Franchu’s Lair

Once more I had the chance to visit Vigo, a city in the north west of Spain. This time I was there for work, so not much time for sightseeing, but I think knowing where to stay and where to eat might be useful for someone. So there we go…

Hotels

The group was split in two hotels. They are not exactly the same quality, but both were ok and quite close to each other.

• Hotel América – I didn’t get to see the rooms, but the people who stayed there said they were ok for a three star hotel.
• Hotel Princesa – I stayed in this one, and even if the rooms are quite small they are clean. The people at the reception desk (Nestor) are really friendly, although they don’t speak english very well. You can check their website for pricing information.

Eating and party

As it is usual in Spain, there are many places where you can eat on a budget and the quality is good. If you like fish and sea food in general this is a great place to go to. Just walk around the center and try one of the many places that you will find.

If you want to play it safe though, we found a very nice place called “El Cortijo” on the street Rosalia de Castro 59. Pili, the waitress, took really good care of us. Ask her for help to know how much food to order and what are the best choices to cover the wide variety of regional specialities. She gave us some discounts for drinks at Marmara, a music pub on the same street walking towards the center. The average age was a bit high, but it was a fun place to finish the workshop.

A falta de los datos para el cuatro trimestre de 2009, en las siguientes animaciones podeis ver cómo ha ido evolucionando la tasa de paro en España desde el 2005 hasta ahora. Los efectos de la crisis son claramente visibles a partir de mediados de 2008, y se puede observar cómo el sur está mucho más afectado que el norte.

Los datos utilizados para generar estos gráficos se han obtenido en las páginas del Instituto Nacional de Estadística y del Ministerio de Trabajo e Inmigración – Servicio Público de Empleo Estatal.

La evolución por sectores también es bastante ilustrativa:

Agricultura

Industria

Construcción

Servicios

Sin empleo anterior

After posting yesterday the R script that generates the averaged temperatures files, you can find in my GitHub page the Processing script I used to generate the video in the post. Downloading the whole folder should be all you need to be able to reproduce the animation in your computer and with higher quality than what you see online as it got very degraded due to the compression.

I am aware that the code is not very good nor clean, but given that it was my first shoot at doing something with Processing and I was in a trial and error mode I think it is quite normal. I also don’t feel like spending time improving this code as there are other visualisations that I want to work on and where I will have the opportunity of correcting the mistakes I am already aware of.

I just wanted to mention a couple of things:

• Processing does not support the declaration of enums inside a pde project. If you declare them in an external Java file you can use them in the pde. That is why the code looks weird passing String to define the type of dataset, and having all those cascading if-elseif statements.
• The code could benefit from a more OO approach and use polymorphism to avoid some repetitions. I promise I will do better next time

As usual, feedback and new ideas are very welcome