixa!

...were some of the paroles accompanied by tactful ringing of bicycle bells. There were of course some more I don't remember right now. Partly because I didn't understand them all :) and as a consequence perhaps I wasn't the most compassionate participant of the event. However, I enjoyed the experience and above all, for a change I was riding my bike with right of way over cars (our police escort was really organized and made a good job) so i.e. cruising in the huge roundabout at the Cibelles fountain it was a nice way to admire the surrounding buildings and other avenues.

In Retiro we were awaited by some people from media, taking photos and shooting a scene. This is also when another group joined the cyclists and what followed was a procession with an impressive team of drummers in the front, giving a firm pace to the group. Then a downpour of rain interrupted the proceedings, but anyway, by then the biggest part of event had already past.

Some words on the Spanish housing market
So far, in the course of my stay in Madrid I've been able to see or hear about actions trying to highlight this issue at numerous times. Mostly in forms of different manifestations, talks on TV (on more or less independent channels...), web-based initiatives, etc. Public discussion is therefore present, usually in a worrying tone, however as I can perceive, the statements made by political representatives are often contradictory. Some claim the current state is alarming, while many are opposing the theories on bubble-like housing behavior affirming, the prices are reflecting a normal state of the free market request/demand and that the government has taken enough and appropriate actions to prevent any negative economic side effects.

I've come across a good entry in Wikipedia on the matter, however the Spanish version is much more updated.

Mostly on the grounds that a large number of local and (of course) foreign investors normally find buying property in Spain as a very solid venture, the result are property prices rising to record levels both in real terms and in relation to average incomes / inflation.

Another factor increasing the demand in the property market is the immigration, however judging on big scale construction efforts in nearly every Spanish city, one would say enough places to meet the demands are insured and accessible.

Not quite so in reality.. and some facts are striking:

according to some estimates, over 3 millions of flats in Spain are EMPTY, merely over 100 - 150 thousand only in Madrid.

In spite of the big number of flats existing and being built, surprisingly - a relatively small proportion is available even for hire. I've had a personal experience when trying to take at rent a place in the "off-season" time.

The main actor profiting from the situation seems to be the strong Spanish banking sector. All sorts of advertisements are full of bank offers for property credits including 40, even 50 years mortgages.

Undisputed is the fact that economic inequality is extending at ever increasing speed. And going out to the big world makes me see such contrasts as never before. Moreover, when I take a look to The sunny side of the Alps I don't believe the situation is any different at all. The ever increasing power of capital and corrupt investment plans of which we may or may never learn. Is this the right way to the oh-so-praised welfare state?