Minecrafting

My son loves Minecraft

During this pandemic, we had extended periods of time when it was not possible to leave the house nor do any activities outside, so I went to videogames, because I like them and they work great to pass the time at home.

The idea was good, and I managed to spend most of April doing an indoors activity that me and my son enjoyed without getting too nervous about meeting friends and going out. For sure it's not good to do this all the time, but during this period it was nice to do so.

With my son I've played together some games. When he was little he was obsessed with helicopters, so I played Just Cause 2 without being violent, just grabbing vehicles, and he liked that. This moved later to Sonic 4, which was probably the first one where he actually played, with the 2 players mode in part 2. This made him interested in other Sonics and other platformers like Cuphead, and well, we just kept trying different ones and different options.

In this way he has learned how to use the basic controllers, plus it has always been a nice bonding activity. I love video games and it's fun to introduce some of them to him and to try new ones together, when they're age-appropriate. For example, I think Nintendo is over-hyped because they tend to repeat themselves way too much and this pathological need to fit their same famous characters with same plot (rescue the princess) everywhere is detrimental, but it's true that their games are rather good for children. Getting the switch has allowed us to play great games, like Luigi's Mansion (that's a good example of detrimental, the game is great but King Boo as the ultimate bad guy really kills the scary but child-appropriate tones because Boos are too cartoonish), Towerfall or Untitled Goose Game.

However, for a while now he has asked to play Minecraft after trying it  a few times as a demo I had on the Xbox. And since I was curious as well, it was cheap, and we were confined, I ended up buying it.

And minecraft is great.

First, while there is combat, this is optional: You can pass the time in creative mode where you cannot die or be attacked, and in this way you have a relaxed atmosphere that allowed him to understand the usual control setting of camera/movement using both joysticks. In other games there was too much action or they required too much fine control right away of this mechanic for him to learn without getting frustrated, but in Minecraft you're allowed time.

Then, the game itself is incredibly detailed. The graphics are what they are, but this allows for a game engine that focus on functionalities rather than in showing off. And by doing that, the game offers a lot of items and different uses you can make of them. It's impressive how can you make castles, rollercoasters, traps, automatic processes and more complex stuff, like basically functional siege cannons,  RAM memories or even basic computers.

The game itself has no point whatsoever, but letting you create and move around freely gives you the tools to let your imagination create your own objectives: Building a house. Then building a tower. Then building something more complex, and so on, and so on, and in this way it stimulates a lot of creativity.

Basically, Minecraft is a computerized Lego with infinite pieces, so of course it stimulates creativity and it's quite addictive. And this made me also try, on my own, the survival mode. This is a bit too hard for him still, he prefers to be able to create things at will even if sometimes activates survival on creative worlds, but it's still interesting.

Survival mode is not that hard, but it forces you to create a home and slowly build things up from there. Very early on you realize you will need a lot of iron, so you start mining, and then you want to improve things, make a better home and a better mine, create new equipment, personalize things, and so on. It's also quite addictive and fun, even if there's no purpose either and you're just passing the time and trying to go a bit deeper and achieving an easily sustainable situation. 

The way he plays sometimes can be quite, just repeating actions or spawning lots of mobs, but he also creates more complex things like houses connected to rollercoasters, fish tanks, tunnels, structures, traps, etc., and it's quite cool to see what he thinks and makes, some of them are quite complex and cool. 

 

If the original game is not enough, they sell extra worlds that offer retexturing, new fucnionalities, new models, etc. You have to pay for most of them, but some of them are quite original and give new opportunities to create new things or play with a new concept. 

Overall it has been a great finding and it's really cool to have an infinte lego-like world to explore our creativity.

Working in Integration

When people ask me what I studied or in which field do I work and I say IT they always ask me if I develop. When I say no, if they know a little about IT, they ask if I test or if I'm a system administrator. And I keep saying "No", which just confuses people. In the end I say that I "integrate", which people take as if i have said "assimilate" or some other word that, while kind of knowing the meaning, doesn't tell you anything....

In one of my earliest long posts I mentioned a little what does it means, but I though I'd spent some time explaining it a bit more...

Integration, for starters, is really a meaningless word. It means to basically put everything together, and in a way that's what I do, but not really...

I do not program, apart from sometimes automatizing some tasks. I do not test much, although there is some testing. I do not administrate systems, although I do connect to servers and run things in there sometimes.

What I do mostly is to act as a firewall between all the teams involved in providing a service and the final users and clients. I'm also (in theory) the person who should know more about a service so, when issues arise, the right team receives work.

This is still pretty vague and sounds as if I spent all day sitting in my chair and twirling my fingers waiting for people to contact me.. so, let me explain  a bit more..

I plan, or help plan, things. For example, we have a new version of the system and we need to install. The team that installs needs to tell me how long will they take and when they can start doing it, and then I go to the users, check what are they doing the day we need to install and plan when can we do it. I then prepare all the paperwork necessary, including requests to the team that installs about what needs to be installed and where.

We also have paperwork(well, it's all Web-based and through computers, but it is basically bureaucracy) about what do we have in our servers and computers, so i do paperwork updating these versions once new deliveries arrive.

Another important part of the job is to help the users  (mostly testers, except for the operational period when we're actually live and the users change) to use the system. Loooots of times someone comes to me and says "your system is not working".

After punishing them adequately for their lack of details regarding what is really not working or in what way it is not working(by being adequately sarcastic or passive-aggressive or as clear as they were when answering about it), I go to where they had the problem to visually see what they mean , check the system and the different monitoring tools we have to check the system status (here I'm not talking about system administration but more on the line of checking logs to see what our application says it's wrong), and find the cause of the issue and a solution. If the cause is not evident, finding a solution first also works.

Most of the time the solution is to smack them on the head and point them to the fact that they missed a step when doing the initialization steps. However, sometimes I need to smack someone in my team (or myself) for breaking something temporarily after having done something stupid,  or passing the problem to another team more qualified to know what's wrong. This could range from security and network teams (the real sysadmins) if things are slow or crashing for no reason, to the company that produces the data that our system reads (because they are giving us the data in a crappy format), to the people that actually prepare configuration files and parameters of the system during installation, or to the developers if we really have a bug in our code. A big part of the job is this, to investigate problems until you can figure out more or less what is happening,  why, and even ways we can fix it.

As usual, the trick is knowing enough to send to the correct team while offering a solution or workaround if possible. It is like in that joke where a guy goes to fix a machine, presses one button and everything works, and charges a lot of money for it. In the detailed bill, he writes that pressing the button costs one dollar, and the rest is the cost of knowing which button....

We have plenty of users and special moments when we need to give extra help, so I have a team that helps me in doing all that...so, I also need to teach my team, prioritize problems and plan stuff with them like vacations and such things .

I also need to speak with the clients, understand what they want and try to make sure they are happy and that when they check the service nothing breaks.

Apart from all that, I help to guide where the service will go in the future. This is not my job directly, but by having the knowledge about how people use it, my opinions in the matter are at least considered, and when something is a pain in the ass to do I try to warn so it gets improved later on. As part of this, I need to manage all petitions to change stuff in my service. Again, this is mostly paperwork, but you can see which changes have been requested, when are they going to be done and stuff like that. Another part of the job precisely is to check that these changes have been done at the time people planned to be done.

Since all this means interacting with other companies and other teams in different parts of the world, there's lots of meetings, conference calls, presentations, trainings, etc...in some of them I am presenting, in some of them I am listening only and in some of them I'm commenting on stuff.

I also do some testing, but not much. I just test things that could not be tested before. For example, you may have tested part A of a system, and it's fine, but after installation you have A connected to B and C, receiving from F and saying hi to Z every 10 minutes...and you cannot test all that until the whole thing is in place, especially because sometimes Z and F are done by another company. Most of this test is done by another team, but my team sometimes needs to test one of those interactions(like A with C, for example).

Another important aspect is to calm down tempers...as the guy people go when there is a problem, part of this job is to make sure there are no panics and things are treated with the level of importance they deserve. If we really need to panic I will say so,  but I also need to assure users and show that it is going to be fine and we're working on it, that things are under control. Perception is very important, and sometimes it does not match with reality. Therefore you need to calm down things, shown is not that bad, offer solutions, etc, not only until things work but also until people realize things work.

Finally, there is periods called operational periods where we give extra help doing work shifts(yes, that means night and weekends sometimes). These periods can be testing periods or the real thing, but in anyway during these periods we work from this nicer area that looks like NASA with lots of screens and projectors and TVs. From there we need to use our systems to prepare the sevice to be live. During the testing phase the users do that, but if we are in operations my team does it. We also practice steps required to do each task, and therefore I need to write plenty of documents about these steps, and improve them from time to time. This way anyone with some knowledge of the project can theoretically do these steps. It's usually in these steps that we can try to do some scripts or little programs that are not oficial but that make our life's easier, but that's the extend of our programming in this position.

While in operations we also take care if issues differently, with more pressure on fixing things faster and in any way possible. Again, all this without touching code, just using back doors,  emergency solutions and our knowledge of the systems. This period also means we have several teams together so we need to interact with all of them,  learn communication channels and how to propagate information to the people that will come next day. I also need to manage the people in my team in these periods, ask for reports, do daily reports myself, track problems, all that...

I don't know if these explanations help to give an idea of the type of job or the level of work we have, but I can tell that it fills our days quite completely, and the fact we are in front of the clients makes everything more intense, fast and stressful...but I do kind of enjoy this^^

Our Apartment's Distribution

Haven't written a long post in a while....we're back from Christmas holidays in Barcelona. We had fun but the amount of visits and meetings was brutal and we ended up really tired...

Now back here we will have several people coming to Rio to visit, which is nice^^. However,  I will also need to do a lot of work in this period, because I have been given several tasks to do that are important, but a pain in the ass to prepare....and I'm in this status of "oh, so much work to do", and then delaying starting working on the worst part...

Anyway, there's something new and nice that we have done while in Barcelona. We bought the apartment in may, but the apartment needed to be rebuild. That's also a lot of work and decisions...but we've made an important one, the distribution.

Here's an image of the distribution we have chosen:

As you can see, there's lots of space, but we wanted to have 4 rooms and 2 toilet,  so that already limits things quite a lot. It was hard to see how this would fit and be nice at the same time...

The end result is that we almost won't have corridors, so we save space. Instead we will reach the kitchen and the dining room from the entrance,  and the dining room is connected to the living room but can be separated at will. This way the living room is smaller but without having to worry about the table we win a lot of space.

The kitchen is big enough, and there's a window between kitchen and dining table which makes it nicer and more sociable to be preparing food. We also have a storage room/washing machine room, where we can handle all the laundry process without needing to occupy other spaces and giving us also a lot of storage volume.

Next to the living room we'll have a guest room/office. This space probably is the one that most people said to be not sure if it was needed, but we think it is nice to have and allow us to divide the living room from guests sleeping (in plenty of places the coach doubles as the guests' bed), while also giving us an office area next to the centre of the house.

The main toilet is close to everything, at the centre, so anyone can access it. Then we have two possible kid rooms, one a little smaller than the other, but we know that with the right furniture this is a very small difference.

Our room is big but as small as possible, with a nice extra second toilet. The funnier part is probably the shower, which is basically in the interior terrace, a funny position that made us doubt, but in the end we though it would be fine.

All windows are exterior and we believe the will be lots of light, also because it is a 5th floor so we're quite high.

The furniture indicated in there it's nor fixed yet, only kitchen and toilets will really be like that, so we don't know yet how everything will turn out, but it is exciting to have already decided on this^^.

Now we need still to agree about a lot of details regarding electric cabling and walls, then there's the budget planning in which we may need to change something and agree on materials and different things, and finally the actual construction  will take place...still a lot of things to do....

But it feels nice to be closer to seeing the final result ^^

Power and Choice

Nowadays at work I have managed to get into a position a little higher than before. This is normal once you acquire experience. Once you have experience, there's plenty that does not surprise you, and you have more solutions to things, so people ask you more and more and depend more on you than before.

This gives you a certain power. They say power corrupts, and well, there's some truth...it is not that it corrupts so much as that it is fun to use power. For example, knowing a second language is a great power. It allows you to expand your communications and meet new people. So it is fun to have this power. Once you have it, you want to use it.

In the IT world, depending on the complexity of the company, one of the great ways of having power is when you can influence what is being done at several levels. In the end, most IT is based on a guy somewhere doing code, and this guy usually has the ultimate power of screwing the whole thing or making it work fine. Companies should remember to treat this guy VERY well, but they don't always do.

However, apart from this guy, there's usually a big list of other people deciding on what the guy will need to do and how the code will be used. Currently I'm one of these people, and hell, it feels nice....

It feels nice to get the extra attention, to be consulted and considered. Very often in big companies your voice gets lost in the middle of the mess that they are, so it is nice to reach a position where you can be heard, even if just a little.

It is amazing to finally be able to influence monolithic things, and see them change slightly. It feels nice. And I understand that it is easy to get addicted and want more. Not only to influence, but to direct and manage.

However, of course, not all is just fun. As the movie said, power comes with responsibility. You need to use it wisely. And part of having power in a company means that you have power over other people, and choices to make. Power to have to ask someone to come on Saturday. Power to tell off someone if they did a bad job, Power to keep everyone working one extra hour because it is needed. And this part sucks, of course...

We all create a narrative in our lives. We imagine ourselves in our story, and we tell ourselves stories about it. We play parts, we follow patterns that we detect in real life.

Recently, I had a person on my team fired. Not really fired fired, but he did not pass the selection period. He did not do anything wrong. He was not someone who got upset, or complained too much, or someone lazy. He was just...not smart enough.

It would have been easier if he had been a bad person. We had one of those too, in another team, and firing him was not a problem. But this guy in my team was just not good for this job, nothing else. So in any stories, this is the part for the bastard,the bad guy, the boss that fires the innocent worker.

Life is never that simple, but still, it's a shame I had to fire him.

With power should come also a higher awareness of consequences, Anything that I needed this guy to do I would have ended up doing myself, which means I would have had double the work. I was not willing to go through that, so I made my choice.

After all, obtaining power is giving you the possibility for more choices, and some of them are the hard ones....

Natural Things

Elay has been walking around for sometime now, which means he touches everything.

This is an evident problem because some things are fragile. or organized, or dangerous, and we cannot let him touch and grab them (and he gets mad when we don't let him do so, but oh well...).  This means following him around and supervising what he does if he wants to walk around the place.

A few weeks ago I tried to show him xbox games, to see what he would do, and let him touch the controller so he would see things moving in the screen whe he pressed buttons. He was not that interested actually, and I don't know if he did fully grasp he could make things happen through the controller. He was happier biting the controller, and then going to the big TV and slapping the screen (which then we had to go and tell him no, he could only touch it softly...even if he tried more times and we had to kept telling no).

This made me think about tablets, phones and other new devices. In lots of modern technology, they defend natural ways of doing things. And our son clearly showed that it is natural that, if you see something in a screen, you interact with it touching the screen. Consoles have also used this concept with movement recognition (Kinect, Wii), in which you use all you body to do something. It's really a natural way of interacting with equipment.

Do you know what else is natural? Dying of appendicitis. Another example? Cyanide can be found in nature. "Natural" things are not necessary "good", or "better" than artificial things.  Some natural things can be improved in a huge number of ways.

Interacting with technology has been evolving through the years, and lately everything has a touchscreen, some have voice-recognition, and some even have movement recognition. Some of these are based on science-fiction work (like the famous mobile air screens in Minority Report). And they look cool, and we definitely should think if it is possible to make and create ways to make it, becasue in some applications it may be useful (like 3D modelling in the middle of the air).

However, practicality should always be in mind. Touchscreens are good for mobiles, because they open space for the screen while allowing mobiles not to have a keyboard. They are good for saving space, which is an important trait in a mobile device. Tablets have a similar principle, if you want to easily move around with them and see videos and play point-and-click games, they're good. Nevertheless, touchscreens are not precise. If you need to select text, or press a small button, touchscreens suck. Because our fingers are thick and imprecise, and the only way they can be useful to select is if the thing being selected has, at least, twice the surface than your finger, not leaving margin for error.

Touchscreen in cameras? Terrible idea. Touchscreen in PCs? Even worse. Touchscreens in gaming? Really really stupid, outside point-and-click games with big thingies to click. The aberration that represents a Windows Server Operating System with touchscreen interface (when servers don't even have touchscreens)? Let's not even waste words...

Same applies to kinect and other movement sensors. To do physical activities it is a good idea, and for some party games as well. However, any shooter where you need to move yourself in front of a camera is a really bad one where you cannot reach immersion at all.

Ideally, communicating with technology is just a translation between what our brain wants to do and what the technology needs to do. the perfect communication would be to have thought-activated things that really do what you want them to do. This is actually hard and complex, so instead we use interfaces like a mouse, or a controller. The idea is to translate our thought into a minimum of actions (like moving muscles). A touchscreen can be a good interface, but the mouse is a lot more precise and with less movements. If you want to select text, the mouse is almost perfect, because it offers a huge amount of precision and control in a flat area and using a very limited number of muscles. For example, if you want to apply the the idea "select text", you need to slightly move your hand until the cursor is on top of the text, and then press slightly with one of your fingers on the mouse button, while again moving slightly your hand and maybe your arm. The more muscles you need to use to translate ideas to the machine, the worse the interface is because the brain needs to do more work and use more parts to transmit simple ideas. Therefore, mouses to use in the air, while you move your hands, are idiotic unless you want to manipulate 3D objects. Since computer screens are usually flat, moving your hands in 3D is stupid. you will end up moving them in a 2D plane in front of the screen, and for that we already have the mouse and without needing to raise arms. To select text with a 3D mouse or system where you wave your hands in the air, you need to move all your arm until the hand is in a position that the computer recognizes as being on top of the text, then signal with the hand by moving one or more of your fingers quite a lot, and then waving your arm around. If the way to select is a touchscreen, the process is quite similar. This is quite less efficient than using the mouse on top of the table.

The same applies with games. The Xbox  controller layout is almost perfect in allowing you to do plenty of actions,including moving two joysticks while pressing buttons. Changing that for a touchscreen or for a movement detector is replacing small finger movements with full body and arm movements, and removing the chance of activating different buttons or actions at the same time.

Again, I'm not saying in all situations it is stupid to use these "new" interaction technologies. I'm just saying that, for example, if you make a dancing game, by all means use a movement sensor. If you're making an RPG with a first person view, don't bother and give me a controller with 10 buttons that I don't need to look at to know what I'm pressing.  Just because you have a movement sensor, don't force it on everything you do.

This is especially annoying regarding bad quality touchscreens for devices that have screens too small for fingers. For example cameras and video cameras. Lately some of them have touchscreens to interact with them, when a small joystick or 4 arrow buttons would be extremely more efficient and easy to use. 

And then there is this trend to force touchscreens on normal PCs or even on servers (again, why the hell did you do this, Microsoft??), which needs its own category of stupidity, because normal stupid look like genius by comparison...

Economics, Apartments And MMORPGs

As I mentioned in previous posts, we're currently searching for an apartment to buy. If we don't find anything before we go to Rio it's fine, but we're investigating to see what's in the market, and if there's an affordable apartment that we like, we will not wait 2 years to get it. Right now we've found one that we may like, and we've even made an offer, but things are still pretty much in the air.

As I said, the whole selection process deserves another post, but right now I'd like to talk about apartment prices, their negotiations, and economics in general. And also how the experience of playing in a Massive Multiplayer Online game helps a lot as an Economics case study, for apartments and for the world in general.

Apartment prices in Spain are still stupidly high compared to people's salaries, but right now they're reaching a level where you can consider to buy one without sacrificing your first-born to the bank. Second hand apartments are still the only option because, with a few exceptions, new apartments are owned by banks. Bank managers (as in bank owners and directors, not office workers nor office directors) know that the prices have gone down and nobody is even able to consider paying such prices for new apartments, but if they lower the prices of new apartments they need to write down that they lost money. Of course, they'd prefer to rape their mothers before admitting that they screw up big time and that they have thousands of useless empty houses that give no benefit, so instead they don't lower the prices and maintain a price bubble.

They hope that the prices will go up again and they will get a benefit. This may happen, but it may take 50-100 years (which is how many years may be needed to get back to a situation in Spain where most people not only can easily buy houses, but can also eat afterwards). Meanwhile, our friendly Spanish government gives them our money (recovered from us through taxes) so they can continue operating without having to get money from selling that big amount of useless cheap houses.

So, we're left with the second-hand house market.

In there, things are currently interesting. Prices were not able to resist the evident difference between supply and demand, and they have plummeted quite a lot. Just 7 years ago it was normal to pay 500.000 euros for a small hole in a wall, and now it is reasonable to get decent places for 200.000 or less (depends on size of apartment, situation, age, state, etc.).

Now we're in the process of negotiating the price for an apartment we consider as an option.

Negotiating prices, reading the market tendencies and the economy in general reminds me a lot about the time I was playing Lineage 2. Lineage 2 is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or MMORPG for short, pronounced like yhatzee does). You have a permanent world where you log in and your character appears. Levelling up and progressing through Lineage 2 is an extremely hard task (or it was when I was playing) that it's not easy achievable. (all the following comments are based on my experiences of the game when I was playing it, before 2008).

The problem I faced when I was playing Lineage 2, is that to level up you need to invest a lot of money in resources and equipment. And the process of levelling up does not reward you with equivalent money. Basically, to level up you need to lose big amounts of in-game money. To be fair, there are ways to get money levelling up and hunting monsters, but they require you to play for 8 hours straight, together with more people, and to limit usage of resources to a minimum. Even like this, profits are minimal. In this world it is true that permanent growth is possible, since when you kill a monster more money gets added to the world. Anyway, this creates funny economic dynamics.

To put it in perspective...once you reach level 20, the equipment that you will need to start using at that moment to be able to fight people and monsters of your level costs close to 2 millions in the internal currency. Once you get to level 20, if killing monsters has reported you around 100.000 of the internal currency count yourself as lucky.

As you can see, there is a bit of a gap between standard income and necessary money to survive. This only gets worse in later levels, since after level 40 the equipment you need is not even sold in game shops, you need to craft it from pieces that monsters drop. Getting all required pieces takes usually more time than levelling up to the point where the equipment you were trying to create is now useless to you.

As a result of all of this, the basis of living in that world is player commerce. Players have the option to trade things and even open shops that offer things and services (like crafting services). Capitalism is king, and prices evolve with the time depending on demand and on what is affordable by most players. What's more, thanks to the constant influx of money to the economy from the players, the world is in a permanent state of inflation, with very strange and particular cases of devaluation. The ones that got rich keep getting richer, and new players will have it very hard to reach a stable economic situation where you don't need to save every single coin.

This really teaches you the workings of the real world, if you want to survive inside the game. For example inside the game I managed to establish a small business of selling helmets. These helmets were needed to complete a set that gave some extra stats for players between level 40 and 52.

However, I did not own any helmets. I did not have the pieces and materials that allowed you to build such helmets. I did definitely not have the ability to even finish building these helmets.

What I was doing was buying materials in a city, for a price that I knew was rather cheap. I bought them in bulk, and when I had my calculated quotas of materials then I proceeded to contract players who had shops to create composite materials. Finally, I contracted someone who was able to made the actual helmet from the composite materials and pieces.

Once I had the helmet (or helmets), I proceeded to go to another city where this helmet had the biggest price (because prices changed from city to city, given the fact that reaching each city required different levels and hours of play). In there I opened a shop and sold the helmet.

Recollecting and buying all the composite materials and pieces, and then contracting other players to build composites and the final helmet was a long process, and it costed around 1.2 millions in the game currency.

However, the completed helmets were sold for prices between 2 and 3.5 millions (depending on the moment). In the worst case, I got 166% of the invested money back. In the best case, 290%. And I did absolutely nothing. I was just an intermediate that knew prices of materials and prices of the finished item, and knew which margins were acceptable. Sure, I wasted a lot of in-game time on this, but it was usually time I was studying at university, and meanwhile my computer was on with the automatic shop activated so other players could sell me materials or buy my helmets.

Sometimes I got people competing, trying to sell helmets next to me for 1.5 million and similar things.I just bought all their helmets with my investment money and sold them for 2.5, getting me an easy, fast and clean benefit of 1 million per helmet.

So, this game showed quite easily a number of points that you always need to consider in doing businesses and buying things, especially when their prices do not match the price of materials used or hours invested in them:

1-Living is expensive, and working hard does not guarantee that you will have money or that you'll be able to afford necessary things.

2-In order to win lots of money, you need to start with lots of money.

3-Without laws regulating business, established companies can ruin any competitors by just buying their stock to resell it at inflated prices or by selling at a loss until the competitors run out of business.

4-Try to avoid as many distributors, agents and other intermediaries between the maker of the product and you. Each step makes the final product stupidly more expensive than the real cost of making it.

5-Monopolies will abuse their position of power and inflate prices.

6-Even with inflated prices and monopolies, customers will call bullshit when the price is too much, and they will opt to live without your product if necessary.

There are more lessons that you can take from the game, but there's no need to list all of them. It's just to show that these games are great examples of pure capitalism (and how incredibly crappy it is for everyone that doesn't have a great idea or control over some particular market). It also shows the catastrophes that can happen in such unregulated markets. (there's a lot of other MMO games that can show you examples of this).

Regarding apartments, what the game taught me is that the price of such things is as much as people are willing to pay. Building an apartment does not cost their actual prices. The apartment prices depend on the idea of a fair price that most people will have in their minds, and prices will change only when people think they should change.

At the moment, every week or two I get notifications that some apartment I was interested dropped 10.000 euros, or even 20.000.

I believe that no matter what newspapers and government are trying to advertise, people still can't pay for apartments, and what's more, people still believe they should not pay for such prices and that prices will go down. There's a big advertising campaign to change people's minds, but I don't believe it's working yet.

I want an apartment where we can live, and I don't care if the prices will drop more, or will increase later. I just want our own place. However, it is an interesting moment to buy, and it is funny to see all the people trying to convince you prices might rise a lot any time next week...

Maybe I'm wrong and prices will really increase soon....but somehow I doubt it.

Back in Barcelona

Having a child and temporarily moving back to your parent's home is quite time-consuming. We've been here for a little more than a month now, but it feels like ages ago, and we've been very busy.

In this time, we've been visiting friends and family. Everyone wants to see Elay, and Elay has a particular timetable that difficuls visiting. (Apart from that, he's very very funny and we're enjoying a lot being with him and seeing him learn^^)

Anyway, we're more adapted to life here now, even if its only temporary: we've managed to be assigned to Rio too, so around July we will move again, for a big period this time.

Meanwhile, we're taking live here as a small vacation, even if we work and do similar things. At work the level of things to do is not comparable to the integration team, and at home we have our parents to help with Elay and to do some daily things.

Living in Barcelona is really really nice. It sounds patriotic, or like those people that say that your original home is where you live best. I don't agree with that, I just think Barcelona is my favourite place to live so far: Adler was too wild, too poor, too corrupted and too much old-fashioned with ideas. London was too big, too gloomy and cold, had too many people and its people thought too much "inside the box".  Vilnius is too poor at the moment, too big for its public transport network and way too cold 9 months of the year. Lund and Malmo are my second favourite places, but the weather is still not as good, and their people are colder too.

Barcelona is a big city but not that big(like Vilnius and Malmo), it has people but not too many (like Adler, Malmo, Lund and Vilnius), the weather is very nice(like Adler), its economy is not very poor (like London, Malmo and Lund), the transport network is really good(like Malmo, Lund and maybe London), it has lots of things to do(like London and Malmo), it allows you to buy things on shops or through internet(like London, Malmo, Lund or Vilnius), it's in the coast(like Malmo and Adler) but also next to the mountains(like Vilnius), it's well communicated by plane and train(like London and Malmo), you can use the bike to move around(like Malmo and Lund, and maybe London), and the city has lots of beautiful areas and places(like London, Malmo and Vilnius).

So, based on a number of things that we subjectively think are best, we can objectively mark Barcelona as our favourite place so far. Scandinavian countries are a close second, and if economy and politics doesn't improve, this will add to the city's drawbacks, but right now it's our favourite place.

One of my favourite things that I've rediscovered is bicing, the public bikes that you can use for free for 30 minutes.

We' be been checking apartments to buy recently (something that may require another post). Everything is very close in this city, and if I go alone it's very easy to grab a bike and go. And the feeling of freedom that you have going around with the bike is one of the best in the world, specially in sunny but fresh weather while you move through big streets lined with trees and grass...

I really have missed using the bike^^

Our Lasts 2 Months In Russia

We're starting the last phases of the project.

Next month we will be very busy, at least when it comes to the amount of hours we will be working. We will be doing lots of long shifts, including night work. This always destroys you, and by the end I will be completely exhausted, regardless of how good or how bad the final result is.

Depending on how this goes, I'll write a post later on about our last impressions in Russia, but I can already say we're happy to go. We have lived well here, but it's not an easy place, and we prefer to live in places where, for example, you don't usually need to worry about having electricity.

These last months have been a lot of fun with Elay. He has grown a lot (as all babies do, but once you notice the changes in past photos and behavior, it's amazing), and for a long time now he reacts to us, smiles, laughs and "talks" with us (well, he makes sounds in your direction, and he's clearly trying to tell you something).

It's really funny^^.

He has started to be more mobile, but we don't need to worry yet about him crawling. We just have noticed that sometimes we leave him on a little carpet with drawings and toys, for kids, and when we look again, he has moved 180 degrees.

He has also learned to grab things, and even to throw them away. He still hasn't enough control, but he has a clear idea. For example, when we put him in bed to sleep he starts grabbing his pacifier and raising it while staring at it. Then he tries to put it back into his mouth, but it usually ends up in his neck, or even in his nose. Of course, this prevents him from relaxing enough to fall asleep, and we need to grab his hands sometimes so he doesn't keep grabbing the pacifier...then again, when he wants, he just spits it.

He started to like toys, with clear favorites that get him all excited and nervous. There are also certain movements (like flexing his legs, or tickling him) that usually makes him laugh, and it's really nice to hear^^.

Apart from enjoying our baby, this next two months we will need to prepare to move out again.

This time we will have the help of our company, but the process is very stressful and we get tired just of thinking about it. Of course, one of the main problems is that we do not have enough space in Barcelona for all our things, and we don't know what are we going to do next so it's unclear if we should rent or use some storage service...oh well...

Right now, we will just enjoy living here together a little bit more^^

And Now We're Three

Our son Elay was born 3 weeks and a half ago.

On Monday, 16th of September, a day before we had a visit with the doctor, contractions started apparently and we went to the hospital. Contractions calmed down, but the doctors told us that everything was ready and it could start at any moment. Since even when it started it would take long (4-5 hours probably), I was sent back home, since in Russian hospitals nobody apart from the mother can enter in the normal rooms, and you can only be during the birth by special permission.

While at home, my wife called me and told me that after analysis, doctors decided that a C-section was necessary and actually urgent, and they were preparing her for it. In 2 hours it should be done, and he should be born. After waiting at home for more news, I finally was told that we were parents.

However, given the fragile condition anyone is after surgery, my wife had to be one day recovering before seeing our son. I could not really visit, so I had to wait to see them both. While working and waiting, my wife finally got to be with him, and sent some pics and videos. These days were a little bit frustrating, but the pics were really nice. Both were doing very well, and recovering very fast.

On Saturday they got permission to leave, so I finally went, together with Misha (who helped us by driving us in his car), and I finally met him. It was a very weird and exciting moment, and I noticed I had a stupid smile for quite a few minutes after holding him for the first time^^. After all, before this moment, I was not fully aware that I was a father...I knew I was, but I had not seen him or held him, so the feeling was similar as if he was still inside the belly...

Since that day we've been happily living together, and adapting to this new person^^.

First thing that we've noticed is that he's very funny to look at^^. He's still very small, of course, so he makes all this faces and movements. When he's hungry, he usually sticks out his tongue, makes little sounds and eats his hand. He keeps twisting his lips in weird ways, and he's very awake when not sleeping, looking everywhere. He focuses his eyes on you, crossing them a little and making a surprised face, and he's very funny^^. We have already taken some funny pics^^. At the same time we're trying not to hunt people to show them pics, and we're managing well in that aspect.

He's quite calm, if he's not hungry or uncomfortable he doesn't cry much (he just makes this single cry for attention when he's hungry or when he just woke up and we're not there with him, most of the time). We're lucky so far, and he seems to like to sleep deeply during the night (which means 4-5 hours, which for a baby is a lot), and until there's light, he just wakes up to feed a little and then he continues to sleep. During the day he's awake quite a lot of hours, just feeding and looking all around, with very curious eyes.

We're unsure about resemblances, but then again we're really bad with faces, or we don't care that much about these things...he clearly looks like his mother in lots of things, but recently we saw a picture of me when I was a newborn too, and since then we realise he has also a strong resemblance with me. He's too little anyway, and his features have changed a lot in just a couple of weeks (and will change even more).

He makes quite a lot of funny noises, grunts, little cries and other sounds that are quite cute^^. He moves his arms and legs not very coordinated, but you can notice when he's stressing about something,  because he squirms and moves all extremities. It's quite funny to see how he doesn't control them well enough yet, and sometimes he bothers himself with his hands, or pushes away my wife's breast while being stressed and trying to grab it with his mouth^^.

For the moment I still feel quite useless. My wife breast-feeds him (of course), so at night she needs to wake up, and I'm rather useless and go back to sleep (or not even wake up). Also, I'm still not good at changing his clothes and pampers, mainly because I'm too slow. Oh well...I do hold him, and walk him around the apartment when he's awake, and I managed to put him to sleep several times when he was not hungry. I try to speak with him in Catalan, explaining thingies that we're doing, and my wife is trying to use Russian, but some times we get back to English because we're used to it...

We're still learning lots of things, checking articles and books regarding what to do, what not to do, what's normal, what can we expect, and all those things. We try not to worry too much, and I think we're so far doing good in that side (for example, we know that when he's sleeping is normal to make sounds, and we don't take him any time he makes a little cry, we wait until he's really awake). Of course, things are still complicated and we don't know a lot, but we're trying to learn.

One very funny thing that we've noticed is that he hates not having some clothes on his body, and that he doesn't like baths at all. After the first bath, next time we undressed him he started to cry a lot and to make a devastated face. It was quite funny and heart-breaking at the same time, and we tried to calm him down and tell him everything is fine, but we couldn't help to laugh at his exaggerated reaction. Since then it has been the same every time we change his clothes, clean him while naked or prepare him for a bath...but well, we hope he may calm down and also learn to enjoy baths when he's more aware of his surroundings and he's able to hold his head without problems.

At this point our lives haven't changed much yet, only thing is that we're staying more at home. Since he's so small and sleeps so much, when he's sleeping we keep watching series and playing games, with the only difference being that we check on him, and that, of course when he's awake, we try to talk with him, and give him attention.

So far we're managing quite well with him, and we're starting to have fun together^^. It's quite a weird feeling, to have this little person to take care of and educate later on...but we're enjoying it a lot^^.

While we were adapting to this new life, here in Sochi it has been raining a lot. In the usual Russian way, several old and new roads "forgot" to have any kind of good drainage, and there was severe flooding (even when the rain itself was not that intense). We happily avoided it by taking care of our little person without moving from home, but I did have to go to Sochi once, to get papers from the hospital, and it was a terrible experience that I hope not to repeat...

Anyway, we're quite happy with our new lives, and waiting to discover more and more things together^^.

The Stroller

Tomorrow we will enter the period in which, if the birth takes place, it will be considered that the pregnancy had normal duration.

Being so close to having a son (probably) is really exciting. They bay has grown a lot and for several months my wife and I can "play" with him by touching the belly in parts where his legs or hands are pressing , and noticing all the movements. It's really funny to notice how he stretches or how he reacts when we touch his feet^^.

We have finally prepared the emergency bag for the hospital, and we believe we have everything more or less ready. We have lots of clothes that everybody has been giving us, several toys and things that other expats have offered  to us, a bed and a stroller.

The stroller took a lot of time and effort. When we first checked what was there in the market, we visited some internet pages, read recommendations and such things. We created a certain picture in our mind, about what exactly did we want for a stroller.

First of all, we wanted a 2 in 1. This model has two different baskets, one were the baby lays on his back and is meant for small babies, and another one that is more like a sit, but that can be rearranged in several ways, for older babies. These two baskets needed to be of good quality and with several settings, while being able to protect the baby from the sun, the cold, or from insects. Then we wanted big wheels, since Adler has quite hard streets, and we needed something resistant and able to move with obstacles and bumps. We also wanted to be able to turn the stroller without having to lift the front wheels. We wanted a basket under the stroller with easy access, and finally we wanted it to be as light as possible (the lighter ones are around 11 Kg). We would also like nice colours in the stroller, but we were more flexible in that aspect. Finally the price should not be very expensive.

This was clearly impossible to get.

First thing we did was visiting all the shops we could find in Adler and Sochi. We actually did several trips to Sochi, to one big shopping centre, so we could see a selection of strollers. However, most shops in that centre had a very small selection. In Adler things were not much better, but there was a couple of shops that had some more strollers.

All of these strollers were not even close to our requirements. Most were transformers or 3 in 1. Some 2 in 1 had big wheels, but could not turn them at all. Even the expensive ones were bad, without turning wheels or with terrible handlebars. One of the most decent ones had a stupid bar that did not allow access to the basket, and most of them were almost 20 Kg in weight.

We have spent close to 2 months visiting these shops, from time to time, and with no luck. After a while we decided to turn to internet, to see if we could order the stroller from there.

In shops outside Russia there were awesome strollers, but also really expensive ones. However, the sending prices were huge, and would take months to reach us. If that wasn't enough, to enter the country we would need to pay taxes, and the price easily doubled.

As per the Russian on-line shops, prices were not much cheaper plus we had no trust in them. It seems in Russia it's still normal to put a website and then cheat and trick people out of their money. In normal countries these practices are mostly eliminated, because they're not productive at all, but well, it's Russia.

We've also heard that deliveries in Russia may take 2 months, and you may find your package open and missing something. Besides, since the country is so big, maybe they don't even send things to the place where you live.

We couldn't trust on-line shopping. We were already thinking we would buy a second hand transformer for a cheap price, and get a good stroller in Barcelona.

However, a couple of weeks ago, we were in one of the baby shops trying to buy other things for the baby, and we checked strollers one more time, just for fun. In the middle of the usual ones, there was one that looked new, decent, and that had all the things we wanted. After asking about it, it turned out it was really new, just arrived to the shop. They had it in a couple of colours.

We checked the stroller, and it was really good. We really liked it. We ordered one in a different colour, and picked it up the following week.

It was a great release. We were not thinking about it, but we were very tired of trying to find the ideal one, and we felt very lucky to have found this by random chance.

However, this showed us the difficulties of buying anything in here. They don't have consistent deliveries, they don't have the same products, they have very limited stock, and you cannot trust on-line shops.

All in all, we're really glad we will not be living here once the Olympics finish...

Erasmus Anniversary

5 years ago, (plus a couple of days) I left Barcelona to finish my university degree in Lund, Sweden. That was one of the best decisions I've taken, and I really loved my time there and all the people I met there.

This is not the first time I had a similar experience, and probably not the last.

When I was 17, I participated in an exchange program in my high school. For a week, I had a Swedish girl (Marianne) living in my house and visiting my high school (together with other Swedes). This was the first time I was in such an international environment, and the first time I had to actively use English to communicate. The ones that participated in it also got to skip some classes, and it was really awesome. I made a friend, and I keep contact with her more than with most people in my high school. When we visited Sweden in return, it was also a great experience, seeing another culture and other ways to do things while using another language that was not our own.

That same year I did Santiago's way with my parents. This is a 740 km long route in the north-west of Spain, done in around 30 days. The origin is religious, but we did it just because we enjoyed walking and visiting new places. While doing it we met lots of nice and different people from all around the world, and one of the people I met was a girl from U.K, that introduced me to the fact that English music is fucking awesome. I already knew that, but I was not fully conscious of how bad the music in Spain was, I believe. This also increased my curiosity regarding U.K, and made me want to visit it and even live there some day. After the way, we lost contact with most of the people, even if we still keep in touch with a few. I realised a simple thing there: Doing the same path again would not feel the same way, because the people walking with me would be different. This way was done, and it would be impossible to repeat it. However, that does not mean you need to stop enjoying walking, or that you need to become obsessed with that single time when everything was so good and the people were so nice.

When I was 18, inspired by last year's meetings and trips, I went to England alone, and visited several cities there. I had great experiences, and I had a first contact with a country that has a wide range of defects, but also has quite nice qualities. After the first trip, I returned quite shortly to attend a music festival with the girl we met during the way and other people. It was great, and I repeated the trip a few more years. I lost contact with that girl, but I met great people while in the festival, people I never met again but oh well.

After this I had to study hard at university, but I did manage to make some nice trips, like the year I went to China for a month with some friends. The cultural shock was quite brutal, but it was really interesting and we survived somehow, even when we were basically backpacking around the place and searching places to stay from one day to the next.

Finally, before ending university I wanted to enjoy university life to the fullest before starting to work, and I went for an Erasmus, as I mentioned.

During an Erasmus you meet lots of people from all around the world, and you really have incredible amounts of fun. It is incredible to call some people you know, just grab the bike and go to some party somewhere. At least, to learn if you enjoy these things or not, and also to learn how to live by yourself and take care of things, organise events, meet and communicate, and all that.

I met my wife there, thanks to a Japanese common friend that I met on the very first day, while trying to find a supermarket to buy some basic survival food. We started dating later on, but without living there, without meeting by chance a person who was just also looking for food, that would have not happened. We always have fun with the fact that a Lithuanian girl and a Spanish boy met in Sweden, obviously. It confuses people a lot ^^.

The first semester was amazing, but of course most people left, and therefore it's the same as in Santiago's way, not possible to really repeat even if we lived there again.

After the Erasmus, I found a job by pure luck in my current company, that offered me the option to continue travelling. I visited Vancouver, and after some years I had (finally) the chance to go and live in U.K., in London.

While working for London Olympics, again I met people from all around the world, and every week there was some party at some pub (even if I didn't go to most of them, there was the option). It reminded us a lot of an Erasmus, actually. In London there were also people I met in Sweden, so my wife and I managed to keep contact with them and meet them, while meeting others who were there working with me. It was also a great experience. London was not as nice as I thought when I was 18, but it was still pretty awesome, the music still was way better than in Spain, and in general we had a great time there. We got married there, and we have an English marriage certificate, as a matter of fact.

Our London life was strangely similar to an Erasmus, and we enjoyed it  a lot too. Afterwards, most co-workers went to their separate ways, and we had the chance to move to Russia and work for Sochi Olympics.

Here again we have met lots of nice people. Here again we have had great experiences.

Our first son (that's the official opinion) will be born here, in a month or even sooner. We will have fun explaining that we're a Lithuanian-Spanish couple that met in Sweden, married in England and had a child in Russia (obviously).

And here again we will leave and it will not be possible to repeat it, but we will take this great experiences and know that we have enjoyed them a lot.

And later on, maybe there will be other countries to visit, other places to live, new people to meet...

Without travels, without Erasmus-like experiences, I would be different. I am married because of Erasmus. We will have a child because of Erasmus. Without Erasmus I might have done these things...or maybe not. But because of Erasmus, these things have happened. And every trip, every second, or third, or fourth Erasmus or pre-Erasmus we have, we enjoy it as if it was the first, even when the people and the places are different and the same conditions are always unrepeatable.

I believe that all these trips and meetings make you open your views, make you learn new things, make your life change for the better. I believe that everybody should have such experiences, if they could. We would be smarter as a society if we would do so.

Finally, I believe that these trips and meetings are really, really funny and nice^^. So don't miss the chance to do them, if you can.

Time To Fire People

In lights of my future parenthood, we are trying at home to prepare everything to make our baby legal.

We decided to have a baby in Russia while living there temporarily and being Lithuanian and Spanish. That may cause some problems, as you can imagine, and the past few days we have tried to call our different embassies and consulates to understand what will be needed from us to make the governments understand that the baby is ours, that therefore he has a right to be Spanish and Lithuanian, and to obtain a passport so he can legally be in Russia.

I guess it comes as no surprise to anybody that the result is a clusterfuck of idiocy, papers, lack of logic, incompetence, bureaucracy and so on...

It seems terribly hard to comprehend for authorities of any country that you are actually you. I understand that if it was easy to pretend to be someone, there would be a lot of associated problems to that. I also understand that in the dark ages, the only way to proof that you're "You" would be to bring numerous amount of papers and documentation, together with signatures and even some witnesses.

However, for he past few years, there's this little thing called "electronic ID" or "electronic passport", that we have been using. If you know a little bit about cryptography, you can easily see the point...if you don't, trust me on this: A digital signature can be INCREDIBLY hard to falsify, compared to what can you do using dark photos, good handwriting skills and make up. Specially if the digital signature is authenticating stuff like your actual picture and your digital prints.

Given these facts, all paperwork should only require such a digital signature, the same one that is already used in lots of passports and IDs, like my Spanish ID or my Spanish passport. (I mean, these things are already used regularly, we're not talking about science-fiction stuff you can only find in MIT labs).

Anyway, these facts and my latest interactions with certain personnel has reminded me about a core problem that, I believe, is an important cause of such clusterfucks, and also an important cause of corruption, idiocy, outdated systems and other such things in Spain (and other countries): We need to fire people.

Now, this is a controversial statement. Plenty of times I've indicated that the Spanish problem is otherwise, how easy has it become to fire people. This is also true, so let's specify: We should be able to fire people that are really incompetent or useless on purpose, regardless of position or organization. I hope this clears it more. I can think of 3 groups that would require more firing options.

First, there's public administration workers. Public workers, at least in Spain (maybe in some countries it's different), cannot be fired, ever, except in extreme circumstances (as in, peeing over customers may cause them to be fired. Short of that, it's a rather hard thing to happen).

I know public workers that are great people and good at their job. Just these days I've talked with very competent people. However, I've also talked with really idiotic people, who clearly were bothered by the fact that they had to work now, after a question!.

For some reason, it is very hard to fire public workers, and that's a big problem, because we all need a certain amount of "fear" to perform a good job.

Liberal theories tend to support the idea of companies having lots of freedom when dealing with workers. One of the ideas behind this is that, otherwise, workers are not productive enough and the company will fail. Social theories indicate that company bosses, if given enough freedom, will exploit workers as much as they can, making society a much worse place. Both theories, however, sometimes seem to fail to ignore a more basic principle: We people are, in general, bastards that sacrifice someone's else well-being and freedom if it means we get to have some benefit out of it. It is not true of everybody, but given the chance to do something "bad" that brings a benefit to you, a large amount of us will take the benefit. 

If you apply this principle to bosses, you can see that most of them (not all) will exploit workers if they have the chance. However, applied to the workers, it also says that most workers (not all) will actually be not productive at all if given the chance.

Therefore, we need an equilibrium of worker rights and company rights. This equilibrium would mean that the company cannot exploit workers and fire them at will, while workers need to actually work or be fired.

In the public administration we do not have this equilibrium, and without the fear of being fired some people simply refuse to work. I was told by a public administrator that when someone works normally, not overdoing it but not taking unnecessary constant breaks, lots of other public workers usually complain because it makes them look bad.

It has reached a point where I believe that some people try to enter public administration to avoid work whatsoever. This is unacceptable, and it´s one of the causes of the administration clusterfuck we usually suffer.You may be regular at your job, and then you should not be fired. But when you´re consciously doing nothing most of the time, to the point where yearly evaluations could show how little you are really doing, it should be possible to fire you.

There's lots of possible jobs in the world, and there's always something you can be good enough at to be able to work on that, or something that interests you. Even if you cannot work in something that you´re really passionate about, you can always work at some place and do some regular, good enough, job. The problem is when you´re not even doing that...

The second group that could use more firing is the "kings of the hill". As in Firefly: "Sad little king of a sad little hill". Self-important pricks.

There's lots of people in administration and in different organizations that has some position and believes themselves to be very important. And maybe inside that organization they are important, we're not denying that. However, they act as if everybody everywhere should give them respect just because of that.

A classic example is the typical case of an on-line community, where its creator and moderator, instead of taking a more passive approach or attitude, participates a lot and with hot opinions. Regardless of right or wrong, some of these community creators act as gods, banning people who disagree with them, giving extra benefits to the people who are nice to them, and all that.

Applied to something more serious, the big political parties all work kind of like this. Some public organisations also work like this, and the reason sometimes paperwork takes so long is because these people, by how important they are, need to stamp everything with their signature before it can be approved...while being too busy to do that very often, of course (several of these overlap with the first group).

The end result is that administration and some other organizations are full of very very stupid steps that do not help, do not give anything, and in this day and age can be easily made more secure and easier to perform by technology.

Therefore, we could improve things by firing some of these positions that are rather obsolete, while also getting rid of very annoying behaviours and attitudes that accompany such people plenty of times.

The final group that we need to be able to fire in an easier way are governmental officials and similar high positions. I'd talk about them, but there's no need: To prove why do we need that, we can always check today's circus at the Spanish parliament, the conclusions of which are that the current rulers will deny doing anything wrong ever, and if you voted for them that's too bad, if you want to change any tiny little aspect of their policies you'll need to wait until next elections.

An Ideal Apartment

The baby seems to have started moving in a noticeable matter. I haven't noticed yet, but my wife can tell when the baby wakes up.

We're in the middle point now, and we're of course excited. One of the things I've done lately is to start looking for an apartment to buy.

When I was little, I imagined that at some moment I would own my own house. The house prices bubble crushed this idea hard. When I was in the middle of my degree in university, i thought i'd be lucky if I could afford a normal rent. However, the "good" part of this crisis is that apartment prices are going down, with no sign of stopping anywhere in the near future. I believe at least a year will pass until they reach a reasonable price, and after that, for a while, we may have an inverse bubble (people expecting the prices to go down some more amd not buying at the real price apartments should have).

They're still stupidly expensive, mind you. However, they don't seem to require all your savings plus 50 years of mortgage anymore. I believe that, if prices keep going down, it may be possible to pay close to one third/one half of it with savings only (well, it depends on the apartment, of course).

First of all, even with the current crisis, the political situation and the overall stupidness of the country, I would like to live in Barcelona, eventually. I like houses, but in Barcelona it's not really possible to get one (unless its a little hole, in ruins, or crazy expensive). In U.K. and other countries is more common to have houses for middle-class people in cities, but in Cayalunya non-posh houses are present only in small towns, urbanizations or in the middle of the mountains.

Therefore, I would like an apartment in the city. As per the situation of the apartment, I'm fond of the Sants-Les Corts area, since it has everything you may need (markets, schools, shops, bars, restaurants, metro and train stations, not far from university area, not far from the center..). However, the area where I've always lived, Clot-Sant Andreu, has also most of these things, so it's also an option. After these two, lots of places in l'Eixample are very nice as well, specially next to Sagrada
Familia. Anyway, I'm not eliminating options.

For the apartment itself, that it has elevator is mandatory. You can live in a place without elevator for a while, but you will always have lots of extra difficulties. First floors or basements are not a good option, I'd prefer something higher than the average street light. The higher the better, but I'm not picky after the first two floors.

Once inside the apartment, let's start with the size. I would like to have 4 bedrooms. The main bedroom would be for us, of course. I think it could be around 10 square meters, if we want a big bed and a big closet to put all of our thingies. It could be smaller than that, but around 10 seems the right size. Then I would like to have 3 smaller bedrooms, 6 square meters each, at least. I lived all my life in one such bedroom, and that's enough space to consider it decent. 2 of those bedrooms would be for possible future kids, and the third one would act as an office or guest room (as in, it should work as both).

Two toilets are mandatory, I hate the idea of having only one, after experiencing it in other houses. One should have a shower or bath, bidet (also mandatory), closet and all that, and the other only would need a toilet. Any extra thing would be nice, but not necessary. I believe the big one could be around 6 square meters, and the small one only needs 2 or 3.

The living-dining room should be big enough to allow two big different areas: The couch/TV area and the table area. We'll talk about these later, but I believe the minimum size should be around 20 square meters. The kitchen needs to be big enough to fit all necessary equipment, but it doesn't have to be bigger than that. I'm not sure, but allowing it to be 10 square meters seems enough. Maybe part of this can be a small laundry room or something similar.

A terrace is optional, but welcomed. Let's say it adds 5 square meters to the total.

Adding everything up, we have a minimum of 72 square meters. However, depending on the distribution of the house, we will probably have corridors. Some corridors may be nice, but they add a lot to the total area. Let's assume not the best distribution, and add 20 square meters made up of corridors (I believe it's a reasonable number given the rooms the apartment would have). This pushes the total size of the apartment up to 92 square meters. Being generous, let's say a round 100 square meters.

So, my perfect apartment is around 100 square meters, including some small terrace, 4 rooms, 2 toilets, one big living room and kitchen/laundry room.

Apart from size, I would like to have natural sunlight (preferably during the morning or a bit after noon time, before evening) in the main bedroom and the living room. The rest of the rooms do not necessarily need sunlight, but they should have exterior windows, and if there is another building in front, there should be enough distance to avoid being able to jump from one to the other...The toilets should have some type of window or ventilation system better than just a small grid with a fan in one corner (otherwise humidity is quite a danger).

I believe that the apartment I described is reasonable enough. I can make concessions (not all rooms have windows, not as much sunlight as I would like, etc.) if the apartment closely resembles this description.

Now, let's talk about some internal details. First, I would prefer an apartment with no furniture. Furniture raises the price, and with some possible exceptions, I would prefer to choose it myself so it fits in very specific ways. I want to use space wisely and according to my taste. Our current apartment in Adler is awesome for the moment. Howver, for long-term stay, it has such wasteful distribution and furniture I could cry. I want to avoid this, even if it implies not being able to prepare all rooms when we buy the apartment, since it may be too expensive to prepare everything from the start. As for the condition of the apartment, I would prefer a new apartment, not older than 20 years.

Since we would have no furniture, ideally, there is something I'd like to do: All apartments usually have the electrical installation (and water, gas...) inserted in the wall and covered with plaster. If there are problems, you need to make holes and plaster it again once you're done. I would like to leave all this in the open, not hidden in the wall. Then, I would like to put some type of wooden cover (or any other material better suited for this) over these lines in the walls. This cover would be removable at will, and would allow a higher degree of customization. I don't know if it's a reasonable idea, but in my ideal house we would have that.

Since we would have an easy way to lay new cables, we would then make sure all rooms have all the necessary electrical plugs. These necessities could change with time, but it would be easier to control. Another thing I would like to add is network cables. I would need to decide a place for the router, and then I would like to set up a network with different connection points (that could be just ethernet inputs on the walls). Each bedroom would have one of these, and the living room would have one too.

With an ethernet cable network, I would get a good router with 5 entries for ethernet cables. If necessary, we could get some small switch instead. This would be set up as a private network, and it would be different than our wireless network, also set up.

Another thing that I could set up using the wall covers is a tower computer in the living room, with cheap processor, memory and motherboard, but decent sound and graphics card(with HDMI), and a lot of disk space. Maybe even a raid configuration for backup purposes. It should also have a DVD player, and maybe a Bluray. Then I would connect this to the network as the main house filesystem, and I would connect a good sound system and our TV to this computer, to be able to easily play videos and music from the filesystem or online.

There are other details that would depend on the distribution of the apartment, but another thing I would like is a proper gaming table. It would be in the living room, and it would be wide and big, enough so 6 people can play table games comfortably, without space constraints, even with some of our bigger table games like Arkham Horror.

Anyway, that's the apartment model I'd like to have. I know I will not even be living in Barcelona in at least 1 year, and who knows what will happen in this time and later. Maybe Spain breaks, maybe the euro crashes and our savings are worthless, maybe I will not have a job....However, I still like to think about it, check current apartments, and imagine our future place...