Ten years since he passed away

Today, 14th of October 2016, marks ten years since my father, Diego Muñoz, passed away because of cancer. I already wrote a bit about how he taught me to try to enjoy life, so this post is more of a small tribute to him.

My relation with him was sometimes complicated, as he was a bit on the extremes: When was happy, was the best dad one could hope to have, but when was angry, shouting and yelling was not as uncommon as you'd like. On the other side, I didn't wanted to study university at first (I just wanted to "work coding and not waste time"), I had some high school years with really bad grades, and in general I was rebellious. Plus I wanted to learn development at an early age so I got some academy courses on Pascal and C and a few books while still young (around 13-14). After a while, every time a dammed Windows 98, or ME, or XP crashed, every time the dial-up or DSL connection went down, it would be my fault "because that's what I studied and I should be able to fix and avoid it". You can imagine how angry I'd get because I was learning to code, not to fix Windows nor Outlook. I ended up accepting to go to the university, so they paid my first year, and then the arguments would be like "I paid your studies so you must do this or that". The first summer afterwards I hunted for a job, and spend my first salaries paying back the first year, saving for the second year, and buying him a new computer. Things got better but he never really understood what I was doing, except for some Visual Basic applications I built for him to ease some tasks, and then he didn't understood why I couldn't fix "the other applications" if I was builing some...

But other times he was awesome. I happily remember when I was younger and every friday he would have some new AMIGA game floppy disks and we would boot it up and play some time either together or in turns. Sometimes when I wanted something he would just grab me and we'd go buy it if I had been good. Or when I had a fight at school or didn't wanted to pray (I'm secular) and the teachers called home, he'd always defend me before asking what happened (I wasn't really bad but I had more than one "issue"). He taught me to fight for what I thought was right, to not shut up, to aim to fulfill my wishes... When happy, he would spread the happiness with everybody around him.

And he was dammed good at his job. He would watch a movie and compare it with dozens of others, he wrote great reviews, he knew everyone and everything about films. And was sometimes radical, like a time Steven Seagal tried to sue him and the newspaper after he wrote a bad review of one of his movies (arguing that "promoting peace" while breaking people's necks and elbows and exploding an oil tanker wasn't very logical). He was always invited to every party, news event, to the Oscars, staying at luxury hotels all expenses paid...

That's why I miss not being able to show him I've participated building cool things, like the biggest spanish social network for some years, that I fought my shyness and I've given more than a few talks in public, that I work hard daily to do what I like, that even I'm now trying to squeeze some time to finish those university studies I ended up freezing...

Anyway, I think he'd be happy and a bit proud as my mother is, so that'll do.

Finally, for once I'll share some personal images, old scanned newspaper articles with obituaries that his friends dedicated to him:
Obituary at La Vanguardia
Obituary at El Pais

And two photos that still make me very proud, because he was so good he got to interview in the nineties some "cool celebrities" like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone:
Interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger
Interviewing Sylvester Stallone

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