I’m running out of time, so the photo captions will have to suffice! Sorry!

Musée du Louvre

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Monday morning we ventured to the Musée de l'Orangerie, which houses eight Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet.

Musée de l'Orangerie

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Next we flew from Barcelona to Aéroport de Paris-Orly, which was not as nice or spacious as Barcelona or Madrid’s airports. But it received the plane just fine! Signs in the airport seemed to be in English for the most part, but I was looking forward to seeing how we got along with whatever amount of French my brother Tim knew.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

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Saturday we went to Barcelona’s Park Güell, a popular forested park area overlooking the city.

CNG_8216.JPG

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Friday night we dined at Cinc Sentits, a fairly new restaurant in Barcelona that is already acknowledged to be one of the best in Spain. The place only takes 10 table reservations a night, as it is a small space and the meal takes hours to complete since there are so many courses.

assorted Spanish treats, including orange garnished olive, tomato shaved cracker, cream skin

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Today was a big day, so I'm going to split it into two posts. Part 2 is “Cinc Sentits, my fanciest dining experience to date”.

We got up and walked from our hotel apartment to the Sagrada Família, probably the most prominent church construction underway in the world. We stopped at La Vieja Tahona for coffee and L'Oreig for tea, and then went to the church.

We had 11 a.m. tickets for ascending one of the towers, so we started with that, and then did the self guided audio tour. It was really fascinating, and the building was incredible. The photos should speak for themselves.

The columns are different colors due to different stone being used according to the load the column has to bear.

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Unfortunately I have not had time to write these captions, so here are just a few photos from Friday while we visited the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.

Charlie Gorichanaz at Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

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Thursday morning we went to the Madrid airport to catch a flight to Barcelona, where we checked into our hotel and headed straight to Casa Batlló, a famous building designed in 1904 by Antoni Gaudí.

Casa Batlló

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Wednesday we walked along the Padeo del Prado en route to the Prado Museum, home to many works by Francisco de Goya, one of the most well known Spanish artists in history.

Tranquility outside the Prado

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I decided May 6 to book a ticket to Madrid to join my mom and her friend Terry on a trip to visit my brother, Tim, who has been working on his master’s there for a year.

I was to leave Monday, May 20, but I had a ton of work to do before that. I ended up logging 116.25 hours in those two weeks, largely thanks to three projects that were behind schedule and high priority. But the overtime allowed me to largely not need to work during the trip!

The day came, and the flight was scheduled for 7 a.m. Monday. I was to land in Madrid Tuesday at 8 a.m. after a stopover at JFK.

Random shots from around Tim’s neighborhood

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Last night Derek invited me to go out with him and some friends from LA. I wasn’t going to, but agreed around 11 p.m. to meet him out. I was more inclined to go because he was presently alone at the bar, so I could meet him first …

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I don't remember exactly how I came up with this idea, but when I was looking at some D3.js powered charts, I decided to make something so I could play with them. Somehow I chose to try pulling my daily step counts through the Fitbit API and graphing it against temperature data. I found a neat weather data API, Forecast.io, and used my Foursquare history to determine which location to use for weather data each day. Once I got this working, I created a web page so others can create their own graphs. And I called it Weatherbit.

My Weatherbit chart

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