Category: English

To Read, to Read, to Read

February 2, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I’ll partecipate to this initiative : to read, to read, to read

For the non italian speaking community I’ll try to sum it up:

The majority of the people do not read. They don’t read books. Reading books is a way to grew, to know new things, and even though it’s not the ultimate solution, it’s something which can’t hurt. It’s not demonstrated but if people will read more there should be less crap around. Or at least is what we want to believe.

Most of the commuters share the same space, but even if they are only few cm of space dividing them, they will not talk to each other. Never. Only if something hilarious or really funny will happen able to “break the ice”.

The proposed initiative consists in one action: give a book as a gift to a complete stranger. You can either buy the book (or took one of your old one). You can write a personal message inside or not. There is an official facebook group here.

This will happen the 26th of March. I’ll do it. It looks fun.

Official video (in italian only. Sorry)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7hetpEIC8M]

Google groups spam

December 31, 2009 / / 0 Comments

If you are getting spam on the google group where you are subscribed… well… you’re not alone!

Reading this post here it’s clear that google groups is not in a good shape.

I hope the google group team (hoping there is one) will fix the spam problem as soon as possible ’cause I’m really tired to skip the spam message from the group which I’m subscribed or moderating.

P.S.: Best wishes for the next year.

Mhh… this is strange

December 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

So it seems that google is not showing the images about the Berlusconi’s aggression:

google_vs_bing

With Bing you can find the images, with Google no. Check here.

The post from google italia to answer the user questions is about a possible delay within the scan of the pages and the results from the engine.

Which is reasonable, but this is not the case.

Yesterday it was possible to find them. On Google Images. Not today.

The question is why?

Update: it seems now you can find them, so the google spider for images is a bit lagging behind.

But the escort?

December 15, 2009 / / 1 Comment

So, as many of you are aware, somebody throw a Duomo souvenir statue to the Prime Minister of Italy, Berlusconi. The poor man was hit in the face, he lost two teeth and he bleed quite a lot.

I just want to raise three points:

  1. this is horrible. violence is not the way forward. Democracy is a space which has to be defended. No matter what.
  2. the man suffers from a mental illness and it’s at least 10 years under treatment. He is mad.
  3. all the escort and the security guards of the prime minister should be fired and replaced with someone who is able to do his own job. It’s really unbearable that just one mad man can easily throw a souvenir statue to the prime minister when he is giving a political speech. It’s a routine situation which a competent escort should be able to cope with.

One thing that Greg pointed out yesterday: when somebody throw stuff to his old head of state (an affair implicating Mr Bush and a shoe, google will tell you more…), Mr bush was able to dodge the shoe. I think if Berlusconi had tried something like that he would had cracked. (It’s too old, c’mon.)

This episode doesn’t change the italian situation. The complete incompetence of this italian government on the energy policy, on the university and research reform, on the economic investment to relaunch the country economy and on the shift to a sustainable regime still remains. More over the problems with the justice which the prime minister has with the justice are not yet solved.

So get well soon Prime Minister, get back to work and try to do something useful for the Italian people.

Questioning habits

December 6, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Today I was at one supermarket and doing some shopping. I stumble upon bananas and I read the label saying “Columbia”. I started to ask myself if we really need this. I mean, Columbia is on the other side of the world. You need to cross a whole ocean to move this bananas here, polluting the enviroment like crazy.

I moved to the next rack of bananas and I found another label saying “Repubblica Domenicana”. Do we need really need bananas?

Yesterday there was the Mill Road Winter Fair and I saw a lot of local farmers selling their own products. It was a completely different world from what you can find from the mainstream market. No more than 30 Km radius from where it was produced, then directly sold to the consumer.

For a lot of reasons we are going towards an age of restriction, where bananas from Columbia will not anymore be allowed and available. This hidden local universe will resurface for everybody. I think it’s a good thing, but I can understand that there is a scale problem.

Will the local producers be able to produce enough food for all the people? I guess their numbers will increase and people will move from the city to the countryside to farm again.

There is going to be a cycle. One of the most favourite figure for History.