New Media Focus on web development

So - the Spanish chapter is well and truly over - now it's time to start ranting about the web development world.

The ensuing posts are going to be comments about new web stuff, thoughts on various marketing methods - viral emarketing, direct mail campaigns, web marketing, newsletters and all that jazz...

patxi this picture is crap

More photos please Patxi

Hey man, i really need to get better pics of you and ariela. This one sucks! I know there's some cool ones of us with cowboy hats on - send 'em over, or this item stays on my blog. I may even paste your ugly chin on other sites!

La Fortaleza Roja

Granada is incredible.

Maria tired at every step. We tempted her with Arabian arches and pools flushed with colourful fish but she was having none of it. Her Italian blood seeked a siesta in the shade of the benevolent ficus trees and refused to move. Clara and I ate paté sandwiches philosophically while Nicolas tempted stray cats with stale bread from the bottom of his rucksack. The sun had already bleached all the tiny spaces in the courtyard white and it had hadn’t even hit 11 am.

I had luckily heeded my house mates advice from Madrid and headed to La Alhambra straight off the night bus. There were around 30 people already camped out at the entrance when I arrived, blank-faced, white-washed and bleary-eyed. I inwardly thanked the hotel porter who’d directed me from the city centre and joined the queue.

An impromptu history lesson, two coffees and an hour and a half later we paid our rite of passage and climbed the hose-dampened tarmac in search of gorgeous architecture and culture. I love the fact that you can rock up alone somewhere with a backpack and soon almagamate friends like dust. 'I' becomes 'we', and you take it from there. I never carry a camera so this is a very useful aspect of solo travel – the age of digital and email exchange allow bonds to be forged for as long as it takes to download the day trip snaps.

La Alhambra – The Red Fortress – was originally built by the invading Arab tribes who conquered most of Spain for centuries until the disparate aristocratic families got their acts together, intermarried, and pushed against the tide. Consequent buildings were added to the fortress until it became what it is today: the best place EVER to have a party – if you can afford it!

Carlos VI couldn’t have cared too much for architecture as the join between his round bull fighting arena obscures part of the most beautiful interior walls I have ever seen. How can you mess with a wall that has the Koran painstakingly inscribed into its surface?

Don’t get me wrong – Charlie’s palace is impressive if you’re into acoustics or blood sports. What really hit me in the gut more was the jasmine gardens to the north-west of the estate. They ‘breem’ with life. Long boulevards paved in ancient stone, spurting fountains that shoot arcs over the succulent surface plant life. Clara obsessed over certain camera angles and I mooched in an alvcove, wondering what people in the facing hill of Albaicín were doing that morning.

We finally left the palace gardens at around 2, over 6 hours after we arrived.

This is a full-on day trip. Pack water, food and energy to sustain a whole day in paradise. This place rocks!

Revelation

wow. just realised that i've had the most beautiful night that could be cut and pasted into any point in the timeline of past, present and future me. Even in those parallel transparent universes where i'll never go i would hold this night dear. It's that irreversible 'self' that evaded my conscious for so long that was there all the time. It was there on the nights when i was too young to join the party, when i'd sit on the landing and hug Gemma and think into the dark spaces of Revel Cottage. It will be there when i'm old and grey (or hopefully white) and will have lived a hundred lives. It's me, on my own, having been invited to several different places and deciding instead to stay here with myself, with good music, in a place where i can write and appreciate how unbelievable existence is. The clouds are scattered and pink across my outside view. In here I've got the glow from my laptop, Sade singing to me in a place outside of time and a feeling of more content than i could ever have in real-time. It all stops here, in these madrugada hours. You can pause, freeze-frame, think away from the present and just float...

"That bright blue sky..."

I realised that this had become a repeated phrase of mine last summer yet I can't explain it any other way. Madrid is encapsuled in this beautiful clean deep azure dome during the summertime that defies all of us who rot her skies. God, i've even resorted to the latin 'azure' to explain how blue it is! How the hell else can i describe it?!

It's like the sky i saw when i was wee. 4 years-old in the garden, having a party for the first Live Aid concert in '85. My sisters friends playing cricket with shards of hard French bread while i squeezed the hose at our big black dog...

7-years old and playing with David in the back yard. Inventing guns, warships, armadas... We'd cruise by our older siblings (bird-watching suckie individuals) and shoot them to shit. Laying in sticky sweat afterwards on the itchy lawn, we'd laugh against huge lung-fuls of anaerobic slack breath. Acid limbs hung limp at our extremities as we looked up into that incredible innocent deep bright blue sky...

Hop to a Halfords trip, anytime in my childhood. There'd be me and my dad and several planks of wood poking out the back of our trashy gold Ford Estate... Status Quo wailing from the casette player full blast and a pissed off mum ready to greet us in the drive with admonishing looks. Too much fun in the wood yard, you two. And what exactly are you doing with all that pine?! Blanket blue remained in the corners of my vision all the way through those days that seemed to last forever...

Renera

Un pueblecito en el medio de la nada. Población: 64 personas, pues, según al padre de Patxi pero creo que eso es un poquillo exagerado. Muy buen rollo. Hace unas horas estuvimos andando por el rio y las letras de "time" por Pink Floyd estaban corriendo dentro de mi cabeza:

"so we run and we run to catch up with the sun rays sinking..."

"we fritter & waste the hours in an off-hand way..."

"the sun is the same in a relative way but we're older,
shorter of breath and one day closer to death..."

Seguimos el sol hacía la casa y de repente era la hora de salir...

Tempting Apples

The discovery of a new band that will no doubt stay with me for a long time is quite a joyous occasion. Today I am just reeling again under the consecutive blows of loneliness that rain down in waves, in sheets, sometimes as a light patter that can be ignored and sometimes in a way that covers me like the sea. The undercurrent drags me back and forth against the rasping bottom but eventually pulls me back to safety. I hate emotions. They won't come when you call. They refuse the rule of logic and ignore the big strikey stick of will.

So that's a shame really.

This is the band though. They rock:

www.theorgan.ca

go fug yourself

Although i've loved this site for, like, EVER, this particular bit of writing has had me in stitches the last FIVE times i read it. If you are reading my blog because you're bored and surfing, or want to see how many other people have put "The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts" in their favourite book section (there's three of us lovey), take a look at this website instead because it's a hell of a lot more entertaining:

www.gofugyourself.com

what made me larf far too much today:

"...I'm frustrated that the fashion industry is apparently trying to stamp out the mighty trouser. Because although I secretly love the idea of a world in which we all walk around ready to deploy jazz hands at any moment, I really do think it's unwise to make nylon the foundation of our society."

What's it all about, ay?

I read an article about Idi Amin yesterday that made me think that anything is possible. If an illiterate former potato peeler can take over a country, get all his mates into high ranking positions, torture and humiliate just for fun, print his own money and run the economy of a blossoming nation into the ground then absolutely anything can come to pass. The history read like a macabre sick-man's fantasy - and one that couldn't possibly happen in 'real' life. I wonder if that's how future generations will look back on mine, as Dubya continue's to make a mockery out of the American political system, Tony Blair continues to rule the UK after lying to the entire nation and peace is still very far from the Middle East. I've stopped reading the international news this week because I can't take any more...