Saturday, October 6, 2018

Backsliding

Woke up at around 9:45am this morning. Clearly backsliding on the jetlag. I didn't do much today. Did a load of laundry and dried it on the drying rack in the guest room. This load included the bed sheets. Everything is dry now and back in its place. I guess this will be sustainable for a while. It may be tough if/when we have visitors in that guest room where the drying rack is currently located.

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I've been having fun gathering raw GPS data from my phone and doing analysis on it. The past couple of days I've been obsessing over noise in the signal and attempting to quantify its effect. I've been reading about low pass filtering and discrete Fourier transforms. At the same time, I've been doing the analysis in python and becoming comfortable with the jupyter environment, the pandas and numpy libraries, and visualization with matplotlib. All of this should be useful when I return to teaching next year.

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I went out for a walk this evening, both for exercise and to collect more GPS data, haha. For the first time, I walked along the river the night before instead of the morning after. There were large groups of people partying even a 8pm as I walked through. The beverage of choice seems to be the 40oz beer (or the metric equivalent). Pretty much a one-to-one correspondence between bottles and people.

The streets were generally busy this evening. Along San Jacinto someone was selling these LED figures/toys:


They were kind of pretty all arrange in the waning light.

Geoduck

We went to Bar Santa Marta for dinner. I had a geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck") tapas. Very weird texture, not much taste, would definitely pass next time. Here's what they looked like before getting sliced up into the tapas:
They're basically clams with a borderline obscene shape when out of the shell.

We went with Wang Zhi, someone from Laura's language school:


After dinner, we kind of just wandered around. We saw this giant fish in a pescaderia:


We also saw this flamenco dancer:


And we saw this rock/jazz trio, Musgö, that featured a harp:


I was hoping to find some of their music on-line, but so far no luck. EDIT: Here's a youtube video, and the harpist's, Mar Gabarre's, youtube channel.

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There's a new store going in on the main street (San Jacinto) in our neighborhood.


The sign went up today "ALE-HOP". I got kind of excited and took this picture. We could always use a bar that does more than just the usual beers around here. Sadly, this is not an exotic beer house. ALE-HOP is a gift store. We definitely don't need another gift store.

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Found this fun, simplified map of Sevilla in the local mall. I like the style: