Saturday and sunday I managed to get “out of the screen”, even though still geeking out at the Arduino workshop.
I discovered a new and fun way of approaching electronics, same as juggling has been a gateway to physics in the past.
For those of you who wonder, Arduino is a open electronic prototyping platform, that comes with a pretty simple programming environment, plenty of code and experiments to get your hands dirty and a very active practitioner community to support your efforts and achievements. Just have a look at youtube and get inspired!
Now I have the tools to make some of those physical computing related pet projects happen… will I have the will, and time, too? :)
Kudos to Alex, Nick and Brock. They’ve been amazing. And the class was quite challenging and fun too, an experience I can’t help but recommend. Oh, you can have an idea of what’s all about from the flickr group.
Another intense week is over. Apparently.
Tomorrow morning I’ll jump on a plain, waste some carbon and go back to Italy for a week, where I plan to attend the Barcamp in Turin and (if I can find a way to sneak in) the girlgeekdinner in Milan (oh there will be other internationalguests this time!). After last year’s barcamp boom, eventually Italy seems to be discovering alternative meetup formats, as the aforementioned geekdinner and the minibar (first one held in Milan last week), and I’d like to keep up with the buzz.
About the barcamp, I’ll probably do a presentation together with Kurai about where game design meets web design. If it turns out well I’ll try to translate the slides and write about it.
Another option could be an overview of the social graph conversation (with openID, OAuth, DiSO as the main buzzwords).
I’ll be back in March and looking forward the Arduino workshop by Tinker.it
Sorry, Portal. For nearly a half hour, you asked for wit and ingenuity. Then right near the end you started asking for reflexes. Sorry, I don’t actually have any of those.
Guess I won’t be able to finish the story. A shame.
Switching metaphor or required skillset half-way through a game (or story, or application, or whatever media experience imho) seems like an excellent way to loose audience.
So next sunday in Rome there’ll be the PiuBlogCamp that is supposed to be summa of the experience of Barcamps in Italy since the BzaarCamp of September 2007 to today.The idea is more than interesting. However, the wiki looks quite full of participants but quite poor in ideas and proposals for conversations. Also asking a little bit around to the people who’ll be there lead to many “hmmm not really sure what I’ll be speaking about” answers”.Is the BarCamp phenomena in Italy coming to a dead end? What can still be learned, what shuold be changed and what needs to stay? I hope the people in Rome will discuss these topics too.As for myself, I think the things we never experimented in Italy and would definitely make a difference are:
opening up to international audience (i.e. supporting english speaking participants )
experiment with a full two-day (and night in between) event.
I may not be able to attend, but in case, one potential presentation, badly needed in my opinion, would be on free hugs:
a bit disappointed for not being in Berlin, but a bit relieved for being here too.
My Italian holidays are almost over, tomorrow I’ll fly back to London. My hometown this morning is already cloaked in mist, like it was forecasting in numb anticipation.
I spent so little time clackering these days, I feel a bit detox’d and a bit out of spin. Probably would be a good idea to try to get back on “track” in the next few days, maybe with one of the thousands of pet vaporware waiting in the dusty pages of wikis, google docs and email drafts.
Maybe the social news reading one.
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.
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.
Your Voice