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Cake day: January 6th, 2024

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  • I am originally from Spain but have since moved abroad where partners changing names is common.

    Personally I love the way it is handled in Spain, where you get your family name at birth and won’t be changed by marrying (you could change it but it is not normal to do it when you get married). And the family name is always a combination of both parents. Traditionally it was the first family name from the father and the first from the mother, but nowadays it can be decided which goes first. So officially everyone’s got two family names, one from each parent. Unofficially you can just go as far as you want, so you get your given name, then first family name from one parent, then first from the other, then the second from the first, then the second from the second, etc. So if you track your family tree you can take all family names to make a huge list of them, which is not used for anything but somehow makes you be more attached to all those roots without names being lost.

    Of course that makes it a nightmare when going to other places, everyone thinks your first family name is a middle name and dealing with two family names officially can be a pain. And let’s not go into naming your kids then…

    When I was marrying my wife she asked me how I felt about her changing her name to mine and if I wanted her to do that. She got her father’s name but her mother divorced him later on and changed her name back and my wife’s father was not much part of her life, so she was happy to just change it. I told her that for me that custom is a bit strange and I didn’t need her to do it but would accept it if she wanted to (knowing her background), so whatever she did I wanted it to be her choice, but notice how in Spain people who share family name are siblings, as it is extremely rare for two persons to share both first and second name if not related, so sharing family name with my wife is really odd in a way…

    At the end she changed her name, but because in this country you only have one she only took the first one. While our kids had to take either both of mine or hers (we had our first kid before us marrying and her changing name, so we chose mine), so now we all share the first (and only, in the case of my wife) family name but me and my kids have both my first and second family name (any kids after the first kid must get the same name).

    If that was not complex enough, as I got my kids both nationalities, in Spain the rule is always first of one parent plus first of the other parent, and as the first one was born before us marrying, in Spain he has a different family name than he does where we live.


  • Most likely I’m too specific about it, but I see quite some shows mentioned that I’d not really consider underrated or unrecognised. Firefly is one of my all time favourites but not really underrated or unrecognised. Or Fringe, possibly not even From (of which I’ll just say I very much hope they have an ending planned because I don’t want it to end lost like Lost).

    Perfect examples of underrated or unrecognised shows are Galavant and Utopia, mentioned by others, they are brilliant.

    In a similar direction I’d say Dead Set, a UK show that really surprised me ages ago but never see mentioned. https://imdb.com/title/tt1285482/

    Maybe I should include also Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, but that may be a lot less underrated and it’s a minishow only.



  • Yeah he worked in Microsoft before that and when he ended in Nokia the path was quite clear what it would be. But I’ve had the chance to talk with many engineers that were working at Nokia back in the day and the problems didn’t start because of Microsoft.

    Basically Nokia had the whole management divided between symbian, maemo, and windows mobile, and as they couldn’t agree on a future path all the efforts were divided. Symbian was quite a disaster at the end and it wouldn’t have gone far most likely, those that wanted to continue with it didn’t have a clear view of the changes coming in the mobile world.

    Maemo was great, really advanced, based on Linux, and working really well, maybe too advanced even, specially for your common users back then. The whole system was constantly put down and delayed and the first devices sold wouldn’t even work as a phone, only the 4th ended up with mobile connection, which didn’t help at all to make it useful (wifi was not as big as it is now) and sold.

    Finally there was Windows Mobile which was still starting basically then and had far less strength, but with the support of Microsoft behind it it was easier to push it out. I don’t understand why it still has such support when it comes to the UI, I personally never liked it and it felt too simplistic and boring, but the more options the better I guess. Of course once Microsoft managed to plant his own guy inside Nokia they managed to favor the balance towards Win mobile and the other two were left behind more and more.

    So Microsoft was a key part in what ended happening but they were not the ones that put Nokia in trouble. That was a lack of direction in the management level.