Somehow I bumped into an American tourists' description of their trip to Portugal. Obviously they did see charming things where us Portuguese see nagging annoyances, but they were quite accurate in other things. We rest assured there's no coffee like the coffee served here, although we drink coffee in small shots because it's quite thick and powerful - if we had bigger serves we wouldn't sleep for days. Quite obviously, tourists are advised to stay clear of restaurants with a menu in multiple languages. As you can understand, there's something weird about a 'typical' restaurant where the locals don't go for dinner.

Another tip for tourists, since the railroads are nearly-ineffective, try to avoid travel if you're just staying for a week, it'll steal too much time. Settle for a couple of places. Go to Lisbon if you want a cosmopolitan place, with museums and palaces and an ultra-modern district and fashionable cafés and bars, come to Porto if you want to visit a more soulful city (without discarding cultural events at all), or avoid these two cities if you feel more like an adventurer, there's a lot to be explored in the central coastal area. If you just want a beach and are considering coming to Algarve, stay in your country and go to the nearest beach. It's just the same, and not warm at all for most of the year.

By the way, I liked their comment on Óbidos, a charming, carefully preserved medieval town, which is nice for a moment but then starts to feel funny. It seems I'm not the only one to believe in Rem Koolhaas' doctrine that too much identity (in urban planning) gives you some kind of Disneyland. ¶

Yet more future illegalities. DOSBox, a games-oriented MS-DOS emulator. Time to dust those LucasArts CD-ROMs (quite a deluxe item back then). Maybe I'll even see those Doom maps of mine again. ¶

Disciples of AgeemaBlues! Again. My legal MP3 files for free type posts don't stop orbiting around the veterans of the 90s .MOD niche. Recommended, if you are just going to downlod one song: AgeemaBlues Orchestra - If You Believe in Love. Straight from the halcyon days. However, it's a paradox the end of the halcyon days and the memetic poisoning of the 00s (unfortuntely not just in music) happens at the same time of a Great Age of Plenty. Example: .Mod Soul Brother. The ability to download 310 tunes by Mortimer Twang at home in ten minutes, via DSL, would make many grown-up kids wet their pants in 1997 (the magic of .MODs - the MP3 of the 16bit computer, without the legal hassle - is that 310 tracks fit in a 21MB zip file). Record it to analog while you can. Media Player 13 or Winamp 8 won't let you open .MOD files, since they lack a DRM certificate and the built-in check (with the help of a giant online database made by MS-Google) will detect copyrighted excerpts of 70s soul tunes. You'll be lucky. Real Player ProPlatinumG3 would call the police. ¶