Archive for the 'personal' Category

$100.00

One Hundred Dollars.jpg$100,000 - The Jason Calacanis Weblog: “Google AdSense is impressive—really impressive.
We started playing with it in September and three days ago I relized that we broke the $100,000 mark.”

This weekend, I broke my little mark too: $100.00 plus spare change in AdSense revenues. Having started with AdSense around the mid of January, it's not bad. What's even better is that the trend seems to be upward. I'm stashing away the money for funding my web activities. This mainly means hosting fees for this site and this other one, when I'll start doing things in earnest. Up to now, I'm mostly in stealth mode.

(Via Darren.)

About Religion (part II)

I wrote here about the first gripe I have with respect to the mourning for the Pope's death. Here's part two.

Yesterday night, when the Pope's death was announced to the people on St.Peter's Square, the cardinal reading the announcement asked that people “accompany with silence the first moments of the Holy Father's meeting with God” (quoting from memory).

What happened immediately is that many thousands people started applauding. Can't you shut up and show some respect, you dickheads! This is not a fucking show.

Pope John Paul II was a great man, much greater than his flock. I don't know about other countries, but in Italy most catholics are a bunch of ignorant hypocrites. I am an atheist but I know more about the Bible and the Gospels than 99% of self-proclaimed catholics. Applauding at funerals, as has become strangely customary here, is proof of this. It is a demonstration of ignorance, disrespect and lack of sensitivity. Doing it when you are explicitly asked for silence, is an insult. You disgust me.

About Religion (part I)

I don't usually write, or even care much, about religion, but the events of these days, and one particular blog post, prompted me to say something. Be warned, I have two or three gripes here, so this might raise a bit of controversy, but as Dave writes: “Too much footsie in the blogosphere. Enough. […] Make some new enemies for a change.”

First gripe: About the Pope's death. I felt quite sad for his illness. He was a great man, one of the most important men of the last century and he dedicated all his life to what he believed in. I didn't feel particularly sad for his death, rather relieved that his suffering was over.

Anyway, whatever my feelings are, all of Italy's institutions and media think that I should mourn. For three days, no less! So we have no movies on the TV, apart from whatever they can find about the Gospels or the life of some saint. No sports at all: No football matches and no showing of the F1 Grand Prix, which was held in Bahrain, a muslim country, otherwise they could have probably stopped that also. No news but endless showing of people in St.Peter's Square.

Notice that they didn't do this for 9/11. Three thousand innocent people die a horrible death, but the show must go on. One old man dies in his bed and everything stops. That's hypocrisy!

Well, if you're a member of that religious sect that is called “The Catholic Church”, you can mourn all you want. I'm not forcing you to watch my Sunday football match, so please do not force me to mourn your ex-chief. I have no desire to, thanks.
Besides football matches, which don't matter much, all of this reminds me that the purported separation of state and church is but a fairy tale, at least in this country.

Since this entry is already quite long, I will post my other two gripes later. Stay tuned, if you wish.

The Bamboo Forest

Actually it's not a forest, but a small patch of land in the heart of the Po river's valley, in northern Italy. Onto this patch of land, a thick grove of bamboo trees, several meters high, has inexplicably grown. Inexplicably because bamboos are not typically found growing wildly in this part of the world.

Bamboo forest

Some might say that this is the effect of the tropicalization of our continental climate due to global warming, but in reality the grove has been there since many years ago. Probably some seeds were carried there by a flood of the nearby Ticino river and found an apt soil and climate. Being in the lowlands near the river, the place is quite humid.

Like invaders from an outer planet, the bamboos have colonized this patch by killing every other plant. Nothing grows between bamboos and, finding no limbs strong enough, birds don't nest there. Given enough time, they will maybe expand to the whole wood, up to the limits of the river on one side and the cultivated fields on the other one.

For your viewing pleasure, I've uploaded some photos to this Flickr photoset.

Four megabits at home

I just called Telecom Italia and ordered an upgrade of my 1.2Mbps ADSL subscription to 4Mbps (Alice 4 Mega), for only 3€ more than what I am paying now: about 40€ instead of 37€. I'm sure there are some countries where you can get such bandwidth for less, but this is Italy after all. Considering that I went from 64Kbps ISDN to 640Kbps ADSL, then to 1.2Mbps ADSL and now 4Mbps, all for about the same price and in a few years, there's really nothing to complain about. Four megabits is actually twice as much as I get at the office!

They said that it will take 3-4 days for the upgrade to be effective. Also, they weren't sure if the modem will need upgrading. If that is the case, I'm afraid they will bring me an USB-only modem, which I have no use for. When I started this subscription, I asked specifically for an Ethernet modem, and of course when they installed the line they brought an USB one, which was immediately sent back to be substituted. Since that mistake took a few days to fix, I sure hope it's not happening again this time.

Who needs Windows anymore?

PassBNL.gifA couple days ago my bank gave me a small blue gizmo with a button and an LCD display. Every time I press the button, a six digit number, always different, is displayed. They tell me it's a One Time Password generator.

Why this matters to me is that with this gizmo I can access my bank account online without using the stupid, clumsy and Windows-only cryptographic software I was forced to use before.

What it all comes down to is the fact that I have no use for Windows anymore, since this was the only Windows application I couldn't absolutely do without. My Intel PC is now sitting idly on my desktop, but it could be more useful as a doorstop. That's what it'll end up being as soon as I can put a brand new iMac G5 on my desktop.

Mexico here we come!

Chichén Itzá pyramidsThis seems to be the day for announcing future travel plans. After Stuttgart in July, it's going to be Mexico in August-September. I just booked a two-week trip to Yucatan for the family, starting August 23rd. By booking so early, I was able to get a substantial discount on the cost of the holiday. Being somewhat of an archaeology buff, I have been wanting to see the Mayan ruins for a long time, so I finally decided to take the chance this year. I'm sure it's going to be great.

By the way, given the proximity of Easter, I'm afraid blogging will be light until tuesday, unless something really interesting turns out in the meantime.

ApacheCon here we come!

apachecon_logo_135x41.gifGot this in the mail this morning:

Thank you for your recent session proposals for ApacheCon Europe 2005.

The following sessions have been selected and
scheduled:

(1244) 'Developing Enterprise Web Applications with Cocoon and Spring'

So it looks like I'll be heading down to Stuttgart next July, great! The proposal I submitted is for the same presentation I did at the Cocoon GetTogether 2004, but given Carsten's recent work on the itegration between Cocoon and Spring, I'll have to update it quite a bit.

Milano - Sanremo

Milano-Sanremo.jpg

As is customary every year, on the next-to-last March Saturday, the Milano-Sanremo cycling race passes right in front of our house. I took a few pictures but none was very good.

Anyway, being a nice, warm day, I was inspired to go for a short bike ride with my friends. Only about 50km, but not bad for one of the first exits of the season.

Update: the race was won by my favorite: Alessandro Petacchi. Go, Alessandro!

Alessandro Petacchi triumphs in Sanremo

A fast police car

Fast police carIf you are caught speeding on the highway by this car, don't even think about outrunning it: it's a Lamborghini that can do 310km/h!

Actually, as they explained to me, it's more frequently used for the quick transportation of organs for transplants.

Saturday morning I happened upon this nice display of new and old highway patrol cars in a local square. Since I had my camera with me I took a few shots and later uploaded them to Flickr. You can see them in this photoset.

iPod Shuffle is here

iPod Shuffle
This morning I received my new iPod Shuffle 1GB, much earlier than anticipated. They say it takes 2-3 weeks before shipping, but evidently they had a few spare in the warehouse, since they shipped it immediately and it took less than six days from order to delivery.

I haven't got much to say at the moment. The real test will be when I go biking with it, but since it was -6°C this morning, I am waiting for warmer weather.

I also ordered a pair of In-Ear Headphones with it. They sound certainly better than the plain-vanilla, bundled earphones, in terms of sound brilliance and dynamic, but the response at the lower end of the audio spectrum is quite low. It gets better if you can equalize the frequency response in iTunes (the “Small Speakers” setting is good enough for a start) but you get no equalization on the Shuffle. I'm not even sure whether loudness is on by default or not.

I think it would be nice if you could pre-equalize the frequency response before uploading tunes to the iPod, don't you think?

The unwilling hero

David Anderson writes about resistance to change and heroes:

The hero firefighter learns to thrive on chaos. Chaos is the norm in the organization and the hero is the master of chaos. The one who parts the seas and delivers the team from the perils of chaos and delivery of non-conformant quality.

A hero does not want to move to a controlled state because their
self-esteem will drop as they are no longer praised for being ahero. A
controlled organization is one that no longer needs heroes!

Sometimes I feel like the hero in the above metaphor. The problem
is, I do want to move to a controlled state and not be a hero anymore.
It's my organization that apparently does not want me to. And this is
why I will probably leave it.

(Originally posted on June, 29th, 2004.)

Night of the goose

Goose
Yesterday's dinner menu at Trattoria Guallina:

  • Goose fat liver with onion and plum confiture.
  • Risotto with beans and goose salami in red wine.
  • Toasted goose breast with potatoes.
  • Apfelstrudel.

Drinks:

Excellent dinner!

First bike ride of the year

Yesterday was an unusual sunny and warm day for this time of the year, even if a bit windy, so we took a chance to go for this year's first bike ride.

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Five days left for domain auction

Just a quick note to let you know that the eBay auction for the beblogging.com domain has five days left before time runs out. If you are interested in a PR6 domain, check it out.

Dr. Strangelove

I've always been a Kubrick fan, but besides a few exceptional cases, his movies very seldom get to be broadcast on the Italian TV channels. If they do, it's at impossible times and with many commercials thrown into, which really sucks.

In particular, I've never been able to watch Dr. Strangelove from start to finish. So it's with great pleasure that I've learned that tomorrow's copy of L'espresso — an Italian weekly newspaper — will feature a DVD copy of Dr. Strangelove. Since they usually distribute a very small number of copies to each newsstand, you have to remember to ask for it early in the morning.

Domain for sale

I've put my old beblogging.com domain for sale on eBay. If you need a .com domain with a Google PageRank of 6, you can post a bid here.

Getting Things Done

In the spirit of
Getting Things Done, I decided to follow Mark Taw’s advice: “Write Everything Down. In One Notebook.”


I keep a list of everything I need to do, along with any relevant notes. Any time I get a phone call, or my boss requests something, it goes in the notebook. Any time I notice something that needs to be done, it goes in the notebook.

So, I got myself a nice, litte Moleskine squared notebook. I hope this will help me being more productive, but so far it just set me back 9 Euros, which is quite a ripoff.

Notebook and pen

Snow

Tonight it's snowing quite heavily. If it goes on like this, tomorrow morning it's going to be hard getting to the office. Oh well…

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Another New Year Resolution

Here’s another resolution for the new year: now that the baby has learned skiing and seems to like it very much, find more time to go skiing.

Martina on the skis