Santa Claus is coming to town, again

Twelve months since I posted the picture of the kitchen after the Christmas lunch.

A lot has been done, but still a lot to do. As a summary of the year I can state that the pace of the projects is slower than the worst scenario that I could predict.

Capturing the information is a real issue, giving value to the project, but transforming it in a boring stream of data collection.

It has been a good option to do it on my own, having the possibility of discovering unexpected coalition agreements, opening new options for research, but at the same time, this option is slowing down the evolution of the project

My supervisor is expecting to get the available data, collected and sorted in one month time, but I'm afraid that I will need, at least, two more months, till the end of February 2012.

Did you ever heard about "el caganer" ?

For detailed information, please follow : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caganer

As matter of fact:

A logical name for a Social Affairs Councillor is Mercy ( Misericòrdia in Catalan )

Such things happen in Tarragona

Again, in Falset 1983, a Councillor for Youth affairs and Cemetery, a personal point of view about life.

50% of the field work done

I'm studying 132 cities and towns, all along 9 electoral contests.

This will produce a matrix with 1.188 cells.

Today I have filled-in information concerning 50% of the cells!!!!

A fantastic result for 12 months of work. Are you serious ?. Yes. A historical success !!

142.000 records

Good enough for the Guinness Award, and let's hope also for the Doctoral Dissertation. I have an EXCEL file containing more than 140.000 records, all inputed manually.

( about 6.000 lines, containing more than 20 fields each one )

This will not explain the pain in my back at 100%, but will be very close.

I started to send e-mail messages to a certain number of cities, asking ( begging ) for the information about 1979 and 1983.

I'm receiving answers !!!!

1979 is arrived !

Till today I have been working the elections of the years 2007, 2003, 1999, 1995 and 1991

Few days ago I started to work the year 2011, because the composition of the new governments is already available in the web page of each city.

But today I could get data for 1979, 1983 and 1987 for the city of Girona. This is the first time that I can see a matrix with data referred to 1979. I advise to look at the pictures of the councilors

http://www.girona.cat/sgdap/cat/regidors_cerques.php

Select the year in the field "legislatura" and click the icon "cercar"

Sommerferien wieder

Again,

A luxury of our First World way of living: yearly holidays.

This time in the South of France. National Parc of Cèvennes.

Time for hiking, and noticing that I can't follow my son's speed anymore

Tarragona, nice but the disaster has been announced

I wanted to work 1979 and 1983 elections.

I have got registers enough from 1987 and ahead.

For a Municipality it is not compulsory to inform about the name of the Mayor and the Councilors to the Official Gazzette, but since 1987 they are used to do it.

No single one did it in 1979 nor in 1983.

Back home with empty papers

Well, I had to invest a lot of time reading each single page, because I couldn't believe the fact that no one was there.

In 1983, the loans were given with an interest rate of 16 % !

What a pitty.

I don't know how, but I must talk to a Secretary of a Municipality, of a certain age, to know where this  information was stored.

Bye Tarragona.