Thea sent me an email about a friend of her's who was looking for digital asset management software for the mac. From the sound of it, more or less what Cattle Dog does. I was checking out the web site of the company she works for - Red Crayon - and it's got a great line on the splash page:

Aussie slang:	“ You're not the brightest one in the pack ”
Meaning:	“ a person of minimal intellect ”
Red Crayon:	“ the brightest one in the pack ”

Now for an unrelated topic...

I caught sight of our housemates' dinner tonight and thought ‘pancakes for dinner?’ before realising it was a flour tortilla in the pan. I said as much and got asked in reply whether I'd seen pancake mix in the supermarket, followed by a shaky proposal that he may just have to try and ‘make pancakes from scratch’.

Needless to say the history of Shrove Tuesday was somewhat lost.

I left Australia about three months after getting my licence. In the 4 years since, I've driven a total of about 2 hours, intentionally on the left hand side of the road.
We're now planning to drive from Barcelona to London and back (yes, through France) at the end of this month, either driving on the wrong side of the road, or on the correct side with a wrong hand drive.
Bring on the i-pod and a boot full of french chocolate, cheese and .. damn those laws about driving and not drinking wine, and it should be great fun. Only problem is with all this spanish I've been stuffing in to my head (and my belly), all the french I ever knew has fallen out. I'm certain I'll be asking for "une baguette, por favor".

Having seen the queues and queues of people waiting to get into the Spanish course I was suprised it was so easy to get into the Catalan course. It may not be as popular a language for foreigners to learn, but it will do you fine in most places in Barcelona.

Of this enormous queue over half were asian (that's oriental if you live in England), so I was curious as to how the Catalan course would be taught, asuming that there would be a mix of students with no real language in common. Simple, it was taught in Castillano (Spanish), almost the entire class spoke Spanish as a first language (lots of South Americans). So I'm now learning another language in one that I barely know.

Well, neither Elisse or I managed to get into the official Spanish course that we applied for. A bit of a pain since it's taken a few weeks to get this far through the registration process. The University of Barcelona didn't have much to offer either, the courses there are expensive (around €1800 a year for 9 hours a week) and over three grand for an actual diploma course and enough extra subjects to make your 20 hours a week (and become visa worthy).

So after ending up in the wrong office a couple of times we found our way to the registrar for the free catalan course, I managed to end up being enrolled for a course starting next Monday (all in about 15 mintues). It's quite amazing how helpful everyone is when the first thing out of your mouth is "I want to learn Catalan."

I've been pretty bad with my updates recently - two days off a month between updates is not really a weblog. Lot's of things have happened:

Thea and Bruce came to visit at the beginning of the month and Elisse and I went with them on a trip to Madrid, by car, going through a lot of north-western and central Spain on the way. We got to see a lot of the country side in Catalunya, the Basque Country and Castilla & Leon. We also spent some time with Robert and Carla while we were in Madrid. Now I can say I like Barcelona better.

Still being kept busy with my three days a week for Titan, everything from XSL transforms, FileMaker developement to a healthy slab of Perl programming keeps me out of trouble.

Elisse and I are trying to get into a Spanish course as well while we're here, so there's been pre-pre-pre inscriptions and all sorts to deal with.

Having said that - the pace of life in Barcelona is completely different from London and being able to afford to go out a bit more makes a big difference as well. There's been all sorts of things on here, and a new fiesta every week - well it seems that way. So there's a long winded excuse as to why I've been neglecting occasionally human.

I had my first day of work on wednesday. It's in a sweet little village 45 minutes north of Barcelona (that's along the coast for directionally retarded people like me). It's a sleepy town with lovely folk, whose minds it never crossed that they are actually living in Spain. They don't speak castellano (Spanish), so it's a case of me being spoken to in catalan, and teaching in a mix of castellano, catalan and hand gestures. It's tiring work, but the kids are fab.

Otherwise, I've fallen in love with Maria Rita and Ella (again)...

blue days... all of them gone, nothing but blue skies from now on

Elisse discovered a few cinemas around Barcelona that play 'Version Original' films, eg. films that have subtitles rather than being dubbed. This is great, so long as we want to see an English film.

On our second attempt at following google maps we actually found one of these cinemas down near Port Olimpic. We saw Planet Terror yesterday, one part of Grind House, what was suppose to be a double bill along with Death Proof, but apparently it didn't do so well in the States, so it's been split up for release in a lot of other places (like Spain). I really enjoyed it - fantastic B-grade horror.

I've been trying to fix the internet here, my wireless keeps dropping off - in any other country waiting until almost 2am would give you a sleeping house to play with the internet. In Spain I'll have to wait until tomorrow morning (at say, 11am) when everyone is asleep.

Oh yeah, and Freebase has public read access now.

Some photos of our Place in the Sun. If you haven't guessed already, I'm sporting a new hairstyle. Next is one of the amazingly decorated streets in Gracia (our Barrio) - this one had plastic and paper veggies hanging everywhere.
Haydenrelaxing after a big lunch of Fideus a l'estil de Lleida in our new lounge area, the view from the back windows (which are ALWAYS open), the kitchen and our lunch (note the 4 olive oils for 5 residents), our room with the balcony and the view - first down towards the old city and the beach, second up towards park guell and the mountains. My new puppies, Haydengetting used to life on the balcony. I guess he'll probably work there during the week..

We had Chinese, we found an apartment and bumped into a huge fiesta in the streets around our future abode!
Thank god those shops were shut

Great.
Haydens first day at "work" (in the living room), my first day getting down to work (finding a house, dealing with banks, cooking etc). Yesterday I found the twin book to my beloved Italian culinary bible: Un paseo Gastronómico por ESPAÑA and this morning was very excited at the prospect of whipping up a Spanish storm. I went out to go shopping and to my dismay discovered that all the shops are bloody shut. It's a public holiday!! Asunción - something about Mary traipsing up to heaven.

So, first day of the new Mediterranean life and we'll probably have take away Chinese to celebrate.