Finally managed to take a break from the City, jumped on an easyjet and safely landed this side of the Alps.
Spent the first day with the family, and the second essentially sleeping and “decompressing” (which means that I’ve been in constant touch with London but not taking any commitment): I just can’t take a sudden break, I know only too well.
While I was there, I took the chance to have a few walks around town to progressively get in touch with the old (most) and the new (very little).
I also took note of the different perceptions, main one being related to amplitude vs. definition: London is bigger, faster, louder than here; colours, sounds, smells… they travel fast and are all-encompassing, while at the same time blending and mixing in a multidimensional smoothie. And leaving gaps behind, gaps much wider than those you can find on the shores of river Po, for instance: there’s a discontinuous thread that connects the social, cultural and architectural fabric and if you look carefully enough you’ll be able to see the difference in texture.
In the modest perfection of the elders dressed up for their monday walk through the village.
In the forsaken ground floor windows of ex shops on the south of the Thames.
In the orange rusty spots of a worn out corkscrew laid on the counter of the loco winery, permeated by the smell of laugh and salt and the regular ticks of a large, round wall clock.
Even in the
crowd assembled outside of a pub, consuming the after work pint.
Then you can start speculating on what can cause or be caused by this different texture. Suit yourself.
Me? I’ll be walking through Milan tomorrow. I have an exhibition to see and a few friends to meet. If you want to have a drink or coffee together, drop me an email, tweet, pidgeon by tomorrow morning.
Geoffrey Grosenbach published a dense post about his experience at FOWA. A very interesting read, focused on the wide concept of scalability of a technology: structural, client-side (perceived), social.
About the latter:
PHP had to intentionally think about the public image of the language. [...]
Where will this come from for Rails? The author of Rails is unlikely to become a calm, diplomatic advocate in a way that non-Ruby web developers can appreciate. [...]
At one point there was something called MINASWAN, but I don’t think that is very well known inside the Rails community (not to mention outside of it).
So is there hope for the Rails PR machine? Is it possible for us to reverse the popular opinion of it as an unscalable, offensively-promoted niche framework?
Now the point here is that being over-aggressive is generally a good marketing tactic, but can actually turn into a poor strategy if weak spots (as scalability in this case) emerge… however this could be good in a sense, because it means that the product (Rails in this case) is given no choice than to fix those weak spots as soon as possible.
Last night I attended the second San Lorenzo dinner in London.
This time the focus was on cheese, of which we tasted a very impressive selection, paired with different types of honey and the usual generous quaff of piedmont wine (oh, Barbera, my love! :) but also Nebbiolo, Gavi to end with a sweet Moscato).
So that is much all I’ll say about the food: it’s just awesome and you should try to get the chance to taste it, the sooner the better.
One interesting thing I noticed during the evening, is that the people around the table took on a curious yin-yang configuration: the “anglo-saxons” on one side, with our Italian host Sara in the middle, and the continental/latins on the other end, with a cheerful london foodblogger in the middle. Two separate conversations, two different rythms, the same unifying context and texture.
P.S.: Chris has some very nice pictures of the food, together with a more thorough description of the menu.
from SmartMobs:
Part of the unease arises from the growing realisation that the legal foundation of privacy law is being rendered increasingly irrelevant.
Ok, I’m not alone. And yes, mine was the “roughandnotpoliticallyscorrect” version.
Thick subject… I mean androids, AI, singularity and the rest…
I’m still looking for the thread to weave a coherent argument here, but since there’s going to be a singularity centric drink in Milan this week, I thought it was worth just collecting here a sequence of a few visual suggestions that are inspiring me these days. Enjoy.
Continue reading ‘Do human flocks dream of androids?’
After a fairly sociable week, spent peeking from the outside at the FOWA, playing the two-point-oh at blognation’s party, stealing pizza at google open source jam and supporting the latest shiny green headshift rigfeat (well done, Tom!), I spent the last couple of days letting myself being cuddled by Victorian aestethics and traditional british flavours (teas, scones, pies and the rest), slingshotting as usual (but with a slower pace) between Mayfair and Oxford.
If you happen to step through Oxford and are looking for some inspiration, here are my favourite hangouts:
. Green Cafe - you can read my review on TrustedPlaces.
. The Eagle and Child - good for (pub) food and if you fancy sitting on the very chairs that witnessed JRR Tolkien giving shape to middle earth.
. Blackwell bookshop - quite huge, with rare books and second hand sections, plus a cozy Caffe Nero. In the middle of the multicolored Broad Street and in front of the Sheldonian… believe me, it oozes character.
…or just have a walk from broad street to north parade, enjoy the green campuses and sophisticated architectures, and then gratify yourself with an ice cream at G&Ds on your way back to town…
Photo by MildlyDiverting, on Flickr
Published 10 monthes and 1 week ago
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Good old Babele posted a video (in Italian) of the iAble, the office suite totally controlled through eye tracking developed at SRLabs (the last Italian company I worked with before moving to the UK).
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