enlahood.com

Many of you have been asking about recommendations for a weekend in Barcelona, and as I keep loosing my emails I thought that it would be better to post all the information here. This way I will save time every time one of you goes to Barcelona for the weekend.

Where to EAT

Tapas - La Cervecería Catalana

Best tapas in town. I go back there every time I go back to Barcelona. Don't leave without tasting jamón de jabugo, pimientos del padrón, pincho de solomillo, and of course pan con tomate. Una clara (beer with lemon juice) to drink will work perfectly with the food.

No booking allowed, but worth queuing for a while.

Meat - El asador de Aranda

Delicious corderito and cochinillo. The building on the Tibidabo outskirts is amazing and the meat can't be better. I would recommend to go for dinner if you don't want to spend the rest of the day taking a siesta.

Booking essential.

Paella - El Merendero de la Mari

You will their paella.

Black rice - Peixerot

What is black rice? Rice that has been cooked with calamari ink and lobster. Delicious!

Fish - Els Pescadors

The restaurant is located in a dodgy area, but the trip is worth as you will have first class fish.

Hot chocolate - Cacao Sampaka

You must try it with some melindros. What are melindros? You will have to find out yourself.

Gaudí

As a Gaudí fan I highly recommend to visit La Pedrera, la Casa Batlló, and el Parque Güell. Amazing arquitecture. If you visit during the summer you can't miss the concerts on la Pedrera's roof - jazz, flamenco,... different music and same cold champagne every night.

La Boqueria Market

If you are a food lover you can't miss La Boqueria, one of the best markets in the world. BTW La Boqueria is hermanado with Borough Market in South London.

MACBA Museum

If you like modern art you can not miss the MACBA Museum, in the old neighbourhood of the city

You will see that walking around is easy in Barcelona.

Paseo de Gracia, Rambla Catalunya, la Rambla de les flors (full of pick pockets - hold your handbag as hard as you can!), el Born, Barri Gotic, Port Olimpic (can be a bit dodgy)...

Paseo de Gracia and Rambla Catalunya are the best places to shop as almost all brands have a shop there. Begin your walk in Rambla Catalunya with Diagonal and then walk down until Plaza Cataluña. After that take Puerta del Angel - At that point you will probably have burnt your plastic card.

If you want to buy any food as ham, chorizo, tuna, or cheese, I would recommend to go to el Corte Ingles where they seal the embutido very well so that it lasts for weeks in the fridge (well, that is the theory - It does not matter if I buy 200 grams or 2 kilos of jabugo, I always finish it withing a couple of weeks!)

You can walk to almost everywhere if you stay in the center of the city. If you feel tired at some point you can take the tube or bus.

A good way to discover the rest of the city is to take a Bus Turistic (I took it myself and found it very good) and have an idea of how the rest of the city looks like. You can get in and out the bus as many times as you like and you get a voucher checkbook that has discounts to many places in the city.

I am too old for that an I have lost the track. You will have to investigate yourself! 

Still, if you want to know where to party we recommend Luz de Gas or a bit more crazier Danzatoria.

www.lanetro.com - For restaurant locations

www.tmb.net - For transport information

www.servicaixa.com - For purchasing any kind of tickets

Enjoy your trip!

Posted by urbangirl at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

News today announcing that Universal will be giving music downloads, for free in a service called spiral frog. The product will be subsidised by advertising revenues and is expected to hit consumers by this next Xmas.

According to the press is the first serious attempt to prove an alternative biz model to itunes. I wonder if Universal competitors would ever want to play Universal's game or maybe launch their own free download service.

Interesting times ahead. 

UPDATE: We just found the official URL for Spiral Frog. <- Click there 

Posted by marcosg at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As you can see just above, just below, just everywhere there are some nice Google ads on this page. Why do we have ads? Or better say, why do we have so many ads?

For such a question I could answer that those ads are really well targeted, that we know our users, that our advertisers are very happy with us having ads on the page that you are a click away from a very interesting offer just for you or I could say that we are running a business and because this is a business we have to pay our bills, techies, non-techies, corporate animals and others or I could also say nothing and leave it this way or ... 

I could say that we just have ads because everyone else has them so why we can not have them, or tell you something like sponsor me, please click on one of the ads or maybe beg you to click a thousand times per day and so on so forth ... but the reality is that we have ads because we want to at least pay the cost of the hosting and the domain of this site.

Just do not click on them otherwise you will make us think that this is going to generate thousands and you know what? that would be mean.

Now that I think about it, click once.

Posted by marcosg at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We will be posting the best articles from the past in an attempt to spam, sorry I meant to bring some more traffic from our old users, long time gone, much more loved.

Today you can see one about Yahoo! Search and the other one about Memoirs of a Geisha and you can always access them through the newly created category oldies.

Have a good one.  

Posted by marcosg at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many websites today are reporting some supposed declarations from Susan Decker, CFO @ Yahoo!, where she claims that Yahoo! does not aim to be no.1 in search. Her declarations look like follows: "We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.".
I am sad, really sad when I read this. Competition is good and even more in such a competitive field such as internet search, so Yahoo! should not give up and should keep innovating with stuff like My Web, Music Search and Yahoo! Answers. We, the users, want the best and if the best is Google now then fine but we want more and that extra bit can only come if there is a fierce competition in every single field of the internet and I can not see a better competitor to Google than Yahoo!. So go Yahoo! go!. If at the end of the day Google keeps better, it will be because Yahoo! (and the others) kept pushing the strings beyond their limits.

Full article here.

This story was posted for the first time here in January 24, 2006. Funny enough seems to be like a prediction ... 

Posted by marcosg at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Author Arthur Golden interviewed Iwasaki while researching for his novel Memoirs of a Geisha. He promised to maintain absolute confidentiality but he thanked her by name in the book's acknowledgements. Iwasaki felt betrayed by that mention to her name and also by the manipulation of her personal life.

For Iwasaki's association with Golden's inaccurate portrayal of the geisha world, she has been shunned in Gion Kobu and treated with hostility.

As a result Iwasaki sued Golden for breach of contract and defamation of character. Golden chose to settle out of court in February 2003.

She wrote her true story in Geisha of Gion: The Memoir of Mineko Iwasaki.

This entry was posted back in January 30, 2006. 

Posted by marcosg at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is Monday morning and if you are not on holidays, is a depressing day with a full week ahead of hard work, long commuting hours and painful meetings. If you are on holidays, sorry about remembering this to you.

To sweeten your week a little, get some shots of intrepid culture at enlahood.com from golf to planets.

Tiger Woods won another big one - this time the PGA - for some time during the last four days, we really thought Sergio Garcia would make it this time, but unfortunately he did not. Tiger seems to be back on track and sooner rather than later will become the best golfer ever.

Posted by marcosg at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have reduced the amount of entries to be displayed at once to 5 entries and we have also added entry bodies, excerpts and main entry (whatever that means all together) just for you fellow readers.

If you wish to have i back to its original shape, please let us know - otherwise this will remain this way.

Enjoy! 

Posted by marcosg at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Breaking news footies! Real Madrid and Lyon just announced that they have reached an agreement to transfer Diarra from Lyon to Real Madrid. Great friday night news!

Read more here:

Lyon website (in french)

As.com (in spanish) 

I will be posting some videos from Diarra tomorrow.  

Posted by marcosg at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I spent the whole night pretending to know what 'module' means. In case you are going out with friends tomorrow night, read the below definition before arriving to the restaurant:

mod·ule    (mjl)

 Latin modulus, diminutive of modus, measure; see med- in Indo-European roots

1. A standard or unit of measurement.
2. Architecture The dimensions of a structural component, such as the base of a column, used as a unit of measurement or standard for determining the proportions of the rest of the construction.
3. A standardized, often interchangeable component of a system or construction that is designed for easy assembly or flexible use: a sofa consisting of two end modules.
4. Electronics A self-contained assembly of electronic components and circuitry, such as a stage in a computer, that is installed as a unit.
5. Computer Science A portion of a program that carries out a specific function and may be used alone or combined with other modules of the same program.
6. A self-contained unit of a spacecraft that performs a specific task or class of tasks in support of the major function of the craft.
7. A unit of education or instruction with a relatively low student-to-teacher ratio, in which a single topic or a small section of a broad topic is studied for a given period of time.
8. Mathematics A system with scalars coming from a ring.

Posted by urbangirl at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We just created a quick news page - politics! Yes, is not sophisticated neither is probably very interesting at least you live in the US and want to get a political view according to users but hey, this is what I can manage to get up and running in 5 minutes.

Give it a try - another thing that needs to be improved with better templates and some filtering. If you do not mind, tell me what news you want to read and I will put it up there.

Before I forget, the news module is courtesy of digg.com .

Posted by marcosg at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A new feature is live today, tag cloud. What is it? I am not certainly sure of its use but since everyone else has it, we have it too. It basically gives you a module that you place on the site that displays the different tags you have; the nice thing though is that the bigger number of entries with one tag the bigger the font size in the cloud is. For instance, you can look at the tag cloud in the right of the page and you will see that all the tags seem to look the same. Give it a few days and they will start changing.

Anyone betting for which one will be bigger and bigger? 

Posted by marcosg at 03:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just found (at Kotaku) the following screens for FEAR for the PS3 - that is the new and upcoming Playstation from Sony.

Not sure how the game compares with the PC version, any ideas?

Click here to get the images at Kotaku. 

Posted by marcosg at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Certainly we are committing to our commitments. As we said in a previous entry, we just included diggit and flickr photos in the site. Since diggit works quite well (is the nice icon at the bottom of each of the entries) the flickr functionality still needs some work around - it will be coming sometime this week.

We also wanted to participate in the crazyness of tags and created an automated tagging system with each of the posts (you can see it alongside the word tags).

Enjoy! 

Posted by marcosg at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently and according to Yahoo! today, the most searched places where to live are:

• Honolulu, Hawaii
• Denver, Colorado
• Las Vegas, Nevada
• Tampa, Florida
• Dallas, Texas

While I can understand Honolulu (island, good weather, get Lost) and Denver (mountains, a small ski resort called Aspen) I just do not get it in the case of Las Vegas, Tampa and Dallas. Is either I have been in those places and did not see the beauty of them or I have lost the plot because, who really wants to be in the middle of the desert, surrounded by neon lights and absolutely nowhere to go apart from Casinos. I got lost in Vegas once, off the Strip, and I can tell you that it was a very revealing experience, put it this way, it is wasteland.

And Tampa? What does it have Tampa apart from the sports teams? Is that a place you want to live because there are sports teams there?

Finishing with Dallas - what? Dallas??? Why? Dallas Mavericks?

Sorry but I just do not get it. 

Posted by marcosg at 03:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Even though everyone told me it was not worth spending any time in Marseille during my Provence trip, I went there for a day and I have to that I loved it.

Here are some pictures I took there. Enjoy! 

As you can see there is a technical problem with photo galleries, so you will have to wait until our geek fixes it. Sorry about that!  

Posted by urbangirl at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have been pretty busy lately improving the functionality of the blog. Here you have a list of the things you can find now:

• Ads by Google: They are back, not by popular demand but by pocket demand.
• Gamertag: Something related to gaming, check it here
• Share via reddit: If you like reddit (I recommed it) you can now add your enlahood stories to your reddit profile.
• Share via del.icio.us: Similar to reddit, but in this case deliciously share your stories at enlahood with del.icio.us

If you wish to have something more added or you want any of these removed, please let us know. The list of things comming are :

• Podcasts (via iTunes likely)
• Digg.it
• RSS syndication
• Flickr

Please send us more ideas - more than happy to hack the blog and incorporate them to enlahood.com.

Posted by marcosg at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have always thought that Microsoft was not a good friend. A good friend does not make sure your computer grows slower every day. A good friend does not avoid you to use other software. A good friend does not create new operating systems that require upgrades every certain time. A good friend is not like Microsoft.

Since I like to have good friends I moved long time ago to Apple and their lovely shiny whitey devices. They feel cool, work and have the same performance throughout the years.

Suddenly, about a year ago (a bit less) Microsoft dropped the Xbox 360. I for once, felt interested in the machine, its prospects, its technology and more over its online capabilities (I had struggled with the complicated underworld of getting online to play games and abandoned the idea due to its complexity). I read about the machine going to be less powerful than competitors (aka Wii and PS3), about the shortness in stock (impossible to get one last Xmas and months after that) and some technical glitches the machine presented (as with every single new device, early adopters pay the duck!). So I waited and before the summer I got my own 360 and so far so good.

The machine is brilliant, stylist, works with HD TVs and the games so far are pretty good. Most importantly, you can play classics such as Galaga or Pac-Man. I would imagine that all of you reading this played any of those machines long time ago (I think I remembered asking for another 25ptas coin to try another time).

There are plenty of good ideas and stuff going on about the 360 (check out Major Nelson's blog) but there is one specific thing that called for my attention today: Looks like Msoft is opening up XNA (a sort of libraries for game programming) to all developers - wow I thought. I think is exceptional that the guys at Redmond have gone down this route. Congratulations, this is an entirely unexpected move.

You might wonder why am I talking about this here (no I am not paid by MSoft and this is just a first post of a pretty long series, I hope) but as you will see I have added my gamertag to the blog, so if anyone out there wanting to challenge me, you know where I am! I am looking for rivals!!!

Posted by marcosg at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those fellow readers the tittle of this entry will sound familiar. It certainly is because we posted something similar a while ago with almost the same actors.

I happened to travel, not long ago, to the north east of Spain. That land, so called Galicia but long known by the Roman Empire as the place where the earth ended (finis terrae), hosts a dramatic scenery. Is a green, wild and unexplored land of legends, sorcery and traditions. Or I should probablyu said it was a green land?

During the last week and half (for those reading this in the future, from the second week of August 2006), this land has been burned by an uncountable number of fires. Once that is something fairly typical in Spain, mostly during the Summer, it is not that typical in this part of Spain where weather is wet and temperatures do not raise as much as in the rest of the country (for those of you thinking what it is like, think about Ireland or England but with seafood).

What is exceptional, as I said, is not the number of fires but the way the fires have been handled by the authorities. Who are they? The authorities, the so called progresits are made out of a coalition from the independentists (BNG) and the socialism branch that helds government in Spain, called PSdeG, who actually lost the elections back a year ago. The president of the community, the ugly of this story is no other than Touriño. Oh, before I continue, do not even try to read the webpages of these two parties, at least you read and understand "gallego" because they simply can not bother less to see that in a globalized world the best thing they can do is to close themselves, look at their bellies and say how nice we are that speak a language nobody else understands. Anyway, coming back  to Touriño, to putt it nicely, he is  one of those useless politicians that without knowing why or what to do got lucky and created a coalition to rule  the government. He  could not be worst.

The bad, oh the bad. The bad is no other than mr ZP. I was reading, three or four weeks ago The Economist and was surprised, actually very surprised, of an article were they were praising Zapatero for his good politics. I always thought that The Economist was a good reading (when having coffee, commuting or before going to bed) but not an excellent reading (a place where you read articles that are deep in content and there is a lot of research done by some people before it goes live to the print edition) but this time, they had passed the limits. They proved a complete lack of interest on knowing what is hapenning in Spain, what this guy is doing and what is not (which is more than what he is by the way) but also were insulting their readers. I will come back to this issue another day, but for now let me say they are about to lose a subscriber.

Back to the bad, Zapatero is the worst of the worst ever. By far is the worst president nowadays in the EU and we just do not deserve it. Instead of taking an active role during the affair of the fires, he decided to stay holidays, sun bathing, siesta taking and seafood eating whilst the others were literally burning. A president that cares about his people cancels holidays even more when there were dead during the last week, people that died because the government was unable to respond with an appropiate strategy to the situation. But he decided to keep the sunbathing. Maybe he got burned too (I hope so) and maybe he will stay there and never come back. ZP you are bad, very bad. You could not be worst. And this is the second time this happens (remember Guadalajara)?

The good. The poor people of Galicia, those who see their forests burning and our beloved President doing nothing, this goes for you. Please keep up there and once everything is gone, demand to ZP what you believe has to be demanded.

Posted by marcosg at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many times I have heard about the xixonistas, about Xixon, how special it is, about Xixon's seafood, Xixon's puerto, Xixon's bla bla bla.

It seems now that we are about to discover Xixon and its marvels because one of its most popular expatriates, and the single one that originated the Xixon buzz is about (almost) to marry.

From here I just want to wish them the best of the best in the future and wishing we soon have little xixonistas so we can continue investigating this special phenomenon.

A good website for all your planning: the knot (http://www.theknot.com/)

Congratulations couple! 

Posted by marcosg at 06:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This post will sound like a flashback post. Why? Because we are back! Yes again, we are back! What hapenned? Nothing, we were just playing around with some configurations and stuff and we screwed up everything.

Hopefully we will be posting more often now, still having some technical glitches that could prevent us doing so but..  

Posted by marcosg at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)