About

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Background

Born in April 1975 in Barcelona (Catalonia).

I got my first computer in 1985 (a first generation MSX). During my teens I started studying Japanese in order to be able to read the MSX Magazine publication from Japan. I visited Japan for the first time in August 2000 to attend the MSX Denyu Land 2000 event, and I ended up permanently moving to Tokyo in May 2002.

Lived around computers since around 1985. Working in technology since around 1998: computer security, system administration, networks, storage systems, Internet services, web development… UNIX lover (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X). Cryptography enthusiast (though most of the math goes way above my head).

Currently working in IT in central Tokyo. Previous employers include Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo, Apple Japan, McGraw Hill (Standard & Poor’s / BusinessWeek / J.D. Power Asia Pacific / McGraw Hill Education) and Grupo Intercom.

Likes: cryptography, retro computers (mostly MSX), pets, virtual reality, small and expensive sports cars, and very strong coffee.

Now living in central Tokyo surrounded by a bunch of computers and my four rat boys.

MSX CV

  • 1985: Got my first MSX computer, a Sanyo MPC-200.
  • Early-mid 1990s: Member of the Spanish group Draken. Released five disk magazines for MSX. Mainly programming, but did also graphics and composed soundtracks.
  • Early-late 1990s: Founded and became the first president of the Asociación de Amigos del MSX (AAM) together with Ramón Ribas and a few other MSX users.
  • Early 1990s – Early 2000s: Helped organize some of the MSX user meetings in Barcelona (though most of the credit must go to Ramón Ribas).
  • Mid 1990s: Released the game Matrix and the music disk MoonBlaster Mania, both collaborations between Carlos García, member of the band Carmans, and me.
  • Late 1990s: Ran LuzNET 2 BBS, an MSX-only bulletin board in Barcelona that gave MSX users access to file downloads and Fidonet messaging, among other national and international networks.
  • Late 1990s: Created and became the first moderator of the R34.MSX Fidonet board.
  • Late 1990s: Programmed and maintained the aamsx.org website, first as the AAM’s official site, and then as a standalone news site.
  • 2000: Visited Japan to attend MSX Denyu Land 2000 (official web, article) representing the AAM, Club Hnostar and Leonardo Padial Electronics.
  • 2000: Visited ASCII Corporation’s headquarters in Hatsudai, Tokyo to meet with Mr. Kazuhiko Nishi (founder and president of ASCII Corporation) and Mr. Ryozo Yamashita, who was in charge of developing the MSX.
  • 2000: Together with Matra, put an MSX stand in Sonimag, one of Spain’s biggest computer fairs. This was before retro was cool.
  • 2001: Visited Holland to attend the MSX fair in Tilburg together with Mr. Kazuhiko Nishi, Mr. Hidekatsu Yokoi (MSX Association) and  Mr. Kazuhiro Tsujikawa (developer of the 1-chip-MSX).
  • 2001: Visited the USA invited by Mr. Kazuhiko Nishi to present at the M.I.T. Media Lab his project based on the 1-chip-MSX design, together with Mr. Hidekatsu Yokoi and Mr. Keita Goto.
  • 2002: Moved to Tokyo.
  • 2003: Helped the MSX Association with some very small contributions to the MSX Magazine Revival (MSXマガジン保存版). Credited as MSXユーザーグループ (MSX Users Group), after the original meaning of aamsx.org.
  • 2004: Did some small development as a contractor for D4 Enterprise.
  • Present: Writing the Relearning MSX series of tutorials and occassionally helping the MSX Association with MSX-related matters outside Japan.
  • Present: Running the MSX Center portal.

Other MSX computers I’ve owned:

Acknowledgements

This web uses the awesome Momento theme by Progression Studios. In August 2011 I started browsing the web for inspiration for a new design, but I wanted to implement everything from zero in order to practice/learn. I found some ideas that I liked and started implementing an HTML+CSS mockup. However, I kept coming to the Momento theme for ideas. Next thing I know, the design is almost a copy of their theme. I took so many ideas from this awesome theme that I bought it anyway.

The Facebook, Flickr and LinkedIn icons are from a pack of freely available social icons by Lenka Melèáková. They’re available at http://www.web-art.cz (Czech Republic).

I started developing my own CMS code from zero using the awesome text editor Coda. Not a cheap text editor, but totally worth it for web development. The remote support, CSS editor, fast preview and awesomely smart syntax highlighting were extremely useful during development. In May 2012 I abandoned my own PHP code and moved to WordPress.

The web fonts are provided by Google Web Fonts.

All graphic-related work (logo, backgrounds, etc) done on Pixelmator.

Several icons come from the Fugue Icon Pack by Yusuke Kamiyamane.

Technical stuff

This site (together with several others) is hosted in one of my servers at home, on a residential 1 Gbps fiber optics line in my apartment, with a static IP address provided by @nifty. 

My home machines are:

  • A MacBook Pro (13″, 2016) for most of my day-to-day work and development
  • A custom-built Windows computer for virtual reality gaming with an HTC Vive mining Monero.
  • A custom-built workstation running VMware ESXi 6, with most of my servers running here as virtual machines (FreeBSD and OpenBSD). This machine has hardware RAID.
  • Two small headless HP desktops. One is running a Bitcoin node and the other a Monero node.
  • A Raspberry Pi 3 with 5 TB of USB storage as the backup server.
  • A Raspberry Pi 2 running several batch jobs.
  • ..and a Panasonic FS-A1GT (MSX turbo R) for everything MSX-related.

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