musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

"[...] not giving the terrorists extended ovations for their performances is an important part of the solution. [...]"
So writes Adam. Right. I agree completely.
In fact I am not scared, I am never been scared, and to be honest I am REALLY annoyed by the security measures - in airports and elsewhere. I think THAT is actually more "theatre" than the attacks themselves….

At the end of September I'll have to go to England for work. Not being able anymore to carry a hand luggage, I think I will have to leave my camera home. I cannot afford to get that stolen or broken by sending it as luggage. I'll have finished paying that in 2008… you can imagine I am worried…

I am actually tempted to show up in this T-Shirt to be honest…

As usual, Dare speaks a pearl of wisdom here:

"[...] I didn't think subscribing to feeds in a conventional aggregator would ever become used by a widespread percentage of the population. Subscribing to feeds seems cool to geeks because it solves a geek problem; having too many sources of information to keep track of and optimizing how this is done. The average person doesn't think it's cool to be able to keep track of 10 - 20 websites a day using a some tool because they aren't interested in 10 - 20 websites on a daily basis in the first place. [...]"

In fact, this reminds me I am a geek, as I could not stay up to date with the load of things I wanna read, withuot his wonderful RSS Bandit.

"[...] But now I’ve come to realize that Flickr is so much more. It’s not just a cleverly designed web application. It’s a repository of human knowledge and creativity organized organically. It’s a visual conversation. It’s countless stories intertwined. It’s a community. It’s a virtual world. It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. [...]"
excerpt from: http://www.stephanspencer.com/archives/2005/02/13/flickr/

This guy is right. Stephan, you really got it - and you described it well too.
I am just crazy about this Flickr thing. It's the HUMAN and collaboration features that make Flickr that cool, addictive and popular. Those really make it emerge over ANY other photo-gallery software or service available.
That is the reason why I use it (and I pay it) even if it has been bought by a competitor of my company, even if I have my own server where I could indipendently publish my galleries at no cost, even if…. [insert random reason here about why I should not be using it]. It is for those "countless stories intertwined" that I like it so much.

my wife: "Oh, look: they DO sell finger paint here in Italy as well"
myself: "Sure, why not?"
my wife: "Well, kids are usually not supposed to get dirty from their parents, right ?"
myself: "ROTFL :-)"

it's quite a comedy (or a tragedy). They really aren't supposed to have fun in many occation because "you get dirty". Sure. That is what washing machines have been invented for, right ? At least these days we have those….
I have seen kids at the playground that were not allowed to get in the sandpit because they would have got dirty or…. well, why did you get them to the playground then if they are not allowed to play ?
Anyway, excluding some moments when my italian genes come forward and try to take ownership of my brain, our kids ARE allowed to get dirty. At least they have fun.

You might find this book of Tim Parks to be quite amusing on this topic

Cool. Transparency in this RC1 build finally works on my laptop. I mean, even with a DECENT resolution.
Everything is much more stable than in the previous beta1 and beta2 builds.

And yes, the background image I am using is this photo of mine.

This is a test post written from Windows Live Writer Beta!! Now… maybe it's just me… I have refused to use editors to post to my blog in the past and kept sticking with the default web interface… but this one looks very nice!

This article shows an intersting (interesting because it is simple but effective!) approach to train SpamAssassing Bayesian spam filter by leveraging the training data in Thunderbird bayesian filter. Basically you can use a program to teach another program how to work better!
This paradigm is cool!