I hate ignorance

10Dec10

One day or the other I should really devote myself to a project that could change my life.

I’d like to write a small plugin for the browser that analyses the content of web pages and corrects the grammar and orthography errors.

The reason is I do not want to read bad written articles.

I can’t stand sentences with typos all over the place and with errors that, if written by a child attending the 5th grade, would be the ones marked in red. I think it’s humiliating, for the authors in first place, to publish such type of content and be convinced that someone could be pleased when reading that sloppy and careless work.

I mainly speak about italian, and more specifically about omitted apostrophes (un amica), orthography errors (e’ instead of è), plural and singular mistakes, and the ones I can’t stand at all: sentences that span from four to five lines without proper punctuation. I’m sure I forgot about a thousand more that I always read but can’t remember right now.

I cannot justify authors for being so “lazy”, since they’re spreading the worst plague I know: ignorance.

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Blogging to yourself

28Sep10

A good part of being a blogger is to ask questions to your presumed audience. To be a good blogger you have to write smart opinions about something and engage your readers in a conversation. The only problem is that noone reads your blog, noone finds your blog interesting, noone wants to leave you a comment and share some thoughts with you.

It’s like setting up the tea table for two, leaving open your apartment’s door and wait for someone to come in and taste your pastries. But noone comes. Get over it.

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They’ll make us hate what we love to do

07May10

Unless we take action and do it our way.

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Tales from another interview

27Jan10

Today I felt really bad.

I had an interview scheduled by a person of the company (let’s call company A) in which I am completing a 3-months training period. He told me the interview was to get a consulting job I eventually had to do in a company (let’s call it C). Noone tells me what kind of project I will be put at work. Arriving at the meeting in front of the building of company C, I was introduced to a third person that works for company B. After a coffee and some generic chats, the person of company A leaves, and while we were on our way to the office, the B person tells me that I should say, during the interview, that I am completing the training in his company, not in company A, and that he rewrote some parts of my cv.

This is exactly when I started feeling bad. Why in the world should you rewrite my professional life? Without telling me what you wrote! But let’s go ahead, we’ll get back to it later.

Arrived at company C we wait for about 40 minutes in a room, and after that, two person show up, introduce themselves,  and take me to a room to get the interview started.

First question: “What would you like to say to us?”, like if I already knew everything about them, like who they were and what kind of business they ran…I started telling some details of my training, what technologies and Java framework I used. They seemed happy and interested, and went on asking me something about my Master Thesis. As I finished talking, they asked me if I ever used some XML parsing library/tool: I never used one, but I told them that I am aware there are two different approaches (based on DOM or based on events).

Getting back to my rewrote cv, I saw the copy the interviewers were reading: it had a nice heading with company B’s logo on, and it reported I had skills in “Oracle sql server”. I would have never wrote that line, for two reasons:

1. I don’t have any skills in Oracle databases;
2. I don’t know what “Oracle sql server” actually is, since a quick search on google reports just 688,000 results for that. It is nothing if we compare it with 81,600,000 results for “Oracle”. Just to confirm that it does not refer to an Oracle product in any way, and was deliberately written there.

Next question: “Do you know what Dojo is?” “Yes, I know it is a kind of javascript framework to implement easily some UI effects, but I never used it”.

That was the last one they asked me.

Then they gave me the opportunity to ask something about them, so I said:

“What kind of projects are you running at this time?”

“Projects with Java. We need a profile quite like yours. “

…enlighting!

The whole thing lasted 7 minutes.

I don’t know if I’d be happy to work in a team where managers need just 7 minutes to screen and evaluate a future team member.

What about you?

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Agile Government

22Oct09

Everything in the economy is moving fast, in opposite to government (at least, the Italian government) where everything is in a Pre-Web Era: they got piles of documents on paper that are difficult to search and locate, and just few companies controlled by the regions have an idea of what is real-time web and what are the opportunities in their context (Atac Mobile, for example).The Government is consuming not only the finances we pay to making it work, but also our time, when we stand in line for hours in the offices.

The institutions must understand that to provide value to us, thay have to go digital in every way possible, involving laws, economy, social services and work. In one word, they should go Agile, and answer to our needs in this fast-paced reality.

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Tags: gov2.0, government

Biblioteche di Roma

16Oct09

Ho deciso di fare l’amanuense e di creare in Google Maps una mappa di tutte le biblioteche del Comune di Roma, visto che sul sito del comune si può vedere solo una GIF statica, abbastanza utile se volete avere informazioni dettagliate (come arrivare con gli autobus, etc), ma un po’ scomoda da consultare.

Ecco qui il link.

Magari nei giorni seguenti cercherò di fare uno script in Ruby che permetta di passare da un file di testo (oppure un .csv) con tutti i luoghi che vogliamo disporre su una mappa a un formato di cui Google Maps consenta l’importazione.

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Had a Great Time!

12May07

It’s a little late to post this, but anyway:

After Easter in Italy there’s a Monday, called Pasquetta, during which Romans are used to go out and have lunch in the countryside. We went out to Valleranello, at my cousins’ house, with so much meat we could feed the whole neighborhood (i came back home with more meat than i arrived with… ).

Since i was preparing for an exam, i arrived there even before Carlo, and i started proclaming proudly my notes to the plants and trees, with no success in teaching them software architecture patterns. Standing in the sun without changing position for one hour gave me the tan i deserved: half red on the right side of the face, half white on the other.

Then Carlo came and we started preparing the house: cutting the grass for the afternoon football match, moving chairs and tables cluelessly, and, most important of all, breaking the grass cutter (how is it called?), so we left the football field as it was: savage and scary.

Our friends came in and we set up the barbecue to cook the large amount of meat we wanted to eat, drinking red wine to refresh our mouths. As always, we had too much things to eat, and we were full very soon.

Now the question is: “What would you do after you ate so much you could explode, and you are drunk to the bone??“

FOOTBALL MATCH!!

The field was ready, our legs not so much, but we played anyway: mixed teams, long grass to soften our falls and german girls fighting in the mud to score a goal (just invented this one… ). This is what i call having fun: in the end we had all our clothes green coloured since the grass was wet and when you started running there was NO other way to stop than sliding on your feet for two meters (do you know skimboard?) and falling on your butt… well, maybe that’s not really having fun, but it was hilarious anyway.

The day ended with guys playing guitar for girls (and girls teaching guys how to play) and having a rest laying at the remaining rays of light.

P. S.: We took a bunch of pictures that day, so if you want to see and feel how we felt that day, you could check out some of that on my flickr page.

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38.9°C

09Jan07

I’m back with the fever!

And i’m not speaking of the one that comes at Saturdays when you are able to drink ’til 5 am while everyone is passing away on the floor. I’m talking about f**king fever. Period.

When i woke up in the morning (12am) i felt a bit tired and had a headache when i walked around the house, and thought it was nothing. After watching Fight Club, at around 5pm i measured my temperature, and i said “BINGO!!”.

Had some plans for tomorrow, so it seems they will have to wait until my health will come back.

Last night i listened to a great band, called Isis and will spend tonight and tomorrow discovering this new band that i heard of on the thrice blog. Hope it’s not that sick music to flame me with fever!!

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Lost. Addiction.

04Jan07

From wikipedia:

Addiction is a mental or physical disorder proposed to be precipitated by a combination of genetic, biological, pharmacological and social factors. Addiction is characterized by the repeated use of substances or behaviors despite clear evidence of morbidity secondary to such use.

I think this is the best diagnosis i can give of the behaviour i see around myself during these days: people stuck at the television watching episode after episode, forgetting the burning coffee on fire and not hearing people yelling at them about how lazy and selfish they are.

I feel totally responsible for what’s happening, since i have been the first to “get sick” and spread the morbus in my family and my friends, and don’t know what to do to stop them from behaving as i was doing sometimes ago. Maybe it’s just that i will have to wait until february 7th to get involved again in this thing

Changing topic, yesterday i installed a new epson scanner for my dad, and used it a little bit on negatives and printed photos. You can check some of the results on my flickr (link on the right).

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Christmas Traffic Jam!

19Dec06

Hello to everyone, this is my first post. I don’t know if i will continue with this blog/thing, and i mainly started this because i’ve been quite influenced by all the ramblings i read on the Net about design and coding and other useless things, and i stupidly started to believe that everyone has the power to say something, even the ones that can’t write in english.

I will write sometimes just to keep my english flowing, since i am from Rome, Italy and i have not much possibilities to practice it. Excluding my studies and the fact that i try to write down sweet and melancholy songs with my band.

That’s all for now. I’m going to write down the list of the gifts i want to do and i will surely f**k up since the time is almost over and running in the traffic jam during these days in Rome is almost crazy… you don’t understand me if you’re not there!

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