Here's the video I promised yesterday:

Oh, I had a wonderful weekend. On Friday I stayed home, the Saturday I spent at Retiro park and went out with friends (what turned into a bit of a weird experience, but still) and Sunday I met up with an old friends, met new people at his place and drank Bloody Maries on his terrace. Not so bad, hm?

Here are some snapshots, tomorrow I will also post a video:

First weekend. April 08

Madrid in spring is breathtaking and yet, I don't know if I am going to stay a lot longer here. It's time to move "out of the comfort zone" as some friend has put it recently. Most crucially though, I miss my girlfriend. I'd move to the Antarctic to be finally with her. However, I hope it's gonna be a nicer place where we finally settle down ;-)

Good night!

After years (!) of abandonment of my very first website, www.reduce-to-the-max.com, I made Tabula Rasa and "relaunched" the site last Sunday. Let's say it is an Alpha version, because there is not a lot to see yet, but I plan to add more content in the future. "Poco a poco"

I especially want to point out the "Favourite Photos" Section. I want to create a photo series in this format every now and then. Maybe galleries with a certain topic or just "Best Ofs" of trips or periods of time.

Hope you like it!

Hoooray, the Elecciones08 campaign made it to the official Youtube blog! Read the original post here.

I always had a special appreciation for Google Reader: Years ago, it was not very advanced, but still it was the best feed reader around. Then, the sheer fact that I knew about this product helped me in my interviews for my current job. In the meantime, I even had the chance to meet his inventor personally and Reader has evolved in a really cool and useful product.

I now use Reader a lot more often again, very rarely on the web though, but on my iPhone. It's fast, has a great design and most importantly, it gives me a chance to read my favourite blogs when I am on the move.

I think there will be lots of products in the future that will turn out more useful on mobile devices than on the web. It's just a matter of time until handsets and mobile versions of these products will catch up with users' needs. Reader and also Facebook have already taken a good direction (Google Maps too of course).

Pretty soon I want to write about my favourite feeds/blogs too and also about syndication of content (text and applications) in general, but for now I go to sleep. Good night!

Today I read a pretty interesting article from Jason Calacanis on his opinion about work/life balance when working in startup companies:

" (...) In fact, I was writing about technology while I was an IT consultant in the early 90s. Now, I did feel like my IT job was work--in the bad sense. Don't get me wrong, I loved the IT business but many times it felt like drudgery. So, I can feel Duncan on that front: when you don't love what you do it sucks. The solution to that is fairly obvious, go find something you love to do in life. It might take some time, but it really isn't THAT hard given how amazing the market is (at least in the United Stats). (...)"

Especially recently I thought a lot about this issue and I found two things to be true (in general, not just in startup companies):

1) It's important that you love what you do, but it's REALLY hard to find such a job. If you really want to succeed in your career though, I guess this is what you have to look for, although it might require lots of patience and effort.

2) Even then, you can run into problems. In the best case you don't see your job purely as work, but as a hobby that earns you money. It becomes tricky, however, when the job gets so time consuming that it takes away your private life and sucks in all your attention. Too much of anything is a bad thing too and establishing limits is important.

Conclusion: Even if you get what you want, life does not get easier ;-)

I think of myself as a very loyal fan of Twoday.net. Mr. Sierra's presentation at the WU sparked my interest in blogging a long time ago, I opened my blog over 1500 (!) days ago and in some way I like to think that all this influenced my career to a certain extent. After all, I ended up working in an internet company.

However, and this might be the first time that I criticize this platform, I don't understand that they have banned iframes from Twoday.net. There is so much cool stuff around that I would love to embedd on my blog and in my point of view it's a real pity that I can't use these functionalities. Unfortunately, it seems that this won't change in the near future: link

Some examples of embeddable iFrames:

Embedd Google Maps


Embedd Google Calendar

Only today Spaniards are going to vote their new president, but the Elecciones08 initiative already finished on Thursday, 6th of March. It has been shitloads of work, undoubtedly, but also a big success in terms of numbers. More importantly, I hope it has contributed to make the electoral campaign more transparent.

Some numbers:

- http://www.youtube.es/elecciones08 was visited by more than a million users and last week it was one of the most visited sites on YouTube worldwide

- 600 user questions were submitted

- 53 of these questions were posed on TV to the political candidates, including Rajoy and Zapatero

You can see all of these interviews here

As I said, it was lots of work, but an incredible experience to be part of such a huge project and I definitely learned a lot, sometimes the hard way. However, I think it was worth it and it makes me proud to have contributed to something that might even gain more influence in electoral campaigns to come.

Here are some other links to pretty cool stuff around the elections and politics in general:

- Election Mapplet: Live election results on Google Maps

- Politics gadgets: http://www.google.es/elecciones08

- Gadget Ad: "Which party am I" -> link

After months of hard work, it's finally there: the first RTVE/YouTube interview. It aired last night in the midnight news of La2 and honestly there are definitely better airtimes, but as the interviewed politicians will get more important, so will the airtime. There are still 5 other interviews scheduled (the last two hopefully with Rajoy and Zapatero)

But without further ado, here is the video: