Deve’s Blog

Nosing around on the Flickr Blog I ran into a particular story… Matt Green decided to walk the USA, coast to coast (reminiscence of Forrest Gump?), telling about his journey on this blog. On foot, from Rockaway Beach (New York) to Rockaway Beach (Oregon), carrying what he needs in a cart, camping in farms, or in the woods if needed.
In this page he tells about the reason he decided to do it… a reason which actually isn’t there…

The nice thing is that his blog posts are not a travel diary; they’re impressions, flashes, observations about little or weird things you can only see if you slow down, at the speed of your feet. Most of the times his posts are only made up of a picture (which is uploaded on Flickr, of course) and a line of text (or even just a word). They’re nice to browse through… I started from the beginning and got as far as the beginning of May. It seems Matt has actually walked quite a lot, judging by the map on his blog homepage… I’m curious to keep reading.

In the meantime, I’ll link down here my favourite posts so far:

Day 14: “hibernated” signs
Day 15: conspiracies…
Day 21: tracks
Day 23: doesn’t look that comfy to me…
Day 25: interesting
Day 27: Randy and Curt
Day 28: fragment of a letter
Day 32: what a story…
Day 34: genius…
Day 39: hot!
Day 39: nice

Mental state: confused.

Peculiar signs: 360° confusion.
Aggravations: variable mood.

Unsolvable doubts.
Hypothetical Hypotheses.
Some pleasant.
Unlikely.

Something good.
Something coming, not so good.
But somehow good, from another point of view.

Total uncertainties.
Maybe mental masturbation.

Rationality in trouble.
Swimming helps unwind.
But it leaves time to think.

Insane situations.
Or are they?

Desire to sleep as soon as you’re up after an 11 hours sleep.

Mental state: confused…

English maybe later…

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Italian only this time around. Don’t feel like translating this one. Ever, I think.

Finally, today I got out of the office early! 6.15 pm!

Wait… today is Saturday…

“Silence implies the relative or absolute lack of sound or noise; an environment producing less than 20 decibel of sound is usually considered silent.

Figuratively, it can indicate abstension from speech or dialogue.”

Thus spoke Wikipedia about silence (that’s actually a translation from the Italian version of the page). By extension, it also becoms “abstension from posting on one’s blog”, and my blog certainly produced very few decibels, considering the two and a half months without posts. And in contrast with the image, there was very little to enjoy: it’s been two heated months, with an exaggerated amount of work, and the upcoming Christmas break didn’t slow down the rythms at all. And what bothers me the most is the mental tiredness, because of which during week-ends or on those rare evenings when we leave the office at a decent time I don’t have the strength to do anything but watch some movies, get some old news on the internet, play some videogames and sleep…

Anyway, with Christmas close by, I decided to make an effort and remove the dust from the blog, as in any case I don’t intend to let the blog die, even if no one reads it. So I thought: should I go for the monolithic post, writing about anything that come sto my mind, or shall I go with several distinct posts? I chose the latter, so I’ll shoot a few short posts (I hope I won’t use the “more” on any of them, if you get the idea), to give some flashes about what happened or what will happen…

And now that I’ve finished writing everything, and I’m getting ready to click on “post” in a quick sequence, I realize it’s 1 am, and that I’ve been writing for three hours, and that I liked it. How comes, in almost three months, I couldn’t find three hours where my mind was fresh enough to do this?
Well, I hope those who will decide to dedicate a few minutes of their time to me will enjoy reading…

Shortly after the blog’s restyling, as I was going through some of the old posts, I was shocked to discover that the great Stage6 service had been brutally terminated!
If you don’t remember it, it was “DivX’s YouTube”, whose main features were the support of videos of any size, duration and resolution (including HD). And indeed I was very happy to upload there the video of my thesis discussion; and now puff, they closed up without notice due to high costs.

So I spent a few hours looking for good alternatives, ’cause sure, YouTube is always there, but the 320×240 resolution and 10 minutes duration are really not the best for all videos…
After a few clicks I think I finally found a solution: so here’s Vimeo. No problems with duration and resolution, but there’s a weekly 500 MB upload limit (which also sets the maximum video size), which after all is very acceptable.
Sure, a very valid alternative was also Veoh, and I might use that in the future, but for the moment what stopped me is the fact that videos longer than 20 minutes must be seen with their specific software you have to download. It’s true videos longer than 20 minutes are quite rare, but this is a constraint which isn’t very nice for sharing.

Well, so if you go and check the post of my discussion, here, you’ll find it updated with the new video.
And very soon I’ll link another very funny video (it’s actually online already, but I’ll use it tomorrow to increase the blog’s post count )

And I hope it lasts this time…

Some time ago I received a message on my Flickr account, notifying me that some of my pictures had been preselected to be included in a Schmap guide (?), and asking me if I gave my permission to it. I said yes, so a few days ago I got a confirmation that they actually used two of my pictures on the East Coast guide (here and here are the two links).

Now, I haven’t really understood how this Schmap works; at first sight, it seems like an interactive touristic guide, but I didn’t delve too deep in it. So I said: let’s post a couple of lines here, and maybe I’ll find someone who can enlighten me and tell me if it’s worth the time to explore Schamp a bit more. In any case, I can still show off my two pictures being used

Well, I’m speechless. No updates from FEBRUARY 24TH. And this post I’m going to publish has actually been in draft for ages, but I was convinced I had at least posted it…
But that’s it, and so here I am, picking up this old post, a short recounting of the ASP aperitif in Turin…

So a couple of Saturdays ago [now that I'm posting, it's a few more than that...], on March 1st, I went to the Alumni ASP aperitif, organized in Turin. The pleasant surprise was the concomitance of the CioccolaTò, a recurring event in Turin, obviously based on chocolate…
Fatto sta che un paio di sabati fa [ora che posto, ormai qualcuno di più...], il primo marzo, sono andato all’aperitivo degli Alumni ASP, organizzato a Torino. La gradita sorpresa è stata la concomitanza con il CioccolaTò, ricorrente manifestazione torinese ovviamente incentrata sul cioccolato… Couldn’t miss it!

Too bad there were only two of us on the train (ok, three, but good old Sivo got there late and we didn’t meet him ); and overall, the number of participants from the glorious first cycle of the Alta Scuola Politecnica was not very high: fortunately there were some people from the second and third cycle, as there certainly weren’t more than fifteen of us from the first cycle (and we even lost il Duca! on the way!)

Anyway, a nice afternoon walking around stands and buying chocolate, drinking a cup of jasmine chocolate, really good; and a cool evening chatting and finding out what we “talented” people are doing a few months from the diploma.

Too bad my psychophysical conditions weren’t exactly optimal due to my working rythms, so after just a couple of drinks (although those drinks very definitely more loaded than usual) I was saturated… I decided to avoid the after-night and went to the historical Hotel Italia in Corso Stati Uniti, that was our welcoming refuge during a month of internship in Orbassano, at the Centro Ricerche FIAT. I couldn’t but miss my fellow of disadventures Nik, who is hereby officially decreed “big jerk”.

Anyway, a few weeks from then I went on to enjoy the various types of chocolates I bought… I still have to try the chili pepper chocolate, but so far Peyrano’s milk chocolate was definitely the most impressive…

Aaaaaaargh! 20 days without having the strength to write ont he blog… insane.
I’ll try to make up for it, with a quite atypical post for me.

Lately I’ve been so lazy and tired that in the morning I don’t even want to choose which album to listen to on my iPod. I’m usually an album guy rather than a playlist guy, and when I want some differences I go for the live albums. Anyway, lately it’s been shuffle and away, with the finger stuck on the forward button, brutally skipping on if the first notes don’t convince me. Moved more by a search for audio stimulation rather than by desire to listen to music.
Well, as the songs kept spinning, a spoken track from the movie Radiofreccia (spoken track which I won’t quote now ’cause it’s much cooler quoting it when closing the post) played: I had always agreed with what they said, but in the morning slumber, on the subway, with the iPod on shuffle, I realized it’s really true.

(Picture courtesy of Steve Crocker)

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