Welcome friends, family, strangers, and likeminded people to Fortu.Net, my blog for you. Feel free to comment.

Hello hello whoever you may be. Summer is officially over and Madrid obligingly decided to feel cold and wet today.

As usual, it's been far too long since I last spent any time and effort on Fortu.Net. And, as usual, I have good intentions to remediate this unfortunate situation. I've recently finished a short assignment on a project for Fon setting up a new online shop system. Fon is a company dedicated to creating the world's largest wi-fi community. With partners like Google and Skype, they may just achieve their goal. My baby on the project was a logistics system for receiving purchase orders from the shop, integrating with 3rd party logistics providers, and keeping track of the status of orders. It turned out to be an interesting project, working with lots of new technology and interesting people.

Now it's time for me to get back to my studies. I'm currently working on my thesis, "On the Effectiveness of Marine Reserves", which I hope to finish by the end of the year (and then... watch this space!).

Please check out the recent changes to the site: Most of the photo collections are now displayed using SimpleViewer, and I highly recommend you take a quick glance at the Diving section, as I've spent a bit of time getting it to work with Google Maps. Thanks Google! Ah... And you can even check what I'm listening to thanks to Last.Fm.

The photo above is yours truly underwater in Tenerife last July.

On a recommendation from my father, I had a look at Oxford Ancestors, a for-profit genealogical DNA testing company. Interestingly, they offer maternal and paternal DNA testing services to identify to which "clan" you belong. Bryan Sykes claims that there are seven maternal clans, corresponding to the so-called Seven Daughters of Eve. Other human genealogists claim there are, in fact, 10-12 clans, including haplogroups I, M and W. All very interesting. Above is an image from Wikipedia describing the migration of the human race out of Africa, according to mitochondrial population genetics.