Gunnar Wolf

Just echoing what happens in Planet Debian for people who follow my blog (or any other planet where it is syndicated) and is interested in DebConf processes — I'm specially thinking about people interested in preparing a bid for hosting a future DebConf, as well as people organizing hacking conferences who are interesed in understanding how DebConf works:

Richard Darst, a.k.a. our very invaluable MrBeige, started a series of posts describing various processes of DebConf organization. He explicitly asked me for comments while this series was still in planning/wiki stage, but I failed miserably at doing so ;-) So at least I'll publicize his work, linking from here:

1. DebConf and Debian: Introductory message, basically outlining (Richard's view on) the relation between Debian and DebConf. This is not yet a clear thing — It seems we are converging on the fact that DebConf *is* part of Debian, but there are several things to clear before it is viewed as a done deal.
2. Timeline of a DebConf: Running a DebConf as a local team is not (just) becoming crazy for two weeks, leaving life behind ans working hard for having your friends and peers in your hometown. It is an interesting full two year process, with different phases and aspects for the work. Richard has been involved as an organizer for the last two years, and he summarizes the main periods here.
3. What is the DebConf team?: We talk about the localteam and the globalteam as if those terms make any sense. Then again, we have had people as part of localteam who live in different countries... What does this mean? What are the tasks of the teams? How do you join? What kind of work is expected from you? What is the real difference between the teams, if there is any?
4. The DebConf selection process: How does the next year's venue selected? How is this "contest" held? When do you have to submit your proposal? How is it ranked/judged/decided? As I have told several people, the first document you should check is always the location checklist (also linked from Richard's text), but having this timeline will surely help you know what to expect.
5. How DebConf manages money?: How should the DebConf fundraising process be, and how it actually is; what is the money relation with the whole Debian project... and a couple of points where you can step in and help, as managing money is really difficult
6. DebConf budgeting for a single conference: A bit further details on how fundraising, negotiations and money spending was handled for DebConf 10
7. The DebConf registration process: What are the parts of our registration process? When does it open/close? Why are the deadlines set so early? How has this been determined in the past? What is corporate and professional attendance?
8. DebConf Fundraising (this text by Pablo Duboe): If you want to host a DebConf, an important part of the job is to get money. How should you do it? Who should you ask, what can we show to potential sponsors, how can we approach them?
9. How DebCamp relates to DebConf: What is DebCamp? What are the terms for participation? what can you expect to have (and to lack)?
10. The DebConf travel sponsorship process (this text by Michael Schultheiss): How is the money for travel sponsorship (travel fare only, lodging and food not included here) awarded to the people requesting it? How does the team reviewing this work decide on whom to grant to? What are the decision criteria?

I don't know if MrBeige is planning further parts for this series; if the past four were interesting, you should check on his weblog. Update: Yes, he is planned, and he has delivered. Adding them to the list as they flow...

During DebConf, I managed to squeeze out of the middle of everything for long enough to write a column, a short article for a participation I have every three months, for Mexican Software Gurú magazine. All in all, I liked the resulting text — The current number's main topic is alternative user interfaces.

I find it sometimes hard to define what Software Gurú's audience is — Probably, project leaders in software development; not the actual developers, but people who actually understand about coding... but care more about The Big Picture, Processes, Architecture Engineering and Buzzword Compliance. It is an interesting magazine, all in all, but with a focus and viewpoint I often feel myself not precisely comfortable with.

So, if this trimester's topic was alternative user interfaces, I decided to write on the history and future of the man-machine interface (Spanish only) (version in the magazine's site). My viewpoint comes from the fact that I do not believe we are in a state of so great, innovative changes that everybody is trumpeting, and I'd rather get others to really think on whether user interfaces have gone different in the last decades. Yes, there are many changes, but in form rather than essence.

Anyway, I shared this text with some friends. Some days later, when I was back in Mexico, Pooka/Alejandro Miranda lent me a very interesting book: Hacer clic: Hacia Una Sociosemiotica De Las Interacciones Digitales (Do click: Towards a Socio-semiotics of Digital Interaction (Cibercultura)), by Carlos Scolari. I am not yet even halfway through it, but I am enjoying it — This book speaks, so far, about the meanings of interfaces, and of the history of interfaces themselves, even forgetting that nowadays we (mostly) refer to interfaces as what we have between the man and the machine.

Sadly, I cannot find this book in English, as it is very well worth a read. But if the topic sounds interesting and you can understand the language, don't hesitate and pick up the book. It gives an interesting insight on the topic, for a group of people (us techies) used to looking at things in a much more human-cognitive-process-oriented way.

[update] I found this nice overview of the "Hacer clic" book, written as a presentation for the book. It explains precisely the part I am currently reading - The four metafora for interaction: Conversational, instrumental, superficial and spatial.

Online translators are not hot news anymore. Not by a long, long shot. Still, today I wanted to get a couple of words in Latin. And was amazed that Google's translation service does not (yet?) offer Latin as an option, so I turned to Translation Guide's free online translators.

And, as it always happens, I thought, hmmm... and what about the random ramblings on my site?

So on I went to Gunnar Lupus alio domus. Of course, several funny things popped up, many of which I don't think are proper Latin, but still, among lotsa' nonsense, I found that Planet Debian gets translated to Plagiarius Debian — Which possibly explains why many people have complained about other unauthorized planetoids plagarizing their posts!

This Monday, Debian celebrated its 17th birthday. Yay!

I was invited to celebrate the birthday at HacklabZAM, but could not make it due to the time (17:00-19:00, and I was just leaving work by 19:00), but still, had some beers with long-time geekish friends Iván Chavero, Rolando Cedillo, Manuel Rabade and Odín Mojica. Nice hanging around, good beer+pizza time, and explicit congratulations to Debian.

On the Debian front, Margarita Manterola, Maximiliano Curia, Valessio Brito and Raphael Geissert came up with a very fun Debian appreciation day page. It even included a (slight) hijacking of the bug tracking system's Web interface, showing happy fun balloons! Guys, thanks for a good laugh, and thanks for providing a vehicle for getting the users' thanks to the project!

All in all, that was a great reminder to what we have been repeating as a mantram throughout the last years: Lets keep Debian fun!

So, DebConf time is over once again. The two weeks worth of fifty weeks waiting are left behind once again, and it's back to get back to normal. DebConf was great — Yes, it always is, and that's what we are all saying, but hey - Seriously! Being in the same building than 300 crazed developers is always fun, and it's always better than last year's fun. A good highlight this year is that, given the number of Free Software and Free Culture groups that exist in USA's north-eastern coast, we had the opportunity to join a large crowd which has never been part of DebConf. Also, I must agree that the USA bid for DebConf was aiming to attract as many Debian people (developers, maintainers, or just happy users) which had not yet been to a DebConf before as possible. And it was a great success! I finally met several people I have long read in the mailing lists, in blogs or in IRC. A much higher proportion than usual, I'd venture to say. Another interesting phenomenon /methinks is that this year's DebCamp started much more staffed than usual: I arrived on the first day, Sunday 25, and there were ~40 people there already; I don't have the actual numbers, but we quickly grew, and the number started to stabilize past mid-week, only to (sharply) rise in the weekend, in time for DebianDay and DebConf start. Great time!

But, they say, nobody can go to the USA without buying some sweet toys, right?

Well, being the proud owner of six very hairy cats, I have thought into entering the looming and weaving industry... But cat hair, while abundant, I have heard is untreadable... Maybe due to the indisciplined, natural and independent personality of the cats (catonality should I say?)...

So I had two choices: Clean up my home quite often, or live in a –literally– hairy mess.

Enter choice #3: The Roomba!

I had been waiting to buy this thing for several years, as they refuse to send to Mexico or charge Mexican cards. So, I walked across Manhattan and got my very own robot cleaner!

For my further surprise, although I have not yet tried it (I don't even have a suitable cable yet), I found this:

Yay, the Roomba is actually hackable (via a 7 pin miniDIN serial port)! Wikipedia says that:

Roomba comes with a Mini-DIN TTL serial interface, which is incompatible with standard PC/Mac serial ports and cables, both electrically and physically. However, third-party adapters are available to access the Roomba's computer via Bluetooth, USB, or RS-232 (PC/Mac serial). New, 500-series, and 410/420 series Roombas upgraded with the OSMO hacker device allow the user to monitor Roomba's many sensors and modify its behavior. The Roomba Open Interface (formerly "Roomba Serial Command Interface") API allows programmers and roboticists to create their own enhancements to Roomba. (…)

My first impressions? Well, the Roomba lazily charged its battery throughout the day today, and was hungry and ready when I arrived home. It is a but louder than what I expected, and –of course– my cats were not thrilled by the presence of a eighth animated and apparently sentient being at home. Their initial reaction was –of course– to be verrry alert of the thing. Twelve eyes were constantly pointing at the Roomba while mine alternated between them. As they measured the thing's speed and (I guess) inferred its movement patterns, they started escaping upstairs – A flat, round thing with no legs to be seen will not likely be able to climb the stairs. And they were completely right. At first, only Chupchic remained downstairs. After a bit, I went up to show them the Roomba didn't jump on us to eat our brains, and after a bit, Santa and Macusa joined. The Roomba roombed for maybe 90 minutes (this space is large, and decided it was enough... And slowly, the rest of them started coming down.

I would not say Roomba's cleaning is perfect, of course. Its room discovery algorithm is funny, and it even seems it's based on the mere chance of covering most (never all) of the space it has to clean. I had, of course, not fully studied it (after a single run, how could I?). It does make a honestly good attempt at cleaning under coaches, chairs and tables. It collected a fair amount of dust (on a house that seemed quite clean to me, I cannot imagine what would happen on a messy one). I have not yet played with the virtual walls (infrared transmitters which limit rooms as if a door was closed), but given the size of this house (and that I don't want it to clean around the cats' designated bathroom area), I guess I will end up using them regularly.

During DebConf, I heard one bad (stupid useless noisy thing) and two very good (it has radically changed my life) comments on the Roomba. I hope to shift the balance towards 3/4 and not towards 2/2!

Anyways... Thanks to each and every one of you. DebConf is great. Always great. Always a success. I cannot even thank specific teams. Debian Rules, and DebConf Rocks!

If you have seen me anywhere near my computer at DebConf, you probably have seen the face of a hurried, worried developer. Still, if you monitor my Debian-related activity, you will notice it is still quite low, even given my (much needed and very much enjoyed) vacations pre-DebConf. Yes, orga-team work is very time consuming, even if my role is far from central this year. And yes, DebCamp+DebConf are known for sucking time into social interaction, which is great but not so (formally) productive. And yes, I even took 1.5 days off to visit my family and a friend who live in the area...

Still, I managed to release! \☺/

Release what?

I have been working with Pooka for the last ~2 years on the Seminary on Collaborative Knowledge Construction. We assembled a group of ~10 speakers/authors, each of whom prepared a chapter for a book meant for publication. Pooka and me coordinated the work, which took a long time because it was also an interaction experiment (and because we both did it only in our free time).

After the coordination work started fading, I took up the task of coming up with a way to translate it all into LaTeX (and fix a host of conversion bugs, and play with the available packages, and... Hey, I'm after all just a LaTeX newbie, and had to learn to tame the beast!), I stumbled upon that precious fact that makes so many projects release.

I stumbled upon a deadline.

We want to publish the book under the seal of IIEc-UNAM. Besides my workplace, it is a very well regarded university, and having its seal in our work is definitively a big plus. And the Publications Committee of my Institute is meeting this week - So I had to send our final manuscript by today.

Having a deadline overlapping with DebConf sucks. But somehow, I managed to do the needed work to my complete satisfaction. The work is now in the Committee's hands, and I expect to have more news soon(ish).

Oh, and where can you get our work? Well, if you register in our site, you will be able to read the whole contents. And once the book is approved and published, the whole work will be published online under a free (CC-BY-SA) license.

BTW, that probably means I will have more time to fix my Debian bugs and pending stuff! \☻/

If Tim can report his movements around New York, so can I! ;-) Sadly, due to Nokia deprecating my still-quite-new N95 phone by not allowing me to use their service anymore, I won't be able to share my routes with you – But anyway…

This morning I decided to take a quick run to start off the day on Riverside Park (the park where we had dinner yesterday). I went South for about 3Km and headed back (for, you guessed right, a grand total of 6Km), and decided that 45 minutes of exercising are enough to declare my day started - As I started at ~8:15, it was getting warm (specially when running under the sun). I am quite heath-intolerant; it's not unpleasant at all, but I will try to run earlier on future days.

Riverside is a long and narrow park. I ran Southwards by the lower trail, in the park itself, but ran Northwards by the upper trail, in the wide sidewalk between the street and the park. The way South was also way flatter, while the way back goes up and down repeatedly.

I don't think I will run on a daily basis, but that will be determined by my mood when I open my eyes in the morning ;-) Anyway, riverside is a very nice run, and I expect to head North. I still am not back to running ~10Km, so I won't do the Central Park trail Tim did - But I'll surely go run there as well a bit. And rent a bike one of this days for a ~2hr morning ride, of course!

I spent the past three weeks away from basically any kind of usual contact. I took a three week vacation in Argentina (Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Tucumán, Salta, Jujuy, Córdoba), got my first snow experience and enjoyed a real lot... But got completely disconnected from all of my usual activities... and responsabilities :-}

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I landed in New York. Arrived to Columbia around 2PM, and spent most of the day zombying around with the Debian crew. And today it starts feeling like the real job is starting.

As always, there is a lot of excitement when DebConf starts. I have many items I want to work on, and most are even Debian related ;-) So, lets get work flowing!

At keyring-maint, we got a request by our DPL, querying for the evolution of the number of keys per keyring – This can be almost-mapped to the number of Debian Developers, Debian Maintainers, retired and deleted accounts over time since the keyrings are maintained over version control.

Stefano insisted this was more out of curiosity than anything else, but given the task seemed easy enough, I came up with the following dirty thingy. I'm sure there are better ways than cruising through the whole Bazaar history, but anyway - In case you want to play, you can clone an almost-up-to-date copy of the tree: bzr clone http://bzr.debian.org/keyring/debian-keyring/

#!/bin/perl
use strict;
my ($lastrev, @keyrings, %revs, $fh);
open $fh, '>growth_stats.txt' or die $!;
 
@keyrings = sort qw(debian-keyring-gpg debian-keyring-pgp 
                    debian-maintainers-gpg
                    emeritus-keyring-gpg emeritus-keyring-pgp 
                    removed-keys-gpg removed-keys-pgp);
 
system('bzr unbind'); # Huge speed difference :-P
$lastrev = `bzr revno`;
 
for my $entry (split /^---+$/m, `bzr log`) {
    my ($rev, $stamp);
    for my $line (split(/\n/, $entry)) {
	next unless $line =~ /^(revno|timestamp): (.*)/;
	$rev = $2 if $1 eq 'revno';
	$stamp = $2 if $1 eq 'timestamp';
    }
    $revs{$rev} = { stamp => $stamp };
}
 
spew('Revision', 'Date', @keyrings);
system('bzr bind')
 
for my $rev (sort {$a<=>$b} keys %revs) {
    system("bzr update -r $rev");
    spew($rev, $revs{$rev}{stamp}, 
	 map {my @keys=<$_/*>;scalar(@keys)} @keyrings);
}
 
sub spew {
    print $fh join('|', @_),"\n"
}

And as a result... Yes, I fired up OpenOffice instead of graphing from within Perl, which could even have been less painful ;-) I had intended to leave graphing the data raw (also attached here) as an excercise to the [rl]eader... But anyway, the result is here (click to view it in full resolution, I don't want to mess your reading experience with a >1000px wide image):

A couple of notes:

• Debian Developers are close to the sum of debian-keyrings-pgp and debian-keyrings-gpg
• After a long time pestering developers (and you can see how far down the tail we were!), as of today, debian-keyrings-pgp will cease to exist. That means, no more old, v3, vulnerable keys. Yay! All the credit goes to Jonathan. Some last DDs using it are still migrating, but we will get them hopefully soon.
• To be fair... No, the correct number is not the sum. Some people had more than one key (i.e. when we had ~200 keys in debian-keyring-pgp). The trend is stabilizing.
• Of course, the {removed-keys,emeritus-keyring}-{pgp,gpg} will continue to grow. Most removed keys are a result of tons of people migrating over from 1024D to stronger 4096R keys
• You can easily see the points where we have removed inactive developers (i.e. the main WAT lack-of-response, as seen at about ¾ of the graph)
• keyring-maint handles the Debian Maintainers keyring since late 2009. There is a sensible increase (~10% in six months), although I expected to see that line grow more. I think it's safe to say the rate of influx of DMs is similar to the rate of influx of DDs - Of course, many DMs become DDs, so the amount of new blood might be (almost) the sum of the two positive slopes?

Anyway, have fun with this. Graphics are always fun!

With due apologies and thanks to my dear and crazy friend UCH:

Once upon a time

Once, because twice would be a repetitive story

A king

One, because two would mean war

Who was married to a queen

One, because two would be drama

They had a princess daughter

One, because two would be a mess

Who was in love with a knight

One, because two would be a soap opera

He was given the task of killing a dragon

One, because two would be a titanic feat

The hero had an idea

One, because two would be asking too much

Using a unique magic sword

One, because were they two, it would no longer be unique

With which, he took the dragon's life

One, because it was a dragon, not a cat

Then they proceeded with the wedding

One, because two would mean bigamy

And they lived happily forever

One, because two forevers would be like two infinites

The end

One, because two ends would be complicated

The bad translation is completely my fault.

I have been recently approached by several friends, from different countries. Mexico and the violence seems to be a frequent news topic all over the world.

I live in Mexico City, as ~25% of the country's population does. This is not an easy city, of course, and I won't deny it has tons of problems of its own. However, Mexico City (and even more so the approximately ⅓ of it that is politically located in Distrito Federal, the formal country capital) is very lucky in this regard. Still, in most of the country, the violence is mostly in the news, mostly a worrying perception that is every day more insistent.

My parents live in Cuernavaca, Morelos, ~80Km south from us. Morelos has been known for decades for being the druglords' getaway and safe haven, so it remained a mostly peaceful state for most of this time. This has changed, and at some points during this year, militarization feels quite creepy... Fortunately, just for a couple of weeks, and then back to what seems like normal. The real problems in Morelos is the undeniable corruption of its successive governments, the lack of regard for the population, the inexistent urban planning...

However, I know from several friends living in the North of the country (and all along the very long border - The most drug-related violent states nowadays are Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, with only two states in the South — Michoacán and Guerrero) that violence is really felt by local population on the streets. Some friends say they have grown used to hearing shootings (Durango), others say that it is now usual that the cartels openly strangle the city's vial system with the express purpose of showing off their strength (Monterrey, Nuevo León, one of Mexico's most important cities and taken in the past as a token of industrialization and first-world-like life conditions... Just don't look towards the poor areas). About Chihuahua, I'd rather not even talk, as by all accounts (official even) it rivals Iraq in the lack of control the government has of its territory.

Still, with all that as background... I am afraid of what I read today in the news. I know a single declaration is not enough to worry about (as said in El Quijote, «una golondrina sola no hace verano», a single swallow does not mean it's summer), but those things always start small... Until they explode. La Jornada reports that The retired general Luis Garfias Magaña recommends suspending constitutional guarantees in the country to be able to properly fight violence.

The last century we had a sad and long history of cases where the military took over civilian power and suspended the constitutional rights in basically every nation in Latin America — Except for Mexico. Not one of those cases was overall successful. Not one of them went by without raging abuses, without terrible consequences. I don't see imminent we will go over to a military rule nor anything close to it, but the environment is getting each time closer to how it was like before said rights suspension. We should learn that it is just not the way, it leads nowhere.

I am convinced, and will keep insisting on it at every ocassion, that the only possible way to fight violence is by reducing the social distance, and that should be achieved most importantly by reducing poverty, but also by making it harder to become incredibly rich. Mexico's percentage of poor people has grown over the last decades, but at the same time, the amount of wealth concentrated in very few hands has grown much faster. A society with terribly rich and terribly poor people leads to hatred, leads to desperation, leads to violence. A flatter society, even if the overall standard was to be somewhat lower, tends to a better equilibrium. And yes, I know the original problem with drugs is that Mexico is a great transit area for drugs to reach the USA (and I could also rant about drug legalization — I won't, it's late and I must go to work), but the main fuel for young people to leave everything behind and take the risk of starting a life of open ilegality is the lack of future they face all life long. That leads many to risk their lives attempting to cross the border to the USA (Mexico "exports" 500,000 people every year), but also lures them to jobs where they will have easy money... In exchange for their lifes, ultimately.

Anyway... Just to repeat and round off: The answer to this problem is not repression, is not policial or military strength. Our only way out is through social justice.

Grah.

I got my current phone (a Nokia N95) back in January 2008. It was the first phone I ever paid for, and I don't expect that to change - The feature set I need from a phone is extremely basic, but I wanted to have a GPS unit on me, without needing to plan for it beforehand. As I recently blogged, I just got over the 5000Km mark (5269 as of last Friday), with almost daily usage since I registered.

A couple of days ago (although please note I don't log in often to the web page, I just upload my , I was greeted by this gem:

IMPORTANT NEWS

Thank you Nokia Sports Tracker beta users!

After two and a half years of operation, the Nokia Sports Tracker beta service will close as of June 30, 2010. Thanks to all of you exercise enthusiasts who used the service and contributed valuable feedback to its improvement.

We want you to stay active. You can keep tracking workouts through a new, non-Nokia service provided by Sports Tracking Technologies available for free in the Ovi Store. The new service is open for registrations at sports-tracker.com, and you'll even be able import your workout history from Nokia Sports Tracker until August 31, 2010.

In my case, instead of Thank you they could have just said Fuck off. They are directing me to a new application available in Nokia's Ovi store. Of course, this application is linked to a new 100% Flash-powered website. That would be a big turnoff for me, yes, although there are many ways around it (after all, I don't need the website functionality every day). However, I find the list of supported phones does not include the N95 (any version). This means, my two year old phone (which I bought as soon as the model arrived in Mexico) is obsolete now and they want me to (spend more money and) switch to a new one. Am I going to do that? Hell no!

The N95 phone is quite good. The only gripes I have is with the (slow, buggy and memory leak and phone crash prone) Symbian S60 operating system. I will probably keep using the SportsTracker application, although I won't be able to link my tracks as easily as I do today.

So... Dear lazyweb, do you know of any similar program? The feature set I use in Sports Tracker is:

1. Have different activity profiles. I use Running and Cycling, and very ocassionaly Walking.
2. Of course, GPS tracking, getting average and top speeds, altitude profile, etc.
3. Aggregation into something website-friendly
4. The ability to do my uploads post-factum (i.e. do not rely on a data plan, allow me to upload my excercising when I get home)

There are probably more things I'd want. But I am a geek, and I basically enjoy tracking myself, and sharing my tracks with $world.

Thanks, dear lazyweb. I am confident you won't let me down.

For the second time (First time was in 2008; I didn't join in 2009 as I travelled to Nicaragua on that date), I took part of the World Naked Bike Ride. The WNBR is a global effort, where people in ~150 cities all over the world go cycling nude on the streets of our towns, with varied demands, including:

• Safe conditions for cyclists (mainly aimed at car drivers, at the society at large, but also requesting proper infrastructure measures from our respective governments)
• Raising the consciousness that every individual has a bit of power to free us all from oil-produced pollution
• Tolerance, acceptance of people who are not exactly like us
• Lower the ecologic impact of humans against the world

One of the things I most like about WNBR is its diversity. Not everybody goes for the same reasons. As people who read me often will know, I took part because I believe (and act accordingly!) that the bicycle is the best, most efficient vehicle in –by far– most of the situations we face day to day, but we need to raise awareness in everybody that the bicycle is just one more vehicle: On one side, we have the right to safely ride on the streets, like any other vehicle. On the other side, we must be responsible, safe drivers, just as we want car drivers to be.

Ok, and I will recognize it before anybody complains that I sound too idealistic: I took part of the WNBR because it is _tons_ of fun. This year, we were between 300 and 500 people (depending on whom you ask). Compared to 2008, I felt less tension, more integration, more respect within the group. Of course, it is only natural in the society I live in that most of the participants were men, but the proportion of women really tends to even out. Also, many more people joined fully or partially in the nude (as nudity is not required, it is just an invitation). There was a great display of creativity, people painted with all kinds of interesting phrases and designs, some really beautiful.

Oh, one more point, important to me: This is one of the best ways to show that we bikers are not athletes or anything like that. We were people ranging from very thin to quite fat, from very young to quite old. And that is even more striking when we show our whole equipment. If we can all bike around... So can you!

Some links, with obvious nudity warnings in case you are offended by looking at innocent butts and similar stuff:

• My WNBR 2010 Mexico photo gallery
• My friend Jesús Wong, professional photographer, was documenting WNBR — His gallery
• Media presence (as far as I have seen):
  • El Universal, Saturday 14:30, reporting the Ride had finished and the streets were again... Safe?
  • El Universal, the note printed in the next morning paper: Pedalling nude, they demand respect towards cyclists
  • La Jornada: Cyclist protest
  • La Crónica: They pedalled bare naked
  • Organización Editorial Mexicana (OEM): Hundreds of cyclists protested nude on Mexico City because of the oil spill — Well... not exactly, but close :)
  • Qué! (España): Around three hundred naked cyclists toured Mexico City
  • rpp.com.pe (Perú): 300 nude cyclists toured the main avenues

As for the sad, stupid note: 19 cyclists were placed under arrest in Morelia, Michoacán because of faltas a la moral (trasgressions against morality), an ill-defined and often abused concept.

Also, by far, most of the comments I have read from people on the media, as well a most questions we had by reporters before or after the ride were either why are you going nude‽ (because that's the only way I'll get your attention!) or But many people were not nude! (nudity is not a requirement but only an option.

Left: British Petroleum's logo. British Petroleum gained international notoriety last April because of the catastrophic oil spill it is still unable to contain in the North of the Gulf of Mexico; so far, the oil has reached the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, and keeps growing and spreading, as probably the worst-ever oil spill. So far, the sea surface covered by oil is larger than several countries in the world. Some sites have very interesting maps that might help understand the importance and size of the spill: BP Gulf Oil Spill Maps in The Daily Green, Deepwater Horizon Incident, Office of Response and Restoration, USA National Ocean Service, Article on Slashdot about quantifying and dealing with the deepwater spill.

Right: Mexico's de facto government's logo. One of the most pushed projects of Felipe Calderón's government (that was fortunately canceled) was to pursue the tesorito de las aguas profundas (little treasure that lies deep in the water); they strongly pushed for a reform in the oil legislation, which is 100% government-funded since 1938, to allow for private investment in orded to build platforms reaching oil deposits 3000m below the Gulf's surface. Yup, precisely like the one that produced this massive spill, although most would probably be bound to much less strict regulation and controls to what they have in the US.

Is the similarity between the two logos just a strange coincidence?

And just to round off my last post (and of course, following a completely non-technical thematic), what is the logical consequence of feeling introspective and blogging just before preparing dinner? Of course — Dinner gets prepared with sharing it in mind. The dish ends up even looking as if meant to be served!

So this was it: One of my simplest and still favorite dishes: Tostadas. But, yes, these are heterodox tostadas, as they share the basic tostadiness (a hard, roasted and cracky toasted corn tortilla with a soft leguminous layer to give it some consistency, and with... stuff on top. Yes, stuff is sometimes too generic, but that's the beauty of it). What did I come up with? In the strict order with which they were approached at feeding time, and described bottom to top:

1. Closest to traditional, top left: Mashed beans, bits of panela cheese with little bits of chipotle and soybean-based vegetarian chorizo
2. Something I have only seen in Guatemala, and which I intend to take a better look at next time I'm there (top right): Mashed frijoles, , cochinita pibil (canned, shame on me, and frankly lacking in taste), grated beet (betabel/remolacha/betarraga/whatnot), grated cabbage
3. The heterodoxiest of them all, and the idea that led me to the others (center): Mashed lima/fava beans (according to Google – habas), cochinita pibil, nopales, and a hint of habanero sauce.

Yum!

[update] On a completely unrelated notice, but not worth opening a third post in a row... Some minutes after I published the earlier post, I got a visit to http://gwolf.org/blog/pleasant-perception-changes?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter. Now, it beats me: I don't use twitter. I don't even care about twitter. And were my message so deep somebody just twitted (twat it?) right away, I still find the time lapse too short. Who's auto-twitting me? Maybe a planet or other such aggregator?