Am I a slacker?

According to a funny minister of the italian republic, I am a slacker.
However, according to an even more funny minister of the same government, I work for too many hours.
Now, can the two ministers please find an agreement between them and decide if I am working too much, or not enough???
Or, maybe, they are the slackers...

Thanks for working on this

Once upon a time, when I was a PhD student, I remember this person... When I (or some other student) sent him a report, or a draft of document, or something similar, he used to start his reply with "Thanks for working on this!".
After this good start, he basically destroyed every single part of the document by (rightfully) criticizing a lot of aspects, etc...
So, his emails looked like this:

Hi Luca;
thanks for working on this!
And, BTW, this is wrong ... that should be explained in a different way ... this you did not understand... Please rewrite that...

and so on... And the frustrating thing is that he was right 99% of the time. I always suspected that he used the "thanks for working on this" thing for making all his critics more acceptable.

Now, the scary thing is that few days ago I found myself writing "thanks for working on this" to someone... Does this mean that I crossed the line?

Back from vacations

I've been in vacations for about 2 weeks (well, technically, I've been in vacations for 8 days, and then I went to attend a conference), but now I am back.
I'll hopefully post some pictures of my vacations soon.

A new idea of democracy

I recently discovered that the concept of democracy is rapidly evolving... I was under the impression that democracy consists in discussing various ideas, voting, and deciding according to the results of the vote. But now I discover that today democracy seems to be something like "If I cannot win, I refuse to discuss and to vote".
To me, this looks like a modern reimplementation of the old "I don't play unless I am sure I will win" idea.

Internet traffic

According to some reliable data (that I obviously forget to reference in details),

• 70% of the internet traffic is due to video downloading/streaming/something;
• 60% of the internet traffic is P2P
• 30% of the internet traffic is due to spam
• 20% of the internet traffic is generated by people trying to understand how many cups of tea they can boil with a google query
• 15% of the internet traffic is generated by people boiling a cup of tea
• 30% of the internet traffic is generated by people trying to brew some coffee... But for some reason google only works with tea (the ICFM - Internet Coffee Freedom Movement - is working on this)
• 5% of the internet traffic is generated by people who wanted to microwave some food by pressed the wrong button
• 3% of the internet traffic does not have an opinion (do not know if this is relevant here, but "does not have an opinion" always sounds good in all kinds of statistics)

Well, I hope there will be at least a small percentage of the internet traffic which is generated by people actually doing some interesting work... Anyway, I guess a good 2% of the internet traffic is generated by people guessing why the sum of the percentages mentioned above is not 100.

Happy Easter!

Rejoice: Christ is risen.
Have a happy Easter!

It's only work...

Thanks to some recent happenings, I realised that I was giving too much importance to my job. Of course, working is part of my life (and I like my job), but it is not the most important part: I have other dreams, hopes, problems, expectations, joys, etc... in my life, and working is not part of them.

The fact that some of my dreams were about my job is scary... Hopefully, I fixed this before it became a real problem. And I am enjoying real life!

I had a dream...

I had a dream... A dream about a university where students can actually learn something, where professors care about the students and about the quality of the courses, where doing research can still be fun... A place where you can enjoy working, where the grass is green and girls are pretty (wops... Sorry, this is a different song :).

And now, reality check: in real world, only money, politics and similar things are important. So, I just had a dream. I stopped dreaming, and back to reality. No problems: I am pretty sure I'll manage to survive.

Broken ski binding

Last Sunday the weather was good, so I decided to go skiing...

Unfortunately, something went terribly wrong; I am ok, but I cannot say the same about the ski binding (as you can see from the picture).

Confusion about technology

I think in these days there is some confusion about technology:

• it is not uncommon to hear people saying things like "I want to take a picture... Can you give me your cell phone?"
• on the other hand, there are people that turn on the computer and use skype to make a phone call
  
• finally, I have to pay a "tv tax" (canone rai) because I own a computer...

Now, I hope to see someone using a photo camera to watch tv, so that the circle is closed...

Starting to blog

Ok; sometimes I feel bored and I decide to try something new...
Let's try blogging and let's see how it goes