A picture taken inside the Castel Sant’Angelo. The bees are part of the coat of arms of the Barberini, a very influential family in Rome during the 17th century.
A website I coded for the regional government of Castile-La Mancha. The guys from Riot Cinema designed it but they needed someone to turn their beautiful layout into a working website. It was meant to showcase a strategic tourism plan for the region.
My thoughts on Frozen River
Family, abandonment, drugs, poverty, immigration, xenophobia, smuggling, slavery, desperation, sacrifice, compassion… All these themes, issues and feelings are dealt with in Frozen River, a worldwide acclaimed independent film that was even nominated for 2 Oscars in this year’s edition.
Director and writer Courtney Hunt has managed to integrate all these elements into the film, using them as part of a rich context that is intrinsic to the story. They’re all there. In more subtle or deep ways but always present, tied to the story, constantly hitting your brain.
Not only the film shines in showing a large amount of issues with coherence, but it’s also quite entertaining. That is perhaps its major achievement, since many films involving social issues tend to fail in that regard. Frozen River is a rare and fascinating exception. One could say that it is in fact a thriller, and a rather exciting one. It keeps you expectant and interested to the end.
The final part of the film is particularly remarkable, with the main character getting into increasing trouble and finally being forced to make a really tough decision. And Melissa Leo is superb in her role. She totally transforms into her character, it’s like she’s not an actress anymore.
So, not that I’m saying this is the film of the decade, but I do think it’s a really great one overall. It’s worth giving it a try if you got some time.
A website I designed and coded for Global System CP, a Spanish chain of private study centers. I opted for a clean and consistent layout, since the main concern was to make the information of all the offered courses very easy to find. The home page featured a one-minute video —which I also made— that presented the company to the visitor.
It’s a fact, Linux has improved
I’m amazed at how much the Linux desktop experience has improved in recent times. The installation process is now easier than ever, applications get more user-friendly and full-featured release after release and the general appearance of the system is actually great —just look at the new style of Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution nowadays—. But equally important, there’s been a huge breakthrough when it comes to hardware support. I’ve lived it myself during the last years, but yesterday I had an experience that got me really surprised.
I finally received my Microsoft LifeCam Cinema, a cool webcam I won for signing up for the LifeCam Shorts Film Festival. It came with a drivers CD, very specific installation instructions and Microsoft Internet Explorer listed among the system requirements. Pretty scary for an Ubuntu Linux user like me. Anyway, I decided to give it a try. I plugged it in and installed Cheese, a nice application to take photos and videos with a webcam —Mac users will understand me perfectly if I say that it’s quite similar to Photo Booth—.
So I opened Cheese and to my surprise I saw myself on the computer screen. No need for weird hacks, complicated configuration or anything. I just plugged it in and I was done. Real plug-and-play. But then I realized the webcam built-in microphone wasn’t working. OK, it was too good to be true. Or not? I remembered that I also had a stand alone microphone plugged into the computer. So I clicked on the volume icon in the desktop panel to bring up a menu and clicked “Sound preferences”. A window popped up and there it was: a selectable item labeled “Microsoft LifeCam Cinema” with a nice big icon of a webcam on its left. The other microphone was also listed in this window and it was selected, so that’s why the webcam mic wasn’t working. One more click and I was finally done.
A high quality webcam with built-in microphone from Microsoft working seamlessly in Ubuntu? Five years ago it seemed impossible. Just as much as Ubuntu looking nice, but it does. Seeing is believing.
A photo of the Diputación Provincial building in Zaragoza. I like how the leaves stick out from the left side of the frame.
A promotional video I made for Global System CP, a Spanish chain of private study centers. It aims to be a quick introduction to the company and its services, targeted to potential students.
March 11th
Six years ago, I had one of the most disturbing days of my life. I remember sitting in shock in front of the TV for the whole evening. I had an exam the next day but I wasn’t able to study. I felt devastated. I had this awful feeling, even though none of my relatives got hurt. But a lot of people actually did. In my city, for no reason. And it could have been anyone, so that was enough to feel that way.
The whole thing became political later with all that controversy about government misinformation, the general election on March 14th, victims’ associations taking sides and so on. But some of us still remember how we felt that day. So forget about everything and just try to recall your feelings, cause that’s all that matters.
A video I made for The Cosmonaut project in commemoration of the reissue of Poetics for Cosmonauts, the book that inspired the film.
