Gran Fondo Barcelona 2016 Review

race number

This year I took part in the second Gran Fondo Barcelona. A Gran Fondo or Sportive is basically a large group ride with a given route, which shouldn't be competitive. The advantage is that you are often travelling on closed roads and there is some support in form of food stops and mechanical support.

I already took part in the 2015 edition, so I knew a lot of the things that were expecting me.

Registration was a lot better this time. It was situated on the top of Montjuic, not far from the Olympic stadium. This time it was held outdoors in a big tent, so it would have been possible to come with your bike. The whole process took only ten minutes or so.
A minor problem was the availability of jerseys, my large version was too large and there were no more mediums available. But they are sorting this out now, so I will have my jersey to remember the ride with a good fit.
As you were required to wear the official jersey on the day I just used the too large version. I don't think requiring these is a good idea. Cyclists are picky about their equipment and I probably would have chosen something a bit warmer. It also makes it impossible to recognise any friends you are riding with. Or yourself on the photos.
Anyway - I got my race pack, which includes the jersey, arm warmers, some energy food and for some reason a pack of beef stock.

sunrise

This time I tried to prepare a bit better than the last time. On the night before I had a massive portion of spaghetti, more than I can usually fit in my belly.

start

Early rise on the day, shower a large muesli and packing energy bars and wind-stopper. It was pretty cold in the morning.

Short ride up to the starting line on Montjuic. I guess there were maybe 600 riders all together. They had the usually horrible euro-techno sound-system and for some reason cheerleaders (!)

stop

From Montjuic we went along the coast to Sitges, where the first food stop was. I skipped that one to keep going a bit faster, but after a kilometre or so we all got stopped by the lead car and basically waited until everyone caught up. This would be a theme that would continue for most of the race. And when we were not stopping the car in front would drive so slow that everyone was riding in one big peloton. This made riding some narrow roads quite tricky.

another stop

I am not a fast rider, but for 120km I was able to see the "leader" in front of me and I even arrived just ten minutes behind him at the finish line. When they said "non-competitive" they really meant it. There was a mention of a minimum speed of 24km/h, but apparently they also enforced a maximum top speed of 30km/h.
At some point we also lost the police escort for further delays.

In the end I only used one food stop to refill my water, with the energy bars I had with me it was enough.

I got away without a puncture too.

medal

But I managed to finish. The finish line is extra special with this Gran Fondo, because it is 10km away from the start, the medal and the pasta party. I heard from some people who didn't know this and so either were surprised by the additional climb or never picked up their medal.

My average over the 138km was 28.88km/h

I would really suggest to move start and finish to the same place. It doesn't have to be in the centre of Barcelona either, which probably would make it easier with space and permits.


Overall I enjoyed myself, but I am not sure I would do it again next year. Compared with Gran Fondo Mussara, which I am doing in May it is just not as well organized. And most of the roads I am riding all the time anyway. It will be more for people who come from other cities and want to also enjoy Barcelona.

In summary, the good parts:

• the route
• registration 
• food stops
• police escort (they where very nice, skilled and helpful)
• the jersey (and replacing it with the correct size)



food stops

• beef stock

the bad:

• distance between finish line and pasta party + medal
• the medal is a bit boring
• "official" and "VIP" cars, they were in the way quite a bit
• slowing down the whole ride, so that really fast riders were probably bored
• random stops

As I said: next sportive is Gran Fondo Mussara mid May near Reus, which will be much harder. Last year I gave up after 120km of 189km. This time I will be hopefully better prepared.

WeLovePHP Talk: Methodologies and tools used by the Splendia development team

Today I gave a talk at WeLovePHP, which is a quarterly talk and workshop series organized by Softonic in Barcelona. They also do one about JavaScript.
I can highly recommend them if you are interested in PHP, JavaScript or related topics.

I talked about the processes and tools we are using at Splendia.
There are no pictures in the slides ... sorry.

Splendia

I must admit that this post comes a bit late. As I have mentioned before, I have left Softonic last year.

The main reason was that it was too difficult to change anything there and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. This might have changed by know.

After Softonic I started at Splendia, where I am still at. Splendia is a hotel booking website focusing on luxury hotels. The company is much smaller than Softonic in every respect.

What drew me in was that they replaced nearly the whole IT team and replaced it with a much more agile team using technologies and methodologies that are industry standards in most PHP companies.
The team is also always open for changes to improve the speed of development.

When we arrived the state of the code was pretty bad. How bad? Well, there were zero unit tests at the beginning of 2012 for example.

By now we have a growing test suite, continuously run through Jenkins. We use github for code reviews, vagrant for workspace virtual machines, cucumber for functional tests, puppet for configuration management and composer to pull in various dependencies including symfony components, doctrine and pear libraries.

I will post some more about how we use these in the future.

Other nice perks: the computers are nice with two big screens, you get to install your choice OS as long as it runs vagrant. The office is located in the centre of Barcelona, which gives a better choice of restaurants and shops. I can also park my bike in the office, which allows me to commute every day now (more about this later too).

There are some things I miss about Softonic though (besides the people there): the pretty office, Spanish classes, free coffee, snacks and the cafeteria for my tea time.
Compared to Softonic the office hours at Splendia are also very rigid, which is annoying.

Well, hopefully more soon...

Leaving Softonic

moving on

Pretty much exactly two years ago I started working for Softonic. I changed from the rather small opus5 to what has been the largest company I have worked for so far.

Working in a company of about 250 people with a development team of around 80 people is certainly a different beast. I learned a lot of things especially regarding scrum management and web technologies. I also learned that it is very difficult to change things once something big like this is in motion.

Size also brings nice things, Softonic offers a lot of "google-style" perks, like massages, conference trips, insurance, free fruits, sweets and soft drinks, a very nice office with chill-out room and great views. If you are interested have a look at: careers.softonic.com. It also means that you will always find someone interesting to talk to.     

But now it is time to move on. I am joining a smaller company with a new team, that I will write about in another post. I will stay in Barcelona though.

I want to thank everyone I worked with at Softonic, especially the brilliant SD team, SEO, the leads, the UK content team (for tea time entertainment) and everyone I chatted to in these years.

Can Kenji

Today I tried a restaurant which has been on my list for a while. Firstly because it is just one block away from my flat and second because it seems to be one of the few authentic Japanese restaurants in Barcelona.

Can Kenji is located in an ugly tower block near Passeig de Sant Joan in the Eixample district. If you don't know it is there it will be difficult to find. The restaurant itself is pretty small with just a handful of tables and a bar at the tiny kitchen.

I took a seat at the bar with good view on the magic happening in the kitchen. I choose the medium tasting menu, which consisted of: a vegetable salad with soy sauce and razor clams, stir fried noodles with clams and mussels, a seared beef fillet, a selection of sushi and finally a ball of sesame ice cream. All together with a water for €17.40.

This was the best lunch menu I had in my time in Barcelona. Every dish was fresh and I was able to watch while it was prepared. The sushi was the best bit, finally a nigiri with rice which didn't taste three days old and fish which melts in your mouth. The stir fired noodles were also amazing.
If I had to nitpick I would say the beef was a bit stringy and the ice too frozen, but I would take it again any time.

You find the restaurant at C/Rossello 325, 08025 Barcelona and on-line at: www.cankenji.com .

Batik

Checked out another Asian restaurant this Friday.

The menu contains a selection of Korean, Thai and Malaysian dishes.

I went for the lunch menu again, which was a Laksa Lemak soup as starter and a merluza with sweet sauce. The soup was nice, the merluza rather bland. The deserts were the usual yoghurt/flan/cake selection, so I went for a coffee.

Because they are one of my favourite dishes I also ordered Thai spring rolls. These are served cold and show their ingredients through their translucent rice skin. Very nice and I will be back to see if the other a la carte dishes are as good.

All together ~ 12 Euro for the lunch menu and 6 Euro for the rolls.

You can find it at C/Valencia 454 or on-line:  http://restaurantbatik.com/

Restaurant

Laksa

Thai Rolls

Merluza

Bembi

Onion Bhaji

Last week I finally checked out Bembi. It is supposed to be one of the few good Indian restaurants in Barcelona. As with Chinese restaurants it seems to be very difficult to find a good one in the rather large selection of Indian restaurants.

I went for the lunch menu, which probably doesn't represent the overall quality because it is rather cheap at about 14€.

The restaurant itself is nicely decorated and non-smoking.

For starters I had the a bit greasy Onion Bhaji, fried onion fritters with a sweet sauce.

The mains was Chicken Assadh, a green curry style dish with a saffron flavoured rice.
 
And for desert the Gulab Jamun, a very nice cinnamon flavoured ice with milk caramel.

Overall the lunch was a good average experience and made me want to check out the taster menu, which is a bit more expensive but probably better quality.

Bembi
www.bembi-barcelona.com
Consell de Cent 377
08009 Barcelona

Chicken Assadh

Gulab Jamun

Menu del Dia

Surprises

Once in the while I do something I haven't done for a while and get surprised by how much fun it is.

Today I wanted to get the ITV (Spanish motorcycle inspection), which has been overdue for a while. I didn't do it because I haven't used it for a while and can't used it because I didn't have the ITV.

Turns out that I needed an appointment, so I run some errands. I got a new zoo membership card and cancelled my old gym. This took me with the motorbike down and along the beach. The weather was beautiful and it was reasonable warm. I saw the beach, smelled the sea and felt the Barcelona air in my face.

Whenever I use the motorcycle I get a smile on my face. I really should use it more often. And it makes me appreciate Barcelona more.

Now - most people would say that it shouldn't come as a surprise that living in Barcelona, enjoying the sun and taking a beautiful bike for a spin along the beach is a nice thing. In fact it is probably a dream for most people - including me.

Sometimes you have to take a step back and take a look at your life and realize that you pretty much got everything you need instead of chasing the next dream. You tend to forget that if you are stuck in your daily routine.

By the way: the picture is from today, but not from the motorcycle trip but a mountain bike ride I did in the afternoon.

And now I am going to make Thai green curry and hack some code.

Nice!

2010 New Year's resolutions

by boite-en-valise

A new year means new resolutions. But first a quick look back at the ones from last year.

On the fail side: I didn't loose weight, neither did I use my motorcycle more or took a lot more advantage of Barcelona. Success on: sorting out my music collection, travelling somewhere new, doing more programming and blogging a bit more.

Now to the next year. I read a bit about these kind of resolutions and how to be better in succeeding. I probably took too much on in the last year and it is better to have some way of quantifying success or failure. So this year I am just taking on three resolutions. I still keep the failed ones from last year in the back of my mind though.

1. Loose weight (again), but this time with a plan. I will try to loose 0.5 kg a month. On the one hand it doesn't seem a lot on the other hand loosing 6 kg in a year seems too much. I will keep track of this and also keep track about my sport activities. To achieve the goal I will have to reduce my lunches with the opus5 guys and increase my sport activities. I will swap my gym for one nearer to my flat. I also will stop eating sweets and snacks.

2. Reduce time spend watching TV, reading e-mails, blogs, facebook and twitter. I will unsubscribe from as many services as possible. Instead I will spend the time programming, cooking, reading, socializing and doing sports. Not sure how I will put that in numbers, as I don't have them for the past, but I will make something up.

3. Do something about my so called "career". This could mean doing something more fun, working less and/or earning more money. Either at opus5, new projects in my free time or something completely new. I will have to see what comes up, but I have twelve months to decide.

2000 to 2009

Now that another decade comes to an end, it is time for me to see if the ten years really were worth the effort. Overall it seems to have been more pain than was strictly necessary.

2000 - it all started quite nice. I just turned 30 and was living in London, just got together with my girlfriend and working for guideguide a very nice start-up which was going quite well at the time. One highlight of the year was a trip to OSCON in California, where I witnessed the beginning of Perl6, which seemed brilliant at the time and now appears a bit pointless.

2001 - will always be remembered for 9/11, someone in the guideguide office heard about it over IRC and we quickly confirmed it on TV. It was also the year where I bought my first iPod, maybe the only trend I ever spotted early. Nobody at the time imagined how either 9/11 or the iPod would shape the future.

2002 - I split up from my girlfriend for a while and decided that this would be the right moment to start drinking alcohol again after ten years.

2003 - guideguide was scaling down a lot now and I had to fire lots of people, which was probably one of the most stressful episodes of my business life so far.

2004 - with not much left of the company I decided I could as well move to Barcelona and work from there. It turned out to be a lot of fun and a lot more relaxed than London. It was also the year where I got ill and fixed up again.

2005 - a bit of work, a bit of travel, a lot of recovery

2006 - I quit guideguide after lots of years. It was a difficult decision, but nobody of the old gang was still around, so I didn't feel too bad. I was also looking for a local job and just being employed for a change. I used the rest of the year to chill and enjoy Barcelona.

2007 - Found a new job at opus5, learned lots of new stuff. For some reason the founder left after I just started, is it me ?

2008 - whatever happened to 2008?

2009 - I decided to stop drinking again, turned out to not be my thing after all. The economy made this year really interesting and I hope it will turn up some new opportunities in the future. Oh, and I turned 40 and I am looking forward to my mid-life-crisis, but that is the topic of another post.

And finally thanks to everyone who made these years more fun then they sound:

• my girlfriend Cat, who makes everything more lovely
• my family: Kathrin, Thomas, Klaus and Ulla, who helped me through some rubbish
• Mikel, who brought me to London
• the guideguide guys: Andy, Adam, Alex, Marc, Rob, Jasper, Ben, Luke, ..., who made me learn a lot and fast
• The Londoners: Anita, Justin and Graham who made it more fun
• Opus5: Dennis & Pablo, where I learned a lot of stuff I didn't wanted to know

So lets see what the next decade brings, maybe a new start and the opportunity to do completely new mistakes!

Here are some random pictures from the past ten years

Barcelona PHP Conference Day 2 #phpbcn2009

Even shorter summary of the second day of the Barcelona PHP conference. (see here for day 1)

Zend_Cache... by Enrico Zimuel

This was a introduction to the cache component of the Zend framework. It pretty much does what you expect: it wraps the common types of caching ( file, apc, memcached, ...) into a common API to make them easy to swap and use. It also has helper objects to support caching of PHP output with output buffering.

The State of Quality Assurance Tools for PHP by Sebastian Bergmann

Mr. PHPUnit gave a short introduction to testing and the PHPUnit framework. He then introduced some of the other tools that can help you with quality metrics of your software, these were:

• phploc - counting lines and more
  
• phpcpd - finding duplicate code
• pdepend / phpmd - static code analysis
• phpcs - code style and static code analysis
• bytkit-clu - more analysis

He then continued to show how you would automate running these and include them in a continuous integration tool like CruiseControl with phpUnderControl or Hudson.

It was a good talk and gave an introduction to the whole process of quality assurance for projects.

Slides

Continuous Integration by Davide Mendola

Another talk about CI, which gave a bit more insight into the tools but because of the previous talk a lot of stuff was repeated and not a lot new information introduced.

One thing was obvious though: nobody is completely happy with the current tools, because they are all Java based and don't fit 100%. There seems to be a market now for new PHP CI tools and I am sure we will see some showing up in the near future. I would also see some of these using a MVC framework instead of being developed from scratch.

And for the hecklers in the back shouting "Xinc" : no release or commit since one year ? Maybe someone should pick that up again. :-)

Symfony 2.0 a sneak peak by Fabien Potencier

Fabien gave a very fast run through some of the new components and designs for Symfony 2.0. A lot of things will change and it will be difficult to port older projects, especially if you have business logic outside your models.

He spent a lot of time explaining the dependency container component and how and why it will be used in Symfony 2.0. I am a bit afraid that this will make things more complicated and difficult to debug or work with in an IDE. I usually don't like to see logic into configuration files, but now I at least understand why he is doing it and what advantages it will have in Symfony 2.0. I just hope I won't see these in every object and sometimes just simple injection is used.

I am looking forward to Symfony 2.0 though, I just got one suggestion to reduce Fabiens work a bit: throw away the Lime testing framework and use PHPUnit. Lime will never match the PHPUnit features and everything you need which isn't provided by PHPUnit yet is probably easy to integrate.

Open Classifieds by Chema Garrido

This was a refreshing different talk by the lone developer of Open Classifieds, which is an open-source classified web application. He developed it from scratch without using any framework (Rasmus would love this), it is very much in the spirit of the KISS talks of this weekend.

If I find time I will certainly have a look at it. And before the security concious object orientated dependency injecting agile caching crowd complains: give the guy a hand with a bit of code review if you find the time.

Open Classifieds Website

Barcelona PHP Conference Day 1 #phpbcn2009

First day of phpconference.es is finished and it was very enjoyable. The location was the same as last year, so was the quality of the organization. I saw six talks, here are small summaries:

KISS by Derick Rethans:

Pretty much a beginners, introduction and common sense talk. Most of it not even directly relevant to PHP. A bit of a disappointment, might have been more interesting for customers than developers.

No slides up yet, but they were very similar to these: Kiss Phpnw08

Trees in the database by Lorenzo Alberton:

A very interesting talk about ways to store trees in a database, which is something everyone has to deal with at some point. He started with the simple "parent-child" method and showed some of the problems with it. Then went through some better versions like the "nested set model", which is for example used in Doctrine. He finished with the "nested interval model", where I think I saw some smoke coming out of some heads around me (and probably mine).

Finally he showed how trees are supported directly in some of the databases and the SQL99 standard.

It would be nice if the "nested interval method" would end up in Doctrine too. And maybe support for the database extensions too, though at the moment I just care for mysql and here is a link with some information how to do the stuff there.

The slides are here: Trees in The Database

Talk by Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus did a two part talk. The first part was about performance and ranged from suggestions to replace lots of expensive library calls with simple echos to introductions into strace, valgrind and xdebug. He likes to complain about frameworks and abstraction, for which he got some angry looks out of the framework corners.

Second part was about security, where he showed some problems through examples in live sites. Because someone twittered about it before he wasn't able to show the ".svn" files on elpais, but he managed to show an interesting XSS exploit on another newspaper page. Then he went on about the "filter" extension, which I don't like much because I see it as just another Swiss army knife function for something which should belong into PEAR libraries or frameworks. One good thing about it is that you can switch it on globally so that you can block most attacks automatically and skip it for special cases, this reminds me a bit of magic quotes though and how much I hate those.

It was very interesting and he is a very charismatic talker, which helps obviously. The questions after the talk came mostly from the framework guys who pointed out that the security part is easier to fix with one of those, because you have centralized points where you can put your security hooks.

And the PHP filter extension is a bit like a "security framework" only that most PHP programmers won't be able to see or change the source.

Most of the people in the audience have different problems to solve than Rasmus, because we need to build websites quick and we don't have the amount of hits that Yahoo gets. But he gave some good pointers and I certainly get my Xdebug profiler out more often.

Ajax for scalability by Erik Schultink

Erik works for Tuenti, which is a facebook clone for the Spanish market. They have millions of hits and more or less the same scalability problems as the original. They use ajax to build the complete page and basically just retrieve json from their servers. He described everything they do to increase their performance, from the server farm set-up, CDN usage and monitoring to the distribution of the image sizes on the website.

This was a very good talk and I wish I had their problems or they would have an office with an opening in Barcelona :-) These are your guys if you want to work for facebook, but live in Madrid.

I wish I had a link to slides, but I don't

Integrating Zend Framework and Symfony by Stefan Koopmanschap

Stefan is the community manager for Symfony and gave some examples of integrating Zend components in Symfony and Symfony components into the Zend framework. He gave some small examples of both ways and introduction to some of the nice components of both worlds.

I definitely have to look more into the Zend framework and see if I can pick some nice things up. The twitter component would have made my life a lot easier while developing krass sets

And there are slides up for the talk.

PHundamental Security by Hans ZaunereDamien Seguy

As the title said: basic security stuff about the typical injection. The slides were a bit confusing at times. Good stuff I picked up: some more evil PHP functions to circumvent register_globals=off, using the tokeniser to find problematic code and using statistic analysis to find problems.

He also mentioned some black-box tools to help find problems in websites, but I forgot them and I can't find slides either.

Tomorrow is day 2, which looks promising again with talks by Herrn PHPUnit and Monsieur Symfony and some other goodies.

New hobby: OpenStreetMapping

I always loved the idea behind OpenStreetMap. Mostly because of my open source experience and sites Wikipedia, these show that with enough people doing a little bit of work in the area they know, it is possible to create results which are better and more free than the conventional commercial offerings.

I remember the time in London, when we had our little start-up and needed location maps for our customers and couldn't find a good provider for this (there was no google maps or map24 at that time). So fools that we were we decided to write it ourself. We got the raw data on CD from TeleAtlas and one of our programmers got pretty far with a renderer. But before we could get anything useful map24 produced a much better version which we started using. But I always have been frustrated by the lack of open map data and open source renderers.

With OpenStreetMap this is now all in the past, the maps are up to the quality of the commercial services in many areas now and the renderers are very good too. In fact the maps are so good that I haven't really had a chance to contribute myself.

But now with my frequent trips to Tibidabo with the mountain bike and my GPS phone I noticed that the OSM maps for that area are full of white spots and are missing most of the hiking and mountain bike routes through the forest, but also some of the tertiary roads.

So I exported some of the tracks I had so far and uploaded them to OSM, this gives everyone working on OSM the chance to use these to create roads on the map. To do this I downloaded merkaartor, which makes it very easy to create roads and places and tag them correctly. There is a Fedora package available, so it was a very easy install. You can also use this to create maps even if you don't have a GPS yourself, just by using the yahoo satellite images or tracks other people made public.

Yesterday I did my first ride especially for OSM to trace some roads and tracks which I haven't travelled with the GPS yet. It took me three hours to ride 30km, which was a lot of fun.

One thing I found difficult is choosing the right tags for the roads and tracks. But it looks good at the moment and if it turns out to be incorrect it is always possible to change later.

Here is an image of the area I am currently working on it is the whole Park de Collserola, around the Tibidabo. I have traced most of the small dotted lines in the current target area and some of the residential and tertiary roads. You can also see the same map on openstreetmap.org.

Turns out this is probably one of the perfect hobbies for me at the moment, as it combines open stuff, mountain biking and gadgets. Now I somehow have to get some programming in there too.

Another look at my New Year resolutions. I decided to do them every four months now, every three was a bit much.

loose weight
fail - I am doing more mountain biking and eat sensible, but I gave up on the gym. Working out with my N79 Active turned out to be a lot of fun.

use my motorcycle more
a little bit more use, small trips and some usage in town. Now I need to get a new ITV.

sort out my music collection
all done. Tapes and CDs are digitized and I got rid of most of the duplicates. Music from podcasts is still a mess, but that can wait for another day.

travel somewhere new
Success - We went to Cadiz for the summer holiday and also checked out Tarifa, Tangier and Gibraltar. I would like to do another weekend trip somewhere, either with the bike or a weekend plane trip.

do more programming
not much happening at work. I started the twitter / tractor top10 website, which was fun. I also took over some packages for Fedora and have two more on review. I also did some programming for the digitization of the tapes and little things on older projects. I would count that as a success.

take more advantage of Barcelona
Saw some arty film stuff, went to the beach more and took full advantage of Tibidabo. Also two trips to the cinema so far: Watchmen and District 9, which are both great. This week is Merce and soon the Air Show and the Red Bull Air Race.

blog more
a little bit better. I think once every two weeks is probably my rhythm :-)

New Year's resolutions (Part 2)

I forgot one:

Take more advantage of Barcelona
I did not spend enough time in the Zoo and the Park or the Beach this year. And I did not use the Chiringuitos, museums or open air cinema. There is a lot of stuff to do and I don't want it to be like London where I did everything in the last two months.

Paris Condal - Restaurant Libanese

View Larger Map

Another lunchtime restaurant review. I ventured over the Gran Via again on the look out for a new restaurant choice for our lunches at work.

Paris Condal is a small restaurant with an attached snack bar. They got pictures of some food in the window, which usually puts me off, but I had a good experience in Andorra so I went in anyway. The restaurant has maybe ten tables and smoking is allowed. I don't understand why anyone would have smokers in a restaurant, but there you go. The bathrooms are dirty like a dark corner in Raval.

The lunch menu is 9.90 EUR and I had dolmades as starter, couscous as main and a cortado.

Dolmades are rice wrapped in grape leaves on a little bit of boring salad. These seem to come from a tin and were certainly neither fresh or handmade. I wonder what is the point to present something like this in a restaurant.

The couscous was nice, a mixture of minestrone and lamb stew with a bit of couscous. It was very well seasoned and not greasy. But I am not sure if I would call it a mains, in another restaurant it probably would make a very nice starter.

The cortado was good and hot, which was nice.

Overall I give this restaurant one star, because I see some potential and I would try it again.

Han In - Korean

View Larger Map

Because my last restaurant review was so successful here is another one. It was also mentioned on the Python Meetup that it is a bit difficult to find good restaurants in Barcelona, because most of them are mediocre, especially for the lunch menu.

I have been there now four times and the food was always good and the service excellent. The lunch menu is very good value for money. For about 10 Euro you get a good sized starter, a main, dessert and a soft drink or wine.

Today I had tempura as a starter, which was very fresh and crispy. Other choices are gyoza style dumplings, korean tortilla, sea weed or miso soup. There is also always a complimentary serving of kim chi, pickled cucumbers and pancakes.

For mains I had spicy Korean beef with rice. In the evening you can get this and other courses also prepared on a barbecue, which is in the middle of each table. For this it is the best to order a few different items and share them between your group as you can always just put one onto the grill. Other options are sushi, noodles and tofu.

I usually don't take dessert but the rice sweets and fried honey bananas are good and my friends seem to like the ice too.

Altogether a very nice experience, all the food is fresh and the service is very friendly.

green&wich

I tried a new restaurant for lunch today to expand the current set of choices. (not everything on there is good)

It is called green&wich, located at C/Villaroel and Gran Via, they don't seem to have a website yet. The location is nice, the space is open to the busy street, the design is minimal and the chairs and tables are a bit wobbly.

They have two menus. I went for the 7.90 one, which gives you a salad, a sandwich, drink and a coffee. I had a rocket, tomato and parmesan salad, which was soggy but still had hard stems in it. A pretty awful combination. The "asia" sandwich was ok, but not much better than the packaged ones you get in the supermarket. Barcelona really does need a Pret-A-Manger to show the locals what fresh a sandwich looks like. I had a cortado for coffee, which still contained coffee powder.

The search continues...

phpconference.es

I just returned from the Barcelona phpconference.es . It was a small on day conference, with just a few talks and not many big names. It was also really cheap at 20€. The organization was very good, especially for Spain. It was held at citilab in Cornellà Centre, which is at the very end of one of the metro lines. There were two rooms with parallel talks. The talks were all in english, which was a change from the last PHP conference. Wifi was available everywhere and there were free drinks and food.

In the morning I got hassled a bit by companies looking for developers, though nothing which convinced me to quit my job yet. I am glad that there are companies like this available in Barcelona though, as they seem to be interested in improving the communitiy through supporting events like this instead of seeing PHP or open source just as the “free beer” option.

I enjoyed the talk about PEAR and the one about xdebug. But none of the talks was really advanced and each one was more or less just an introduction to the topic.

One thing I noticed was the number of netbooks in use by the attendees. I would say the distribution was 30% netbooks, 40% mac and 30% for the rest. I just bought a Asus Eee PC, which is my first portable computer – but more about this another time.

Overall I must say that I am probably not a conference person. I enjoy the talks, but I am not so much av crowd person and probably could get the same information spending a day in front of firefox and youtube. But I will give it a another try next time.

M_NUS @ BAM

Went to see Magda, Gaiser and Richie Hawtin at the Red Bull Music Academy M_NUS @ BAM.

It started at midnight, which is a more civilised time than the usual 3:00 we get here in Barcelona.

Magda was very good, Gaiser was ok and Hawtin had his good moments. I think Hawtin now has the same problem as Sven Vaeth, he is just too popular and his productions and studio mix sessions are way better than his live sets. It is a pity, because I remember a lot of good parties with him a few years ago.

The visuals were also especially good, I have to find out who created them. Also very minimal, abstract and like a good screensaver. It wasn't a projection, but a enormous LED display wall with one part below the DJ desk.

Very good times, can we have more of this please?