We arrived in Spain on December 10 so the locals were already in the Christmas season. In Spain, it starts on the 8th with the feast of the Immaculate Conception and continues until January 6 (the Epiphany). The Spanish airline we flew on from London had the typical magazine in the seat pocket except that the articles were in both English and Spanish. The one that caught my eye was on the changing Christmas celebrations in Spain. The author attributed the diminishing emphasis on the traditional celebrations to the influence of American culture. In Spain, the three wise men bring gifts to the children on the eve of the Epiphany. Santa, though, is slowly strengthening his grip on the people of Spain and displacing the wise men. We saw a lot of blow-up Santas rappelling from balconies or beckoning shoppers into stores. Resistance is futile.

I put ten photos from our trip to Seville, Spain here (sort of a late notice). It should give you a glimpse of what the city was like. As I have time and inclination, I'll be posting more photos to my main photo page.

It is very easy to notice cultural differences when traveling. I find, though, that I am very unsure what is the appropriate scale of my observations of Seville — is something a Sevillan peculiarity, or maybe its Spanish or Continental or European? Whatever the correct generalization may be, the service in Sevillan restaurants is quite different from American ones. I wonder how much of this is driven by cultural values and how much by the economics.

Here are two observations: 1. Waitresses and waiters get paid a decent wage rather than depending on tips and 2. Sevillans spend a long time talking in restaurants. In the States, it is to the economic benefit of a waitress to move people through her tables as quickly as possible in order to accumulate as many tips as possible. This motivation is not significant in Seville due to the aforementioned wage levels and the minimal amount of tipping. So did the different economic restaurant calculus develop because of the culture, vice versa, or are they independent? I lean toward the last answer, but what do I know.

Of course, I ignored the owners of the restaurant in the above discussion. They always do better financially by moving people through the restaurant quickly. But are they strong capitalists? — probably not. There are other differences possibly caused by the different economics. The smaller number of patrons is offset by a diminished staff. There is neither hostess to seat you, nor busboy to clear the dishes or fill water glasses (no water glasses to be filled anyway). The waiter or waitress handle a larger number of tables. They do not hover around you asking questions about the meal. Instead, you signal when you need something. All of this makes for a very different dining experience.

While we were sitting on a park bench eating pastries (they have really good pastries in Seville), I noticed a young Sevillan couple across the plaza involved in some passionate love-making. They were completely oblivious to the world around them - the tourists walking by, the people posing for pictures right behind them, the school kids being led home by their grandmother. It didn't last too long as the young man took a call on his cell phone. The moment was lost for them. The spell was broken. After the interruption, they talked some, kissed a few times, but nothing like before.

It seems that the people of Spain have a better understanding of the number system than Americans do. The ground floor is considered to be floor 0. If you go down a level, it is floor -1. None of this silly switching to letters to denote floors below the ground floor. I gave my talk yesterday on floor -2 of the conference hotel.

They also use a 24 hour clock so there is never any confusion over am or pm. Fortuntely, they don´t ring the bells 23 times at 11 pm - especially since we are staying at an inn right next to Giralda.

I have been working on an extremely frustrating project for the past several months. I won't provide a complete picture since this is a public site and all, but here is a glimpse of what it has been like.

Every few days I come across something like this:
hold = dataPtr[3];
dataPtr[0] = dataPtr[3];
dataPtr[1] = dataPtr[2];
dataPtr[2] = dataPtr[1];
dataPtr[3] = hold;
I found this gem today. The guy who wrote this was trying to swap the byte ordering of a 32-bit variable. I should also note that he used this snippet of code over forty times (functions or macros...nah).