Happy new year 2011

2010 is about to end, and I have many reasons to be happy for the things that happened during 2010, both personal and professional. But I have some close friends who can not say the same, and from a general, economic point of view, it was a hard year.

So it is time to wish you all the best for the new year; hopefully the international crisis will, once and for all, finish, and hopefully all of us will have a pleasant year. "La vida son cuatro días y hay que aprovecharlos".

Carpe diem.

The top 10 posts of this blog in 2010

The end of 2010 is approaching, and thus it is a good time to look back to the content posted in this blog during the last 12 months, and how it was received by the audience.

And I must say I am a bit shocked. Let's explain:

The most read post was devoted to our car, the Fiat Multipla; I wrote a sincere text paying homage to the many qualities of this car, which controversial aesthetics never allowed to receive the deserved success. Much to my surprise, this page -that I considered of interest for very few people- received over 6,000 visits, making it by far the most visited page of Cateto blog in 2010.  I don't know what is exactly the reason for such success, but hey, I'm glad to see that my post contributed to the promotion of this priceless car.

In the rest of the top 10, you can see three clear topics, which correspond to some of my favourite hobbies: Prince music, and related stuff; photography; music; and technology.

The top 2 post was an article where I speculated (before the release of 20Ten) that the next Prince album would be for hardcores. Unfortunately it proved wrong, and we have seen another album in the commercial vein started in 2004 with Musicology. I liked 20Ten, but it is nowhere near the expectations of us hardcores, truth be told.

There were other posts related to Prince, as top 5 (discussing the amazing quality of the release Box O Chocolate, in which different outtakes were included with an unprecedented, pristine audio quality), and top 10 (dedicated to the astonishing show performed by Prince at Parisian "Le New Morning" club).

Among the posts related to photography, we have top 6 (on new Olympus micro4/3 cameras), top 8 (another speculative post describing rumours about other brands joining the micro4/3 standard) and top 11 (focused on the possibility of Pentax joining the mentioned standard). It seems clear this topic attracts the interest of readers.

I left for the end three posts which, strangely, remain in the top 10 although they were posted in 2009:

First, we have the infamous post stating that QuickTime X could play natively flv videos (located this year at top 4); it was a mistake from yours truly, but I was so excited that I submitted it to John Gruber, and it was linked in his blog, daringfireball. This caused massive attention, in spite of my correction when I realized it was wrong.

Then we have at top 7 a little post on the second album of Spanish singer Bebe; for unknown reasons to me, it has also received many visits, although it contained only my appreciation for the unmistikable personality of her way of singing and doing music. Still, I'm happy of this little success.

Finally, we have at top 9 another post made in 2009: it was another little homage from me to the great site Housequaque.com, which was closed at the time of posting. The birth of this blog is directly related to issues derived from Housequake, and I'm glad to see that, still today, in 2010, people are visiting my blog to read words of homage to the best Prince forum ever, Housequake.com.

And this is all for today. Hopefully there will be more interesting stuff posted here, and hopefully we will see a bit more of comments, either of appreciation or critic, so that the author of this blog can have a proper feedback to check what readers think about Cateto blog.

Walking around the Mezquita in December 2010

I admit this topic is maybe too recurrent, but what can I do if I live in a beauty of city like Córdoba?

Sufjan Stevens and The National: Christmas songs

2010 must be one of the most productive years in Sufjan's career: after releasing an EP and a CD (which to all respects equal to two full albums already in 2010), he just released his traditional collection of songs for Christmas: Sufjan Stevens and The National: Christmas songs.

You can listen the whole album at Consequence of Sound.

Why I'm an atheist

I saw today this article written by Ricky Gervais, posted in The Wall Street Journal, and many of my own way of thinking is reflected in it. Besides, you can hardly see articles defending the atheism in US newspapers, let alone a conservative newspaper like The Wall Street Journal. So I think this piece is quite bold to deserve being read quietly.

Review of Pentax K-5 at dpreview

After a long wait, it is finally there: the review of Pentax K-5 at dpreview.

It's strange, as I have the feeling they are somehow reluctant to give full praise, but the camera is so good that they can't do otherwise. Fun days in the world of photography.

Catholic church getting unregistered properties in Spain

A couple of days ago, while zapping tv, I found a documentary on a legal concept which is possibly a particularity of Spanish law: in 1946 or so, a new law was established. According to it, the Catholic church is enabled to put under its ownership different properties that are unregistered. As strange and weird as this looks on first regard, the documentary showed different cases where the Catholic church was getting properties, usually churches which had been originally built by the municipality of small villages, upon their own expenses. In many cases, neighboors were describing that they had personally contributed to pay in part, or in full, those buildings.

It seems many of these villages are currently engaged in a lawsuit against the Catholic church, in order to recover these properties. But the very fact of seeing that these facts are covered, and protected, by an old law promulgated in Franco times, is truly shocking; and it is even more shocking that this law has not been derogated in the 35 years of democracy in Spain, since 1975.

In my view this thing, called in Spanish "inmatriculaciones", can be called also with an old name: thievery.

Here you can see the full documentary, in Spanish.

Estrella Morente sings "Habanera imposible" in his father's homage

I'm plain speechless:



If this is not moving, I don't know what is.

The arsenic-utilizing bacteria that never was?

The recent publication in the top scientific journal Science of a paper describing a kind of bacteria enabled to replace phosphorus by arsenic has made loads of headlights in the world of science. And with good reason, since if these results are true, they mean a revolution in the current understanding on how the molecules of life are made.

Yet this paper has received loads of criticism and the controversy is reaching such levels that I would not be surprised if this paper is eventually retracted. We will see.

In the mean time, you can read a full history of this publication and the critics at this blog.

Sony 16 mm f 2.8 NEX pancake lens, trashed by DSLR Magazine

Sony introduced some months ago, with much fanfare, the new NEX mirrorless compact cameras system, hyping its supposedly better image quality, related (in theory) with its bigger APS-C  sensor size (compared to other similar systems, as the micro 4/3 models from Olympus & Panasonic).

Well, it seems there was much more hype than actual quality. The reputed site DSLR Magazine has posted an in depth test of the new 16 mm NEX lens, and they basically are trashing it; furthermore, they detected a clear improvement in the production models, vs the pre-production ones; but still they state that the image quality is not up to the expected standards.

As someone said before, All that glitters ain't gold.

TV special of Séptimo de Caballería on Enrique Morente

Séptimo de Caballería was a tv series devoted to live music shows of all classes. It was directed by famous Spanish singer Miguel Bosé, and it is well known for Prince fans because one of the shows focused on Prince.

But today we are speaking about Enrique Morente, and I discovered that Spanish tv has made available the full show I mention above. You can watch it here, and let me say it is a truly stunning show, well worth to watch even if you don't understand Spanish.

In homage of the great Morente, one in a class apart.

The digital story of the Nativity

Times change, feelings remain the same

Enrique Morente, a Master of flamenco, died

Reading the press today, I discovered that Enrique Morente is currently in "brain death", and his life is only supported by machines. It happened after a surgery, according to recent reports. These are very sad news for all music lovers, and particularly for those interested in flamenco.

Enrique Morente was currently possibly the most reputed musician of flamenco, and one of the very prime figures in Spanish music. I was lucky enough to see one of his peaks of all time: his collaboration with the rock band Lagartija Nick, Omega, in a live gig which is among the most impressing music shows I have ever seen.

The authority of Morente in the world of flamenco was undisputed, and it enabled him to make from the most traditional pieces in the most orthodox style, to avantgarde works like the above mentioned Omega. He was one of the rare musicians whose authenticity was never challenged by his approaches to other kinds of music.

May Morente rest in peace. His memory and his tremendous influence in the world of Spanish music will never be forgotten.

If you would like to read further information on Morente, you can do it here.

What's really wrong with Microsoft

John Gruber linked today a truly excellent article by Michael Mace, analyzing the current status of RIM, the company behind BlackBerry. It is entitled "What's really wrong with BlackBerry (and what to do about it)". It is detailed, well written, and seems to me absolutely right.

Now, while reading this article, I was thinking that I would love to see a similar analysis focused on "What's really wrong with Microsoft (and what to do about it)". In my opinion, there are many similarities between both companies, Microsoft and RIM, even if their size and focus are very different. But the bottom line is the same: the current numbers look very nice. Yet analyzing them in detail, there are many reasons to be worried, if you run Microsoft: they are missing many trains lately, and trying to catch up, but not actually leading the trends in any way, nor developping smashing alternatives to the leaders (and I mean in computers and also in smartphones).

Floods, again, in the Guadalquivir river

Less than a year ago, I posted pictures of the Guadalquivir river with plenty of water, after loads of rain in Córdoba. Here you have again similar pictures, taken on December 6, only a few days ago. Again it was raining like crazy, and we have seen extremely high levels of water.

There is still hope in Italy

Spanish news channel CNN+ will disappear on December 31, 2010

Also reading El País today, I learned that Spanish news channel CNN+, which was founded years ago as collaboration between a big Spanish company, Prisa (the editors of El País) and CNN, is going to disappear at the end of this year.

This is one of the side effects of the sale of part of the TV companies owned by Prisa (including another channel, Cuatro) to the Italian group Telecinco. And this, in turn, is another of the side effects of the catastrophic business started by Prisa when they founded a satellite tv channel platform called Digital +. It was supposed to be a tremendously healthy company, which paid tons of money for rights of sports broadcasts. In reality it was a huge hole of money, which required huge debts in order to keep on paying for the sports broadcasts rights.

The final effect of the whole history is that the satellite tv platform almost killed Prisa, who had been a very solid enterprise publishing El País. And it also means that the shit broadcasted by Telecinco (one of the countless tv channels owned by Berlusconi) proved to be profitable in the long run, and allowed them to purchase a big part of the channels broadcasting in Spain.

In short: we will have more shit in more tv channels, and we will have less independent media, since obviously you won't see many Berlusconi-related scandals (in spite of the many of them reported on an almost daily basis by other media) in Berlusconi-owned media.

Once more: shame on top of old shame.

Spain destroyed 6 million doses of vaccine against swine flu

Shame on top of old shame: after the scandal of the false swine flu emergence, today I found in El País that Spain destroyed 6 million unused doses of vaccine against swine flu. This must be among the ugliest scandals involving medical affairs in the history, and still some people have the guts to deffend that the initial alarm was justified. The price of the destroyed vaccines was 40 million euros. And I'm pretty sure that similar stories happened in many other countries: you create artificial alarm, you convince people and governments to make huge expenses to buy vaccines in a "preventive action", and you make a big business. Then the real world demonstrates it was a pure invention, but the business is already done.

It's time for a change; it's time to show the big companies that people are not stupid; it's time to make understand politicians that they can not act like thieves without paying a big price.

Prince reveals some of the guests artists for his forthcoming shows in New York City

According to Fender Blog,  these will be some of the guests artists during the forthcoming shows in New York City: Esperanza Spalding, Lalah Hathaway, Cassandra Wilson, Sheila E., Maceo Parker, Sinbad, Larry Graham, Mint Condition, and Jannelle Monaé. Sounds like great stuff, hopefully people living in the US will massively attend and enjoy these shows.

Reviews of Pentax K-r, K-5 and 645D in Chasseur d'Images

This was posted by Ned Bunnell at his blog: the very prestigious French magazine Chasseur d'Images has published reviews of the new dSLR range, K-r and K-5, and also of the medium format 645D. You can see the full pdf files and also translations to English here.

Wikileaks: US government pressing on Spain to forget the killing of José Couso

El País published an article based on the recent information from Wikileaks, describing the ugly suggestions from the US government to Spanish institutions in order to make them forget about the killing of Spanish journalist José Couso, from Tele 5, who was killed by US troops in Iraq.

The article is in Spanish, but it is really a shame to read that this is the way of dealing with cases of assassination for no reason: it HAS TO be forgotten because it was done by the US army.

Shame both on the US and the Spanish governments.

Hercules & Love Affair new song: My house

Back to the 80s technohouse, but very, very catchy; it will be track number 2 in their forthcoming album Blue Songs. Thanks to jenesaispop for the heads up.

My house

For those interested, another band (formed with past members of Hercules & Love affair) released recently another catchy song; they are called Jessica 6 and this is the first song receiving promotion:


Fun girl