The morning commute

The first leg of my commute to work starts at the Hostafrancs metro station. I get on the train heading to Fondo on line L1 and get off at Catalunya, possibly the largest station in the system (a large hub of several train lines). There are I think three train systems in Barcelona, the metro is one of them, then the Renfe trains are another, and there's a third, the FGC. I have to get on FGC train S2 or S55 to get up to the university.

To get to the FGC trains, I have to walk through a couple of connecting tunnels and the L3 line metro stop (it's strange to me why a metro stop platform should act as a thoroughfare as it tends to cause human traffic congestion, but that's how it seems to be organized). One could surface from the metro station instead and get to the FGC trains via the sidewalk, but may as well stay underground.

At one point in the series of tunnels I come to this central round connecting hub. You can then choose to surface (see the light at left?), head into one of the L1 or L3 metro lines (where I'm coming out of), or head into the Renfe train platforms, as you see at right. It's difficult to make out in the pic, but above the entrance to the tunnel you see the train numbers that are there—S2 and S55 should be there. Why the distinction in train services? I think it's because of differing management companies: Renfe is one, the TMB is the other (managing the metro), and the FGC, or Ferrocarrils Generalitat de Catalunya. For me, the distinction between the S lines and the L lines is patterned after the German organization I found in Munich: I think of the S lines as "surface trains", whereas the L lines are metro lines.

After turning into the FGC doorway, it's one more short tunnel and then through the ticket machines onto the train platforms. Here I just need to glance at the train departure times to figure which of the S2 or S55 trains is departing next and from which platform. In the pic at right I think it's the S2 that's coming in. Once I get on this train, it's a somewhat lengthy ride up to campus. There, once I get off the train, it's just a quick jaunt up a hill to the Traduccio i Interpretaccio building, and into the office my hosts have let me use.

Last week although I was busy settling in, doing reimbursement paperwork, skype'ing with a student back in Clemson, filling out my faculty activity system (FAS) info, I actually got some good coding done. I'm working with ffmpeg and am in the middle of ripping apart a one-file playback example, splitting it up into its logical components—the one file was 2600+ lines of code. The code is difficult enough to figure out without having to scroll back and forth up a 2600 line vi window. Video playback is complicated by the use of numerous codecs and synchronization between video, audio, and subtitle streams. However, these components make it fairly logical to break up the one large file into. After I've finished doing this, the idea is to marry this code with my eye tracking code so that I can capture eye movements over video, which is why I'm here in Barcelona in the first place. I'll write more on this stuff later, as the programming effort progresses.