I have recently attended to

Courses

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Seminars and workshops

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Congresses

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Early teaching

Courses

Lectures and presentations

Ancient music

Classical music

Ethnic & Folk

Modern

Electricity

I was interested in wires since childhood and that made me learn all I could about electricity. I remember learning from an excellent professional that used to work with my father, named Felipe, may this be a small tribute to him. In school, my then physics teacher and now friend, Manuel Narváez fed my interest and made me learn some theory.

Thanks to all this I have been able to work easily with excellent electricians (my University colleague and friend Rafael Navarro comes to my mind) that have taught and helped me a lot with job related and personal projects.

And, as result, now I have started my biggest project: redesign and install myself all of my home electrical wiring.

Plumbing

This was another result of my learning inclinations, and my grandma's love for reforms :-). Guillermo, a complete professional that executed her projects while I was in my teens, took the time to teach me while working, and it seems he was as good at teaching as he was at doing his job.

I confess that I have not dared to use the soldering lamp, but I like changing pipes, installing taps or fixing toilet flushes. Though, I admit that I really get mad when I have to redo something several times because of dripping joints.

Mechanics

This also dates really back in my life, I think it predates the other two, I liked playing with a Meccano set I had inherited from my grand uncle, but real mechanics started when my grand dad taught me to fix my bicycle, which I still do now a days. I inherited his old Seat 600, unfortunately he died too young and I ended having a car one year before I had a driving license. Driving a car with over 100 thousand kilometres in your student days piques one's imagination. And, again, I was fortunate to find a good professional that did not mid sharing his knowledge with whom I learnt a lot basic maintenance tasks and some not so basic other ones like changing the drive shafts.

Unfortunately, modern engines are not so friendly, so it's been a long time since I've done motor mechanics, I just do bike mechanics.

Tools

All these interests require adequate tools, and I have a good collection of them, new and old. I even have a wooden spirit level, which is almost a century old, and belonged to my great grand father.

You need the right tools for each job if you want things done right.

My addiction to phones dates back to the nineteen seventies when I started collecting old phones with mechanical rotary dials. I extended the phone network in my parents, even at a time when fiddling with the phone lines was not exactly legal.

That led to my interest for modems that got me into computer communications. I have owned all kinds of them (some of which are still laying around my home lab), from basic 300 baud + videotext intercal ISA cards, through v96 56k baud + fax + GSM PCMCIA cards.

This addiction has extended to present times when I enjoy writing dialplans for Asterisk, which I discovered back in the late nineteen nineties, or connecting ISDN BRI and PRI lines both land linea and mobile. And, of course, VoIP.

Mobile communications have also grabbed my attention and I have used portable phones since the early days before GSM (1996), and have used the whole line of Nokia communicators but 9300, that, of course, have become part of my private collection.

The convergence of computers and phones have resulted in joining three of my passions: phones, computers and networking. This makes for a lot of fun in my free time, like diverting calls over several networks, including the Internet, and all of it legally!.

I must say that I like doing community work, I believe that we must return what we get, increased if at all possible.

Work related

Personal