How to check if you have any traffic fines (multado) in Spain!

Man this goes beyond any common sense but, well, I guess you need to be opened to different cultures and their different ways of handling common administrative tasks.

If you think you have managed to live in Spain all those years without ever receiving a road fine (in your letter box), THINK AGAIN, you might be up for a big surprise. At least a friend of mine was: a mere 640 euros of fines was waiting for him in there :(

It seems the Spanish administration won't bother sending you a letter. It's your duty to go to the following websites and check for any outstanding payments!

 https://sede.dgt.gob.es/sede/faces/paginas/testra/testraIframe.xhtml?pagina=itablon.html

Once there, type in your name and check for the results!

To be fair, once you know about this website you can actually register to receive email notifications, just check the links on the sides of the page.

Let me know in your comments how it went for you.

Why We Can't Solve Big Problems | MIT Technology Review

A great thought triggering article. I still believe we are in a phase of technology consolidation (mainly IT enablers to help solve complex problems - better collaboration, knowledge sharing, problem awareness, computation and simulation power) and major breakthroughs will show up soon.

Why We Can't Solve Big Problems | MIT Technology Review

How to add visitor track bar with location

Well I've just gone through the search so I might as well post it here.

In essence you have:
- feedjit, my favourite one, I use on my Compastic! blog, check it to see what it looks like. For blogger do not use the Add a Gadget one, I don't quite know what it is supposed to display but it is totally irrelevant. In fact installing is incredibly simple, just go to the website, register and it will take you to your blog for installation.
- clustrMaps,  the one I use in this blog, displays on a map with support for various type of sites. Check it to see what it looks like. To add it to blogger, go to the design tab, add a Gadget and choose the HTML/Javascript one amongst the list of popular ones. Go to the clustrMaps website and get the code. Copy paste into your gadget content and add the title you like.
- revolver maps, a great one too. To install get the code from the website and as for clustrMap, add the HTML/Javascript gadget and paste the code to your new widget. Check it out on my other blog Me, My Princesses and My Company.

Real Random Stuff

Well, it's time for some real random stuff. I don't know about you but I have the "unlucky" privilege of having my birthday in January, right after all the Christmas and New Year's shopping frenzy. Which means that there is generally less money and less ideas for your poor me.
Well, this year was a rare treat.

Nebulos

I posted my Nebulos code to the google Visualisation Gallery. I attempted to make it a Facebook App but it never took off. You can find the App @ Graphit. The App actually uses another Visualisation component, namely the famous 3D world cloud from Roy Tanck, the one that's on WordPress.
I am wondering if making some code open source, therefore "giving it" away has any potential to increase your application use & web page traffic.

Crowd Funded

I love all this crowd stuff. Well, within reasons. But I believe the Net is there to help us connect and interact for the better. Crowd something (formed, funded, voted, designed, ...) has been there for a while now, eg Wikipedia, and will expand big time in the future. In fact it is probably the future of working.
I already talked about Quirky, which is what I call a crowd shaped (my own wordings) business. There are plenty of other forms of Crowding out there. One fascinating one is crowd funding, eg how to get seed funding from the crowds (your fans).

Quirky

I have been playing a bit with Quirky lately. And I must say it is ADDICTIVE.

The idea is very simple, every week or so there are two open calls for ideas on Quirky.