I <3 ROFLcopter!

delete all the images that are not in a specific format

2010-03-11T16:51:00.002Z

Ok, I'm writing this because it may be useful to me again in the future, as well as to somebody else.

Problem: suppose you have a bunch of jpeg files, with names such as .jpg. Then, you open some of these, and unfortunately enough some of them aren't actually JPEG, but say PNG with the wrong extension. You may want to move them, rename them, or do something to fix the problem (many image viewers won't complain, but some will). In my case I just wanted to remove them.

The command uses ImageMagick, it is for linux and it goes as

identify -format "%f %m\n" * | grep -v JPEG | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs rm

Identify is an ImageMagick program that retrieves information about the image file, the -format option tells what to print (filename and format, as detected by the magic number).

The grep command takes all the lines that do *not* match "JPEG".

the awk takes the first word in the line (the filename).

The xargs concatenates the word to the command "rm" (REMOVE, again, pay attention!).

[LaTeX] rubber and bibtopic

2009-12-01T08:24:00.002Z

The freezing temperature of today made me think that this post can be potentially useful to other people out there, sooner or later. I've been struggling, recently, with some missing support for bibtopic in rubber. Let me explain.

We are talking about the LaTeX typesetting system.
bibtopic is a LaTeX package to insert multiple bibliographies.
rubber is an automated builder for LaTex (called, in this case, by the gedit LaTeX plugin).

OK. Now the problem: rubber does not support bibtopic. In particular, the presence of bibtopic requires BibTeX to be called not on the main files (e.g. main.aux), but on several other files (e.g. main1.aux, main2.aux, etc). So the build will always fail.

For some days, I decided to tweak the bibtopic support inside of rubber, a python program that, unfortunately, knows little about object-oriented programming, information hiding, encapsulation, single-responsibility-rule, and so on. Basically, it is almost impossible to modify.

The final solution? Use multibib instead of bibtopic. It's supported by rubber, more modern than bibtopic, and, on top of that, more neatly designed, more flexible, and ultimately easier to use. It took me minutes to switch from the one to the other.

Academy and the (non-travelling) salesman problem

2009-05-18T16:49:00.002+01:00

It's difficult to me to stand the pressure, typical in my academic experience, to focus on "selling" your product rather than make it better, up to some paradoxical point in which one may want to convince somebody about the goodness of something in which he's the first not to believe.

I'm completely the opposite: I like to work on real problems, as a scientist, and to present real solutions, contributions that I consider worthy. Adding white noise around is of no use for anybody. There is already too much around. Unfortunately, apparently this is often not possible. It is a pity, because the research activity (real research, I mean, not writing papers, editing papers, writing rebuttals, re-editing papers...) appeals me indeed. I'm sure I can do it somehow how I like to, after the PhD.

Career planning

2009-03-19T08:33:00.003Z

I went to a career orientation event yesterday. There was free lunch (sandwiches&fruit) and some few former research students, now grown-up, describing how their career evolved and describing their job in different areas. Interesting at times, but not useful nor inspiring. The first thing I noticed is, none of them had planned his/her career path, that has been shaped mostly by them being made redundant, being sick with their current job, or being offered a new job out of the blue.

I left at the tea-break. Yet another proof that career orientation days aren't useful but for the free lunch and for you to think a bit about your career, but not for orienting you nor for giving you useful information.

How to detect the presence of links within a PDF file - linux

2009-02-20T10:30:00.002Z

This is again somehow related to the conference organisation tasks in which I'm sometimes involved. IEEE does not accept for inclusion in IEEEXplore PDF files that contain links. Therefore, it's useful to have a way to check quickly if the bunch of submitted camera-ready is compliant before sending them over to IEEE.

If you have all your PDFs in a certain directory, from there you simply perform a:

egrep -l "/Link" *.pdf

All the non-compliant filenames will pop out.

About querulousness

2009-01-01T08:17:00.002Z

It's good and healthy to discuss our own troubles with people close to us, our family and those ones that we call friends. Nonetheless, the sensibility is required to find suitable moments and ways to do so, in order not to become peevish. Yet, many people just wouldn't care, throwing up to you all their "sicknesses" at the first available opportunity. Failure in interfacing with people that care about you results in becoming isolated, damaging oneself on the first place.
It looks something so obvious, yet a number of people make this error and either do not realise it or confuse it with being honest and open. Good luck to them.

Convert all the images of a format into another format

2008-12-02T16:41:00.002Z

So, you have a lot of images to be converted into EPS format in order to be included in you LaTeX file, don't you? OK, then the following is right for you

mogrify -format eps *.png

Once again, thanks, ImageMagick!

Useful notes about writing properly technical documents n LaTeX

2008-11-13T11:41:00.006Z

For you guys out there that, for passion or just for work, write technical papers in LaTeX, I just found a page that points out common mistakes in (LaTeX) technical writing. Even though I discovered I was already complying with some of the guidances, it has been useful to me, so I share.

(from http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~jowens/commonerrors.html)

test

mloss

2008-09-10T12:20:00.004+01:00

At http://mloss.org/software/ it is possible to find a good collection of Open Source Machine Learning software. In my experience, this kind of resource is very valuable since the availability of good software is fundamental both not to "reinvent the wheel", and to have a quick "bootstrap" into the real problems of machine learning that are not connected with implementation of algorithms that are, by themselves, quite complex both in theory and for numerical considerations.

I gave a look quickly since I'm not needing any new algorithm now, and I saw some good projects that I had the opportunity to use in my past work:

OpenCV for image processing;
LibDAI for graph inference;

in addition to other things that I didn't use but I know by fame.

oh shit, the Pope...

2008-09-07T10:52:00.003+01:00

I've been lucky to come back to London recently. Sure, Im under the rain while down there there are 30 degrees and people is laying on the beach, but at least I avoided the Pope visit in Cagliari! What a curse. And apparently, pope Benedict "Palpatine" XVI, going up and down by the city with his "papa-mobile" (not quite a bat-mobile, but still...) has been warmly greeted. For the event, also Berlusconi was there (plagues never come alone). Some facts:

the Pope arrived this morning with a personal Italian Army airplane: guess who's paying the fuel bill?
according to the newspaper: "three girls, Chiara, Valeria, and Giorgia, gave to the Pope a bunch of flowers, receiving in return a wide smile and a caress." Then I ask to myself... WHO IN THE HELL GIVES A FUCK?!? ARE THESE ONES THE FUCKING NEWS FROM THE COUNTRY?

I'm disconcerted, I don't know what's going on here. Depression.

I can hear Righeira in the background...

2008-08-28T09:32:00.003+01:00

For those who didn't have the luck of being born and grown in Italy in my times, I'm referring to "L'estate sta finendo" (the summer is ending, yes Zuppa, that was AFTER our performance at the beach), historical hit of our 80s charts. It's a bit sad, but I really enjoyed these holidays (long ones, something more than three weeks) in town. Nothing too complex, I simply stayed in the city seeing friends and spending a bit of time at the beach and with my family.

Anyway, I relly couldn't stand anymore that old post "Adieu my crappy bike", I bought a new one after two weeks, that is twenty times better! See the picture on the side. Yes, it's a racing one, and I like it! Of course, you cannot quite jump on the footpaths and do things like that, but it's very fast and light. Very good to go to school in the morning (at least during summer, I'm afraid I'm about to end this nice habit for this year).

In London, I started doing skateboarding (no pics, I'm afraid) a couple of times with Paulo, with disastrous results for my body, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it, compatibly with my skills (I'm a public threat basically). Here in Cagliari I had to stop but I made up for it by windsurfing, activity that I love. I'm also a bit envious of Marco's new board (F2 Xantos 08 124L) and sail (Naish Sprint 2008), that is an amazing equip that I used a couple of times this year with great fun.

Well that's it. I was staying in Castello in these holiday days and I have to say when you cycle via Buoncammino at around half-past-eight in the summer you cannot avoid falling in love with the place (well, I cannot). Let's see what is going to happen in the future. OK, now I'm satisfied since for a while I'll have a nice memory of this summer looking at the home of my blog, instead that reminding the stealth of my old, crappy bike!

Adieu, my crappy bike

2008-05-25T09:41:00.002+01:00

This last days haven't been plenty of good news. Nothing horrible, fortunately! At first, I had my £80-worth dodgy bike stolen. Not a big loss, for the bike itself was a failure, but it hurts having something unfairly taken away. It hurts less than the first time, though. Now, I already bought on-line a proper lock, for it was partially my bad, and my toy-lock one's, if the thief considered it was so straightforward to steal the bike that it was worth doing within the college premises, under the eye of a (useless) CCTV. As soon as it arrives, I'll decide which bike to buy next (possibly new, since now I fear to aliment the stolen bike market by buying a used one).

Second thing, we are yet other victims of the house market, because the landlady decided to sell, fearing the plummeting house prices, and the mortgage market turmoil (I noticed that scattering here and there terms like plummeting and turmoil makes my sentence sound like the Economist!). Moral: we may be kicked out in a couple of months, and no similar houses are available in this gloomy period on the market. Who knows... Anyway, the perspective buyers that came yesterday seemed very nice and I'd be relatively happy for them to buy the house.

Embedding fonts in PDF with GhostScript

2008-05-06T11:49:00.002+01:00

In a period in which I hardly have the time to breath, after having spent my birthday working, the only thing I have to annotate here is a very useful link to solve a bad problem of conference organisers: font embedding in pdfs.

http://colinm.org/tips/latex

In practice, the command to embed fonts is:

gs -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=figures/Mprime-new.pdf -f figures/Mprime.pdf

and it works perfectly.

Italian elections

2008-03-29T12:40:00.003Z

Where am I?

details: http://www.voisietequi.it/risultato_utente/1a219a96.html

go go go! If you are Italian, take the test now! ;-)

Why people believe in God

2008-03-23T10:33:00.004Z

I've been reading an article in the Economist about Scientific Research being financed by the European Union on the relation between religion and evolution, trying to understand why so many people in the world believe in the existence of a supreme being, despite the obvious absence of any support whatsoever. The article was describing some "scientific" experiments that in my view are just ridiculous, but one of the underlying theories was the one of the "natural selection". This point of view, that in some way is hilarious for this Darwinian theory is so uncomfortable for children of God, is more or less consistent with my idea on the matter. I have this belief, that peoples' life is meaningless. When, on top of that, you have to live a miserable life of restraints and despair, either you find a reason to keep going or what's the purpose? And there it comes, God, the heaven, the promises after life, and so on. Faith helps you going on, fair enough. That's also why religiosity is more widespread where populations are poor and uneducated.

A consequence of this is that, at least in my perception, religious people is usually advantaged in finding reasons to be happy and things to enjoy in life. They are less likely to spend Easter day home alone in front of a PC screen, too. This is not exactly the sort of things that help preserving your DNA and your culture. By the way, today it snows.

Delete Junk Messages in Thunderbird

2008-03-07T10:09:00.004Z

Today I improved the quality of my life. I've been wondering why in the Hell in Thunderbird there is an option to mark the junk messages as "junk", to move all the junk messages in a particular folder, but... there is NO command to EMPTY that dumb folder!

Sometimes the Thunderbird and Firefox (but particularly the Thunderbird) programmers lose a lot for small defiances. Fortunately, somebody else thought about it, and he came out with an add-on, that I found extremely useful: "Delete Junk Context Menu".

The Conformist

2008-03-05T09:50:00.002Z

I went to see the Conformist at BFI Southbank yesterday. Amazing film, hyperbolic representation of the fascist mentality, with an artistic mixture of politics, ideals, religion and sexuality. And everything so well disposed, every excess so well integrated into the plot... it is definitely a masterpiece.

I was confident since I'd read very enthusiastic comments on the net before, but after having seen it I have to admit that this is one of the films that you have to be Italian to fully appreciate. It is not just a matter of language, subtitles, and so on. It's a matter of national identity: it tells you a story that is part of our history, if it's not your own history, you can still understand it, but you will miss the passion in it. You won't feel it as your own.

Classical Music

2008-02-19T11:46:00.003Z

Yahoo!! I'm going to listen to some classical music tonight! I'm very excited about it!

Well, the event I'm going to is this one:
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/music/productions/the-night-shift-38443

It seems actually a nice and easy-going environment, very cheap (£4, even my friend Zuppa would come!), and the pieces of music, although short, are very promising, being famous and definitely beautiful (and, I would add, easy to appreciate for a non-expert ear like mine).

There will be the Coriolan, overture of the Beethoven's op. 62:

Then two movements from the Mozart's piano concerto No.21 in C, K.467, which is among the most well-known ones:

and

Let's see!

Cycling London!

2008-02-16T20:42:00.004Z

Done. Bought a bike. Again.

Well, my initial idea was to buy a cheap used one, but in the last weeks I realised that last time I've been quite lucky. I still remember that day. At first, I went to a shop, where a crappy 2nd handed bike was £60. I was almost resigned, but I decided to try Brick Lane market, a place in which people try to sell their rubbish to other people, basically a real life (RL) ebay. I found a bike seller... the prices were better than the shop, even though still quite high for me. Suddenly, a guy showed up, claiming that one of the bikes on sale was its own, that he'd had stolen few days before. Understandably enough, I wasn't quite in the mood to buy from that guy anymore. Everything appeared to be lost, when, in a dark corner of the street, I saw a est-european seller with a bike of the 50s. Acceptable. He could barely speak English... £35! I have £30! OK, £30! Taken. My subconscious tried to let me think about the "dubious" origin of that bike, but I was new in London too, I wasn't supposed to know. So I bought an acceptable bike at a good price, last time (I had it stolen a couple of months after... fair enough).

Anyway, now I'm not new in London anymore, I can't say "oh, in Brick Lane people sell stolen bikes? Oh boy, I didn't know, I swear!"... so my consciousness told me "go to a shop". And again, normal bikes for 250 quid and for "merely" £60 a little choice of crappy rusty skeletons. I was resigned, but, then.. "Don't shop for it! Argos it!" Good deal, £90 (+5 delivery, +2 to have it delivered on Saturday...). So, today, at 9.30, it comes! It's half unmounted, the quality of the nuts is crap, I can't unscrew most of them... not to mention the spanners... I was swearing a lot, while mounting, and a lot more afterwards! It's a crap!! Not professional at all, heavy, slow.. an abortion. After a while, I went for a second test-ride and I I reconsidered the matter: for a leasure ride from time to time it's OK, people won't steal it (not as a 250 one!), and if they take it I won't cry for a long time. The deal has been not good, but certainly fair. Ah, btw, in the second photo it's how it looks like in the RL (it's photogenic, it seems actually better than what it is...).

Anyway, today I couldn't ride it for a long time. Too cold. Let's see tomorrow.

Wagamama cookbook! Banzai!

2008-01-15T09:19:00.000Z

Yep. I've been curious about Japanese cuisine for a while, and finally I put my hands on the wagamama cookbook, that hopefully will give me the opportunity to try some ramen, yakisoba, okonomiyaki and all the other cool things that we use to see in Ranma 1/2 and other similar animes.

The first hurdle, though, will be to gather the ingredients. I don't know if Sainsbury's and Morrisons will provide me with the necessary stuff. I'll try to manage.

BTW, during the weekend I uploaded the pictures of my trip in Umbria with my family. I shall add a short captions to the photos to comment them.

Handling the ignorance

2007-10-26T23:00:00.000+01:00

I'm astonished in observing, day after day, how the people is unable of handling their own ignorance. Note, I'm not disturbed by the ignorance itself - people are not walking versions of Wikipedia - but there are many different ways to deal with it, and the first one is admitting to be ignorant in respect to something. There is nothing wrong in that, and it often is a very wise and clever achievement. In my work the ignorance is everything: when there is no ignorance, the information engineer/computer scientist is hardly useful at all. A good engineer differs from a bad one in what he's able to identify the ignorance scope, and to selectively and promptly counter-act to reduce it. Once there is no more ignorance left, or the amount is completely under control and can be handled by somebody less skilled than you, our job has ended.

Some time ago, a consultant hired by the company in which I used to work introduced me and some others to the theory of the five orders of ignorance (P.G. Armour, The five orders of ignorance, CAMC, Oct 2000):

0th: Lack of Ignorance (I know something and can demonstrably prove it)
1st: Lack of Knowledge (I don't know something, but I know that I don't know it)
2nd: Lack of Awareness (I don't know something, and I don't know that I don't know it)
3rd: Lack of process (I don't know something, I don't know that I don't know it, and I don't know how to find out that I don't know it)
4th: Meta Ignorance (I don't know that there are these levels of ignorance)

When we fall in the 0th, there is no problem. The 1th is easy to handle: go to wikipedia, borrow/buy a book, ask an expert. The 2th is tricky: but if you know that in the future it's likely that new ignorance will show up, you can try to plan something to make this new ignorance to show up as soon as possible. This action is not possible if you fall in the 3th, but if you're aware that you're in the 3th, you can still plan something to counteract the ignorance when it will show up. Socrates would have placed in a good position in this scale, being on the level 1 of ignorance. For many of us is normal to fall in the 2nd level of ignorance even in our area of expertise - I think it's not a good signal if you fall in the 3th in your work - it may mean that you are quite a beginner.

Unfortunately, many and many people, from all the professions, fall into the 4th: they don't know absolutely anything, and they are absolutely convinced of their knowledge, that it's not possible that some ignorance will show up later on in the processes, and that there is the possibility that they are not aware of something. I think that no professional working in any skilled job should fall in the 4th: what if a doctor is so convinced of a treatment not to be opened to the slightest doubt? There'd come the troubles... and often it is: people rely on professionals that are supposedly "experts" in their field.

Who's Jakie Chun?

2007-10-03T23:35:00.000+01:00

It has been a long time since the last post. Now I don't really have time to write something complex (but 2+3i, haha), I'm about to go to sleep, so, I promise that my next post will be more juicy, but for now I invoke the afroninja martial arts power to protect me!

and for my fans joy...

2007-09-24T16:47:00.000+01:00

a serious post!! It has to be short though, I don't want to push that too far.

http://videolectures.net/

This is a website with some interesting lectures, whose overall quality is definitely good, as I could see (I've seen just a couple of them, actually).

The main topic is computer science, so either you are interested in computer science, or it's unlikely that you will find anything worth seeing.

Dream psychology and table manners

2007-09-23T10:47:00.000+01:00

The title of this post tells you all. Where "all" stands for "this post is rubbish". But now, I have to be coherent with the title of the post and write down the rubbish, otherwise I'll contradict myself. And I have to do that quickly, because then I have to go to argos (don't shop for it, argos it) to return my wonderful Braun 3710, that broke down. For the second time. In 8 months. Now, this is the cheapest razor ever, but it's also the one that shaves me better (which is just an incidental property that was highlighted only after the minimisation of the "cost" function, where cost is not to be intended in broad sense), and I would be veeery pissed if they wouldn't change it for me for free, because it's the one that shaves me the best. Nonetheless, I can't afford a new electric razor every four months.

Whatever. I've discovered that this blog provokes dreams in which people find hidden messages below toilet paper rolls, messages that discover how the image I sometimes give when I express my personal opinion tend to be much harsher than I expect. I felt sorry for that, but on the same time I was delighted to appear in somebody else's dream. Damned egotism!

And, what about table manners? My parents struggled to teach me some of these, and, for their satisfaction, I have to say they managed. I'm not too rigid, but I started thinking that a little bit of control when we eat can help to trace the line between us and the animals, and to show respect for the people you are eating with. That's why I bought a set of four napkins yesterday. Now, the bet is open: how long will we use them? (less-than-a-week is 10:1).

Welcome, my first guest!

2007-09-16T16:56:00.000+01:00

Yeah, since I never told anybody about the blog, of course anybody has never read this blog, apart from me. Till 2 days ago. Then, my friend Zuppa discovered everything, backtracing this place from my profile page. That's a weak point, because I like the profile pages, I have to fill them every time I'm asked to do so! So, I'm probably the only person as now that filled up the profile page in CiteULike. Anyway, I'm glad to have a new reader, and that's why I linked his blog. Which is useless, since the only two readers of this blog are me and him, and, obviously enough, both of us are aware of that blog.

Now, since my mental capabilities are scaled so that now I'm almost 7 years old, I like also the "little thoughts", as we used to call them at elementary schools. But one per post is enough. The today's one is the following.

I'm so sick of the ups and downs of McCann's life! I don't give a shit, really. And yet, I seem to be the only one. I discovered 2 minutes ago that Sir Richard Branson (on the right, a guy that drinks Virgin Cola, has got a Virgin mobile phone, listen to cds bought in a Virgin Store while flying in a Virgin train or a Virgin plane, and owns the Virgin company) will pay for the brand-new top London lawyer that McCann hired to defend themselves. The same that defended Pinochet (on the left, irony) in UK. It's ridiculous. Like all the other things, that I don't want to recall. Like the visit to the pope, the McCanns blog, the McCanns interviews, the McCanns car, the McCanns website, the McCanns ads, and everything. Everything is just the last idea to make money. And, on top of that, is Sir Richard Branson still virgin?

Ok, now I'll go to write some bullshit that I'll pretend to be interesting things to be sent in some useless conference that pretends to be an interesting conference in order to attract people interested in taking holidays and plan how to obtain more money to plan other conferences like that one. This is science and research, folks! And it doesn't matter if the solution is suboptimal, as a friend of mine, recently involved in his first inter-university european project, pointed out a couple of days ago. "My impression is that if we, guys, in our room, managed the entire project, without any expensive meeting around the world every two weeks, any integration, without tons of paperwork that nobody is interested in, we'd finish five times faster". Ah, that's why we are students, because we haven't mastered this art. Not yet. But somebody of us is managing to improve, pointing out that he doesn't like to work as a researcher in a private company. The usually publish less papers. Maybe because they are working. Who knows.

End of the criticism (that anyway is not addressed to all my friends that work in this field, included the one that I welcomed at the beginning of the post, but to many aspects of the big organisation of the field itself - I'll write it down just in case...).

What colour was the Napoleon's white horse?

2007-09-09T21:54:00.000+01:00

It has been more than a month since my last post, in the meanwhile I've been in Cagliari, happily taking my holidays and windsurfing and going to the beach all the time, and in Greece for a conference, which translates more or less in "going to the beach all the time". But I also have some proof that I also did something useful, for example my first "serious" presentation (check out the shot, don't I seem a great performer?)

Well, there would be a lot of things to say about my tales, but now I don't feel like writing a lot, I'm tired and looking "the lord of the ring: the two towers", which inspired the title of this post. Why? Because of "shuttafuck", the Gandalf's horse, of course! Well, somebody could argue that the horse's name is Shadowfax, but shuttafuck sounds much better. And it makes more sense, also. Better than some strange shadow thing that faxes papers around.

Today I realised that it would be good to have a small apple tree instead of the ugly bush we have in our small backyard. In the right season I have to buy one.. I'm already excited :)

This week I also presented in spite of a friend a poster in a conference organised by our University, in London. The best part of it was, of course, that I took part to the social event: a trip on the London Eye, for free (well, I didn't pay for it...).

Well, what to say, other than I'm going to sleep?

What do you call a dog with no legs?

2007-08-01T09:26:00.000+01:00

It doesn't matter, he won't come anyway.

No way, I have to write a couple of serious posts but I have no time for that. But I have time for silly ones! :)

This guy that reviews old console games is fantastic, yesterday I spent one hour watching him (and today I'm sleepy to death):
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XjUz8IT0CYg

I'm a little bit sad because yesterday I was looking at some shots of "Back to the future II" and I discovered that Marty Mc Fly has got the Parkinson Disease.

By the way, tomorrow I'll fly to Italy for some holidays, so I'm quite happy :)

Back to work

2007-07-23T09:54:00.000+01:00

And there we go! Interesting summer school, I will write a report in the future if I find the time. I've got another post to put on the blog as well, that I wrote at the airport while waiting for my flight, but it's kinda serious and I want to review it a little bit before putting it on. So, as now, just a quick "welcome back" post and the news of the launch of my first conference website, a perfect way to throw the time of a research student in the loo and then flush:

http://cbmi08.qmul.net/

We use to laugh at the research student forced to waste time on things like this... at least I did it quite quickly, and it looks nice to me (I admit it, I'm a minimalist).

Goodbye, room sweet room

2007-07-14T13:39:00.000+01:00

I'm leaving London for a week! Tomorrow I'll go in the Scottish, wet Glasgow for a one-week-long summer school. I hope my dear flatmates won't be able to tear down the house in such a little time :-) So, good bye sweet room (in the image).

There will be lectures for me to attend, and I also have to present my work (I prepared a poster the makes the matusa shit in the underwear, as my friend Zuppa would say). And, on top of that, social events of different nature. I guess if there will be a canoing tour among the flooded streets of the city, it would be interesting.

Somebody could wonder if I'm concerned about the "terrorist threat": some days ago the Glasgow airport was under attack, it seems. The answer is "not at all". And the reason is simple: I've heard that just yesterday the USA decided to double the reward on the Bin Laden's head (now it's $50M). That makes me feel a lot safer and I'm sure that it will solve every problem with the terrorism. Those Americans are the dudes, really. I'm impressed.

Nothing more, now I'll go to cook risotto and possibly a peas omelette. I'll leave you with the link of a wonderful and very nerd blog that makes me laugh out loud (lol): http://xkcd.com/. The best is http://xkcd.com/c276.html.

yeah! blogging again!

2007-07-09T10:01:00.000+01:00

It was just a matter of time, I knew that... I'm starting to blog again, with some differences:

less often: I don't have a lot of time right now, thanks to my self-punishment skill..
in English: well, I strongly believe that for many of us writing a blog is done more for personal satisfaction that to have a message going through, or at lest for me it is. I don't have any pretension to be interesting, so I'll write in English to improve my writing skills, and I'll talk of Italian facts because they are interesting to me. No matter how many people will actually read it. And, of course, I won't advertise my blog at all, as usual :P

I'd have liked to call this blog http://zeppe.blogspot.com, but unfortunately it looks like there already is a blog with this name. And the subject is a dog (Zeppe, actually). So, having discovered that there is a best man's friend with my same nick, I opted for zeppethefake.

The subject of the first post would have been the Italian politics, the thing that most makes me feel the desire to express myself. Now, the post is becoming too long, so I just want to inform my little readers that Italy is the only country in the world where the government is thinking about a shortage of the retirement age. And why, will the smart reader ask? What a strong argument should the politicians bring to do something so stupid (the people are living longer, it's obvious that we have to work longer...)! Well, it is strong. The argument is "because behind the numbers there are people"! Whoa. I'm impressed. As if the young workers that have to pay for 25 years people that are doing nothing else than scratching their belly because they retired at 55 were not "people". And, believe me or not, when you retire so early it's very likely that you will become depressed in a short time. But Bertinotti and Epifani are too ahead. They are the dudes. Rats.