Busy day. Today was a very busy day at the office. I don't know how Americans call this type of day, when you feel like you're working as a slave. A hard day maybe? Anyway, things started out as normal: bad news on TV and a rainy weather. Tuna sandwich for breakfast, pretty common stuff I guess. The traffic was an utter nightmare. I wished my car had wings so I could pass over the endless line of cars, buses and trucks ahead of me. Usually there are traffic jams in my city but none like today's. It was really frustrating. Then I had a lot of meetings with my customers, domestic and international ones. Things are not going well with our current project... we are far behind schedule and that is causing a negative impact on my cash flow. Well... for better or worse this day is over. Tomorrow will be another day, hopefully better.

Awale In my last entry I promised to wirte about Awale, an ancestral game that has been played for centuries. It's a board game for two players. I'll start by explaining the board: The board is a wooden surface with twelve holes, six on each side of the board. There are forty eight seeds (actually in modern boards they are rounded stones or marbles) which are placed in groups of four pieces in each hole. That way at the start of the game each player has all of his/her holes with four seeds each. Who is making the first move is decided randomly. The objective of the game is to capture twenty five seeds or to force the opponent to resign. Each player makes only one move each turn. In order to do a move, each player takes all the seeds in one of his/her holes and starting on the hole to the right, he/she drops a single seed in each hole until all seeds have been placed. This move, which I'll call "seeding" from now on, must be done counter-clockwise. If there are enough seeds to make a complete loop across the board, the starting hole is skip. If the final hole reached in a seeding move ends with two or three pieces, those pieces are captured. If the preceding hole, the one before the hole where a capture has taken place, contains two or three pieces as well, those pieces are also captured. This process continues until a hole which does not contain two or three pieces is reached. A capture can only be done (made??) in one of the opponent's holes. The capture rule has an exception though: if at the end of the capture procedure there are no seeds on the opponent's field (this is his/her six holes) the capture cannot be done. This is called the "feed the starving one" rule. Also if at any time your opponent runs out of seeds you must make a move which places at least one seed in his/her field. This game hasn't been solved by computers so far. It can be as hard as chess! Thanks for reading.

My day. Today was an ordinary day in a not so ordinary life. I wake up at 6 o'clock and I made a couple of eggs and a huge cup of coffee for breakfast. After half and hour watching the local news on TV, I tried to do my workout and then I was off to work. It was a boring day in my studio. The only exciting event was that Jose, one of my employees, finally managed to get a win against my business partner at Awale (I'll talk about this ancestral game in my next entry). Now I'm home, browsing what's new on iTalki and thinking about how different English style is from Spanish style. Thanks for reading.

How to type Spanish accent marks if you don't have a Spanish keyboard. Hi. This is the first entry of my notebook. This time I want to tell you how to type Spanish accent marks even if you don't have a Spanish keyboard. I hope this will help you! Well, here we go! Press Alt and by using the numeric keypad input the following codes for each case: 160 : This code puts an "á" 130 : This code puts an "é" 161 : This one puts an "í" 162 : This one puts an "ó" 163: Use this one if you want to type an "ú" Finally the following ones are not accent marks but I'm pretty sure you'll use them a lot as well: 164 : Puts a "ñ" 165 : Puts a "Ñ" This is all for now. Thanks for reading. Note (Edit): This should work on any computer configured to use the Western alphabet. Tested on a Windows OS (in English) and a standard English 101k keyboard.