Yesterday, feeling sick, I was able to get to bed early. In the morning I woke up quite refreshed, free of symptoms, and in a good mood. I began ruminating if it was true sickness or just a coincidence of symptoms, but then I thought it's the same: you are sick if you feel crappy, and I felt grateful for feeling good today. Still I chose to remain close to home in case if my state should deteriorate, so I came to Vallecas to check out a pair of study halls which are new to me.
I'm currently in a study hall in an employment office, it's modern and evidently underused. Vallecas is a working class district, on the way here I passed a park where all the picnic tables were occupied by people having a breakfast of beer, smokes and cards at 9am. No judgement arose from this observation which I found strange. I suspect that if I were on my way to a job which I didn't want to do I'd feel more judgemental.
Let's get to work.
Work session 1 (2h)
Project Arete work. Made a little experiment with some dom diff libraries instead of allowing d3.js to render everything. Didn't get too far. I wanted to use Brutal.js but it wasn't rendering. I just hate JS preprocessors so anything that implies JSX is out of the question. Brutal.js uses ES6 templates, so the fact that it didn't work was a bummer. Almost everything out there requires preprocessing.
I then went to a pool in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Madrid: Entrevías. To my Mexican eyes, it just seems a middle class neighborhood. The pool and gym facilities were top notch. The only difference I noticed were younger Spaniard parents, and senior people with tattoos. I had lunch and a nap, I didn't get into the pool because I'm not entirely positive that I'm not sick. I had seen a TV show about this neighborhood, it showed a lot of gypsies squatting apartments, drug addicts, and prostitutes, but I saw nothing of this. Surely there is a street where these kind of activities are commonplace, but it was the entire neighborhood painted in a negative light. If they made a balanced assessment they wouldn't have a TV show.
Work session 2 (2h)
I went to a library in Entrevías neighborhood, but it was closed for remodeling. I decided to go even further away, to Villa de Vallecas, which is a satellite town to Madrid. The library is old but serviceable. I worked on the Bézier Game, trying to scale the paths by their pathData instead of scaling them through the viewport. I searched through many js libraries, but all of them would be killing flies with cannonballs as they say in Spain. Then I remembered Method Draw inherited this code from SVG Edit, and I spent most of these two hours extracting all the necessary functions. Finally I got it to work! This is good. Time for a break, I'll head to the Villa de Vallecas market to get a bite, then I'll visit the second (more modern) library of Villa de Vallecas.
Work session 2 (30min)
The entire market was closed for vacations during August, so I grabbed some fruit from the fruit store. Then I came to Luis Martin Santos Library in Villa de Vallecas. It's an astounding space, I think this is why the other library was almost empty, it's just a few hundred meters away but decades ahead in quality. I begun working on integrating what I did a while ago into the actual game, I ran into some problems, but my mind has run out of gas. I'm simply too tired to focus. Ah, but as I write this I notice there are some things which I can do which don't require a sharp mind: I'll search through the noun project for good icons to import into the Bézier Game. Let's see... Nah, I'd need a coffee to get through this. Let's call it a day. I hope to come to this library some other day, it's a pleasant space.
As I was biking back home I went through a road where trees had been recently watered. I came down a hill, quite fast, and I saw that I had the red light. I pressed on my brakes hard, the bike skidded to the side and I flipped over with the momentum, sliding a couple of meters before coming to a stop. Everybody rushed to my help but I was in one piece, I picked myself up and put the bike on the sidewalk. The car behind me offered me a ride to the hospital, but it was just some scrapes and a bruised ego. I made a stop at another pool along the way, because I needed to wash off the mud (in the showers of course!) and regain composure. After the adrenaline wore off I felt the hit on my thigh, it may become a bruise but other than that I'm in one piece, thank God.