Just Bru

If you don't read my Italian blogs, chances are you don't know that, after spending the whole 2004 in Perugia, I decided to go back to University to get my degree in 2005.
Obviously, I'm eager to use this time here as an opportunity to experiment all the techniques and tecnologies that I've acquired during my experiential learning.
So, just to start, I set up a new blog, and a proper WikiWeb, dedicated to University projects and the catch-that-damned-degree process. Since this will be a collaborative and pretty localized effort, almost everything I'll write there will be in Italian, but some resources may be in English too.

Oh, and if you didn't already do that on the Italian sites above, you can still subscribe to my little social experiment: the I Power Bru initiative. It's really simple: you bother me at least once a week asking me wether I'm focusing on my degree while not loosing my everyday job, and I buy you a beer whenever we meet, will have your name on the thesis and my endless gratitude. Still here? Go and sign!!! ;)

On Sunday evening I had the pleasure to meet and have a drink with Régine and Max of near near future and Claudio.
It always surprises me how first-time meeting with bloggers always turns out like an old time re-union. Each one knows a little about the others, but not enough to spoil the conversation, and there are plenty of arguments to exploit, from technology to art, society, travels (why so many bloggers are affected by wanderlust?), working experiences and dreams (or in some occasions, plans) for the future. And when all these topics are exhausted, you can always start talking about blogs...

I spent two wonderful hours, in one of those conversations where it's hard to leave, but you go away satisfied and the warm fuzzy feeling to be more smart than before. Way to go, José :)

Five fast email productivity tips published on 43Folders.

This makes me think about how ego comes so often in the way of productivity: all the hints are really useful, but I see that all of them really hit my ego.
"What? Using templates for mail? that's not fair!", "writing short letters? When I' sooooo good at it? Never" "No autochecking? But that sounds rude!" and so on...
So, let's try again, and let's hope I'll remember this post next time my fat ego will show up :)

Write less - Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.” Stop trying to be Victor Hugo, and just smack it over the net—especially if fear of writing a long reply is what slows your response time. N.B.: This does not mean that you should write elliptically or bypass standard grammar, capitalization, and punctuation (unless you want to look 12 years old); just that your well-written message can and should be as concise as possible. That saves everyone time.

J.J. Garreth published a few days ago this article about Ajax...

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:
. standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
. dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
. data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
. asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
. and JavaScript binding everything together.

Lilia writes something about her new research on information overload, that is turning to be more about practices of dealing with information.
As usual, I feel quite in sync with her thought, and what surprises me is the timeliness with which she blogs on topics I'm interested at this very moment. Probably it's just another tribe side-effect.

• How do you manage multitasking? Strategies, tips and tricks to handle multiple processes...
• How do you manage working with multiple sources needed for a task? Especially when there are a lot of them and they are in different formats (emails, files, paper documents, IM talks, coffee-table discussions).
• How do you manage awareness? How do you monitor multiple sources of information that could be useful in the future?

Though a lot could be said on this, at first thought these could be my answers:
- Multitasking: I manage multitasking (when I'm able to do it), by procrastinating as little as possible, and sorting out the really small stuff as it comes (pretty much like GTD). As I'm used to work with pretty immersive/complex task context switch is what I fear most. I can deal with several tasks but only as long as they are at the same level and/or pertaining a similar field. That's why I tend to wipe away the small urgent attention-critters first.
- Multiple sources/awareness: Paper is still my swiss knife. I keep a post-it block and a notebook at hand, and jot down any info that could be useful. If I'm online, I may also use my wiki, but that's mainly for refactoring and/or sharing with others, and comes as a second step. The matter is that basically the first thing I do is (usually) draw, not write. Blogs used here for awareness too.

Keeping along this line of mutual agreement, she also wrote this excellent post about blogs in the frame of Covey's urgent/important matrix (nice to think to urgent stuff as “urgent can wait” ;).
Definitely worth a look, or even better print it and make it read to your “no time to blog” friends.

Oh, and thanks to Lilia I discover that the BlogTalk2 papers are now available also as a book at Amazon.de as well as at Libri

I wrote a postmortem on CatchBob! a treasure-hunt type, Wi-Fi based locative and collaborative mobile game I developped at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. The document describes the whole development process, from the technical architecture to the user perception of the game. I talk about the positioning system, the data, the communication tool as well as the the user interface.

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging much these days. No, really, it's not that I feel like a holy service or anything, but blogging actually helps me in building some kind of mental discipline about staying informed and staying active.
Yeah because I'm starting to feel an enourmous difference in the quality of time spent simply consuming resources (being that just time, money, or information) and time actually spent building something out of it.
In meatspace, this is the difference between sneezing lazily on the couch and actually walking the street or participating in conferences, for example. In blogland, this is the difference between lurking and writing... more in detail, I recognize several different levels of commitment and matching satisfaction: chatting (almost no trace is left of what you're saying, the conversation is limited to synchronous consumption) , newsreading, (social) bookmarking (that is posting reference of an interesting article on a site like del.icio.us or spurl), reblogging (that's the practice of taking an article and republishing it, usually adding a small personal comment), commenting (when actually building on a conversation through personal ideas and opinions), “self-centered” blogging (as in this post), cross-reference blogging (when a post is part of a wider conversation, with references, new ideas, refactoring and so on).

That said, the reason I haven't been blogging much is that I'm trying to commit more to my degree, and I also spent the last couple of days playing with broadcasting technology, as I posted here. I'm planning to write more also on this subject, but so far, after two days of transmission are:
1. The effort required by webcasting, even if “just” for 8/10 hours a day and seldom speaking, is enormous, compared to blogging... but equally enormous is the feedback and the ego boost coming straight from listeners, even if they are far far far less in number than the readers of your blog (current record is 5 streams). I cannot say if this comes from the broader channel or from the innate emotional power of music (and thus it's tribe aggregating effect), though.
2. There's an interesting effect on the learning curve, that I already noticed on other proAm activities in the past. With the aid of open (free) technology, cooperation and the emotional commitment granted by the participation and satisfaction of others (the listeners in this case), there's been a remarkable thrust both in quality of the product (the broadcast), and in... how to explain... “minimum accepted standard”, I mean that I'm suddenly far more demanding about what I want to get from tools of the trade and myself as well (and now I want jingles and fake commercials, for example).

Maybe Antonio Cavedoni could share some of his experience on this topic from the Zio Radio experiment...

I guess the problem with a long piece is many just skim it, and the more words there are the more chance there is for the meaning to be lost. I’ve given a lot of thought to putting things as succintly as possible: Knowing what I knew then, I would probably make the same decision; knowing what I know now I wouldn’t even consider it. Not thinking through all the ramifications was a big mistake. So was not having more community dialog from the beginning, which would have caught this earlier. I am extremely sorry for both, and it won’t happen again. Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive. Amazingly, WordPress has gotten more donations in the last 4 days then it has in the past year — what an incredible community.

Ajax applications feel more like desktop applications, except with the real-time internet data part that you get from being on a web page.

Once satellite etc. is standard equipment in new cars, that's the last straw.

People will pay to control their media. They'll also pay for the long tail. They'll also pay to avoid commercials. 3 strikes...

“Can television one day be something completely different from the content the entertainment industry is currently serving us? Can TV be an ”art terminal“ that brings a slow, inspiring flow of funky images into people’s homes, [...]”

The idea is that the “silly box” could be used as an ever evolving painting which displays silent slow moving images instead of shows and TV series which do not really interest us.

We are used to think of Social Pressure as that feeling of “I have to do more” to stand up with the expectations of others.

Today I experienced another kind of Social Pressure, the one being imposed by your expanded social network on your attention/focus.
Let me explain:
I read on Kottke's that an explosion caused massive power outage in Moscow.
Normally this would go totally unnoticed. But today something different happened: the words “explosion” and “moscow” rang a bell. My mind ravaged on a query for “is there anybody you know who could be in Moscow now?”.
Of course yes.
Next query was “May she actually be there?” and, yes, I remembered reading something about that, and I had this sensation she hadn't blogged in a while.
A quick check confirmed these feelings.
The fact I couldn't find her on IM made me worry even more. All these well knowing the nobody were injured or whatever, that's funny.

Anyway, the point is that having a large social network actually imposes an higher attention degree on what goes on worldwide, and in a sense can make you listen to and be sympathethic with topics you'd never noticed before.
Which is good, of course, but on the other side can lead to much more cognitive load than we were used to...

In which I go a little verbose on what happened last week in Florence...

Régine reports about Digital Wardrobe project, by Chantal Mora.

When users get dressed and walk out the door, an RFID reader detects the tags in each piece of clothing and sends the information to the PC. Users can view the garment narrative on their PC: when the item was last worn, how it was accessorized, how much it cost and, according to how often the piece has been worn, what's the $ per use, etc.

As I see it, this is yet another neat context logger. Context tracking is a subject I'm quite (as in utterly) curious about. It makes up the meta-data of life, and it's useful in the end because re-creating similar conditions, chances are you'll get similar results.

No it's not a matter of being supersticious: a color, a song, a poem, a place can, by triggering memories, chains of thoughts and emotions, swing your mood and influence your performance. As simple as that.

So, now just imagine the digital wardrobe coupled with a blog/journal of sort: on day X I wore this and that, and I achieved Y. Naybe you could find that your favourite pair of shoes really brings you good luck ;)

Kottke points to this article at IGDA by Evan Robinson.
It's about why the Crunch Method doesn't work, and it gives historical proofs on the matter.
It's an elightening read. If you can't afford the whole article, here's the executive summary:

When used long-term, Crunch Mode slows development and creates more bugs when compared with 40-hour weeks.

More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.

In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.

Now, my considerations: of course I couldn't agree more with the whole thesis. I witnessed my cognitive loss due to overtime one time too many in these years.
The trouble is that, even knowing that crunch method over a long time is bad bad bad, I find it so difficult to not apply it in my life: almost every day I wake up, drink coffee, log into the net, and log out late at night. Why is that?
I reckon the reason lives in the fact that my work (writing thesis and generally researching on social software) is also my main passion. So I should find a way to draw a line between when I do things (e.g. blog) for work (that would be legitimate 9 to 5) and when I do it for fun (that could be done in recreational time). Obviously drawing that line is far more difficult for passionate knowledge workers than, say, for a graphic designer who plays pool for fun: if you're drawing, you're not playing pool! :)
In the end, I think that all that's required is some ecology of the mind. As with Getting Things Done and other productivity methods, it's all about that magic, mystic, frightening word: discipline (which is not to be confused with rigidity, but I'll write more about this later on).

Johnnie's blog is always a source of inspiration.
This is from a couple of days ago, about structure and emergence in organizations:

Set up a game and people start testing the rules. [...] Generally, they kind of stick to the rules but find ways to do unexpected things within them (A bit like how we used to have industrial disputes where workers disrupted business by the deliberate and clever rigidity of “working-to-rule”)

Take the rules away completely, however, and there is no game. It's like there's no space within which to experience freedom.

No board, no game. Sounds good! :)
As I wrote, this comes amidst a conversation on structure vs. emergence (and featuring a quote from F. Capra), where the point is that an organization to be successful needs both of them. I add that probably this is true both on a larger and smaller scale, it's the old blues of going back and forth between illuminism and romanticism and so on. Quality is somewhere in between.
At the other hand, the same concept is valid for the process: if it is good to have some guidelines and case studies (struture), an excess of detail in codifying success will be pointless as the next innovator (emergence) will come along.
And as Johnnie puts it:

For me, the best bit about “best practice” is the word practice - as in keep trying stuff, and keep learning.

I should be in the final rush at the University.
I wrote "should" because my thesis (which involves social software) really draught most of my time in the last couple of weeks. But now I'd really go back to more "ordinary" topics and notes, at least for a while.

I'll keep on taking bookmarks quite often, so if you are reading this blog through feeds, this could be a good chance to switch to the aggregated one via feedburner.

Oh, well, of course I'll also keep on posting once in a while, mainly on topics closely related to social software, folksonomy and my humble adventures in the semantic web ;)

Bye for now then. Ciao!

This has been the meme of the day.
I've spent the day riding my motorbike through northern Italy to go from city A to city B.
It took far more than expected, and even more interesting, the landmarks were quite unexpected themselves.

I had to climb to the top of three mountains to cover small parts of the map, felt the difference of heat and humidity in the air, the engine going weirder and weirder as we climbed on and on.
And again smells and lights and shadows as seen from the street level and not from behind a glass screen as we are used when travelling by car.

There are two other things that riding a bike shows you easily: the turbulence effect is one. Try keeping close behind a speeding car while on two wheels and you'll feel like a thousand invisible imps are kicking you all over: they don't do much harm, but can threaten your balance.
The other is the principle of stable vs. unstable balance, and the might of the human subconscious, that can learn how to drive a vehicle and make it act like an extension of its body after a few hours of exercise, thus reacting light fast in case of danger, using all its newly acquired "limbs" to safely escape the situation (in other words, drive a bike for a while, find yourself in the middle of two braking trucks, and you'll master zig-zag acrobatic turns in no time... well don't try this at home please).

After living for about six monthes using just gmail as my main mail agent, I decided to give a chance to other programs and check for new (hopefully) useful features while on the way.
Basically I split my mail traffic and in this period I'm handling it part with gmail, part with Mail and part with Thunderbird.
So far, I realized that Gmail's conversation clustering feature is quite addictive.
Although, I found these useful practices for the other programs:
Mail.app's MailTags, that lets you add flexible tags and priority to each message.
Here's how to use Thunderbird's label and saved searches to implement some of the principles of the GTD method.

For reasons that I still have to fully understand, but somehow related to my thesis, these two topics are attracting my interest and slowly creeping into my everyday dictionary.
Thus I found this link on Pasta and Vinegar quite amusing.

And about the one vs. the other issue... well this is something I often face both in academic and business arguments: both parties try to claim their own land and mark borders, thus leading to a schism.
I usually start on the opposite side, by trying to pinpoint common grounds and build on them. Too bad this often turned out to be quite an uncommon position, therefore making such claims pretty invisible to the audience ;)

Here it comes, ethnography strikes back. As I wrote the other day, it's creeping in my everyday life, and this time again it comes from the Nicolas' blog.

A good project and resources about digital ethnography can be found here. It’s called DEW (Digital Ethnography Workgroup). and it’s led by Edwin Hutchins (mister ‘distributed cognition’) [...]

The point of this ‘digital ethnography’ is that digital technology can play an important role in each step of an ethnography: site selection / observation-interaction data collection / transcription / coding /analysis / publication-archiving. This page summarizes how this would work.

I guess when it comes to study how digital technologies can improve the way of doing things (together, as in cooperation), ethographies are something you have to deal with.

What amazes me, day after day, is how far from pure computer science these research is leading me... now I'm in anthropologists' turf, but I've been wandering through social scientists', psychologists' and cogscientists' in the past few monthes. I wonder if it'll bring me back "home" someday oneday.

It can happen that when you are riding your motorbike on the motorway in a late-summer morning, it suddenly dawns on you the simple fact the this whole blogosphere / glocalization / smallworld / emergent whatever is just a hivemind stuff.
I mean, the more people are allowed to monitor and transmit (aka share) each and every bit of their life, and the more other people are given the tools to dig this universe of data for what's meaningful to them (or, on the other side, if the relevant information somehow emerge to the benefit of who needs them), well... brrr, scary.

Have we been assimilated? oh, ok. So what?

As you may have noticed, All Things Bru is undergoing a period of suspended animation.
Think of it as a breath-out time: as all natural things, I think blogging too is subject to cycles... especially learning blogs like this. You put stuff into it, shake, stir, pour some peer review in it (breath-in) and then eventually comes the harvest time, when you pour the cocktail in the glass and either drink it, throw it away or do some alchemy with it.
I'm trying an alchemy called thesis, and this spell is going to take until october, 26th to complete.
After that a new cycle will begin, hopefully.

For now, I can tell you that the title for the thesis is:
A Web Wide World: (lower case) semantic applications for virtual teams.

By far the toughest part in it is higlighting the computer science topics (which is what I'm degreeing in) among the tons of social science stuff (which seems to be what I'm more interested in, at the moment).

P.S.: hopefully the wiki will be back in the weekend. There you'll find the thesis-in-progress.

Johnnie Moore on the value of conversation with customers, in response to this article from Jennifer Rice.

A lot more happens in conversations than the mere exchange of data. Conversations are part of a process of relationship building in which people influence each other, often unconsciously. Sometimes the words exhanged are not the the most important thing going on in a conversation. If we focus only what is explicit in conversation, we may miss something crucial. Conversations are a vital way for people to align with each other, to feel like they know each other - even if the actual information traded is in some way “invalid”.

And this is something really relevant. Often I try to take mental notes of crucial points in my conversations, when I talk with people in the office for example, and most of the time the information traded is crap: there happens to be more technical or operational data in a 5 lines post-it or 30seconds email than in a 5 minutes morning briefing. Nonetheless, the way I and the others speak, move, the kind of words we use rather than the color of our shirts create a connection. Moreover, that smile given in a moment when the other felt in need of some extra-confidence could be the fuel for that day.
This is what happens to teams, but I suppose the same concept could be translated to the relationship with customers, patients and pupils alike.

I'm taking a look at the specification of the Amazon Mechanical Turk thing (how cool is the Artificial Artificial Intelligence motto? :) ) and the lazyweb instantly popped to my mind.

AMT looks to me as the lazyweb for business, and probably it is.
They developed a simple meta-language to describe tasks (that are now called HIT, for Human Intelligence Task) and backed it with a business model simple enough to go mainstream.
The idea is to find out those tasks that are hard for computers to accomplish but very easy for a human to do on one side, and hire people who volunteer to do those tasks. Applicants are payed for every HIT they accomplish, and Amazon gets a (fairly high, in my opinion) percentage of the income.
Something like the job of the main character in Amitav Gosh's

The question now is if it will go mainstream, all things considered.

As a matter of fact, it also sounds a lot like the job of Amitav Gosh's "The Calcutta Chromosome" protagonist, who was paid to stand in front of the terminal of a supercomputer in his Calcutta flat and classify objects as they were found and put into the mainframe by the organization scanners. Nice book.

The Myth of Multitasking (or The Truth About Multitasking)
Originally uploaded by Tim Morgan.

Inspired by Merlin Mann's podcast of the same name.

Further supplemented by this and likely many other articles and blog posts saying the same thing. So stop multitasking!

Just a quick update un my current social/blogging behaviour: I'm now indulging in this personal trend that drives me away from blogging aloud, while instead keeping a lot of personal conversation open with several friends of mine. This leads obviously to less blogging, while on the other hand the mailbox turned into a neversleeping word forge.

The curious bit is that neither texts (sms) nor instant messaging raised significantly, and this scores some point for the thesis that IM is not so much about conversation, but rather about raw transmission of simple data and lot of noise (of various kind).

According to the researchers, the secret of actors' memories is, well, acting. An actor acquires lines readily by focusing not on the words of the script, but on those words' meaning — the moment-to-moment motivations of the character saying them — as well as on the physical and emotional dimensions of their performance.
Not so big a surprise, but nice to see scientific research is supporting this thesis.
Most of memorization techniques I stumbled into are based upon the use of as many senses as possible, and possibly linking emotions and sensations to the build up a strong impression of that memory/data.
What best of playing it? :)
Moreover, the script itself, with its characters, settings, timeline, provides a strong and cogerent context where the lines can lay. This makes sense to me.

If you're interested in the topic, Merlin here points to some useful resource related to memory techniques.

Rails Engines are a way of dropping in whole chunks of functionality into your existing application without affecting any of your existing code.

While I'm following with some envy the photostream of the podcasthotel, I decided to download the podcasts of Future of Web Apps, that are now available at the summit's site.
So far I haven't listened to podcasts so much, maybe because I don't have an iPod (nor any other form of mp3 player) so my listening time is limited to the time I spend in front of the mac, which is quite a time, I know.
Nevertheless, while working I either prefer listening to "work" music (that in my case ranges from Bob Dylan to Fugazi, depending on the task) or keeping the "audio" channel open for coworkers (I still don't feel it so natural to follow conversations in English and it requires a good amount of attention on my side).

So an idle sunday looks like the best bet to try and listen to a considerable amount of good speeches.

Just a quick productivity trick I'm finding extremely useful:

these days I'm developing often with tools like textmate and eclipse but the following considerations apply to knowledge working in general (web surfing for instance).
By the way, this leads to having a fast growing list of open files piling up in nice, pretty formatted tabs.

I found that all these tabs, while granting me fast access to all the contexts I need while writing, actually clutter my attention space. More than one time I found myself iterating through the tabs hopelessly.

One practice I found very useful is just periodically (better just after every significant context switch, being it an interrupt or actual new task) cleaning up all tabs and starting it all over.

Funny: there's a certain amount of thrill in pressing that ctrl+shift+w combination, followed by the inner knowledge that all your data is still there, safely stored in the subversion.

And this is another tip: if you never tried that you can't imagine how mind freeing is having your code/data/whatever nicely versioned somehow :)

Quite kaizen, indeed.

Yesterday I was cleaning home, when I just realized this: as everybody who's ever cleaned a house at least once will know, there's a "best practice" in doing it (aside from finding someone else to do it), and it's starting from the "top" (furniture, glasses, kitchen stuff) and moving "down", leaving the floor as the last thing. The reason is quite simple: gravity.
Moreover, it's clear that it (the gravity law) is far beyond our chance to modify it by any means, so you can obviously ignore the best practive and start from the bottom, but you'll find yourself either doubling the effort or ending up with a filthy floor.

Now the question is: are there any absolute laws appliable to knowledge work as there are in the physical world that can hinder one approach against another?

Yes, tomorrow the maker of my laptop will be 30 years old. And even if it's been a while since I read the feeds I guess there'll be some buzz going on. There'll be news? A new release? What is it going to be? A faster powerbook? A smaller iPod? Maybe a shePod? ;)

But.

But for today it is me who turns 30. So probably now I should go through a list of my best achievements of the year, of cool-sounding forecasts for the time to come, I should tell you how a big change is that, and how proud or happy or sad I am and how I plan to settle all that or maybe how I'll change my look or even throw away my blog or instead become a pundit and all.
But nothing of these is gonna happen (well, I definitely need an haircut though).
Everything is good, really; everything is fine, truly: I'm doing the thing I like the most while being surrounded by some of the people I value the most (and seriously thinking of how to keep in touch with other meaningful people out there because, since I'm basically a lucky guy, I know a lot of them), I got the feeling of doing something useful, and the funny thing is that I even get payed for that :)

So I am in no condition to ask for presents, or to desire any. In a few hours a lovely friend from Italy will land at Luton, and seeing her smile will make me feel closer to all my Italian friends, that are really the thing I always miss the most. I'm really looking forward to that moment.
Oh, and maybe I'll even have that haircut, that would be nice.

That said, there is just one thing I feel like asking you.
Just try and have a nice day. Think about it. Please.

P.S.: Oh look! In a few days another bold guy will turn 30! Cheers :)

If you deploy rails, remember to freeze...

Dave Pell came out this morning with this entertaining challenge:

Let’s set a new goal.

From this day forth, any blogger who is writing an entry for public consumption must either get the facts right or provide some analysis of those facts that is accurate, logical or at least makes a little sense.

Let me make this clear. I am not suggesting that a blogger do both of these things.

I think I'll take this as a personal note and try to actually commit to this.

From time to time is useful to catch something that has been just thewn up in the air or to a general public. make it fit yourself and try to abide to it.

Why renaissance?
Well, to tell the truth this will be the theme at reboot, the übercool (un)conference that's going to happen in a few week's time in Copenaghen. This theme has been haunting me for a while now since I was (and still am) trying to organize my ideas in a sort of demo/workshop/
roundtable to submit to reboot itself.
Eventually I thought there could be no better moment to end this seemingly endless transition from the "old" All Things Bru to this not-new-anymore-and-probable-will-die-still-embryonic-instead-if-I-dont-move-quickly "environment".

the story so far
having to deal with a theme, I started by looking at a complete definition of it.

According to the usual descriptions, the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century, spreading through the rest of Europe, represented a reconnection of the west with classical antiquity, the absorption of knowledge—particularly mathematics—from Arabic, the return of experimentalism, the focus on the importance of living well in the present (e.g. Renaissance humanism), an explosion of the dissemination of knowledge brought on by printing and the creation of new techniques in art, poetry and architecture which led to a radical change in the style, and substance of the arts and letters. This period, in this view, represents Europe emerging from a long period as a backwater, and the rise of commerce and exploration. The Italian Renaissance is often labeled as the beginning of the "modern" epoch.

Well, in short, there's something here about making things in a new way, or finding new things to do, isn't it?

So I had a look back at my blog and, oh my! I suddenly realized that I couldn't recognize it anymore as my "personal knowledge management" system, or my "digital lifestyle aggregator" or whatever!!! And started feeling uneasy.
Meanwhile, I came across this trend about alpha or "first generation" bloggers quitting the scene...and started to understand the feeling of who decide to just "give-up" (there can be many reasons behind, my has always been "it's no more exciting as it used to / I want a new toy / what am I missing out there? ).

But I don't want to give up, essentially because in my case it wouldn't make sense at all: this was born as my cooperative pKM tool, and I definitely need to manage my thoughts and cooperate now more than ever!

So, it is the time for some huge change, and the (fairly obvious, but rather invisible unless you stop and think about) reason is that many things already ch-ch-ch-changed in my life (which is the main topic of the blog) in the last few years.

I divided these in three big categories:
1) context (where do I live, what/how/why do I do, who do I meet)
2) content (what/how/why do I blog)
3) tools (this and my other blogs, plus other services I started / stopped using)

Among these, context is definitely the pivotal element: it changes day by day due to my ongoing journey through life, experiences I make and so on, and I must admit that I'm pretty happy with it today as I was with the one I had three years ago, only in a different manner.
This is also the reason why I always put so much of a stress on the context elements of blogging (try searching "context"...), that often seems to go pretty much unnoticed.
At the end of the day, I like to think of content and tools as the "mobile" components of this knowledge machine, hence those that neede to be adjusted in order to match my own personal context.

I finish this post, as I often do, with a personal challenge: I'll spend the next two days (luckily enough monday will be a bank holyday :D ) thinking, designing and planning my next generation pKM environment. Tomorrow will be dedicated to content, while monday I'll review the tools.

What can I say if not... stay tuned ;)

one year of white pages
Originally uploaded by bru76.

This has been my "note-taking" choice for year 2006. No PDA and no uber-expensive moleskine: these twelve booklets (by NAVA) feature a smart set of "holes" to indicate the month of reference and just the right number of pages. So I can easily keep a track of what happened, month by month ;)

A few weeks back, while I was in Italy on my time-off, I sketched this few lines on my notebook about the sources of inspiration.

Woke up this morning in the bedroom where I grew up, in Alessandria, Italy.
And, mate, was it good!
The smell of good coffee, all my books, comics, gadgets around. It's more than the actual value of things, ya know, it's about what they're tied to into your head: the context they represented, and that's triggered by that specific colour, or maybe that smell of books, or the sound that door makes when it's shut. And it may go totally subconscious too... like glancing at the bookcase and that specific title fires up the right neuron at the right time.

The result is that my mind actually blew up with inspiration, su much so that I don't know where to start with.
Of course being on "time off" really means something, but I'm sure this dear, reassuring, friendly environment also has its weight.

This made me think a lot about style, design and my tastes about it.
You see, I embraced and spread the gospel of minimalism, I dearly love empty spaces, white surfaces, burning-bright and pinpointed lights.
And then guess what? I come back home and find out that in this messy, tiny room full to the unimaginable with stacks of old newspapers, RPG magazines, books, CDs, worthless pieces of electronics,wires, a bicicyle hanging from the wall and another wall totally covered by old ugly pictures and "symbols" from my childhood (racing cars, fantasy characters, and so on)... in this very room, I was saying, it is where it's easier for me to fire out new ideas and small sparkles of enlightenment.
So what? So I still have no ultimate answer. Let me have this terrific coffee and think about it ;)

I'm blogging those now because yesterday, after three weeks spent with these thoughts "bubbling" in the background of my mind theatre, I joined some dots. As I'll explain in the next post.

Spent the last three days enjoying great company, better conversations (thank you Sebastian for having always one more anecdote to tell) and nice weather while staying at good Ton and Elmine's in occasion of Lilia's wedding.

As always happens when the blogwalk crew is around (and this time I also attended a geekdinner), my mind is joyfully enlightened by seeing there are so many people around this small world thinking along similar patterns.

Well, but I guess the time has come to pack and head toward Amsterdam and then London.

After my last (and first since I moved) trip to Italy, I brought back books and notes of the Japanese lessons I took a few years back. The reason is that I'm not only still interested in it, but would like to finally get back to it and refresh/improve my skill in Japanese (as well as French...).

Yesterday on the way to work I realized that podcasts could be quite a good tool for language learning, so tonight I fired up iTunes and... guess what? In the box of "favourites international podcasts" there was this JapanesePod101 that looks really promising: they're at beginner lesson #68 (which I just downloaded), but the feed also contains podcasts for intermediate level, survival phrases, japanese culture and news.

What? You want learning material? Just have a look at the website!

Dave McKean's talk was nearly as good as expected.
To be honest, in the few early minutes I was not relly impressed: the whole thing started with Dave sitting in a corner of the stage, behind his powerbook, clicking through the slides of his personal portfolio (that, after two days spent watching funambolic speeches made by people who seemed to be able to have an empathic link with their slideshow, feels so past generation) and reading a comic story. What? No wait, I didn't come here to listen to you reading a graphic novel sir... but then, well mate, the man can read!
And knows how to tell a story, because that's what he is: a storyteller. And that, I discovered, is the reason why I like his work.
Indeed, the magic of the evening has been peeking at the artist behind the mask, and finding out some of his patterns, motivations, attitude, which eventually lead to a couple of innuendos about my own way to see creativity, art, and ultimately life itself.

Quickly, those can be summarized as:
* The importance of music as a language (both of us chose between music and something else)
* The importance of stories (and stories withing stories, everything is about telling a tale)
* A practical, "here and now" approach to storytelling: Dave higlighted this attitude in contrast with Neil Gaiman mythical/archetypical approach. I think archetypes are great too, but useless if are not aimed at giving clues about the very present moment.

Last but not least, at my question about how the relationship with music changed now that he's dealing with moving images and where does the "Week before" soundtrack come from, Dave replied:
"Well, I chose that music because listening to it you cannot help but smile"
And, I say, that's all what there is.

I'll fly to Italy tomorrow night, just for a couple of days. Too little to meet all the people I'm missing day by day, but enough to share a chat with anybody who'll be at the Flickr meeting in Milano on Sunday.

In the meanwhile, here in London there are a few worthwhile events for those who'll wander by the Thames:
as the Architecture Biennale goes on, this night at the Tate Modern you'll have a chance to attend to the Regeneration debate:

elving into the complex issues surrounding the regeneration of our ageing capital, leading figures from the world of architecture and urban planning ask what it takes to create a sustainable city and how to spend London’s regeneration funds effectively. The discussion focuses in particular on regeneration projects within Southwark, especially around Bankside, Borough and Elephant and Castle.

Eight quids. Quite something.

On friday, Trafalgar square will see the coming of Theo Jensen's Strandbeesten. If you miss this, they will be on display at the ICA from the 3rd of July. Jensen will also give a speech on 5th of July.

By the way, the Architecture Biennale is a good excuse to explore central London, and there are a few interesting installations here and there. In Clerkenwell Green for example you can find a huge weird thing halfway between an alien christmas tree and Matrix's harvesters that is supposed to grant inspiration and a lift to your spirits in the midst of the urban grind. I've been there twice, and aside from a guy mangling with his vaio connected to the big thing and a lot of coloured leds nothing happened there.
But probably you're expected to go there before dusk.

Will be back to London on or about next monday.

Yet another example of how blogs are meaningful in deepening and add new dimensions to conversations:
I had this conversation with Francesca today, which ended up on the subject of Ulysses.
Actually we quickly overviewed part of the literature on the topic, from myth to his appearance in Dante's Inferno, to Lord Tennyson's Ulysses poem.
And all through the discussion I stay focused on my personal perspective and model of Ulysses: that of a man who never tires of seeking knowledge and "virtue": I was focusing on the psychology and identifying traits of the character... what makes that man Ulysses.

Then, after a few hours, I found out that Francesca wrote a post about our brainstorm, and what emerged from it is a slightly different, but definitely charming, theme: that of the ageing man who's put in front of his limits and growing experience, and an ever changing and challenging world outside. She brings the focus on the stage, on the relationship between the character and his world.
Hmmm... must be something like the different perspective that director and actor get of a play.

And all this... is something that, without her blog, I would have never realized. Cool. Thank you Fra.

Saturday I stumbled into Matt Webb at the Bartlett's architecture exhibition.
During the quick conversation that followed, he said he'd like to understand architecture in its own terms.

I thought a little bit about that... and, well, realized it's exactly what I'm not interested into.
Rather, the more time passes, the more I look at common patterns amongst different arts and scientific disciplines.

Yes, that's always me. Joining the dots.

Mental note: there are three kinds of people that I find precious. One is the De Kerchove type: those that can easily juggle a conversation on as many subjects and with as many people as you can imagine, and can always find the red ribbon to keep it all together and make a sense out of it. Another is the ultimate Occam samurai: the one who can classify everything and every concept into nice crafted boxes and explain them to you in a few, essential words. The last type is the one that always finds out the unexpected point of view in any given topic, adding fun and interest even to the most boring matters. Matt belongs to this category.

So yesterday on saturday I went and saw Generation, the Summer Show of Royal College of Art.
Ok, if you want the prototype of events that I find absolutely mind blowing, this is the case: from interaction design to design products, architecture, printmaking, and many other fields all mixed in a nice venue and with the opportunity to talk to the (sometime a little tired, other times really fresh and excited) authors.
Just three projects among all:

Availabot
a.k.a. put a doll of your IM contacts on your (physical) desktop.

Design for the Computer Obsessive

Provocative, simple idea but oh so smart.

Make/Shift

It's just amazing: self-sustaining shelves, no need for screws, thought for those who move often... and I want one of those in my house!

If you're getting excited and want more, have a look at WMMA's coverage :)

The reason why I like IRC so much more than IM (even if I seldom use it nowadays), is that you can hang out there just skimming through the channel's log, but nonetheless at the end of the day you'll end up learning something.
That doesn't happen with one2one IMs.

On a physical parallel, you can think of going down to a pub or agora as opposed to making phone calls from one's own living room.

IM, as phone, turns off the "noise" completely (except from the occasional SPAM, of course), while IRC lets you manage (either cognitively or technologically) the squelch.
IRC, as muds, pubs, agoras tend to allow or even push serendipity at the cost of a higher cognitive load (but of course, this could be managed through ambient knowledge...).
IM, as phone, audio/video conferences, letters (even if this is totally different media), and in general all forms of one2one communication deliberately deny serendipity, while focusing on the main stream of content.

I don't think either tool is objectively better than the other: they're just tools. But maybe your feeling about them can be significative of your way to handle communication and knowledge.

Create your own method. Don't depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.

Konstantin Stanislavski, talkin about his own System.

Sorry for the flood of McLuhan stuff. It's just that (re)reading through all his stuff really feels like going back home...

To reward and to make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of total awareness.

P.S.: The bold is mine, of course.

Tumbling down the hill on an early monday morning to the railway station, just to find out that the information system went nuts so the LED panels are unmistakably black and, judging from the crowd on the platform, there must be some delay going on could be definitely be interpreted as a bad omen.
Then you notice that a merry man dressed up in a high visibility jacket is standing on the top of a bench, using his hands around his mouth to carry his voice and shouting "ladiiiiiies and gentlemaaaaaaaaan, neeext traaaaain from thiiiis platfooorm wiiill be to London Bridge - note the capital L and B - and will be due in... - enter train from the left - ...well, approximately 3 seconds!!!". That was the first smile of the week.

It's curious to see how human interaction is still not only the more powerful way of communication. I'm not saying it's reliable, nor it is especially efficient, but it conveys so much more than just a cool machine giving out just data: That smile, on an otherwise moody or anyway anonymous monday morning, was simply invaluable.

flam·boy·ant (flăm-boi'ənt) adj.

1. Highly elaborate; ornate.
2. Richly colored; resplendent.
3. Architecture. Of, relating to, or having wavy lines and flamelike forms characteristic of 15th- and 16th-century French Gothic architecture.
4. Given to ostentatious or audacious display.

Synonyms: extravagant, theatrical

Today I've been defined like that. Hmm... cool, I must say :)

A few hours before leaving for Denmark. Last few chances to gather my thoughts on the subject.
I feel excited on one side, empty (as if everything has been already said) on the other, challenged (as actually the topic is soo huge) on yet another (at least we know I'm more than bidimensional).
What follows is just a collection of freeform thoughts and conjectures. Please take them for what they are. But, as usual, conversation is more than welcome.

Anyway, here we are: hypertexts.
They hold Process.
They hold Structure.
They also meet the Social, where the non linear nature of both structure and process justify the active participation of the user in the editing process.

Media Affordance

From visual to auditory media

Learning experience

This can be ok in a personal development context, but takes on a total new perspective when efficiency and productivity parameters start to be taken into account.

User experience

1. one start - one end. Self contained experiences. Certain immersive art installations, labyrinths and most museums, allow this kind of approach. Same thing applies to some videogames, where the beginning and the end of the story are fixed, but the game can develop along different different lines. Moreover, the first "artistic" hypertext I ever experienced was of this kind (sadly I don't have the references here, they're in Italy).
2. one start - many endings. This is the typical GameBook approach.
3. random starts - one end. This is maybe the ideal knowledge management grail(?)... really easy to obtain when the information sought and the system are both simple and well defined (yellow pages), very hard when they are heterogeneous (internet search).
4. random access - multiple ending. Wikipedia type: you choose how deep to go.

Is this all? Actually not. We just considered the structure of the experience but not its process.
so the process too can be either linear or hypertextual.
And combining process and structure, we find that:
- A linear process from a single start can only lead to a single end, for any given instance of the experience, that is, given a certain context; under different context/circumstances, we can expect the user to explore a different path.
- A hypertextual approach from a fixed start can lead to a multiple end or to a single end (depending on the structure).
- A linear process in a random access structure can, depending on the structure, reach multiple or single endings (though in this case through different paths).
- Finally a hypertext approach from a multiple start will lead to a single or multiple result.

Sounds a little like predicate logic, doesn't it?

According to Italian newspaper Repubblica The Facility Architects, a UK based design studio, will develop a prototype of power station powered by energy harvested from a few London Tube stations.
Claire Price, one of the studio architects, explains that the 34k commuters that pass through Victoria station during rush hours could power 6500 LED light bulbs. Not bad.

Update: found reference to the BBC article.

When I was a kid I used to spend some time playing boardgames.
One of my favourite was Scotland Yard. I reckon it also contributed, together with Conan Doyle stories, to ignite this neverending fascination of mine for this city.

Anyway, back to Scotland Yard, it is a game of transportation and deduction: the whole point is choosing the right route and getting from A to B faster than X (actually Mr. X, the in-game antagonist).

Well, after living here for 9 monthes, I realized that probably that boardgame is just an over-simplified training ground for London everyday life :)

Try to get to, say, Luton airport on an average sunday morning from south London and you will incur in a random permutation of the following:
. TFL website giving odd results or refusing to give you hint on best routes (I suppose this is like a "bonus stage" of the game)
. Trains being cancelled due to overexcited teenagers pulling emergency brake
. Clueless ticket seller
. No service on the main underground line leading to king's cross (where the train for the airport departs)
. once you get to king's cross: no train connection to the airport (this is like "go back three steps")
. Second bonus stage: find the right bus stop for alternate route to the alternate train station (Kentish Town), under pouring London Rain(tm).
. Oh, unlucky you! There are engineering works in Kentish Town too! No entry from the main entrance. Find the alternate entrance (hint: get around the station, and don't be scared of open wires, jackhammers and so on)
. Congratulations! You are now in Luton Airport: here comes the "boss". Get through the dreadful "security check" and be prepared to surrender your toothpaste! Lucky me, I have no child to milk and don't use lipstick.

This is the story so far... now I'm relaxing in the lounge and waiting for level 2: stay tuned!

Really, this is fun. Life is so good!

Good vibes at the first day of BlogTalk here in Vienna.
Macbook being resurrected by some mysterious Donau influence, I'm now approaching the *cough cough* refining stage of my speech for tomorrow.

This night was spent playing werewolf, moderated by Danah Boyd. That was FUN.

Videos of all presentations from Blogtalk are available now from the event website. Yes, there's also my speech. Yes, I'm talking too fast. Yes, I was never looking in camera. Gosh.

Second draft... wrote friday 6th

I'm sitting in la maison rouge near place de la Bastille, attending the presentation during Intensive Science, the open days for the 10 years of Sony CSL Paris.

Currently Frédéric Kaplan is speaking about his effort and research involving creating a playground for AIBOs. More than the results of the research itself, that I find charming but probably a little bit out of my reach, what I found very useful was the breakdown of the cognitive process of learning that lead the researchers to estabilish a model for curiousity driven behaviour.

Basically they found out that it was really difficult to teach concept to AIBOs because they lacked attention.
In order to get attention, they needed a know-how, that is know what to do with a specific feature of environment; to understand this concept, try to think of a dining room from the perspective of a man and a fly: the man will see all kind of objects (table, chairs, plates, glasses, couch, bookshelf, and so on), while the fly will "perceive" just the lightbulb and probably the plates and glasses, the rest will be just environmental noise.

But where the know-how origins? It comes from motivation.
So the next step is to give our learning subjects (AIBOs in this case) a motivation to learn. The problem is: how to model it?
The key factor chosen was error predictability: different behaviours will choose "what to do next" based on the fact that the task will have a high, moderate or low chance of failure, from daredevils to sheep-mode that is.

To cut it short, they found out that neither choosing the high risk nor the low risk was good for the learning of the AIBOs (in the first case it would be stuck with some very unpredictable task, in the other will just shutdown because it's the safest choice), but the best results come from studying a function of the derivate of risk prediction: engage in those tasks that are challenging at first, but will then become easier and easier.

Which is something we instinctively do constantly, I know... but it's nice to see it shown as a math model :)

Got a contact yesterday coming from my other blog.
Googled for the sender at once.
Didn't fnd any results.
Subconsciously reacted with "don't trust".

Yesterday night, at the end of this pretty social week, the first in London after my little european "tour", I was spending some brain cycles over the ideas and experiments on learning I heard in Paris.

I realized that, at least for myself, the "curiousity driven" behaviour rules not only my professional and educational grounds, but essentially all types of interaction with an environment and thus all skill development processes.
As the AIBO that has to choose what to try and learn, I will ponder all possible next actions (most often focusing just on the "shining" ones to tell you the truth), discard those that are simply impossible and take the first that labels "just" as sheer folly: after all, if there's even the slightest chance, it means it can be done.

Funny enough, it's the same pattern I follow in games, like WoW. I find simplified environment like Warcraft's one incredibly useful to test behaviours, don't you?

Well, what if instead of considering all actions that can be taken in an scenario, we try to investigate behaviourial patterns in a given area. Let's say: social interaction.
I reckon for me it's the same, and this was this week's epiphany: having spent thursday night surrounded by canadian immigrants, friday tasting wine with a couple of australians and yesterday walking through London with two of my very few Italian friends here, I came to the conclusion that, despite the fact I'm definitely a social type, I will tend to choose the most challenging conditions to be so. That is, not being satisfied to be in a foreign country, I'm not trying to merge in the Italian "tribe" in London nor that much among the Londonders... instead I'll keep on trying to explore new cultures and find those connections that could undisclose the "next step".
Nomad mindset again, I suppose.

and a step to the right.

A simple yet powerful trick borrowed by that well of wisdom that is... the Rocky Horror Show.

If there's something you're stuck in do it: jump.
Maybe you won't find (immediately) the solution, but at least three things will happen:
1. You'll see the world from a different perspective, even if for just a sec.
2. You'll come back down, and be reminded that there are some rules the world plays by, and you should never forget them.
3. Your body will know it is alive.

A metasyntactic variable is either a placeholder name (a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion), or a random member of a class of things under discussion. The term originates from computer programming and other technical contexts, and is commonly used in examples by hackers and programmers. The use of a metasyntactic variable is helpful in freeing a programmer from creating a logically named variable, although the invented term may also become sufficiently popular and enter the language as a neologism. The word foo is the canonical example (it is known as the canonical metasyntactical variable).

long long week. Eventually came to an end, and I feel just like collapsing (yeah, even missing geekdinner and/or Ben Katchor at the ICA don't seem big issues now) but I had one very lovely experience at lunchtime: there was a beautiful sun and enjoyed a short walk in the Marylebone station area, then went to a pub, had a decent fish&chips and a pint of IPA (really really light bitter) and spent twenty minutes or so just eating, sipping my pint, eyes closed and sun gently reminding me that yes, life on earth is really due to it.

Oh, and on my way home I discovered another really nice corner of London: James street. It's just out of Bond street station, and features plenty of nice venues and a lively ecosystem. At least on a late october friday evening.

This blog dates back more than 4 years. It's among the longes experiments I've ever had and feel quite fond of it.
However, I realized today I'm not going back to it as often as I used to.
Most of the time (even now), my interface to this blog is that of ecto, and once I submit the post it's almost forgotten, as I seldom go and browse the blog itself.
I remember a time not so long ago when it was my main tool in organizing my experiences. What changed? Well, the answer is not so difficult, and is at least :
. there used to be a wiki, that is no more.
. there used to be more "tools" here, such as the calendar, that now are spread on different platforms (google calendar and friends)
. I was writing more personal stuff or, to say the truth, the same stuff from a more personal cut, and with much less squelch

Now, if the first two are syntomatic of less and less time spent on this platform, as more and more time was required to explore the new kids on the block, the third point is crucial.
Especially considering how useful I always found the habit of keeping diary.
And there's no reason why this shouldn't be the place to keep on storing those shards of memory (yes the Italian one was supposed to serve that purpose, but that's another problem: I found i cannot split my personality between the two).

Sorry for periodically going back to this kind of posts, but for me is actually useful to record this kind of iterations.

Quoting Neil Gaiman:

Then I made up a tradition of us reading vaguely spooky poems to each other before she went to sleep, Kipling's Smuggler's Song and Monro's "Overheard on a Salt Marsh", the Macbeth "Hubble Bubble" speech and a few more. You can make up traditions if you do it with conviction, and remember to do it next year too.

Why do IT people (me first) always try to sneak away and make things not happen?
What a $swear lazy lot.

Six months and one week. My last post on this blog was written right before LIFT conference in Géneva.
There, speaking with Martin, I just came to the conclusion that the image that was projected by this website was not anymore resembling the man behind it.

Masks and characters gain power and weight while you play them, until the point where the filter is just stronger than the signal. So, as 4 years ago, I put the weblog on a hiatus while taking the time to explore other voices.

These above were focused mainly on social events, thoughts and the neverending stream of consciousness.

However, the present blog has always been the best place where to keep track of geeky/techy achievements, and in these months I had the chance to realize how much of my personal learning path follows the way of technology and design. So here we go: a new post and maybe a new, gentler, stream of more focused journal of experiences.

Without further ado, since february life moved on quite a lot, so let's try to summarize how my context changed through the main points below:

Research

In the field of media, last year has been dominatede by McLuhan theories and (critical/smart) mass effects... while in these last months I've been focusing more on niche, interactive media like virtual worlds (particularly WoW and Second Life) and games and learning (forgive me if I don't use the edutainment word).

In the realm of physical spaces, while last year I tried to fill some of my huge gaps in architecture, nowadays I've been exploring object interaction (and in particular identification - barcodes or RFIDs, hardware hacking - arduino, and fabbers)

Social bla bla bla

On the events side, last year has been definitely a BarCamp year for me. 

This year, especially after the amazing RItalia experience, I've had a chance to reconsider the the interaction between tools (like BarCamps) and the people who use it: it's not (only) the people nor the tools that make the difference, you need both (yeah, basically you need the people, then the tools help in actually make them do something).

And speaking of tools, this year I've been definitely blogging less and enjoying network oriented social media like facebook and twitter more. And no, wait, this isn't exactly what was happening before: I spent years on deviantArt and Flickr, but there you needed an excuse (photos, in these two examples) to act as both a magnet and expedient to trigger the conversation. Facebook, Twitter... well, they're just about it: the ties that binds.

Last but not least...

Adding contrast to the lifescape (or of the importance of sending clear messages... to yourself, first and foremost)

I'll not explain this in depth now... but essentially this year has been a lot about letting go of sophistications. I know that my very argot doesn't suggest that but... well, bear with me for a while, I'll try to prove it :) and embracing a sharpened view of life.

For now, I'll say that I tried to switch from being serial mover to being a full time nomad, so that (maybe) eventually will understand and appreciate the settlers.

Similarly, I stepped from being a devsultant to dive into fulltime, bleeding edge hard-coder (and having fun doing it, thanks to Rails) so that will eventually slingshot back into a more defined consultantdom.

Well, that's all folks... stay tuned!