I've arrived at a point in learning Spanish which is at times very exciting, and then immediately enormously frustrating and/or confusing.

Since I'm going to RetroEuskal in July and I'm going to have to actually talk to people, I've upped the intensity of my study a great deal - mainly the spoken word. Reading now is easy. What makes reading easy is when you spot a word you don't know, you just put it in WordReference (which rocks, by the way, if you're on the lookout for a good multilingual dictionary - http://www.wordreference.com/ - and it also has good monolingual dictionaries at least for English and Spanish). But you just can't do that with the spoken word. When you read, you can just stop, take some time figuring out the bits you don't understand, and start again. If you're listening to the radio or watching TV - miss it, and it's gone. Also it's much harder to listen - I find the quality of the sound greatly affects how easily I can understand something (of course, this is true of your native language, but it's much easier to infer the missing words in your native language).

I've been listening to an episode of SpanishPodcast (http://www.spanishpodcast.org) in the morning. Typically these are 30 minutes long, and consist of Spanish being taught in Spanish - because of this I find them very valuable.

I also watch an hour of TV every day. The Spanish public service broadcaster (http://rtve.es) has a lot of their TV output available on demand "TVE a la carta" and it's not restricted to Spain. I have found a really interesting series called "Redes", in which the presenter, Eduard Punset, interviews researchers and philosophers on many interesting subjects - health, the universe, how the brain works, all interesting subjects to a geek. I can understand this particular TV programme almost entirely. In fact about two weeks ago I realised I was just understanding it without needing to think about it. It was an amazing feeling. (And all the episodes are available on Eduard Punset's website - http://www.eduardpunset.es )

But then I watched an episode of some crime fiction show, and for the entire 70 minute show (there's no advertising) I think I understood one sentence and that was it. It was incredibly disheartening after being able to effortlessly understand an episode of Redes. I actually understood the drama - unlike a TV programme on a technical matter, in a drama much of the meaning is conveyed in body language and tone of voice - I was just missing all the detail. But due to the quality of the sound (noisy street scenes, telephones, people speaking fast in hushed voices, people speaking in an agitated manner) I simply couldn't catch any of the words even though I wager I would know 80% of them (or be able to figure them out from context) if I saw the transcript of the show. So frustrating.

One thing I have noticed is when native speakers are talking, they occasionally get genders wrong - they start off something like "Este -" stop, and correct - "Esta -". If native speakers do it occasionally, I don't feel so bad if I make that sort of mistake :-) I do have to wonder why the Romance languages never evolved a neuter gender though, English is far simpler in that respect.

For speaking practise, not having a native speaker to talk to, I just have to talk to myself in the house. I feel incredibly self-conscious despite there being no one apart from my cats to hear me! Something about talking to yourself being the first sign of madness (it's not the language, I feel very self conscious if I speak in English to myself at home!). I also joined Barrapunto.com (a Slashdot-like site in Spanish) and I've been writing a while on foro.speccy.org since writing will help me internalize what I've been learning about the grammar. So far people say I write very well, but what they don't realise is that I spend half an hour agonizing over the grammar after writing a message and going back and editing it :-) Again, writing is much easier than speaking. If I'm not sure a phrase is grammatically correct, I just type it in quotes into google.es. If I get loads of hits with people using the same phrase I can be pretty certain I got it right (as well as getting it right for the context). You can't do this if you're speaking, though...

Simply incredible. There's nothing more that I can write about this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjbpwlqp5Qw

...of Slashdotters gone down? Or is it just a bunch of trolls?

It seems like any article discussing the unbundling of Internet Explorer from Windows seems to *repeatedly* contain versions of this comment:

"Why isn't Apple forced to unbundle Safari? Why isn't Canonical forced to unbundle FF from Ubuntu?" - well, neither Apple nor Canonical have been found guilty of breaking monopoly legislation with the bundling of browsers.

"How is the user going to get a browser if one isn't installed by default?" - Oh come on, it's not rocket science to supply a simple tool to allow the user to download and install one of the browsers available today! Any competent developer could knock up such a tool in an afternoon including a 2 hour coffee break. It's not like unbundling the browser means the TCP/IP stack has gone, too. In any case, hardly anyone actually installs Windows, most normal users have it preinstalled on a PC, and the OEM will ship some sort of browser. OEMs are already shipping things like Google Desktop, it's hardly a big leap to add Firefox or Chrome or whatever to the image.

The best comments by far are those of they type "if the European Union punishes Microsoft for breaking EU law, then Microsoft should retaliate by pulling out of the EU market". Firstly, that sort of action would result in the instant slaughter of the Microsoft board by the shareholders (the EU market for software is larger than the entire North American market), and secondly, it would immediately and clearly demonstrate how dangerous the MS monopoly is - and cause EU companies and states to switch to alternatives. This in turn would mean the widespread acceptance of the alternatives to Windows (which in the desktop market doesn't really exist at present), and therefore damage Microsoft's markets in the rest of the world - especially the market for MS Office if everyone in the EU stopped using it.

I've been working more on my "make a useful ethernet card for the Sinclair Spectrum" (which if you don't come from these parts, the Spectrum is the home computer in the 80s, which in at least Britain and Spain occupied the same kind of position as the Commodore 64 did in the United States). The board has a flash ROM, and it doesn't just contain a socket library, but other useful things - a small memory manager, a way of adding firmware modules and the like. I also added a lightweight "virtual filesystem" layer, so that filesystem ROM modules can be written. The first naturally is a network filesystem (dubbed "TNFS" - Tiny (or perhaps Trivial) network filesystem, which is designed to be a bit better as a filesystem than FTP or HTTP, but not as hairy or as complex as SMB or NFS). After prototyping the filesystem, I made a VFS-like layer in the base firmware which exposes a fcntl-like layer with a bunch of low level filesystem I/O operations. By the use of jump tables, you can write a filesystem module to do practically anything filesystem like. It would even be possible to make a sort of "devfs" like Linux has :-)

Amazingly, it actually works. I managed to load a game (Manic Miner) from the network filesystem on Sunday.

I was watching a TV programme on rtve.es for Spanish listening practise, and an article came up about a Spanish-designed ultra low power netbook, which of course runs Linux...and lo and behold, there was a short clip of Richard Stallman speaking about the computer - in Spanish.

So once the programme was over, I had a quick dig around the 'net and quickly found an 8 minute or so segment from Spanish TV where Stallman speaks about the "fundamental freedoms":

http://tuxpepino.wordpress.com/2008/05/24/video-entrevista-a-richard-stallman/

He speaks it slowly and clearly, and I found him very easy to understand, but it was very odd hearing Spanish spoken with an American accent. (I imagine when I try to speak it, my accent is just as bad. I have to say the funniest thing I've heard while learning Spanish is someone speaking it with a Welsh accent...)

My motorbike is almost ready to put on the road, everything is done save for an oil change and changing a blown bulb, and insurance. Oh, and me getting my CBT done which is scheduled for the 22nd. My Dad will give it a testride first though.

I've been doing a bit more work on this Sinclair Spectrum ethernet card of mine. As I expected, the software is 10 times the work of the hardware. The last big bit is going in though, the network file system (naturally, all written in Z80 assembler). The prototype code actually works! I'm implementing a VFS layer, so it'll be possible to just plug in the appropriate filesystem code mount the FS, and code written to access filesystems will just work. This means getting down to all the gnarly assembly language tricks to make it reasonably fast and the code to find out the real implementation function not too long - things like self modifying code and tinkering with the stack. This is what makes coding on the "bare metal" so much fun.

Rockband 2 needs to have "Size of a Cow" by The Wonderstuff. I would *love* to drum to that.

That is all.

It's curious how we use language sometimes, and it really comes home to you how much context matters when you're learning one. The other day, I disvoered Barrapunto - and as you can probably guess - barra = slash, punto = dot. Yes, a Spanish Slashdot! (Mainly aimed at Spain, but including stories from other parts of the world, just like the English Slashdot is mainly USA, but includes quite a bit of other stuff).

Anyway, RMS (Richard Stallman, if you've been hiding under a rock) is apparently giving a few lectures in Spain in the near future. The usual talk about RMS of course cropped up, and then I encountered this: someone asked, "What does he live on, thin air?" (my translation), as in - how does he eat? There were the usual sensible responses (the lecture circuit pays), but one piece of interesting colloquialism had me totally baffled. Someone responded:

"De los tranchetes que lleva entre los dedos de los pies"

The interesting word here is tranchete. According to the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (which is like our Oxford English Dictionary, the reference tome to the language), tranchete means "cuchilla de zapatero", which means a cobbler's blade (some tool used by shoe makers). Which now had me totally confused, because apparently RMS lives on "the shoemaker's blades that he has between his toes".

So I asked on WordReference forums (which are excellent, by the way. I love WordReference). It turns out that in this context, that "tranchete" is actually a corruption of Tranchette, which is a brand name belonging to Kraft, of those little processed cheese slices ( http://www.kraftfoods.es/kraft/page?siteid=kraft-prd&locale=eses1&PagecRef=2300&Mid=2300 ). It suddenly became very clear. Furthermore someone posted that "tranchete" has sort of become a generic way to refer to preformed slices of cheese like this, a bit like "hoover" means any vacuum cleaner in Britain, not just ones made by Hoover. So any sort of processed soft cheese just becomes "tranchete". So you know where this is going... well, someone was referring to the goop that may exist between his toes as such.

Eww.

But from a language point of view it goes further. "Tranchette" itself turns out to be a loanword from French, "tranche" meaning "slice" in French (and I suppose "Tranchette" probably roughly means "slicelet" - I know very little French but I seem to remember -ette being the way the French form a diminutive version of a word). And "tranchete" in this context probably only has meaning in Spain, because I don't think Tranchette cheese slices are sold in Latin America.

Anyway, enough rambling for one evening.

(Actually, I think I can picture exactly what Tranchettes are. According to the Kraft page I linked above, they are those rubbery slices of cheese between film, the kind of thing you use to make cheeseburgers etc. The site says the process came from the US - a friend of mine in the US used to feed them to his dog as treats...)

So my Cagiva Mito is *almost* ready to go on the road - there's just one more bit of electrical work I need to do. I have most of the fairings back on now, and with them on it doesn't look like a puny little 125 but Pure Sex On Wheels. I will take some pics when I put the bottom fairing on.

I actually gave it a short run today (all of 200 yards, up and down the lane by my house) to verify the clutch was operating properly, and gears were getting selected properly, and the speedometer was working. (All were). It also demonstrated I need to make a proper ramp to get it out of the lane and into my back yard, I just laid an edging stone down as a (rather steep) ramp, and I needed to drive it up because it was too steep to push, and the entrance is narrow and it's surprisingly hard to get a bike up a steep gradient through a narrow entrance when the back wheel just wants to spin on the grass... actually the real solution is to put a large door in the back of my shed so I can park it in there.

Once I get the remaining jobs done, I can get it insured, do my CBT and get it on the road.

Well, I can call the sourdough starter a success. I made a pretty standard brown bread with it. My main worry about it was it'd end up being far too sour, but I think it's just about right and will go great as a bacon butty.

Of course, despite passing the butcher's shop twice yesterday, I forgot to buy bacon.

Someone at foro.speccy.org has a Spectrumera for a wife... take a look at this masterpiece of embroidery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/quenerapu/3391220093/in/set-72157613145351169/

Manic Miner...embroidered!

Sitting in the warm cupboard that also has my combi heater (hot water/central heating boiler) is the latest in my experiment in what bugs and fungi I could find in the kitchen. The sourdough dough is in there, proving, lurking like the microbial monster it is.

The starter that I made has been rising amazingly quickly in that location, and the remainder is now in a bowl in the fridge, fed with a bit more flour, where it will probably lurk for years to come *if* the bread turns out good. The starter certainly did smell rather interesting when I got a lump of it to put in the bread dough.

I'm starting off with a straightforward, simple standard bread, just made with sourdough starter rather than baker's yeast, from there I can hopefully judge whether the starter is any good.

I find kneading dough extremely therapeutic and relaxing.

...and it's called a sourdough starter. I just fed the beast for the first time tonight (actually, just building it up - I started it off almost as soon as I got back from the airport). It seems to be fermenting. By Saturday I may be able to do something with it.

I also flew my T-Rex 500 heli for the first time after rebuilding it after The Crash (caused by an improperly set gyro). Unfortunately, it seems like one of my LiPoly battery packs had died so I only had one pack to fly with. But it flies again. I was so tempted to loop it, but the blade tracking is slightly out so I need to borrow the pitch gauge from the model shop again and do some tweaking (I really don't want to try to set the tracking like with the little helis - by looking eyes level at the rotor disc while holding the heli down!) But it flies so well. I think I might need to up the head speed a little bit too, to improve responsiveness.

What do you need when you arrive home after a 10 hour transatlantic flight, 6 timezones, 2 hours schlepping across London to your connecting flight, and no groceries in the house?

A dead car battery...

Somehow I summoned up enough energy to walk to the supermarket.

By the simple expedient of typing "podcast español" into Google, I found on the first hit a Spanish podcast for people learning Spanish. The podcast is given entirely in Spanish (apart from a couple of sentences at the beginning), teaching Spanish in Spanish. Which is just what I want. I've now learned enough that I can hear all the words when spoken, even if I don't understand all of the words. So a podcast teaching more Spanish in Spanish is what I really wanted.

The podcast is at http://www.spanishpodcast.org/

I've listened to two so far. The format so far is a short "story" on some subject. For the first time, she tells the story speaking quite slowly. Then she explains some of the words and grammar constructs (slowly and clearly in Spanish), then retells the story at the speed people in Spain speak (which is VERY fast, I find. I find the news on telemadrid about 5 times harder to understand than BBC Mundo, which seems to mostly have Latin American presenters).

I've probably done most of my learning of Spanish by being taught in Spanish so far (using Rosetta Stone, which doesn't use translations, but rather images of scenes and a description written and spoken), by reading the BBC Mundo website http://www.bbcmundo.com/ and listening to their news podcast, and watching the videos. While at first it was very hard (especially trying to use BBC Mundo which is NOT a language teaching tool but the BBC's Spanish service), it's starting to pay off.

I've also been put in touch with someone from Spain who is flying for Manx2 (one of the local airlines) who needs practise at English, so hopefully I can get together with a native speaker and actually do some speaking with a real live person at some point.