Name, TLD and profile photo
Common questions about my name
-Why is your name Carles, not Carlos or Charles?
-Carles is in Catalan, Charles is in English and Carlos is in Spanish, Portuguese and Tagalog.
-How do you pronounce Carles?
-Similar to Car-less. Like when I didn't have a car.
-Why do you have two surnames?
-It's standard in many countries: the first one is my father's first surname, the second one is my
mother's first surname. See Wikipedia for more information.
-Why do you have an "i" between your surnames Pina i Estany?
-Some people in Catalonia informally separate the first and second surnames with "i" which means "and". It's not in any official
documentation but
I got used to it when I was a child and I carried on doing it. In retrospect hyphenating would have been easier! (for example Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
About the .cat Top-Level Domain
My main email address and main domain is a .cat domain. No, it is not because I am a cat lover but because of Catalonia. Since Catalonia is not a state (hence does not have a two-letter domain) the Catalan community requested, already in the early 2000s, to have a top-level domain for Catalan language and culture. It was the first domain of this type (approved in 2005), a historic moment.
My family is from Catalonia. Only six days after the registry was opened, we bought pina.cat (the registry was opened on 23rd of April 2006, St. George day, much celebrated in Catalonia).
I use carles.pina.cat instead of the shorter pina.cat because, initially, I set it up for my father's company and it remained this way. I was still using pinux.info (university nickname).
Character in my profile photo
It is a "Tió de Nadal" (Christmas Log). Wikipedia has an interesting article. The tradition is that on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day children beat the Log singing a specific traditional song and the log deposits presents. Instead of Santa Claus, many houses use the Tió de Nadal (or both!).
The Tió de Nadal is traditional and very popular in Catalonia, Aragón (Spain), Occitania (France) and Andorra. Spanish Wikipedia says that also in Galicia.
It often wears a Catalan folkloric red hat (called a barretina) but when we prepared our Tió de Nadal in England we didn't have one handy, so the profile photo wears a red blanket instead.