When I started the Cercedilla Field Notes series my intention was to publish about the natural diversity of Cercedilla (topics such as birds, trees, and whatnot), but Cercedilla has such interesting cultural aspects as well, I feel I need to expand the series to include them as well and the first post is regarding a traditional Easter week game called calva that is so unique and so Cercedilla.
Spring officially started last Thursday, but until today it has not been felt, and then all at once like someone flipped a switch it has stopped raining and there are blue skys again!
Without exaggerating it has been 3 or 4 weeks without seeing any blue skys, something that is not normal in Madrid, and a quick search confirms it
The month of March 2025 will go down in the history of meteorology in the Community of Madrid as the rainiest March since records have been kept: 1893. But this is not the only data that the rains of these days will leave for posterity. The Madrid-Retiro observatory, according to data from Embalses.net, has exceeded 200 l/m², a historic rainfall record in the city: nothing like this has been seen in the 130 years that records have been kept.
The good side of all the grey raining days: I have a keen appreciation for the blue sky, the stronger spring light, fuzzy trees, not being in the dark on the roof at 06:45 doing morning exercises, and warming days! It is like I have never lived a winter to spring transition in my life!
Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).
Ever wonder what network traffic a process is generating in Windows? Well we had a problem with a service at work this week and I had just that need and found a nifty way to find out…read on for details!
The last few days I have been avoiding NPR as the news is so crazy of late with all of Trump’s shenanigans, so instead I have been listening to podcasts that are non political and stumbled across this young kid Dwarkesh Patel who interviews people. I have listen to an interview with the ceo of microsoft (Satya Nadella) and two guys at google deep mind that I am getting the impression one of them is the father of LLMs as we know them today.
Read on to hear me rant!
Sorry for the potty mouth, but as it is my own blog I feel ok using such strong language to express my frustration with the latest thing broken by design on a software update, and is something I have been saying 10s or 100s of times a day when I use my recently upgraded phone…
Update 26/02/2025: Impact probability for Earth has been dropped to 0.00005% (1 in 20,000)… no word on moon impact but it will be threading the needle between Earth and the Moon in 2023.
Yesterday I heard a story on NPR about a space rock named 2024 YR4 that had at the time of the story 2.1% chance (1 in 47) of hitting earth on December 22 2032. That would be unfortunate, but let’s use this as a learning experience and explore!
OMG. I was an early arival party for a winter weekend in Cercedilla (our little house is not winter proof and we have determined best to only go when sunny) and I was sitting on the front porch enjoying the sun going down (and its warmth because inside the house is low 50s) and suddenly I saw three iberian magpies in a leafless tree enjoying the sun as well. I pulled out my binoculars and was admiring them and suddenly there was one on every branch, then I realized there was a low hum of bird calls and there were like a 50 of them flying towards the setting sun!!!! Crazy cool!
Last friday I had an email from Eric Migicovsky (original founder of Pebble and founder of the new RePebble company announced in January) with an update and a call to action while we wait for a new iteration of the beloved watches (hopefully in time before my Pebble Time Steel passes away!). The call to action had small, medium, and big projects and I spent my weekend on two small projects: (1) pulling all my old Pebbles out and trying to get them to work and (2) compiling a watch face. Read on for the details!
