Just Bru

Impossible not to notice, even here, in Italy, 6000 kilometers from ground zero.

Sometimes I wonder if I really care, more often I'm simply too darn busy to

notice that someone else is around or that something is happening outside me.

Welcome back again, here it's a strange day. Had to handle a couple of computer-related wierdness, while @ the same time I was on the phone the whole day trying to put up the basis for a would-be movie event that I and some other fool guys are trying to organize in Milan for the next winter.

I'll keep U up with that.

Hallo.

This is starting to annoy me. Keeping journal up 2 date I mean.

It's just like that: I build a shiny new toy, it's funny for a while, and then a little while I find it boring to death.

Always.

Why? Why can't I just keep up with it and find new ways to play and enjoy this little thing, rather than dropping it for the next shiny new thing around?

Good question, I think, gotta find an answer.

Ok, here I am again.

Spent last week in Umbria, near Assisi, attending an intensive training about time management, team work public speaking and the like. I love this kind of things, training I mean.

...in italiano.

Sì perché in fondo, quando si tratta di tirar fuori qualcosa di un po' più profondo del solito chiacchiericcio con cui riempio le mie giornate, � dell'italiano che ho bisogno...

Yesterday's been a busy day, even if it was sunday.

Started with the very of a very good green tea at my mum's, but I had no chance to ask her where she found it, because before remembering that, we had to leave to go and visit my sister, who lives 150 km or so in the north.

Spent some hours there, then on the car again to go and visit some friends of us who just came back from holiday (Thailand + Egypt), lot of beautiful photos and some wanderlust coming over :P

We had some (china) food together, and finally got a VERY comfortable seat to see the new "Pinocchio". Actually I liked the movie, but the place (apart from the seats) was quite disturbing: the movie was due for 22:30, and it started at 23:00, after something like 30' of giant sized ads!

In the last two days I've been spending quite a bit of brainpower on CW II... the last surprise (or maybe delusion) was that I came over an EJB specification, and while I was rapidly overlooking it, I vered that it was precisely the architecture I was planning about (except that it's Java...)!!!!

So now I'm left with but two choices: go ahead and rewrite the whole monster in perl, or try to make use of what somebody else already did, eventually concentrating on the applications themselves.

About this night: theatre lesson, can't wait for that!

Ieri, venerdì 18 ottobre, c'è stato uno sciopero nazionale dei lavoratori; non ho avuto modo di partecipare né, per il momento, di verificare se ha avuto successo e in quale misura.

Ha però condizionato la mia giornata, in quanto sono dovuto fiondarmi fuori dall'ufficio alle 17.00 (inaudito!!! :)). Serata sui navigli ricca di impressioni interessanti: ho scoperto un nuovo pub dal nome suggestivo di Agarthi, buona birra (bitter), ma speravo di trovare un po' più di ricchezza scavando intorno al nome...

Sono inoltre riuscito a migliorare il mio record personale di "due di picche" situazionali, con una persona che dovevo incontrare che è arrivata al luogo dell'appuntamento, si è guardata intorno, non mi ha riconosciuto, e se ne è andata senza nemmeno provare a telefonare... c'est la vie.

Aperitivo con chiacchierata filosofica e poi a cena con G. in un locale dal nome un po' meno evocativo di "ovosodo", ma dalla cucina molto allettante.

In tutto questo, come dicevo all'inizio, non ho scoperto che ne è stato dello sciopero...

L'altra sera ho incontrato un vecchio amico che mi ha annunciato di aver fondato un nuovo gruppo, e di avere addirittura un sito (!) che mi pregava caldamente di visitare.

Il gruppo si chiama Lo stato delle cose, e conoscendo gli elementi verrà sicuramente fuori qualcosa di straordinario!!!

Per quanto riguarda il sito... beh, come minimo dovrebbero metterci qualcosa dentro ;) per ora c'è un bel simbolo, una serie di pagine "in costruzione", ed un vivace guestbook già ricco di incoraggiamenti.

Che dire, spero che questa pubblicità occulta ma non troppo mi valga un pass per il prossimo concerto :P

Domenica pomeriggio ho partecipato alla presentazione della Fondazione Paoletti, ad Assisi. È stata un'esperienza decisamente interessante, innanzitutto perchè non avevo mai partecipato ad una serata di gala :P

In secondo luogo perchè ho avuto la possibilità di entrare in contatto con una realtà particolarmente "attiva", in molti territori che vanno dal sociale alla formazione, alla finanza, alla salute.

In particolare, mi hanno interessato un progetto per la lotta al tabagismo, ed una campagna in collaborazione con il Corriere della sera e L'Albero Della Vita.

Lunedì sera è stata una lezione "particolare". Per la prima volta non abbiamo fatto solo esercizi "preparatori", ma ho avuto la sensazione di cominciare a mettere le "mani in pasta", a fare finta di studiare recitazione insomma.

Lo strumento che ha dominato durante tutta la lezione è stata la maschera neutra. Per coloro che non sapessero di che si tratta (me compreso fino a lunedì pomeriggio), si tratta di una maschera in tela gessata, di origine francese, ma di ispirazione decisamente orientale. È completamente inespressiva e per questo viene chiamata "neutra".

L'idea che mi ha raggiunto di questa tecnica è che la maschera deve diventare come gli occhi e l'intero corpo della persona diventa la faccia dell'attore. Quindi occorre utilizzare tutto il corpo in maniera appropriata per trasmettere quelle sensazioni che altrimenti sarebbero trasmesse naturalmente dal volto.

Per quanto riguarda l'esperienza in se, io ho provato una forte snesazione di coinvolgimento: indossare la maschera è un po' come entrare al cinema, la scena si popola istantaneamente di figure, suoni, odori, colori, e ti senti parte di ciò che vuoi interpretare; il pubblico sparisce, il dialogo interiore si fa molto più forte anche perché il rumore del proprio respiro risulta enormemente amplificato.

Anche questa volta ho portato a casa molto più di quanto mi aspettassi, e ancora una volta mi chiedo se non sarebbe stato meglio iscriversi ad una scuola di teatro vera e propria. Per ora mi rispondo ancora che sarebbe stata l'ennesima esperienza cominciata e mai finita, e che è meglio un corso introduttivo che sicuramente sarò in grado di portare a termine.

4 ore, dico, ho passato 4 ore in tangenziale per fare Milano - Bergamo!!!!!!

Per chi non fosse pratico della zona, si tratta di sì e no 40 kilometri....

Se solo fossi stato un po' più lungimirante e avessi preso la moto...

Week end all'insegna del vagabondaggio tra Torino, Alessandria, Milano, Genova.
Ho visto un sacco di vecchi amici e amiche che non vedevo da tempo, e ho preso "in prestito" da Ezio (grazie!) una fantafigosissima Canon S20, con la quale mi sto dilettando. Come facile notare dai risultati, non ci capisco nulla di fotografia, e ho passato tutta la sera a smanettare tra i vari controlli e regolatori, solo per ottenere una manciata di foto sfuocate :P
Impareremo...

Lunedì mattina... non posso dire di essere il tipo da "I hate mondays", ma il lunedì mattina è sempre un gradino importante per cominciare la settimana... e negli anni ho visto che a seconda di che piede utilizzi per salire quel gradino, i giorni si susseguiranno ricchi di frutti, o disastrosi, o magari assolutamente anonimi...
Oggi è un po' diverso, tuttavia. Mi sono risvegliato a Roma, in un albergo a poca distanza dal Grande Raccordo. La struttura era ancora in costruzione, ma le camere pulite e con una certa pretesa di sfarzo un po' retrò... ho pensato che a volte è bello trattarsi bene. Colazione solitaria e via...
Uscendo dal cancello ho visto la mia immagine riflessa nella vetrata della piscina, e per un momento mi sono sembrato, dal modo di camminare e portare le borse a tracolla, ripreso in una delle scene di apertura o chiusura dei telefilm dell'Incredibile Hulk, quando c'era quella musica tristissima... l'immagine e l'assurdità dei miei percorsi mentali mi ha strappato una risata.
La breve passeggiata dall'albergo all'ufficio mi ha riempito di gioia e di voglia di fare... il solo fatto di vedere il cielo azzurro e non il solito grigio plumbeo di Milano mi ha dato una carica incredibile! Sarò metereopatico? Forse. Sarà che "cambiare aria" ogni tanto fa bene? Sicuramente. Fatto sta che ogni volta che vengo nella capitale è per me come fare una cura rigenerante. E tutto ciò nonostante il traffico, il caos, e tutti gli altri elementi che, in quanto metropoli, la caratterizzano.

sul treno ufficio2casa... Oggi � una giornata pienotta, ma comungue all'insegna dell'buon umore (+). Ho viaggiato parecchio e sono piuttosto stanco, ma (<osservazione>) ho ancora addosso la carica dello speech di stamattina, poche cose (i voli in aereo sono uno di questi) mi rigenerano quanto l'essere di fronte ad una platea (</osservazione>).

ieri sera a lezione di teatro abbiamo lavorato pi� sul testo che sul fisico. Il testo in questione era l'orto dei Capuleti, hai presente "Rom�o, Rom�o, perch� sei tu Rom�o?"; ecco, guello. In particolare ci � stato richiesto di porre particolare attenzione alla dizione: st�lle e non st�lle, Giuli�tta e non Giuli�tta, s�nza e non s�nza... Non ti dico che goduria con la mia r moscia... :)
guardiamo i lati positivi: ieri ero l'unico maschietto, e c'era anche una nuova studentessa: Maria Sveva.

Il delirio è cominciato con una telefonata di Panda alle 17:15 che, trovandosi momentaneamente nella "Milano da bere" causa presenza in televisione del nostro comune amico Angelo, ha pensato, con mia grande gioia, di farmi un'improvvisata e quindi di passarmi a trovare. Praticamente in contemporanea, dopo un rapidissimo scambio di e-mail, mi accordavo per un aperitivo in centro alle 19:15 con Micaela, la mia consulente bancaria (nonché appassionata di comunicazione, viaggi, irlanda, vela e cavalli) preferita.

Problema: alle 18:30 avevo appuntamento per la lezione di giapponese. Decido di incontrare comunque Stefano, e utilizzare il tempo necessario per attraversare la città in auto per fare due chiacchiere... ahimé, non ho calcolato il traffico del venerdì pomeriggio!!!
Arriviamo sotto casa di Ai alle 19:00, per cui mi sono dovuto fare coraggio e "bidonare" in diretta la mia neo-insegnante di giapponese, che rischia ora di essere la mia ex-neo-insegnante di giapponese.
In realtà l'ha presa piuttosto bene, ma ha dimostrato un temperamento decisamente "tosto"!
Sarà meglio non tardare la prossima volta!!!!

Next step, corsa fino in Duomo per appuntamento con M. e quindi aperitivo. Sono nate alcune elucubrazioni interessanti su possibili collaborazioni... chi vivrà vedrà.

Teoricamente la serata sarebbe dovuta continuare con una cena a casa di Flavio ma, tanto per non variare il tasso entropico della serata, pare che quasi tutti gli invitati abbiano dato due di picche, per cui ho considerato saggio redirigermi verso casa... e così ora sono qui, a casa alle 23.00 di venerdì sera! Quanto tempo che non accadeva una cosa simile :)
E con tutta la casa per me (suppongo ancora per molte ore, visto il trend recente), mi sono messo a sistemare un po' la camera, l'armadio, e fare tutte quelle cose che non ho trovato il tempo di fare nel mese e mezzo passato.

Discutevo ieri sera con Gianluca di alcune piéce teatrali, in particolare di Shakespeare e Stoppard. Tra le elucubrazioni inutili, i voli pindarici, e le seghe mentali, sono emerse alcuni spunti interessanti sull'idea di meccanicità. È nato istantaneamente il desiderio ed il proposito di portare in scena qualcosa su questo tema, così mi sto dando da fare per produrre uno script adeguato all'evenienza. Hollywood, arrivooooo!!!

Ieri sera sono finalmente riuscito a vedere per un aperitivo la mia carissima Udì.
Incredibile, la conosco da più di 15 anni ed è sempre la stessa. Voglio dire, ho una foto della prima media, avete presente quelle foto tristissime, con la prof di italiano lì, appollaiata tipo gufo a lato di una teppa di marmocchi inebetiti e inamidati? Ecco... solo che quella foto è tutt'altro che triste, e forse è l'unica, la foto della prima media, che guardo, quando mi capita, e che mi strappa sempre un sorriso.
Bene, in mezzo a quella marmaglia di futuri mancati musicisti, mimetizzata tra i piumini, i jeans e le pettinature anni '80, spiccava lo stesso volto che ieri sera, a 100 km e 15 anni di distanza, mi ha salutato sfoderando lo stesso, identico, sorriso, proprio quello.

All'aperitivo ha partecipato anche un'amica di Udì, Linda, appassionata di comunicazione, con la quale ho intavolato un interessante rso sulla PNL e sui reciproci percorsi di sviluppo. Ho anche scoperto che mantiene un sito dedicato al mondo della comunicazione.

Il resto della serata è passato tra una pizza ed una birra sui navigli, chiacchierando di viaggi, astrologia (argomento di cui sono per ora profano, ma che mi ha incuriosito abbastanza, tanto che al mio ritorno a casa sono andato a caccia di un sito che mi facesse il tema natale) e sesso. Per la prima volta dopo mesi sono tornato a casa dopo le 02:30!!!!!

ieri sera sono venuti a trovarmi nella metropoli Emanuele e Claudio.
Dopo un rapido ma non troppo aperitivo al Joe Pena's, rallegrato dalla presenza brillante di Antonella (cidovrebbeessereunlinkadunafotochenonèvenuta), abbiamo guadagnato la strada di casa, e consumato una pizza di gomma.
Strana stanchezza nell'aria, ieri sera. Tutte le persone che ho sentito erano spossate, o influenzate, o in down... congiunzione astrale, cambiamento di stagione (magari!) o virus? :)

Ieri ho passato la giornata a Torino, per lavoro, una meta che sta diventando piuttosto abituale, e devo ammettere che la cosa non può che farmi piacere... chissà se un giorno o l'altro riuscirò a ritagliare qualche minuto per passare a trovare un po' di vecchi amici che si sono trasferiti all'ombra della Mole e di Superga!?
Ad ogni modo, avendo a disposizione circa 4 ore complessive di treno, ho deciso di affrontare uno dei classici che da anni adornano la mia libreria, ma che in tutto questo tempo non hanno fatto che prendere polvere: Siddhartha...

Scenario: Mercoledì sera, lezione di teatro. Lorenzo non c'è, lo sostituisce in qualità di insegnante Enzo, che ci fa lavorare sulla percezione dello spazio (hai presente mosca cieca? ecco, solo che anche chi deve "scappare" è bendato, bellissimo!), sull'improvvisazione creativa, sul movimento. Non c'è male, grazie!
Ore 20.35, fine lezione, e comincia la serata...

È il titolo dell'ultimo libro che ho letto, e anche uno degli argomenti sui quali orbitano recentemente i miei pensieri. Per stasera infatti, a lezione di teatro, ci è stato richiesto di produrre una ricerca o un elaborato proprio sulla tragedia shakespereana ambientata a Verona.
Romeo e Giulietta, Giulietta e Romeo. Cosa dire che non sia ancora stato detto su di loro?
Primo punto: perché s'ha da essere per forza originali? Chi se ne frega se qualcun altro, in giro per il mondo, ha già detto o scritto qualcosa su questo argomento... e quindi, via libera ai pensieri e all'emozione, per Giove!

Lezione di Giapponese... ancora arranco un po' col katakana, uff, perché?
In compenso abbiamo finalmente iniziato ad affrontare i Kanji!!!!!! Per ora ne conosco 5 o 6, la lingua giapponese ne prevede circa 2000... è meglio che non mi metta a fare calcoli o mi deprimo! :)

Piuttosto, perché noi occidentali abbiamo la tendenza a cercare costantemente la "scorciatoia"?
Mi spiego: ad ogni nuovo simbolo, ad ogni nuova parola, ritorno con insistenza alla caccia di una "regola", qualche teorema unificatore della grammatica nipponica, e magari, perché no, di tutte le grammatiche.
E invece la mia buona Ai, con paziente fermezza, mi ripete ogni volta resta qui, non c'è regola (anzi, legola), devi solo imparare le parole.
Eppure, ogni volta, ci ricasco: cerco un pattern nei simboli dell'hiragana, ad esempio...
perché ぬ (nu) deve essere simile a �?� (me), cosa li lega? Per non parlare di に (ni) e �? (ta), o そ(so) e �??(ru)...
Chissà se è una benedizione o meno? Questo tendere alla via breve, intendo, certo permette forse di andare più veloce, ma le si potrebbe obiettare che questa velocità viene al costo di una minore penetrazione, profondità!
Del resto non era il buon vecchio Einstein che, parlando di sé, affermava:
"sono solo uno che cerca di stare con le domande più a lungo degli altri"
<zen>Probabilmente, come in tutto, dipende dall'attitudine</zen> :)

Recentemente ho saputo che Marco, un vecchio compagno di bevute e di serate in musica ce l'ha fatta, ha finalmente pubblicato un cd per la grande distribuzione... mi sono subito fiondato alla ricerca e al primo colpo, in piazza Duomo, l'ho trovato!

Così è per me, di Marco Berruti.
Molte canzoni sono ancora loro, quelle che ho sentito così spesso nei locali fumosi persi nelle colline del monferrato, tra un bicchiere di barbera di quello buono e tanti volti amici...
...anche se i nuovi arrangiamenti sofisticati e preziosi, per quanto aggiungano indiscutibilmente alla qualità del disco, mi hanno strappato qualche pensiero malinconico, per quelle canzoni che avevo amato tanto e che ora nessuno conoscerà più in quella stessa forma...

Circa una settimana fa poi, surfando alla ricerca di commenti internettiani su RVS, ho poi scoperto che un'altra vecchia conoscenza, Cecilia, non solo è sempre attivissima, ma ha pure al suo attivo la colonna sonora di un film (Quartetto).

Infine, incuriosito da queste scoperte, ho proseguito la ricerca, nella speranza di ritrovare le tracce di qualche volto a me caro e nonostante il tempo abbia indebolito i legami... sono inciampato, ad esempio, in Iano, cantautore straordinario, dotato di una voce incredibile.
Anche lui astigiano, anche lui compagno di qualche buona bevuta e di tante serate in musica. Ho ancora nelle orecchie una sua interpretazione di Summer on a solitary beach di Battiato... da brivido. Argh correva l'anno 2000!!! Sigh, quanto tempo...

Sto battendo, con mio forte rammarico, il mio record personale di "pacchi":
Lunedì sera avevo in programma due alternative:
lo spettacolo dei Dervisci Sari Gul, a Bergamo, oppure la serata Retroscena con gusto a Legnano.
Alla fine non ho potuto partecipare, né all'una né all'altra.
Cerchiamo il lato positivo: ho avuto la possibilità, per una volta di sbrigare alcune faccende domestiche (come fare il bucato, verificare le bollette, ecc.),
Ieri sera invece, ho preferito rimanere qui a Torino invece di fare ritorno a Milano per poi rimbalzare sul primo treno domattina che mi riportasse in Porta Nuova...
Lato negativo: ho dovuto rinunciare alla prima di "schifo", lo spettacolo in scena all'Arsenale, diretto ed interpretato da Graziano.
Lato positivo: mentre ero a Torino ho avuto modo di incontrare Claudio (che mi sta ospitando per stanotte), Michele e Simona.
La serata non è stata particolarmente "mondana": una lunga passeggiata alla caccia di un locale che non abbiamo trovato, poi una pizza, ottima, da Amici miei e via.
Eppure è stata divertente: era da tanto tempo che non ci vedevamo, sia con Claudio ma in special modo con Michele, eppure era come se stare lì, seduti intorno ad un tavolo a chiacchierare di tutto ciò che ci passava per la testa fosse il nostro elemento naturale, un po' come imparare ad andare in bicicletta: certo ci sono dei momenti, all'inizio, nei quali hai paura di lanciarti; momenti in cui ti fai mille problemi e ti consideri inferiore o superiore, in buona fede, per carità!
Ma ammettiamolo, capita a tutti... eppure poi riconosci l'illusione, si squarcia quel velo di perbenismo ipocrita che come la polvere si deposita col tempo su tutto, e ricompare la complicità di 3 ragazzini che ne hanno combinate un sacco insieme, solo un po' più cresciuti... chi con la barba, chi con la giacca...
Anche Torino mi ha fatto un effetto un po' particolare: mi è sembrata al tempo stesso una città triste, eppure dotata di un'energia più diretta e sincera, sicuramente meno sofisticata e rarefatta del clima che si respira a Milano!
Non sono sicuro che mi piacerebbe vivere qui, ma è una bella rottura di schema, passarci di tanto in tanto!

Qualche tempo fa, mi è capitato di leggere, dopo un sacco di tempo, un albo di fumetti.
Si trattava del secondo capitolo di Rigel, dell'italianissima e decisamente dotata Elena de' Grimani.

È stata un'esperienza quantomeno interessante. Tanto per cominciare, mi sono reso conto di non essere più abituato a leggere i fumetti... o di aver cambiato approcio, forse.
La dove prima passavo le mezz'ore ad analizzare i dettagli, l'espressione, ogni singola frase, ora tendo a mantenere una visione d'insieme, e a procedere molto più rapidamente nella lettura. È una sensazione strana, ma non è tanto legata alla superficialità quanto proprio alla visione d'insieme, al cercare di catturare il quadro generale, la struttura soggiacente, che da equilibrio e movimento alla tavola.
Poi si sono scatenati in me una moltitudine di "nastri", legati al mio passato: la voglia di ricominciare a disegnare, a scrivere un racconto, un libro, una sceneggiatura, in pochi istanti mi ero trasferito dal divano di casa mia ad un set cinematografico hollywoodiano, dove si stava girando l'ultima di una lunga serie di mie produzioni... argh!

Poi silenzio, e una voce: "resta qui". Che fatica, però! Che pace, però!

Grazie, Elena.

me l'ero preparata bene, questa entry... avrebbe dovuto avere a che fare col weekend passato, anzi, con due week end fa, e con tutte le avventure nelle quali, per accidente o per destino, mi sono troato coinvolto....

Eppure, eccomi qui, giovedì notte (ahimé, in realtà già è venerdì!) stanco, stanco di una guerra appena cominciata, eppure già così assurda e fuori luogo, che tutto e tutti, da ogni angolo del pianeta, stanno gridando "basta, non l'abbiamo voluta, noi!".
Ma ancora di più, sono stanco per quanto intorno a me rappresenta una stella fissa, qualcosa che io nel mio piccolo non posso cambiare.
Ciò che posso cambiare è il rapporto con gli altri, l'eterna danza che ci vede un attimo prima condurre e un attimo dopo seguire il ballo, quel gioco modulato da gratificazione e disperazione, un vorticoso gioco di ombre cinesi che i buddisti chiamano samsara.

Questa entry, che è rimasta per quasi due settimane allo stato embrionale, nella cartella "drafts", voleva parlare di un entusiasmante week end, quello del 15/16 marzo, che mi ha visto, tra le altre cose, protagonista di un'impresa di montaggio catene nel bel mezzo di una tormenta di neve (a metà marzo!), con i pantaloni squarciati, ed i sandali ai piedi... so che suona un po' assurdo, ma c'è una giustificazione razionale per tutto...
Peccato sia passato il tempo per questa condivisione...
c'est la vie, goodnight

Tornando dall'ufficio, alle 20.50, passo per caso davanti a Mac@Work, un bellissimo negozio di Apple che nasconde un sacco di sorprese interessanti.
Sono passato a salutare Salvia (nome strano? me lo sono chiesto anche io...), dopodiché di corsa sui navigli per festeggiare.
La serata è stata ancora all'insegna della celebrazione delle avventure passate ma non solo, con Fabry sono venute fuori idee mooolto interessanti su cosa fare da grandi, ma per scaramanzia non le condividerò ora. Le direzioni comuni sono comunque la didattica, e il sociale.

La compagnia si è congedata dopo la mezzanotte, e Simonetta ha pensato bene di bucare una ruota centrando in pieno un marciapiede. Siamo stati circa un ora fermi, prima perché la gomma era bucata, poi perché i bulloni si erano sfilettati (mea culpa, ora so che i ruotini hanno bulloni diversi dai cerchi). E così abbiamo dovuto attendere che un angelo dotato di quattro ruote venisse a prenderci (grazie Anna).

Anche oggi ho imparato qualcosa di nuovo :)

è una definizione che ho rubato a Simone, una delle nuove conoscenze di questa sera.
Si riferiva alla cena che io, Carla e Maria Laura, in anticipo sull'appuntamento/cinema, ci siamo concessi presso uno dei take-away indiani storici di Milano, decidendo poi di consumare in loco l'ottimo tandoori.
Non so perché, ma questa definizione mi ha colpito e mi ha fatto ridere... ed essendo un grande fruitore di take-away, penso avrò modo di avvantaggiarmi molto di questo nuovo vocabolo.

Una frase che lessi tanto tanto tempo fa, ma che mi segnò a fondo.
Mi è tornata alla mente oggi, emersa dalle nebbie della memoria, in quanto mi sono ritrovato a pensare con malinconica insistenza ad un'altra "Francesca", con la quale, nei panni di un novello "Paolo", ho condiviso la passione per un libro, una leggenda, una visione.

So today I packed most of my stuff. It was amazing to discover that I could just trash a good 20% of the things that were floating on my desk, armchairs, floor, and could fit half the other things (everything save for "winter" wardrobe) in a Fiat Punto.
I never realized how much minimalist I became in this last year. Changing house twice in a year and spending 80% of your time in a foreign city changes you. A lot.

I'm back in dear (?) old Alessandria, my hometown. I'll stay here for a while, one week or so I guess, until my lovely friend Ai will move back to Japan and I'll finally be able to move in the new flat in Milan.

First impression about the place: p-e-a-c-e. It's quite like having been used to see a movie in fast-forward, and suddenly clicking "play". Everything's so slow, so warm... Milan's like this just in middle August! :)
But people find a way to be grumpy anyway. I can't believe that. How can you grow stressed here? Perhaps is just a question of getting used to different speeds.

Sorry, the Exilim is still in Milan, so no photo of the town, yet.

Today I woke up in Alessandria, after a night spent in part in Milan, in part on the highway (A7, if you want the details). I was deadly tired, and had to stop at e-v-e-r-y station just to take a walk, a coffee, or a few minutes snooze. It took me forever to get home, but it's been quite fun.
Today, just for a change, I decided to go back to Milan :) This time to attend to a Japanese lesson. I'm pretty satisfied with this Japanese thing. in just a few weeks I learnt hiragana, katakana, a few kanji, and most of the basic rules. Now I should just apply to build up a decent dictionary!!!
Spent the rest of the afternoon with lovely C. walking around Piazza Duomo, where I tried to buy Harry Potter V, but it was sold out!!!!! It looks like The Order Of The Phoenix is the best selling book in Italy!!!!!! What's so strange about that, you could ask: well, the weird thing is that no translation's been done yet, so the best selling book in Italy today is a book in english!!!!
Good, if that means that MANY people are going to read it in the mother tongue, weird instead if so many people bought it without noticing the unusual language...
Came back to Alessandria in the evening, and spent the last few hours with Peo and Gas at the Time Out, the coolest place in town where drink a beer and meet nice people.
Missing the time I spent at the University's Computer Lab with so many of them. It's nice to come back, from time to time.

Spent the day in Milan. It's been like taking a tour through hell's kitchen (a very posh one, indeed), for how much it was hot.
So why spending this saturday in the sprawl instead of going to, for example, the sea?
The reason was a call I received the other night from Gianluca, a very good friend of mine and fellow actor (no, actually he's a true actor... made some movies... got paid... that sort of actor) who's nowadays working as a producer for a couple of interesting movie projects... and today there would have been this sort of "technical" casting, where he wanted to meet all people interested to work behind the scenes (assistant producers, directors, photography, and so on...). So, the question was: well, what can I do for you? And it's amazing because at once I realized that no matter how much "knowledge" you have about everything (moviemaking being a specialization of the concept), it's the attitude that makes the difference! Experience is another matter, but it'll come... :)
The next question was: "Well, you can do that, and it's cool. Damn cool. But, is it really useful for you now to spend time in this kind of things?"; the answer required some clear mind, because I've seen that there's a thin border between a desire and a focus...
But in the end, my ultimate goals consedered, well, I think that would be utterly GREAT!
See you in Hollywood :P

ops, cannot write more about the movie, so don't ask. sorry.

This morning I went and saw, together with Ai, my (hopefully) future householder (is this the right noun?). Well, anyway, I mean the man who owns the house in which I'm going to live :P
He's a kind man, and after a not so long argue, we agreed on a very good rent (for me at least). So it seems that from the July, 27th I'll have an apartment!!!! Can't believe that.
Maybe I'll throw some party, pity it'll be almost August, that means nobody will be in Milan to party with...

The other day I received a message on ICQ from MrHood. He told me that "it's true that everybody is getting a graduation, if they gave one to me too!".
Congratulation man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I hope this post will get me a beer ;-)

Yesterday spent the day in Laveno with Andrea at a hang-glider's landing field. We met lot of interesting people there, chatted a little bit with Renato, the "chief" of the hang-gliding school, and decided to start the course in september. The story is quite long actually, beginning a month or so ago, when I discovered that a hang-glider was lying unused and covered with dust in Andrea's garage. It couldn't be true! Suddenly I saw myself flying as Icarus in the silent wind... oh so cool! I had to learn to fly!
and so be it.... or so it seems... see you on next episode :P

Found this (not so) old CD under a pile of books on my desk.
I've been listening to it for the whole day, and it's good, damn good. Dear old irish folk mixed up with a little bit of my beloved "piedmont-folk" :)
The band is called Acustica and, quite surprisingly, I never met them in the long years spent wandering from pub to concert, to pub, to concert, and so on...

I should be on vacation. Since friday. Actually, as often happens in IT companies (but I'm afraid more or less everywhere is the same), deadlines and customers made me reconsider my vacation period, so today I got on my car at 6:40 to come to Turin and meet a milestone of a big big project. Whoa!
Now everybody's happy, even if nothing actually changed... Is it my curse to always have to clash with the power of form (as in image) over substance (as in essence)? Maybe I should just surrender to the fact that the world is driven by appearances, and not by facts.
Or maybe I should simply look for another kind of job :)
Ok, let's cheer up, 'cos now I'll go and get back for another day to the seaside, and then on the road to Umbria!
...of course I'll have in the backpack my faithful Titanium, but that's another story...

A week on the hills, under a cloudless sky. A week to find the way and get enough energies to go back to Milan, finish those projects that are still "open", say hallo to the big city and hit the road again.

Two good reasons to have a party this night:

1. To say bye bye to a dear friend leaving tomorrow for Japan
   
2. To celebrate a job incredibly finished by the timeline!
   

More news tomorrow ;)

I've been out of this topic since it's started a while ago... but as the thing is growing, I'm getting aware of how serious this could be (and become).

Glutter

CHINA HAS FURTHER CURBED FREE SPEECH AMONG ITS CITIZENS

THE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT HAS BANNED ALL TYPEPAD SITES WITHIN CHINA. ANOTHER BLOW TO FREESPEECH AND FREEDOM OF INFORMATION WITHIN THE COUNTRY.

THIS IS A SAD DAY.

GLUTTER TURNS BLACK AS A MEANS TO PROTEST AND BRING ATTENTION TO THIS ISSUE

If I could so much ask, I would like to suggest others who own typepad sites and other blogs to put a note on theirs as a means to spread the word.

Pass it on.

Via North Korea zone

So I'm finally in Alessandria. I slept here this night, after a family dinner.
I was so tired I fell asleep on the couch and so I failed to meet some of my loco friends.
Sadly the same thing is gonna happen today, since I've gotta leave early, and I can't manage to go to Saronno for a pizza at Lu's.
There are so many ppl I'd like to hang out a little with, and so little time :)

Made some photos in Florence and Milan... and chances are I'll do more today on the way back to Perugia. I think I'll post some of 'em soon.

Veryvery compliments to lalaura, who graduated yesterday!!!!!!
Ypeeeeeee!

A couple of news that would make good graduation presents for lalaura:

• Gucci's high fashion iPod bag
  
• iPod enabled Smart
  

Obviously, even "just" an iPod will do ;)

So, since it's been a while since I moved last time, today I packed all my things up and said bye bye to the room that's been my home for the last 7 monthes.

I moved in a new complex, quite close to where I was staying till yesterday, to say the truth.
The room here is much cozier, and I have a beautiful sight from my window to a sort of zen garden too :)

Then, the bright side of moving is that every time you happen to meet bright people.
This time I share my appartment with Massimo and Lorenzo.
Massimo is a Painter (notice the capitalized P ;) ), while Lorenzo is a Tai-Chi master (cool!).
Both of them worked for the Fondazione, so it was no surprise for me to discover they were hangin' around.

On the other hand, tomorrow I'll be off to Milan. I plan to stay there 'till wednesday, then going to Webb.IT, in Padova.

Too bad I won't be there... :(
Well, it'll be for the next time then. Have fun (and make a toast to me too ;) )!!!!!!!!

Loic Lemur

Oh my god, when I started this wiki page, I thought a few people would jump in to have dinner, then James and Cory changed the date of a blogger get together in London to match this date, this is really cool, it is now a crazy evening, could not expect better !

So now, I counted quickly but around 50 people will join, and it is becoming not only a London get together but an international one with Paolo from Italy, Andrew from the US, Heiko from Germany and other people who make it too...

Yesterday night I've seen Pay it forward and found it so... so inspiring!!!
Well, for those of you who haven't seen it (and trying to not put any spoiler here), it's the story of an eleven years old child who's given this "exercise" on the first day of the social studies course:

Find an idea that will change our world.
Then put it into ACTION

Interesting, isn't it?
Well, what the boy does is even more cool: he builds up a social network (hmm a multi-level structure, actually, since it was just working in one direction). A social network built upon the idea of doing good actions in order to change the world.
This is the schema:

• find three people who need your aid, and do them a favor. Make it something big, something they can't do by themselves.
  
• once you've helped them, tell'em the rules, and let them find other three people in need.
  

It made me think... about social software (strange, uh? :) ). Yep, and the potential power of 'em. Power to influence the people, at a rate and in a range far more interesting than most traditional "marketing" tools. We already know that, and if I were a little less tired (maybe I'll do tomorrow) I could certainly find some good papers on this.
Even the game I followed a few days ago was a clear example of this power: the day after that, I made a survey and found that something like 70% of my (Italian) blogosphere followed it. And it was a silly game :)
As a sidenote: my dear friend Michele argued that it could have something to deal with the 23 skidoo conspiracy :)

Anyway, just think of it: what makes blogs so different from mailing lists or mail-chains? because that's the point! To cut it short, I think it's a matter of motivation: first of all, when you get an (e)mail, you get an interrupt. That requires a series of operations on your part to stop what you're doing at the moment, set an ideal "bookmark" on it, go to the mail, open, read, evaluate it (unless, of course, you were actually mainly reading emails).
While, if you go and read a blog, you are already doing two things:
1) you made a choice, and used some of your emotion to go and visit the page. For as little as it may seem, it's still a choice.
2) If you're reading my diary, chances are you identify yourself with pov, or at least with some thoughts of mine. This is how mass-media works, from ads to soap-operas to realityshows to detailing "personal" stories during the news... all this "tricks" aim at making you identify with the casual "hero", and thus make you think as he/her, and thus, in the end, influence your choices.
So, why not doing it once for "good"? Why not using blogs to spread some positive perspective on life, things, people? After all, it works on the other side too: Moody posts will influence those reading us. Well, it's also a fact that moody posts are usually "more successful" than cheerful ones in bringing attention to the blogger... this is another interesting point, and it's got to do with interaction in a more general way. I'll have to dig more...

So, do you want to change your world? Because I do. Not the world, that's impossible, just mine, that's ours, because if you're reading this, you're already part of my world too, and vice versa. Wanna help? :D

hmmm... I think there's enough space here for some digression on blog-research ethics... but maybe tomorrow.

Have a good night.

...I start to feel sick.
Well, wait, let me explain :D

As in every field that I observed in my life, the more I demand from my mind, the more it works well. It's not a linear thing, obviously, but more an "adaptation process", the same you experience when you train in a gym.

Now, recently I've been definitely demanding, and my mind started to produce ideas and thoughts at an interesting rate. The trouble is that, if I can't come up with something or I don't "use" these Ideas, they start sticking around, actually poisoning my life. If it never happened to you with thoughts, I'm sure you can find some field of application that suites perfectly some experience in your life too.

So I found that blogging helps a lot: by serializing and giving a "place" to each idea, I feel like I can free up some space, and let the process go on.

In what it claims was simply an effort to boost turnout, the Italian government has sent millions of cell phone users text messages on voting procedures for this weekend's European and local elections.
[...]
A consumer advocacy group Adusbef, estimating the cost of sending the flood of SMS messages, at more than $6.9 million, demanded to know who was footing the bill.

I was reading this article on the BBC UK site, reporting a list of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, when I suddenly realized that, as for now, that matches exactly with the list of my preferences (well, maybe substituting Osaka with New York)... curious enough...

MOST EXPENSIVE CITIES

• Tokyo
• London
• Moscow
• Osaka
• Hong Kong

Will be traveling most of the weekend, and only partially online until wednesday, since I'll be attending a couple of weddings (on saturday and sunday) and eventually BlogTalk 2.0 on monday and tuesday!!!
:)

Saturday had lesson 0 of paragliding.
Zero because there was so much wind that we could not even try a little "jumpy run" as I call when paragliders run with their sail above just to simulate take-off and landing...We had a lot of theory though, which is good, and now I perfectly know how to fold, unfold, and check sail and strings :)

It was also a very interesting social day: spent hours chatting with all kinds of interesting people, from Stefano, the president of our little sport club, who's starting to be interested in the joy of blogging (can't believe that I'm becoming an evangelist ;) ), or Alessandro, a not so young guy who used to live in Israel, and is now moving to Nepal to open a new gliding school...
Staying with these people sitting on the top of a mountain makes me feel like meeting old seawolves in a pub in Tortuga ;)

By the end of the day, we also assisted at a really great take off of a glider who challenged the crazy wind. It's been the only flying thing during the whole day. Boys, that was cool!

Stay tuned for lesson number 1 :)

Forkscrew published for Centre for study in Political Graphics a poster series that want to push some reflections on the war in Iraq. Excellent work!

Source SocialDesignZine

Spent more than one week totally offline.

This let me realize and have a tangible proof that I'm not (yet) a totally net/blog addict.
Even more so, it was clear how un-wired computers are totally unappealing to me, and that it's just internet and that makes them interesting to me (and probably I'm not alone in this).
It's like computers are but leaves of a tree (of a forest, actually), getting life while they're still attached to their branches and trees (the underlying network), and as soon as they detach, they becomes dead leaves, which are still beautiful fractal examples of Nature's art, but a dead art anyway.

So how did I spend these last days? Well, playing the farmer game :)
Yes, I was on vacation and, since it's harvesting time here, there's always need of some help in the fields... and it's been some time since I felt the need to do some practical "hands on" job... so when the neighbours asked if I could give a hand, I was eager to enjoy the challenge!
And for ten days I've been under the hot Italian sun, surrounded by barley, wheat, and all kind of vegetables instead of paper, keyboards, LCD and air conditioning :)
So, practically speaking, what have I learnt from this experience?
* Not all vegetables on one plant get mature at the same time
* I always had this idea that too many fruits on one single plant make the average fruit weaker, while I found that healthy plants make plenty of healthy fruits, while weak plants make few weak fruits, or no fruits at all.
* No matter how well you look for fruits, there are some that hides too well. Always give a second look at things
* It's wonderful to see such ordered patterns (mature fruits, but also corn fields and so on) emerging from the chaos of seeds thrown into a field and subject to heavy rain, sun, diseases, treatments...
* Never do tomorrow what you can do today: veggies will rot on the plant if you don't pick them at the right time! :-/
* Sun doesn't burn so much after all... and I can live with a tan ;)
* Not planning anything can be challenging (and good for the lazy), but most often it's just stupid (e.g. it's good to have tape close by in case you get cut).

Left home on Sunday, and spent last 48 hours travelling around northern Italy and meeting people.
Thought a lot about how ubiquity could be nice these days ;) ...but even ubiquitous computing could have been enough.

This morning I've been in a library and, surprisingly enough (!), I bought a couple of books about chaos theory and ubiquity. Nice thing is that, by skimming through it, I found almost the same underlying themes, from fractals to strange attractors :)

Finally back to the office. I just opened my laptop and distributed on the desk all notes, business cards, a few bills, train and plane tickets from my last trip to London to attend BlogWalk 4.
My mind also is iterating through all the faces, places, and interesting discussions we had.

I should definitely start organizing BlogWalk notes, but some meta-consideration evolved during these days and I need to write it down before considering anything else.
While looking at the Window Wiki at the second floor of the Old Crown in New Oxford st. I saw one of the post-it fall down, like a dead leaf from the window. Like a dead leaf, or a snow flake.
Snow flakes are something that always captured my imagination. Two connections instantly pop up in my mind:
- one of the final sequences of the movie "Nirvana", by Gabriele Salvatores, and the narrating voice saying "Come un fiocco di neve che non cade in nessun posto" (like a snowflake, falling nowhere).
- some passages of Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science, describing the chaotic process of snowflakes formation.

Post-its, categorization, knowledge mapping, emergent order, snow, post-its, categorization, knowledge...

I was looking for the whole in the part. And that's what chaos theory is (also) about... finding simple models for reality, since simple systems can lead to "common" complex behaviours, and thus there must be laws that make order "emerge" from disorder in very different types of systems, laws that are not dependent on specific context (finance, ecology, weather...).

Of Maps

So what? Map is not the territory, and we all know that.
Yet, a map is darn useful if you know what to look for, and the map is simple enough or, better, it honestly fit your purpose.
Take as an example a mad rush to using public transport to catch an airplane that is going to take off on the airport on the opposite side of the city... I wouldn't care about turistic attraction near each station of the tube, but rather I'd like to have a visualization system that isn't even based on geographic distances, but on the time needed to get from one point to the other...

Of SnowFlakes

Like a snowflake, falling nowhere...

Let's go back to the idea of simple models for complex systems: how can a crystal of snow be a model for human beings?

Of Man

So, from a hypothethic - not formal at all - "chaos psychology" point of view (actually I just made a google on Chaos Psychology, and discovered plenty of studies and papers on the subject... just downloaded some for future reading), let's consider a man who does not like the way his personality "crystal" is growing up. What could he do?
I see two probblems here:

• The Future: creating "good" or "nice" layers from now on
• The Past: deconstructuring the old, unwanted ones

• it is fuzzy, since none of the behaviour are absolute (i.e. never say never...)
• it is dynamic, since different pieces (behaviours) can move to different position (condition), grow, shrink, flip upside down, adjusting to inner feedback and the everchanging context...

Problem number two (deconstructuring old layers) is a little more complicated.
It is about breaking old habits, in a way that new, healthier ones can becreated. Going back to our snowflake metaphor, it would be like catching a gust of hot air (or maybe a sunray) that would melt a few layers, so that they can be remade under new conditions...

Of Actors

1. learning to live the emotion, vision and feelings of the character, and
2. learning to use the body as the ultimate tool since "emotional life is a kind of two-way street", and "there is never a direct line to emotions in performance, only to the body".

Jerzi Grotowski

by gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, communion.

So, by learning how to wear (and, even moreso, un-wear) masks and costumes, the actor learns (if he wants) both to take a distance from what shines around and inside him, eventually "cleaning" his inner image of all the bells and whistles, and thus creating what Shannon or information theorists would address as a less noisy channel ;)

In the end, this approach to theatre teaches you to resist your vanity and pride, and the natural identification in the role which would result in creating an hybrid monster (made up of your own personality merged with your personal interpretation of the character), and to surrender instead to lean towards the audience, in order to listen to it and understand their current needs, expectations and belies, eventually wearing (building) the "best" mask to transmit that specific feeling, emotion, or vision. As St.Paul would say "being Greek with Greeks and Roman with Romans" (or going back to information theory, choose the best encoding scheme for the receiver).

To be or not to be... what?

Let's start from the latter. What makes the difference? At first sight, it seems that the answer is to be sought in the focus on communicating with an audience: this could bring to a generalization of this set to include all arts since, no matter how wide or narrow the channel is (for example actors can rely on a much wide communication channel with their audience than musicists or painters), he/she will have to go through this process of bending (cleaning up the channel) to the message and listen to (properly encode for) the audience.
But this is a dead-end, interesting but not general enough, and leading away from the pattern estabilished, for example, by hermits and ascetists, whose main focus is not transmitting data to a public "outside", but to a very special "inner" public, being it wether God himself or themeselves.

This way we can generalise a lot by eliminating the dependence on the external audience, and we are left with this "focus on channel/communication" common characteristic.
So we could think that professions dealing with communication in general have this "evolutive" potential to be exploited, while others do not.
This is already a remarkable improvements from the starting assumptions: we now have a fairly good choice of professions/activities that will let's re-shape ourselves :)

To boldly go where no man has gone before

But how to get rid of it???

So we have that, no matter what we do, things we are doing can be used for reshaping our image/personality/self.
The general path for achieving this requires moving "why we do things" from doing things because we need (either recognition, money, whatever), to doing things out of passion, to doing things following a vision (plan).
On the "what we do?" extension instead, it's about moving from doing something just because it's fun, to make the safest choice, to doing things "right", to doing "right thing" :)

Open Questions

1. Are there any differences between activities focused on "evolution", those focused on "communication", and others? If so, where's the advantage?
2. This discussion is based on linear logic, and thus doesn't consider the fuzzy factor of real life, where nobody's dedicated to just "one" activity 24/7. How this influences the model?

I'll be hanging out in S.Marino till monday...
Blogging on hold until tuesday ;)

After four crazy days of meeting people, talking, tons listening and, more then anything else, learning.
Learning from whatever came across, learning from the smile of a young mother to her child, learning from the handshake of an old friend as well as from books and statistics and official experiences.

In these latest weeks codewitch.org's network has been "unstable", just to say it from an optimistic point of view... time to find some serious hosting. Ideas?

...and what have you done?

Will be out of office for a few days. I thought of making two presents to my blog this year, the first one was installing the antispam plugin as I mentioned before. The second one hopefully will be online in a few hours ;)

But now I've to catch a train!

Be happy (possibly not only on christmas...).

This is the first post of this year.
I want to use it in a not so original way: to send my best wishes to you all.
2004 has been a tough one; nevertheless, to my life it brought so many events, challenges, revolutions, serendipities and epiphanies that I have to consider it a rather special one.
Definitely I can say that I experienced such an “intense” quality of life as never before.

My wish for the new year is to live up to this standard, while growing still in peace, passion, focus.
Peace, passion, and focus seems three good things to wish you all.
Take care ;)

Anu writes this short post on his blog:

I want to say something about this,
CorporateBloggingBlog: Internal Blogging More In Focus - Blog Consultants Beware
but I don’t have the time right now, and if I just consign it to del.icio.us or a bookmark then I’ll probably never see it again.. Having it on here means I’ll eventually get shamed into saying something…one hopes.

After reading this line I thought back at my evergrowing del.icio.us account, but also at those entries I mark as “Keep New” or clip in Bloglines, as well as the long list of blog drafts... I realize nano/personal/callitwhateveryouwant publishing actually helps a lot in getting things done, since it speeds up a lot the drafting/referencing/reviewing/publishing workflow, but at the same time procrastination is still a sexy beast. I recognize the trap is in the “save as a draft” or “put a bookmark here” phase, since no time is associated with the action, actually making this choice valid for an indefinite amount on time. I wonder if a small workaround like a “remind me in 1/2/5 days” checkbox could save some thought from the limbo...
On the other hand, you can always rely on the social pressure effect generate by having an “incomplete” post on the blog, as Anu is choosing to do this time.

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!!! ;)

There are times when I get this lazy thought of being scared by the amount of unread posts on bloglines.
This is one of those days.
BlogPanic? BlogStress? Generic Lazyness? What's the name for this? :)
C'mon pal, let's stare at the beast...

For the month of March, two artists in a long-distance relationship are going to put all their electronic communication online. Phone conversations, emails, IMs, camera phone pics, the lot, it’ll all be online under a Creative Commons licence. IN Network, the performance is called.

Since I'm spending this period at my parent's flat, I decided to properly bring it into the new millenium. This basically means cabilng one room and setting up a wireless lan. This took some time, mainly because I approached the choice of the wireless devices (router and cards) a bit too lightly and then had to spend a couple of nights googling for solutions to their misbehaving.

Wiring was fun. It's always like that, as in every hands-on job I mean. It's hard to start (lazyness rules), but more and more enjoyable as it goes.
So now I'm proudly writing this post from the balcony, and enjoying this new cable-less, radiowave-full experience.

On the geek side, this is my setup:
Belkin router G125 ( F5D7231 )
Belkin pcmcia G125 ( F5D7011 )

I publish the report here since this 54G pcmcia is not officially supported on MacOSX. But it works. Well it works great, believe me.
Though, I had some really hard time setting up the network. At first I couldn't male the pcmcia see any signal at all. After a lot of googling (and no useful information found) the magic move (magic as in try every possible combination of settings in both the router and the pcmcia) was to change the wireless channel (from the default of 11 to 9 in my case), and TA-DAA, instantly the laptop noticed the local wlan.

Time marches on... :)

On Pasta and Vinegar, I read that ICON magazine published a review of the 21 most influential sources of inspiration and influence in contemporary design landscapes:

Ikea is first…then it’s Rapid prototyping, Easyjet, Milan, Design Academy Eindhoven…Alice Rawsthorne, Copying, Bouroullec Brothers, Blogs, Midsummer Light, Light Transmitting Concrete, the Readymade, South Korea, Rei Kawakubo, Ora Ito, Naoto Fukasawa, Entropy, Nintendo DS, Dunne & Raby, Murray Moss and Yves Behar.

Nicolas comments this as a little too "cosy" a list, and would add détournement to it.
As for myself, I simply made a personal note to discover what a detournement is... in the meanwhile, must admit that seeing Milan at position number four makes me a little proud. Even if I don't live there anymore :)

...I started applying a little more to my all-Italian blog a few weeks ago.

As you may know, I've been keeping a toy blog in Italian on Blogger for a few monthes. Then I started to notice a growing interest (both mine and from my Italian readers) and I ended up moving the thing away from Blogger and here on Codewitch, giving it a wordpress codebase. This happened in mid april.
In a couple of days I had most of the platform up and running the way I liked (the famous 20%), then I started tweaking it to make it more like a conversation engine, that is one of the possible uses of a weblog, and definitely the one that best suits my Italian audience. It took me a couple weeks of off-time work to get through it all (the infamous 80%).
Now I have a platform I'm fairly satisfied with. It is more advanced techonolgy-wise than AllThingsBru, quite heavily Ajaxised and will probably be my favourite testbed for new technologies and socialsoftware hacks for the time being.
As for the type of conversation and subjects, it is (and is going to be) lighter and more focused on local events and news. And of course it is going to stay Italian.

AllThingsBru will still be my major blog, and I'll keep it up-to-date with my thoughts and rants, especially those pertaining to interaction design, learning theories, blogging, creative commons and so on...

I should thank Gaspar Torriero and Antonio Sofi, who helped me sorting out these thoughts of mine during a couple of nice conversations.

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...

It started one hour and a half ago, when a friend of mine from London sent me an IM describing the situation, then more and more people where buzzing all over, in the mailbox, on the IM...
Now I'm trying to understand the numbers, but news sites are of little help.
Bad bad bad.
And I know too many people in London. Getting a lot emotional about that.

As a note on the media: first one to give me the "official numbers" where two contacts from messenger.

I forgot tu put a link. Matt hates BBC coverage but it's the first one I got. You can also take a look at wikinews and technorati. Also pictures in the London and London bomb blast tags on Flickr.

Update: Italian news site Repubblica uses Google Maps to pinpoint blast locations.

Ok so I have no more excuses: finished exams for my BA, found a nice day job that (hopefully) will let me improve a lot on the design side, and almost repaired my motorbike.
Now just gimme the time to sync on with those 2 or 3 thousand posts I haven't read yet and I'll be back at full blogging speed.

Horst Prillinger makes some rather simple yet very deep considerations about how terrorism is dealing with the "west". I agree on the whole line. Here's an excerpt, but please do read the full post.

George Bush said that Al-Quaeda is attacking the western democracies because they hate our democratic system, our civil liberties and our values and want to destroy them.
I say: if that is indeed the case, then Osama bin-Laden (or whoever is behind these attacks) has been pretty successful: in the USA, the Patriot Act has done away with many very basic civil liberties, human rights even. Several EU countries have passed laws that allow for the unlimited detainment of people on the basis of the mere assumption that they might know someone who could be involced in some terrorist activity. Laws that allow the recording and archiving of all our telephone and internet communications are on the way.

Just one sudden thought. Has there been any opportunity open for dialogue, since this whole crap begun? Or has it been just a show off of military power and generalized madness?

Why everybody up there keeps forgetting that what makes mankind what it is, is the ability to talk, and how can they pretend that people doesn't notice this paradox?

... 60 years old: a gracious, elderly, deadly mistress...
60 years ago lady 'A' struck 140k people (that's one hundred and forty thousand... one time and a half the city where I live) in Hiroshima.
Just to remember.

This has been yesterday's meme.
I parked my bike close to Trento's city centre and was walking through it dressed in my blackleatherandshiningmetal bike suite, with this black helmet under my arm and a huge backpack, and you could see thoughts and feelings in the eyes of people very different from those I'm used to when wearing my usual "mask".

The other little trick you can verify is that this same mask feedback gives birth to a funny loop effect: the more people gaze at you as an "alien potentially dangerous rough man", the more you act like a troll.
And it's a lot of fun. Indeed.

Today's thought is about fluxes.
Or maybe it's just a driver's Pavlovian reaction: you put your wheels ona a motorway, your speed doubles.
Weird.

There was a time when the world of IT was quite easy.
Microsoft was Evil, Google (or Apple) was Good and it seemed they just were facing each other in an endless conflict, with the Evil empire gaining more power day after day but, like in Tolkien's middle-earth, a sort of cozy feeling in the back of your head that eventually the Good will win.

Nowadays it's not that simple, nor that straight.
While MS is backing up in the wait for the rise of the LongHornVista (and building an army of babyface bloggers in the meanwhile),
Apple is messing up with DRM, Google lost its do no evil aura and Yahoo plays the nasty colonist role with Flickr community.

Now just tell me that I have to pay for GNU/Linux and I will know for sure the end of the world is nigh.

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?

So we are almost there.
Next week now I'll be discussing my thesis and hopefully get my degree in computer science at the UPO.

Main resource for writing it has been wikipedia. It, together with various blogs, has been the only source of enough coherent information about magmatics and fluid topics as web 2.0, semantic web, research in fields like virtual teams, emergence and user interfaces.
As for the document itself, it's coming out much less glamorous than I thought, and my mind on that is that it's such a huge and rich argument (title going to be: A Web Wide World: (lower case) semantic applications for virtual teams) that much of its beauty comes out from sheer complexity, and trying to render it out of its natural hypertextual context will inevitably ruin most of it (unless of course you're a natural born writer, which I'm not).

Anyway, I'm carefully keeping track of all the wikipedia articles I'm pillaging to complete the writing, since I plan to give them back (translated) to the Italian wiki. I think this could be a nice deal to keep the ecosystem healthy.

Two days to the discussion. Not many things to say aside from the fact that I'm damn late on it.
Working full time, moving to another city, trying to keep an active social life AND writing at the same time is quite challenging. But makes me feel alive, much more than those idle days spent comfortably under a blanket or on a beach.
That said, I want a vacation and sleep for a whole day ASAP :D

But not now. Now there are still some questions to be answered, stuff to be dealt with "well" and projects to be closed in the short term. I will definitely need some kaizen-foo.

Last month, Paolo and I had lot of fun creating a paper for SWAP 2005.

The paper was rejected, and I agree with Paolo about the right choice of the reviewers: our one was on first instance a divertissement and at the same time a provocation for the semantic web community.

Paolo just posted a terrific article on the subject, explaining the how and whys of our little adventure. So take a look there if you want to know the whole story :)

The title of the paper is “A Semantic Mobs Manifesto for the (r)Evolutionary Web” (pdf). As I already said, it was a night divertissement, it took us few hours creating it, well, most of the time was spent in chatting about the possible title. We skyped really improbable titles I think I remember. And it was a lot of fun. [...] So how we created the paper? We took verbatim a blog post by Ryan King titled “An Evolutionary Revolution - On the shoulders of giants” and we inserted it in the paper. Since the blog post was resealed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence, we could import it legally, in fact we of course gave credit to Ryan King in the paper, we re-released the paper under the same licence and the paper was not a commercial work.
Then we added a short quibbling about how with the Semantic Web envisioned in the conference, a paper like this one would be easily creatable by some software tool, expecially when i a short future the number of creative commons released text works will be huge. The last lines of the abstract hinted a matrix-like scenario in which (human) researchers will be no more needed. The title was entirely Bru's fault. Don't tell him but I think we got rejected because of the title ;)

And yes, if you ask me, the title was just perfect, of course :)

I've been struggling with Google Analytics tracking code since this morning.
Anybody has got a clue why the hell it keeps complaining about code missing in my html? It's there!
Liar, liar, liar! :D

Last night I bought a dvd featuring Dopo Mezzanotte an Italian movie (2004) set in the city of Turin.
Well, it's actually more than set there. Turin is actually one of the main characters of the story, with its landscapes, the Mole Antonelliana (that hosts the permanent Cinema Museum) and its fancy streetlights.

I fancied the movie quite a lot, especially 'cause its a movie about movies: most of it is set inside the cinema museum, and the “film” meme drives the whole story.

More funny even is that the day after, checking my daily news feeds, I found this post from Régine reporting about some Rudolph Valentino silent movies freely available for download (and Dopo Mezzanotte is full tributes and quotes from those very movies).

I'm spending a lot of time offline these days. Not having adsl in my house in Milan was a good reason to leave the lid of the powerbook shut and take a train to Florence, then to Genoa, and then crawling back to Milan. In Florence I missed for the Nth time Antonio, we deserve each other a few hangover-worth of beer by now.

Quick thoughts:
. Want to have an idea of what viral marketing is? Go on an Italian train and cry out "beatles", then step back and watch amused.
. There are places that, as a child you imbue with mythical and fabulous charms. They become promised lands where you'll find all those toy shops you ever dreamed off and so on. Typically that's the "big city" if you come from the countryside. As you grow up, you care no more about the toy shops, but the place retain all of its subliminal magic. For me that place is Genoa.
. There is no rulebook to life. Right. But there are a lot of rules of thumb.

I'm developing a strong interest in MMORPG communities (especially WoW related) even though I still haven't played it.
Basically I was interested in game mechanics, verifying if and how it was different from tabletop, pen-and-paper, MUDs and other gaming experiences, but as the monthes pass, I'm growing more and more curious about the social dynamics that can evolve both in the gaming world and in the world of gamers.

Nevertheless (and inevitable as this could be), I was moved by reading today about the fact that more people are gaming theirself to death.
As the article reports this is something that apparently is happening mostly in the far east. I wonder if and how this is tied to the loco culture, politics or economics balance.

On the other hand, I think this (MMORPGs) could be an excellent playground for creative forms of incentives for not sticking to the game for more than a reasonable (and health-safe) amount of time: gameworlds are addictive indeed, I remember for instance spending more than a night planning fleet raids in ogame.
As a countermeasure, some governments passed (china) or are planning laws that restrict gaming sessions to a few hours. Now, I don't know almost anything about Chinese modern culture, but this kind of law would have on me exactly the opposite effect: gamelust.
A different, and probably more socially sustainable countermeasure would be that of encouraging game builders to disincentive continuous gaming by, for instance, put in-game exhaustion limit or rest bonuses (as done in wow). These would add to the game experience and at the same time push the player toward a safer behaviour. IMHO.

Update: just found this article on the Economist about gameworlds as economic models

2005 has come and gone.
Being not at ease with deadlines whatsoever, and starting to look at procrastination from a different perspective, insteaad of rushing to a quick list of done-and-todo's, I decided to postpone my personal consideration to a more suitable time. This time.

How the year ended
Working with a wonderful team on something really enthralling: eye-tracking technologies.

How the year started
Travelling through Italy on a fabulous trip

How things are going to change
Only better, as far as I can see: and here comes the big news.
On saturday I'll jump on a plane to leave Milan. No return ticket.
Destination: London. Monday will bring me into a serious headshift ;)
So another very cool team with more and more challenging stuff to learn and do. Yeeeeeh!

On a more brainstormy note, these offline days have been great not only for the weather, food, sightings and company, but also I had time to think. Far away from the cognitive storm that is my everyday experience of the net, either staring at a sunset on an ancient, labyrinthine town or breathing the odd beauty of the Italian baroque (even better if accompained by a few pasticciotti) I could breath out lot of stuffed data and also breath in some carefully handpicked experience that gave birth to some precious sparkles of intuition that (I guess) will drive my personal research for this newborn year:
1. blogosphere vs. cities. Well, actually this is the shortcut: Lilia has been writing bits and pieces of her thoughts on the matter since last year, but I really had nothing to add till now. The path I'd like to explore is the link between the blogosphere or, more in general, those metaphors devoted to the management of knowledge and architecture (as the art of shaping space), design (as the art of shaping objects) and archaeology (as the art of creating knowledge from shape and noise).
2. In particular, I'd like to get a grip on aesthetics' role in this scenario.

As usual, more to come...

Landed at 4p.m.
This time the first meeting with british culture has been with a cornish pasty of the lamb&mint kind.
Excellent way to give a whole new meaning to the word hot.

Yes, ok, we're not supposed to be ubiquitous, so being everywhere at once is not an option... but today I'm missing two cool conferences at once:

• InEdita Blog - Genova, Italy
  
• LIFT06 - Geneva, Switzerland
  

Well, it's just a matter of a vowel, 'o' for 'e'... maybe I could have made it :)

Good Luck to everybody there. Please blog your experience!!!

On The Long Tail blog, Chris has posted a great, crunchy, stats-rich piece on the death of the Hollywood blockbuster. According to Chris's research, the proportion of Hollywood's money coming from blockbusters is falling, while the cost of making blockbusters is up, and the number of people going to blockbusters is falling. It doesn't take a psychic to see that this means trouble for Hollywood, which has been mainlining $200MM box-office turds for half a decade now.

It was just weird reading this post today and realizing Cory explained that same concept on that very day speaking face to face.

Spent most of the weekend transferring codewitch.org to a new hosting service.

Now I'm in very good company in a nice, noisy and quite alive bazaar.
Stay tuned for more news and updates ;)

We got a code monster shared hosting plan from DreamHost, which, after a first shock, seems quite usable (except from an awkward one-db-for-one-host limit of course) and even reasonably fast. The fact to sit on a debian host also amuses me quite a bit ;)

By the way, on the other hand, if switching DNS was pretty fast and painless, the MX record (you can think of it as an Internet equivalent of postcodes) took ages to be propagated to DreamHost's namesever, god knows why.
As a straight consequence my mailboxes were obscured for the last two days :-/

Now eventually DH realized to be my new mail exchanger, so everything should be working fine from now on, but if you sent me emails during the weekend, please resend'em ;)

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 :)

...for saying I'm an asshole... (together with all left-winged Italian electors)

You know when you walk out in a sunny day and would really enjoy an ice cream as your perfect companion?
Today was exactly one of those days.

So I walked pass the tower bridge and got caught at the first icecream selling kiosk... only to realize that the main ingredient of the so called ice cream is a chemical component roughly the flavour of sylicon.

Excellent, if your main aim is maintaining the work of your aestethic surgeon...

Something weird happened today in Copenaghen with cellphones.
Mine (Orange) stopped working just after midday (well at least I couldn't make any international phone calls), like no signal could be found or, better, like no call slot could be allocated. The thing went on for a few hours, I could make a call I think around 8pm or so.
The weird part is that Giorgio Baresi, who was in town too, had the same problem at the same time.

I wouldn't normally worry too much about it, but if you're expected to meet and hang out with cool rebooters and you're relying on your mobile, that could be quite frustrating. I had to blog it :)

P.S.: Luckily enough, there still exists phone booths (and sorry Giorgio, as you know that call was not aimed at you ;) ).

As often happens, Danah Boyd writes and I cannot help but quote. And comment. But first things first: quote.

But when i think about reading blogs about tech industry, my research area or other arenas that would actually be helpful, i go into anaphylactic shock. There's too many, it's too overwhelming, i can't cope, eek! I can't even stomach blogs written by dear friends who i will talk with for hours about professional or intellectual ideas (unless they embed the nutritious material in the sugary gossip stuff). I don't even think i'd read my blog given its content if i weren't the one writing it [bold is mine, n.d.Bru].

It's not that i don't want to be engaged with meaningful conversations, but somehow, the popularity of blogging and the amount of content that people produce flips the all or nothing bit in my head

Enter comment, which is actually not a comment at all.
I must say that re-reading these lines after witnessing reboot and still having this juicy overdose of social and intellectual sparkles (bonfire would be a better word) rushing through my veins sounds quite weird. I keep seeing Ben's grin as he cries out "Eat more!" couple of nights back. Definitely I can see the all-or-nothing flag, it's something I have too. It something that most western minds have, and I wonder if we must say thank you to Aristotele and his logic for that.
They always say the secret is passion. But I don't think neither Danah nor me lacks passion in what we do. For me what could help would be probably taking it easier, going with the flow, and making it fun (and sorry if it sounds a banality, it's just plain true). Being able to switch between Occam's razor and a travelled juggler's beanbags. Maybe juggling occam's razors could be even more interesting.

Having said that, you know what? I reckon this blog often just stinks (hence the bold text in danah's quote). And do you know why? Because, as we were discussing a few hours back in Tivoli with a bunch of smart dutch conference buddies, all my "self", personal stuff just moved a while ago to the Italian blog (together with a much magnified drive for silly stuff), while for too long Just Bru kept just all the boring, almost "institutional" stuff. That's not Just Bru, that's Just Inanimated Crap! Having two blogs doesn't seem to be generally a problem, but probably having two spots where to stick personal kind of thoughts, aimed at the same kind of audience, just in a different language, is a little too much. At least for me (Paolo, what's your secret?): I never know where to put stuff, and never considered plain translation an option. Actually since a few weeks I registered a turn of the tide, but this will mean less passion, participation, and ultimately effort in Giocolando. Sad.

Unless... unless I can just swap my mind about the blogs and start considering this as the "creative/personal" blog and the other as the repository for just the silly stuff, plus any strictly italian-interests only pieces. Ultimately is just changing my intimate "tags" for those. Yeah, it's just a mind hack, but that should do the trick.
And since, as Doc says, the best blogging is provisional, probably we can infer that the best attitude toward blogging is provisional too: keep it Simple, keep it Straight, keep in Sync with yourself (wow, I got a 3S rule too :D ).

And forgive me for this meta-blogging rant.

Saturday night, after a joyful experience at Tivoli (Copenaghen's amusement park), I had a walk and a nice chat with Francesca about life as traveling soul, what's different between us and the "settlers", the inevitable time of goodbyes and this odd feeling that we shared of always leaving "something behind" when eventually yet another airplane carries you away.
She went into even deeper detail in her blog:

Ricardo said never say no as he left me on my doorstep and headed off to get lost in Copenhagen. Ironically I say yes more often than I say no, and I have the scars to prove it.

I was feeling sad at the end of today. Looking at the loose fibres of this life I am weaving, I suddenly could not handle the sadness of leaving yet another incredible experience behind. I love the movement of travel. It is invigorating to meet new people, but each time I am forced to draw the curtains, blow out the light, and head back to my corner of the world, I can't help but feeling I have lost another piece of me. I keep losing pieces of myself around the world, and I am starting to feel the weight of the absence.

I'd like to try and define my feeling about leaving, that is twofold:
. on one side Francesca's right. There's something sad in closing the curtain and turning off the lights. As when there's some cool event that you know you're going to miss.
. on the other hand though, we live in such a small world, that to me moving is like archiving an album of photographs: I know that those thoughts, those emotions and feelings are still there, tied to the stone and cristal and flesh and voices of the land. And I can find them whenever I want, just jumping on a plane and going there. It may be difficult at first to get them back (as I experienced last time I moved back to Milan), but eventually there'll be a smell, a color, a sound that will trigger that hidden chest full of inspiration and feelings open again.

As for the scars, I'm afraid I don't have the necessary confidence nor the knowledge to comment. After all, I've been definitely lucky, as the scars I bear are quite few; but then again I wonder if this is just a matter of sheer luck or this foolishly enthusiastic attitude of mine toward life actually helps.
Maybe those same scars that on me seem just grazes, on somebody else's shoulder could be something more significant... but probably the truth is I'm just lucky :)

Yes dear friend, here in London we have the sun! And especially yesterday it was even fairly hot. Something like Italy in late march.
So I happily did my usual cleaning and washing and all that cinderellish stuff that a young awesome single is supposed to do to keep his house between the range of "decent" and "decorous", and away from the dreaded (but sometime coveted) Swamp of Perfect Chaos.
At noon, after enjoying a huge tuna&sweetcorn sandwich at a local cafe I headed toward the city centre to steal some bandwidth at the Apple Store while waiting for Stefano, who happened to be wandering in London these days. Mind you, stealing bandwidth in Regent street is a bad idea, unless you've got the patience of a stoned zen monk (too many laptop vampires flying around, it took me ages just to check gmail) and an ApplePromoter-proof pair of headphones (they're sweet and funny, but sooo loud).

Anyway, most of the day was spent hanging out in London parks (Hyde, Green, St.James) and talking about natural interaction, headshift, girls, reboot, rails, more girls, Italy and its gorgeous girls.
In the end, we joined a group of couchsurfers, that have been my main social theme of the week: hosted three and met a dozen. And again, as often happens when I meet with someone of this lot, I've been tantalized by their general energy: natural promoters. They got the will, the easy-going style and the stories to tell. And move a lot, quickly spreading the couchsurfing gospel all over this smaller and smaller world.

I left Stefano in Holborn around midnight and merrily walked my way back to Trafalgar and the night bus waiting just for me. Streets were still so full of life: and all of the joyful type, not the drunk type.
This is the London I like.

I've been cut out of my domestic access to the net for a while now.
The direct result is that I'm hanging out a LOT in the centre, especially Oxford Circus area, precisely Regent street. Free wifi, comfortable chairs, housands drooling people coming and going and the invaluable show of a dozen net-junkies (me first) sitting in the presentation area absolutely detached from what's going on around.
Some has interesting look/fashion style.
And speaking of this, an interesting side effect is that I'm becoming a regular at the GAP of oxford circus too. My wardrope has never been so happy. My bank account start to worry though. Better to find quickly a new broadband for home. Any suggestion?

or a story on self representation through time

What follows is the result of a few introspective moments generated by reading back through reboot's notes, attending Dave McKean's talk, diving into McLuhan's thought once again and spending a couple of evenings at home without wifi but too much coffee at hand.

...and listening to Stone's Just my Imagination...

A sudden revelation
You know when you look around and everything seems just to hint at something just beyond your gaze; pattern emerges, and a yellow brick road appears leading somewhere, a path I cannot help but following...

Personal archetypes
Let's start with some history. As you may have noticed, I tend to give a huge weight to sources of inspiration, and I think it's worthwhille to recognize one's own: since they can help you understand or explain past actions, highlight possible points of contacts, the meaning behind choices and so on. It's easy to verify how identifying oneself with a book's main character while we read it may temporarily alter the way we think or see the world.
This is a short list of archetypes I can recognize as models since my childhood until now. The difference I noticed in how they influence my perspective and motifs is probably that now, as a "grown up boy", I tend to stick to a less pure version of the role/mask I wear at the moment, or maybe I simply delve more into the details, playing with the hues and shadows (variations) of its character, while in youth I used to stick to the main theme.
So, without further ado, let's start this quick tour through my personal gallery of wanna-be-this-and-that, childhood to here and now.
the jedi - well, this was my very first one... chances are pretty much at the same time I dreamed of being a knight of the round table, which is the legendary counterpart of the jedi after all. The Star Wars saga actually had some strong impact on my childhood. I was all about being right and just and balanced. I must say that as a boy I was not exactly like that... funny enough this theme came back in my adulthood, and maybe now I'm more of a pragmatical ideal-driven monk than I was twenty years ago.

the vampire - this is a fascination I share with many people I think. It's the dark side, it's the perfect eros&thanatos cocktail, with an added overdose of style. And black is the new black, after all. So I spent quite a few years dressing monochromatic (and feeling like the only goth in the village) and spending my nights out (as late as being less than 18 allowed me) and my days buried in my room reading tons of comics and romantic books. Ironically, I never read anything of Anne Rice. As a sidenote, I reckon I never enjoyed playing the sad-doomed-hopeislostletsgetstoned type of vampire, but rather a cheerful, I-am-having-so-much-fun-with-life-I-want-to-suck-it-all type: I was really influenced in that by Neil Gaiman's Death character. This was also the time of the Vampire role-playing-game, which really marked some main achievement in my storytelling experience, and where the "bru" nickname comes from in the first place, as a short for brujah (a clan of vampires in that game, characterized by a drive for philosphy and brawling).

the witch - well, everybody dreams, at least once in a lifetime, to be a wizard. I had this quirck though, about witches more than wizards. Aside from the sex difference (try and look, it's full of male witch charachters out there), the witch iconography is very interesting, and I found it more inspiring than the "old guy in a robe and pointed hat" which is usually associated with the wizard archetype. Witches are about life, social, sex of course, small practical things, symbols, clubbing out in the wild. Cool stuff. Moreover, witch in spanish is bruja, which made an interesting link with the previous archetype. This is where this domain name comes from also, that in the beginning was supposed to become the home of my own MVC framework (2001, long way before Rails, but it's alive and kickin' while CodeWitch is not so I'll shut up, ok). If you're interested in my perspective on the Witch theme, take a look at the Witchard character of "The Witch who saved Halloween" (it's a kids book from the '80s, but maybe you can still find it on amazon), or Bod Pa in Anton Quintana's "Book of Bod Pa" - this is especially fun if you know the author.

the juggler - I discovered juggling some time around 1998. It's been love at first sight. Especially with the philosophy behind it and how much can be learnt from just three beanbags. The simple fact that the balls will eventually fall on the ground, and the only resonable thing you can do is just deciding if to pick them up and start again or to leave the game is one of the greatest revelations I had so far (which is not a great deal, you may argue :) ). Juggling also teaches you about staying with the flow, and that the only constant is change. Essentially, juggling teaches you about life.
the corsair - there's been a time when I my job was in the information security business. Actually, I owned a company whose business model was about doing security related knowledge management on one side and network hardening on the other. I gave up a lot of years ago due to the extreme boreness of the subject, as well as... let's say ethical disagreement. So in those days, I felt a lot like a corsair, or privateer, doing the pirate stuff with some kind of blessing from above. For most people that's enough, but believe me, wearing a white hat didn't make me feel better.
the nomad - When I broke up with my company, a new life began. For the first time in many years I woke up one morning with no real job. Also, having step off the enterpreneur wagon, I lack an agenda too. Very interesting.
So what I did was leaving Milan, retiring for a while to a nice park in the middle of Umbria, and think. And study. And move a lot from city to conference to wilderness. And wondering what I really want to do when I "grow up". I met a lot of people, who shared their ideas with me. Then I got an agenda (the fabled and elusive Master Plan), and now I got a city, too. I still feel like a road runner, but more like a purpose driven one: a nomad on rails :)
the joker - this is the result of a very recent innuendo. it's nice that the Joker as a fictional character is actually the nemesis (the other side of the coin) of the Batman, a character I'm quite fond of, and that is essentially the result of some alchemy between the first two archetypes described above: the Jedi and the Vampire.
... a lot more should be written on this topic, but I have a couchsurfing friend to pick up at the station, so I leave this for the next episode :D

These days I'm hosting Roi, an enthusiastic couchsurfer who became friend a long time ago and then faithful travel companion during my last days in Italy.
She arrived on thursday, with a suitcase full of Italian food. Good girl :)
So today started with a long breakfast the english way and then had a nice lunch (south) Italian style. Cool.

A (not so) quick walk in the Crystal Palace Park and its Maze revealed me that knowing a place infrastructure (i.e. having been in the maze during winter, when you can see straight through the leafless fences) can spoil most of the "natural" charm of a place (there still remains the contextual charm, the one that is bound to that specific time and situation).
The other thought/theme of the day was the aestethic value of repetition, especially applied to architecture. The thesis I was trying to push is that there is a minimum necessary complexity of the "atomic" element (and that this minimum complexity is to be found putting together enough simple geometric elements like shapes and proportions, plus some "seed" complex element, such as adding a sense of depth with a bow window), which probably is also the border between simple/minimalist and ugly; if you step below this threshold, you'll get a magnified ugly, depressing landscape... and if the plan is to have people living there, well... you have a problem. The whole discussion started from looking at the endless series of victorian houses along the streets of London, as opposed as some Le Corbusier "creations".
Then we moved to Oxford street, where I spent a couple of hours looking for a dress to wear at a wedding in Italy next week (I'm supposed to be the best man, so Roi says I cannot be too "extravagant"). At the end of the day, I think I'll play the "uncle from England" role and rent one of those dandyish and oh-so-english suits just for the occasion. Could be fun. And I love the hat, oh those hats... yes, yes. I could even start smoking pipe... hmmm... no, no.

Anyway, the score at the end of the shopping match was no dress for me (aside from the wedding package idea) and a Lush shopper (with some stuff in it) for Roi (yep we are not black belt shopaholics). Kudos to Lush for the idea of shoppers recycling incentives: you reuse the same paper shopper, and after 5 times (they put huge nice stamps on it each time) you get a free "happy pill".
Mandatory stop at the Apple store to steal some bandwidth and then at the ICA where she was looking for documents about of an age old (1954?) ICA exhibition by a bunch of architects called the Independent Group while I was digging through Routledge Classics books in vain (hint: if you are in London and interested in philosophy/media/art literature, the ICA is doing a £2 discount on the Routledge edition books. The catalogue is quite rich, but they apply the discount only until the end of the stock... for example I was looking for "Understanding Media (Routledge Classics)" (Marshall McLuhan) but it was already sold out and the forthcoming copies will be at full price. darn).

By dinner time we were in soho and after scaring Roi with the sight of the Interpid Fox (gorgeous punk/goth/rock/whatever pub), we opted for the Hummus Bros, a cozy small hoummus(!) restaurant in the same (Wardour?) street. As I was saying, the place is cozy, the crew is something awesome (Roi guarantees for the waiters, I for the French waitress) and nice, and the food is simple but good. Very good (well, this is biased, as I really love hoummus). And quite cheap. And we got a mint tea free. And schwag! (two pins with "Give peas a chance", nice copy indeed).
...and did I mention the free wi-fi? :)
(if you're wondering, I didn't use it, but knowing it was there gave me that warm fuzzy feeling...)

On the "missed" side of the daily balance, I was waiting for a call from two of the "dutches of tivoli" who were wandering through London these days to share a beer and some conversation, but it didn't come. Pity, see you next time.

There's a lot of people out there I miss constantly, with different weight of "missness" and varying durations of the "miss cycle" (a lot, slightly less, a little, a little more, a lot, eccetera).

Then from time to time I focus on a specific character, and I start really feeling the weight of that distance. But what's actually missing in this case? Is it that sudden smile, that flickr of eyelids, that tone of voice, skin contact and holding of hands, or you taking a picture or drinking wines I'd never even consider mentioning lest drinking them. Or maybe it's the line joining all the dots, that specific pattern that makes you "yourself".

Or, possibly, it's just the nice box I created around all these things and labeled as "You". A box full of expectations, innuendos, personal fantasies and colorful pictures of what I think you are and what could be if only... essentially yet another projection of my needs on you.

Scary.

Alessandro quotes Bakunin.
I quote Alessandro.

"By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward".
I will print and attach this where I can always see it.

If you're of the "the system doesn't work. fullstop." type, stick with me, 'cos I want to tell you a secret.
A secret that's going to make you so popular among your contractors and suppliers... and the secret is: how to deal with troubles and issues.

Well, do you remember those five basic questions that usually they taught you at primary school whenre it was a matter to write your first composition? Ya know What, Where, When, Who, Why... well, you won't believe me, but it's as simple as that!
As a bonus, since you're supposed to be in the position of just reporting an issue, you can leave out the why bit as an excercise for the assignee, so that adds up to just four questions. Couldn't be more easy! So, without further ado, let's try once. Step by step, don't be afraid, it could even be funny. So, take a deep breath and then think:
Who (or for whom) does the "system not work"?
What was the user trying to do (EXACTLY)?
Where does it happen? That is, on which type of system?
When (and/or how often) does the problem arise? Maybe it is possible to repolicate it just on every monday?

That's it. If you really want to impress your audience, you could even throw in a:
How did the system complain? (Ya know, that log thing).

Sweet, isn't it?

Spent the evening out at a Bowling lane close to Euston station as a cool alternative birthday party for Dan. I finally had a chance to verify how crap my bowling is... I think my birthday party could be at a place for table-soccer, that's something I can still feel in my wrists :)

Today it's been also one of those days when I wish I was a voodoo shaman just to be able to create a doll in the shape of the Transport for London brand and fill it with rusty, huge needles. No trains on my way to the city nor on the way back, with a stupid forced diversion through balham in the middle of the night.
Well, at least now I improved my knowledge of the "surface" London.
Ehy, that would be an idea! Dear TFL, just stop calling them engineering works and start promoting alternate touristic route through characteristic London suburbs, that would be cool.

A few notes probably written while daydreaming or after one pint too many...
I found them funny so here they are.

[...] There are daffodils pouring out from her premature chin [...]

[...] Trains screaming in the midsummer chilly dream.
I bliss you [...]

[...] There must be a Pizza in our life [...]

[...] What's this weird equilibrum? It's not about balance at all: it's like when, in dire straits, you can't help but defining yourself... layer after layer, you build up your own jail, and the only thing that you can do then is see differences. Us and them, you and the world. Why do people want to be alone? [...]

[...] And as side dish: a blog please... is it hot or cool? [...]

Despite the fact that there are plenty of wifi around, for the first time today I couldn't piggyback on any of them, so I ended up abusing a loco ordinateur. The thing that I am writing from a cozy hut on the roof of Paris and trying to be zen about French keyboard make me feel a bit like a cyber bohemienne, and the fact that this night there will be a nuit blanche in Paris (that, if this is the same as in Italy, means a lot of shops open, concerts or stuff happening in every corner and LOADS of people in the streets) adds a lot to this feeling, even if I'm not sure if more on the cyber or on the boheme side of it.

I collected the notes about Sony CSL event on the macbook, that has been agonizing again: now it seem to be sensitive to position and movements. Go figure.

Now that I have longer hair they're quite visible.
It had to happen. Shocking it is, nonetheless.

Spin

1.1 To draw out and twist (fibers) into thread. 1.1To form (thread or yarn) in this manner. 2. To form (a web or cocoon, for example) by extruding viscous filaments. 3. To make or produce by or as if by drawing out and twisting. 4.1 To relate or create: spun tales for the children. 4.2 To prolong or extend: spin out a visit with an old friend. 5. To cause to rotate swiftly; twirl. 6. To shape or manufacture by a twirling or rotating process. 7. To provide an interpretation of (a statement or event, for example), especially in a way meant to sway public opinion: “a messenger who spins bogus research into a vile theology of hatred” (William A. Henry III). 8. Slang. To play (a phonograph record or records), especially as a disc jockey.

but also...

In physics, spin refers to the angular momentum intrinsic to a body, as opposed to orbital angular momentum, which is generated by the motion of its center of mass about an external point. In classical mechanics, the spin angular momentum of a body is associated with the rotation of the body around its own center of mass. For example, the spin of the Earth is associated with its daily rotation about the polar axis. On the other hand, the orbital angular momentum of the Earth is associated with its annual motion around the Sun.

In quantum mechanics, spin is particularly important for systems at atomic length scales, such as individual atoms, protons, or electrons. Such particles and the spin of quantum mechanical systems (“particle spin”) possesses several unusual or non-classical features, and for such systems, spin angular momentum cannot be associated with rotation but instead refers only to the presence of angular momentum.

This morning I was initiated to the experience of fire drilling.
Having never worked in a huge company safe for temporary consultancies, I always managed to avoid this sweet enterprise social rituals.

You know what, it tastes exactly like going to a school trip: everybody flocking around the block and chatting nobody knows about what or why... with the difference that 99.9% of the people wore suite&ties. Awesome view.

Feeling like a flu is fighting its way in my system. Sad because, as usual, it happens during the weekend (I suppose it's because the system just "relax" then) and a major project is due to be closed next week.I also had the most challenging conversation in a long time today, and as always happens, both angels and demons came out of it: life, cities, love and gender.
Now really, no way of reading or studying or working tonight. Maybe just some brainless hack'n'slash in a fantasy world...

Today was one of those in which I love London weather: crispy but not too chilly, generally clear and sunny but with huge black clouds passing by. I had the chance to do a short walk around lunchtime and at some point I simply had to indulge and stop dashing, relax, slow down and stare around a little bit.

The evening also came with a wonderful halloween treat. After work I went straight to the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm where Imogen Heap was going to play tonight. I didn't know her at all (before tonight), but trusting Francesca's tastes and the fact that the line to get in was insanely long, I happily added myself to the insane mob and waited for the theatre to swallow us all.
In the meanwhile, I enjoyed a conversation with two really cute female yeti (that is, the costume was all white and snowflakelike) from San Francisco, California. Being caught between them on one side and my Canadian friend on the other immediately short circuited my oldworld-trained english translating neuron (yeah, it's just one and goes by the name of Jeeves), so for the most part of our queue time I just nodded politely. Oh by the way I featured a nice "tamed werewolf" costume that nobody understood. Go figure.

When finally we got to the inside of the round shaped building, I had a double revelation: 1. the roundhouse is a really cool place. It's got a wooden dome and black, old fashioned metallic columns dividing the balconies from the pit/stage area. The impression I had by looking at it ceiling to floor and following the wooden structure lines meeting the iron and wires and stage lights was that of a well organized complexity.
The artist herself was the second (2) revelation. Nothing astonishingly new, but done with style. The way she live records herself and the other instruments to build a multi-track performance that gets more and more complex as the theme unveils is quite something. And in more than one occasion I just found myself pleasantly "tricked" as she chose some unexpected passage or combination of chords and rhythm.
Finally, before Imogen played this guy, armed just with a trumpet and a powerbook; couldn't pick up his name, but definitely have to find out who he is (and his records).

Like all best fairy tales, the evening ended quite early but, as I wrote, with the nice warm fuzzy feeling of fresh discoveries.

Yesterday I went with some friends on my first day trip out of the london sprawl since I moved to the UK.
We headed northwest, toward Warwick and its nice castle, aiming at some good photoshoots.
While cruising through the countryside, I suddenly realized how much Essex looks like northern Italy. Exception made for sheeps everywhere and funny looking houses. And the orbital also feels slightly like Milan's ring... and it's not just because all rings look the same: Rome's one is totally different. But perhaps I'm just a little nostalgic ;)

Anyway, now I've got the proof: there's more to England than urban landscape!

As for the pictures, coming soon on flickr.

Ya know all these webtwopointoish websites offering nice features, including a shrapnel of emails to your friends to "spread the cool meme"?
Now it's the turn of iLike. The service is actually quite interesting, why has it to be pushed so loudly?

We invite every music lover to participate in a more democratic music industry. Our other site, GarageBand offers a level playing field for new artists to be surfaced based on people’s tastes. With iLike, we set out to help people discover new music without changing their everyday habits.

The main way we discover music is via word-of-mouth, so we designed iLike to facilitate that. Radio used to help us discover new music, but iPods are replacing music radio. So we designed iLike to improve your iPod experience — with passive discovery of new music, free downloads from emerging artists, and social links to a community of other music lovers — all to match your personal tastes.

Anybody out there interested in a study on the aestethic of spam? :)

...is it, how little resonance the U.S. midterm elections had on my radar.
As you may know I tend not to follow mainstream media, so I was expecting far more echoes from the net. Especially from the italian-speaking part of the blogosphere.
This may lead to two conclusions: 1) my acquaintances in Italy are not concerned about international politics 2) (mass) media coverage there hasn't been so strong. Which is quite curious, since we have now a left-winged government that should at least cheer at the elections' results.
But as we (sadly) know, probably due to a reaction against previous trend, current leftwing in Italy is not so interested/well-versed in communication. Dangerous.

Time to write another page, or I'll start losing track of events.
As you can guess from the title, I spent one week not feeling properly at my best.

but the week before has been very full and intense... and I even managed to miss the London Minibar!
But let's go with order:
- European Photographers of the 20th century at the Barbican. Together with Francesca, my favorite media anthropologist friend. We had to hold our usual mediaisthemessage mantra since we were not alone, but it was good company anyway. The exhibition itself was... uhm... ok. Some good ideas and shots, of course (ok, more than just some), but coming out of it I was wondering what image of 20th century Europe I could get from the pictures and artists chosen... a place of war, sorrow and deviance, so different from the Europe I experienced. Now, I know that I just witnessed a quarter of that century and from a very, very lucky perspective, but...
Oh, and no Italian photographers. Grrr.

Also at the Barbican, there is a rather small exhibition by Richard Wilson. Highly recommended. First of all: it's free. And then it's all about "perspective" and movement: everyday objects (in this case transports) reinvented and everchanging as you walk around them in the bending gallery. And you don't want to miss a rolling roulotte, do you?

Next came the Hayward Gallery with its How to Improve the World, a cozy and smart walk through 60 years of British art. Many of the exhibits made me smile, which is a very good thing. Some of them made me think, which is even better; among these one of Hirst's tanks (I must admit that usually don't understand/like his stuff, but this really made my brain spin for a while).

Then came the dorkbot @ state51. Can't explain: you have to see it.
Fun in a very simple, unsofisticated but at the same time utterly geeky way. With an intresting quirk: many girls.

Then then... oh of course the ICA for the premiere of Alien Nation, cool exhibition taking early 50s sci-fi as inspirating theme

Finally a whole afternoon at the Tate, which is always a good way to spend some hours. Sadly, the slides were sold out again. I'll have to go back :)

So this was the uber artsy week; nothing much to say about the past one: after a good start, I got ill on wednesday morning and I'm finally ok today. But hey, I managed to sleep more than 8 hours in a row! Yay, it was ages.

Yes, I ate Hakarl... as (almost) all headshifters. Yawp!

We prefer brennivin though.

...but I'm mainly twittering these days.

Hope it'll be better after thursday, since I'll be in Italy, officialy on holiday. But you're not supposed to blog on holiday, aren't you. Oh well...

Speaking of that, what about a social shopping session in Milan on thursday afternoon?

It's a shiny noon here in northwestern Italy, and the owner of this blog is enjoying his first hours back in hometown after yesterday's hell of a journey:
London epic fog (which I have barely met in one full year of London based life) did its best to delay my flight from Gatwick airport, and in the end we took off with almost 3 hours delay. I must admit that the sight of the boeing in front of us just disappearing in the fog while still firmly on ground and not even a furlong away was quite a scary one.

First thing I did when arrived in Milan was supposed to be having a proper coffee, but instead I had a (maybe not-so-proper) cannolo with Roi, which was an excellent mix for my mood. Then a walk through a Milan in a Xmas high (ehy, the Duomo looks so white and neat now that it's clean!) and finally the long commuting to my hometown, where I hit bed safe and sound at 1 o'clock in the night (well, after a few more social drinks at the loco artsy winery).
One thing impressed me a lot in the said winery: there, in a corner, there was a small box... with a bookcrossing sticker on it! If social media hit Alessandria, anything can happen. As the Time said (and everybody bounced), we are officially mainstream.

Being here also brought me back to one of my favourite blogging dilemma: which language, and which topics to which blog (assuming one I don't love to repeat myself). A while ago (that is, on the most recent iteration of the blogging dilemma) I decided to keep all the diary like entries, together with innuendos and research/geeky stuff here, while keeping the Italian blog for more fun, ludicrous (and somehow geeky too) stuff.
Problem is, Italy offers nowadays a lot of interesting conversations and quite an active social mediascape, and it's difficult to join them with this kind of setup: on average Italian readers stop at Giocolando and get just that "mask", ignoring this one.
A long story made short, I'm considering closing the Giocolando experiment for the time being, and maybe re-investing that time and effort in making contribution to other italian streams (Andrea, Leandro, Sergio, I'm looking at you :) ).

Google published as every year its 2006 Zeitgeist.
Nice to see things like "how to levitate" still clinging to position 6 in the howto list, or "what is tramadol" on position 5 of the "what is" (and we could start ranting about socio-cultural effects of spam).
On the other hand, "who is borat" on position 1 of the who is list can tell you something about the international hype that surrounded borat's movie (nobody knows him in Italy, for example, so I can imagine a lot of people watching trailers and then asking google who's that bloke).
Funny also to see "Where is Torino" as 3rd in where is. You organize the olympics and think they should be in a place everybody knows... well, now everybody does. Good!

As for myself, I'd like to "steal" the meme from Svaroschi who published her own zeitgeist for the past year. So here is mine:
. London
. Headshift
. Reboot
. Barcamps
. Airports
. Architecture
. Nabaztag (+blogjects)
. Aesthethics
. Babysteps
. Italian pride

I'd say also twitter deserves a slot, but let's wait for it to consolidate... maybe next year :)

Finally, this should be the time for resolutions (see yesterday's rocketboom on the topic :) ). I've been thinking about mine for a while, then threw away the whole (far too comples) list, so eventually these are the de-mistified ones:
. laugh more
. play more
. indulge
. be serious about it
. build up "affordance"

And then we have the evergreens:
. drink less coffee
. give up crackling my bones (for the happiness of my dear colleagues)
. cook more
. start jogging
. go back to regular meditation practice

This is gonna be it. But I'd like to say bye bye (at least for this year) with a few inspiring words and a picture.
I found the picture on Zadi Diaz's while the words are from an article on Icon magazine, as reported by Fabio Sergio: these could seriously be good manifestos for the next few monthes (but maybe more)!
That's it, enjoy your time and see you next year!

"There's nothing intrinsically interesting about technology.
It's only as interesting as what you can do with it.
You can create some piece of 'convergent' nonsense - a printer that plays music and polishes your shoes - or you can project an image of a tree in a public square, make the leaves fall as people walk past and have them swirl on the ground as pedestrians walk through them.
The first is onanism, the second is poetry.

The designers collected together in our feature on interaction design (Simon Heijdens, Moritz Waldemeyer, Greyworld, Loop and Troika) use increasingly accessible forms of technology to make surprising, delightful things rather than strictly 'useful' ones (isn't it useful to make someone feel better on the way home from work?).
Now that, at least in the west, our design needs are largely met, the designer's role can become that of the humanist - or even magician.
Our electronic devices can be so much more intuitive, our public spaces so much more magical.
Advocates of a stricter notion of design may accuse the practices published here of playing around on the margins of the discipline.
To them I would say that perhaps what we need - as a society - is less design and more magic."

By reading twitters around it seems like yesterday has been a sort of de-lurking day. I didn't put effort in that, so here I pay the penalty by eventually joining the 5 things about you bandwagon. For the sake of google justice, I must say that I've been tagged by Davide (at least that I noticed).
So without further ado, here we go:
1. For more than two years I regularly meditated (well, tried to) half an hour every day. That changed my perception of the world enormously. Since then, I value discipline as one of the most precious traits, even if on the other hand I still find it difficult to accept it and apply it to my life most of the time.
2. The nickname Bru is self assigned, and comes from that era of the Net when the nick was the only concept of avatar available. It's a short for brujah, which means (almost, the actual word being bruja) witch in Spanish but is also a vampiric clan in the role playing game Vampire: the masquerade. Yes, I used to be a storyteller. As a trivia, Bru came after a few unsuccessful other nicknames like "respawn" and "bodhran". (Well, this was something many people already knew, but at least maybe I can prevent some new ones from asking).
3. Speaking of role playing games, one of my (not so) secret unfulfilled dreams at that time was to play the whole Dragonlance saga once (even if I can't say to have been a fan of the novels at all). I tried three times and then gave up: everybody was getting bored after the first meeting at the inn (day 1, page 3 out of 300). Ok, it's a lousy beginning, but it gets much better after that... oh well...
4. I stil know by heart the phone number of my first "love", which dates back to the '80s. On the other hand, I don't know my current mobile number.
5. I'm really, really bad at sports, all of them. I just don't buy the idea of competition, it always made me sick (and tend to have an enormous inertia, too). On the other hand, put me in front of a mountain and I'll get to the top. No matter the odds.

Phew, done. Feeling much better now :)
Feel free to consider yourself tagged, whoever you are. As for my personal curiousity, would love to read Lilia's 5 things, especially in this moment of her life (I mean, shifting of priorities and so on), but wouldn't force that of course :)

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!