AitorGarcia.net

On Monday, after two lengthy months studying at least seven hours everyday, I had my last exam this semester. The exam didn’t go very well; but as a whole the exam season went pretty well although I still don’t have all the results.

Juanma and me studying

Right now I’m getting ready to travel this Saturday to Zwickau (Germany), where I will be working thanks to IAESTE until the end of August.
So, from now on I’ll have time to spare. That means I’ll have time to update my weblog, I want to post at least 3 times a week but that will depend on the Internet connection availability in the dorm where I will be living.

Dani and Artiga studying Telecommunications Systems

Today Real Madrid won its 30th Spanish league championship. The match against Real Mallorca was incredible, exciting until the end. Once again the best team in the world has shown its power.

Next year we will go for our 10th European Champions League.

On Monday after doing an exam I headed downtown to Fnac to buy a new camera. I really needed a camera because I’ve been without one since before Christmas, and I want to document my summer in Germany and post pictures in this blog.

I was looking for a camera within a price range between 150 and 250 €. Small and compact, preferably a Nikon or a Canon. After looking at all the cameras they had on display I decided to buy a Nikon Coolpix S200.

Its basic features are:

- 7.1 Megapixels.

- 3X optical zoom.

- Electronic vibration reduction.

- In-camera Red Eye fix (supposedly I will never see a red eye in my pictures).

- Video recording with sound at 30 fps (640 x 480 pixels).

-Rechargeable Li-ion Battery (no batteries!) that will last approx. 230 shots.

-Light, small and with a big screen.

It cost me 199€, probably I could have gotten it cheaper somewhere but I didn’t want to lose time. I’m quite happy with my purchase, I hope it will last long and doesn’t give me any problems like I had with past cameras.

Álvaro has just written a post about the books he has recently read and the books that he’s currently reading. So it’s a good time to write about my reading habits, upload my booklog and add a link in the sidebar to the left. As you can see if you take a look at it I’m not exactly an avid reader. When I was a kid I used to read a lot more but since I discovered the net (and spend hours and hours reading stuff) my book reading habits decreased a lot. As a matter of fact, last year I read only 2 miserable books, quite quite far from people that read (or at least try) 50 books a year, like Pjorge, my brother or Rikel.

However, since March I’ve begun reading a bit more, almost everyday. And little by little I’m going to try reading more everyday. Let’s set a goal of 10 books this year. Not a big achievement, but it’s a good starting point.

The last books that I’ve read are:

-The Best of Roald Dahl (english): A collection of Roald Dahl’s best short stories. Roald Dahl is the writer of the famous Charly and the Chocolate Factory. This compilation is a book easy to pick up and read one of its entertaining stories.

-The Picture of Dorian Gray (english): A true classic written by Oscar Wilde. I read a simplified version that I bought for my mother who is learning english. I didn’t like it very much, maybe because it was a rewriting by some other author and was not in its original form.

And currently I’m reading:

-A Short History of Nearly Everything (spanish): By Bill Bryson, a book that my uncle recommended me some time ago and I bought in Fnac the last time I went. It’s a book about diferent topics in science explained in an easy way. I’ve read 3 chapters and until now I find it very interesting.

In the future I have the intention to read:
-Kafka on the Shore (english) by Haruki Murakami.
-Once Upon a Time in Japan (english): A compilation of popular Japanese tales.
-The Metamorphosis (english) by Franz Kafka

Geni is a social-networking website for families to explore their geneology. In other words it’s a website similar to Facebook, Orkut or hi5 but family-oriented. I found out about Geni.com some months ago but at first I thought it was not worth to try it out. Two or three weeks ago I decided to register and start building my own family tree, it’s very easy and intuitive. However I realized I had forgotten the names of most of my great-grandparents, but the thing that makes Geni special is that it uses the contact information that you include to invite members of your family to start contributing to build the same family tree. So I just had to include my father’s e-mail, teach him the basics and right now I have a family tree of 77 members and now I know that the great-grandparents of the great-grandparent of my great-granparent were called Miguel Polanco (who died in 1778) and Ana María Gutierrez (who died in 1775). Cool!

My genealogic tree

The next step is teaching my cousins and my uncles how to use it so they can start growing our family tree. Maybe in the future we’ll have built a gigantic family tree. I have read some stories in blogs about people with more than one thousand people in their family tree, and about people that has found out that they are related to famous people and they didn’t know about it.

If you have 10 minutes take a look at Geni.com and start building your own family tree, because I’m pretty sure it will get popular in the future, and it’s just going to get better because the company has raised more than $10 million from venture capital firms.

To start I am going to introduce myself so you all know who is writing this blog. Let’s start from the beginning. I was born the 15th of May 1983 in Alicante (Spain), I lived with my parents and my brother until I was 18 years old in Calpe, a very beautiful town in the eastern coast of Spain. Then I moved to Valencia to pursue a BSc+MSc in Telecommunications Engineering (basically the same as Electrical Engineering) at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV). I expect this to be my last year in Valencia, as if everything goes smooth, next year I will be enjoying the well-known Erasmus programme in Hamburg (Germany) at the Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH). Before that I will be working for two months this summer in Zwickau, a small city in eastern Germany, where I will be able to warm up my German language skills. There I will be an intern at the West Saxon University of Applied Sciences thanks to the IAESTE programme. Last summer I enjoyed another IAESTE internship in Łódź (Poland) developing software for Makolab, a leading IT company in Poland. There I spent the best summer in my life traveling and making friends with other engineers from all over the world.

Me in Alicante’s harbor

Besides traveling my hobbies include watching and practicing sports (specially basketball and soccer), watching TV series and movies, and reading books and manga comics. Moreover I have a passion for technology and everything related to the Internet. When I was younger I was fond of videogames but lately I prefer doing other stuff instead. I also enjoy learning languages, right now I am refreshing my, not so good, German skills and hoping to have an almost perfect English some time in the future.

I consider myself a smart, cheerful, shy and ambitious person. I am a good guy who somehow most of the time seems to have a smile in the face. Some friends think that it’s practically impossible to make me mad. I am also a perfectionist, thus making me a big procrastinator, but I’m working on that.

For anything you can contact me at:

After some days of tweaking and pimping my English blog, it finally sees the light. I bought the domain last year in May and started my Spanish blog using Wordpress sometime in August but I never got to update it regularly due to some setbacks and it’s been abandoned since last year; however I intend to update it regularly as soon as I finish my final exams.

AitorGarcia.net is a personal weblog where I will be writing about whatever I feel like and whenever I feel like, but the intention is to update on a regular basis. Mostly I will be writing about my life as a student and as someone that hopefully will be entering the working world in the next 2 years, about my travels around the world, about 2 or 3 online projects that I have in mind and I hope to have enough time to start developing someday, about my hobbies (sports, technology, movies, tv series, books…) and about interesting things I come across online.

My English blog will be mostly based on the Spanish counterpart, however it won’t be a direct translation as some of the posts there won’t appeal to people that is not from Spain, and at the same time I will be writing new posts here that won’t be in the Spanish part.

I hope you follow me through my journey. Welcome!