Thursday, 23 April 2009

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.

Tuesday, 21 April 2009

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.

Sunday, 12 April 2009

Happy Easter!

Rejoice: Christ is risen.
Have a happy Easter!

Sunday, 8 March 2009

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!

Thursday, 5 March 2009

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.

Wednesday, 18 February 2009

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).

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

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...