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As most people in Málaga probably have noticed, there is a large publicitary campaign to have Málaga named European Capital of Culture in 2016.

I strongly oppose that candidacy.

Not that Málaga is not a nice place. I love living in this city, but culture is not the first thing you think of when speaking about in Málaga. What important museums do we have? Important monuments? What about music? And arts? Where is the live scene of young artists performing their arts?

The truth is that Málaga has a very limited cultural offer compared to other Spanish cities. If you compare to e.g. Granada, Córdoba, Madrid, Bilbao, Sevilla, San Sebastián, Valencia, Barcelona, etc, is Málaga worth the title as Capital of Culture?

In my opinion the current political and cultural leaders in Málaga are bad for culture. A couple of examples from the musical scene (the one closest to my heart):

Malaga used to have a wonderful music festival called Etnimalaga. It was celebrated over a summer weekend on the beach with ethnical music from all over the world. It used to be crowded. Suddenly, a couple of years ago, the festival was abandoned.

The jazz scene, while not big, has been improving the last few years. A yearly jazz festival has attracted names such as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Bobby McFerrin and more. It has been attended partly by the local population and partly by North-Europeans coming in from the nearby costal cities. This year they are celebrating another festival (Terral) with great artists like Diana Krall, Herbie Hancock, Lou Reed and more. The problem though, is that prices has more than doubled compared to what has been normal. To get a decent ticket for Krall or Reed, you need to pay 100 €. That’s about 10 % of the mean monthly net salary in Málaga, or about what 2-3 times what a 3 course dinner with wine might cost you in a decent restaurant. I have a feeling that this year, Herbie will be able to speak all he wants in English; since the audience will consist of 60 year old Englishmen coming in from Marbella.

Maybe Málaga’s culture was at a high level when the Arabs still ruled the area. There is no doubt that Pablo Picasso was one of the most important painters of the previous decade. And I don’t doubt that there are a lot of Malagueños (including Moroccans, Finnish and Senegalese) that make wonderful music or paintings or whatever.

But don’t visit Málaga for it’s culture. Not in 2008, and I have no reason to believe that things will be different in 2016.

PS. I do recommend the concert with the American singer Madeleine Peyroux, the 8th of July in Teatro Cervantes (40 € for good tickets). Hear her version of "Dance me to the end of love" below.

If you ever move the Windows Vista Search Index database (Control Panel -> Indexing Option -> Advanced -> Index Location), there is a risk that you end up breaking the search if you e.g. delete the location you moved it to or mess up file permissions.

If you see any of the following symptoms, this post may have the solution:

• The Indexing Option window is all greyed out, telling you that “Indexing is not running
• The service Windows Search is stopped and if you try to start it you get the following error message: “Windows could not start the Windows Search on Local Computer. For more
  information, review the System Event Log. If this is a non-Microsoft
  service, contact the service vendor, and refer to service-specific error
  code -2147218141″
• In the event log applications you get the following error message: “The Windows Search Service has failed to created the new system catalog. Internal error <1,0x80070003>.”

If this is the case, try the solution I have quoted below:

Re: Vista Indexer - MSDN Forums
Can you check under %systemdrive%\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Config and see if gathrprm.txt and schema.txt exists? Did you move your default index location? If you don’t see these two files, grab them from another vista machine or send me an email for the files.

If you don’t have these files, you can get mine here. (Unzip the file to your system root, i.e. usually C:\.)

Today Vista refused to restart because it was performing the important task you can see below:

Sign at a local supermarket (Mercadona, El Consul) in Málaga, Spain.

Beklager, men denne posten er ikkje tilgjengeleg på norsk

Nokia N95 8GB has everything, yet fails on just about every function. Here are some of the reasons why you should not buy this phone:

1. It is too big
2. The internal memory while big is awfully slow. It will take you at least 30 minutes to transfer 1GB.
3. The camera has 5 MP, but is too slow. Do not expect to use it for taking portraits. It is mostly useful for shooting landscapes on sunny days.
4. The included music player is bad. It has no “shuffle all” function. Volume is at times to low. Sometimes the phone beeps for no aparant reason or fades volume down and back up when you listen to music.
5. GPS is awfully slow and if you want the navigation option it just got very expensive. Spain for 1 year costs 60-70 €. No 3 year option anymore. Do not trust the price quotes you see on the Nokia web pages. This is not what you will get on your phone (confirmed with customer service)
6. The Symbian S60 platform is locked down for freeware. Nokia brags about it being an open platform, but you won’t find much software worth installing
7. The phone’s Wifi has some strange drop out issues
8. The podcast application, while able to download over Wifi, is crap. It does not remember the last position you listened to. It is only half-way integrated with the music player (using different concepts of new/played). It does not clean up old downloads.

Conclusion: Tech savvy will learn to tolerate it. Non savvy will never use half the functions. But noone will really like it.

From my living room

Originally uploaded by Magnus A.