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My daughter will probably kill me if she finds out that I posted this photo. But I’m proud of her so I guess she will forgive my good intentions. She is making croquetas, following a recipe she asked from her grandmother, my mother.

She first made a bechamel sauce stuffed with small bits of jamón ibérico, Spanish ham cured in salt. Then she made small balls, coating them in wheat flower, egg and bread crumbs. She made around 80 of these croquetas.

She fried a dozen of them for our dinner and saved the rest in the freezer. Croquetas make a great appetizer for any nice family meal.

I love cooking. My children have always been quite lazy to help me in the kitchen, but it looks like they are finally finding their own way to basic survival skills. So I’m happy.

🚀 Why I don’t write dev posts – Manu

The reason why I don’t write about dev stuff it’s because, like many others, I suffer from impostor syndrome. I’ve been working on the web for more than 12 years. I’m still convinced I don’t know shit. I scroll through minimal.gallery or OPL, see the work of all those great designers and developers, and reinforce this idea that there are, in fact, countless people out there who are better than me.

And that’s pretty much why I only write shitty and infrequent legal posts at umerez.eu.

🚀 Mastodon and the Fediverse is too noisy. Why?:

Micro.blog is the only Fediverse-compatible platform I know of which truly does away with likes, boosts, follower counts, and hashtags. I wish all social networks removed these pointless stats by default. Maybe offer an option to see them privately but I certainly don’t find the stats to be doing any good publicly. Micro.blog has but a single social component, a Mentions feed. It doesn’t care for any popularity contests, even if you go looking for it. This has made the local community warmer, better welcoming, and more human than other digital places I’ve been to.

And that’s exactly why I’m so happy in Micro.blog.

I know, I know, modern computers don’t need rebooting and yours has been running without a hitch for months on end. But mine just said enough is enough, and started sabotaging my every key press and trackpad drag. So I had to teach it how dumb it actually is. I offered it a reboot, promptly said yes and now it’s serving at my pleasure again. #thoughts

🚀 Simona Halep’s ‘triumph of truth’ after doping ban significantly reduced | Simona Halep | The Guardian

“This ordeal has been a testament to resilience,” Halep wrote on Instagram. “The triumph of truth is a bittersweet vindication that, albeit delayed, is immensely gratifying.”

I’m so happy to know that she is back at last. Go Simona!

I started to read Don Quijote, Blackie Books edition. The book is in Spanish (duh) and this is the description they provide in English:

THE CLASSIC OF CLASSICS IN AN ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR AND VAST DELUXE EDITION: OVER 700 PAGES, 100 NOTES, A PHOTONOVEL, QUOTES, AND COLORFUL GRAPHIC MATERIAL. Accessible at last: free of academicism, but keeping its full literary power, everyone who has ever wanted to read it will find their edition of choice in Quixote Freed. An agile text, version of Gonzalo Pontón, Hispanic scholar. Chapter selection by Agustín Sánchez, Cervantine authority. DON QUIXOTE IS MORE THAN A BOOK. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza do not live in the page alone. In over four hundred years since its publication, both characters have frequented music and painting, cinema and advertising, theater and poetry, and popular culture. Quixote Freed includes numerous audiovisual resources (film clips, music, poetry, etc.) that are activated via QR codes. A MOVIE QUIXOTE. In 1957, Soviet director Grigori Kózintsev, of Ukrainian origin, filmed what is considered the best movie adaptation of Don Quixote, with Nikolai Cherkasov (Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible) in the leading role. It was the first Soviet film to be released in Spain, in 1967. The full movie is accessible through the QR code in the book. Also, we extracted from the movie the most celebrated episodes of the book and arranged them as a photonovel.

My daughter baked chocolate chip cookies for the first time. She found the recipe online, and apart from a little help from me turning on the oven, she made them all by herself. She was disappointed with the final result and did not like them, she said they’re dull. I did like them. I could eat cookies made out of cardboard.

I took a minute to write down the rage episode I had this week. I’m not proud of it, but I made peace with myself. I took time to write every detail and confront my behavior. I can’t say it won’t happen again, but it is true that it does not happen very often and that, when it happens, it’s a very short burst of anger. I wrote it down on paper and it will stay there.

This looks too much like a journal entry. I don’t like journals. I’m not consistent enough to keep a journal so I don’t like them.

🫣🙈

I have given up on my country’s politics. I don’t feel represented by any of the multiple choices that compete in Spain. All political parties, regardless of their apparent ideological differences, have sequestered democracy for their own purposes. They only act for their own benefit and if it serves the purpose of gaining or maintaining power. No political leader talks to or thinks about all the people anymore. When they say “the people”, they are only thinking about “their people”, the ones who voted or could vote for them. Policies are not proposals for the Country’s well-being or progress, they are weapons that are thrown with contempt against the other side of an imaginary political spectrum. There is no checks and balances any more, all State Powers are in the hands of the political parties. Only a few independent judges resist in their every day lives in court. None of them have real power to change anything about how the country is governed.

In the Basque Country, a small region in the bigger State, the two main parties still talk about policy. And I really think they still believe in good policy. The problem here is that of the main political ideology, though, which is nationalism. At the best, it makes me sick how many times a day we repeat ourselves that there’s no better place than this and better people than us. At the worst, although nationalism is cool as long as it looks like a small country looking for its place in the world, we know how much pain and sorrow it has caused in our past, and we certainly know it is a seven headed hydra in the long run.

Looking at my countries (both the small and the big one) and the world around me, my only hope is in the small people. In you and me, in that, the day we meet in the field, because that day will arrive, we will not be willing to kill each other. Instead, that we will believe that we are brothers and sisters that need and want to live together. We will prevail over the leaders that sent us there. That’s my hope.

🚀 Notes on meaning, career, writing and blogging – Ratika Deshpande:

The mistake I was making, and which I think many of us are making, in a zeitgeist where people think that you should make a living doing what you love and retire early, is believing that narrative.

Here’s what I’ve learned: the thing that pays the bills does not have to be the thing that you enjoy doing. And the thing that you enjoy does not have to be the thing that helps you do good in the world. Here again, we suffer from the idea that we must maximize the good we do (or the profit we make). Of course, if we are able to do that, that’s great, but anything less than “the maximum possible” isn’t bad.

This is really helpful for me, in these times where I don’t feel good about all the time that I give to the thing that pays the bills and the very little time that I have for the things that I enjoy doing. I’m constantly thinking that I need to streamline my productivity so that I have more time for my personal stuff, and the only thing I do is make more time to work more. Ratika has given me a couple of good clues to think about.