Ever changing

True. Yes, you’re right (and - almost obviously) I’m wrong. But I have at least a couple of reasons to explain you why I haven’t blogged in a month; at a second look I’d say it’s just one reason: I love a constant change feeling to fulfill my life.

Point one. Professional life: officially speaking I’ll take a new role as manager at Gabetti with a brand new team reporting to me and a whole new task to supervise the whole servers+security+network side of our infrastructure.
If you know me or read this blog since some time you might know that my carrier/experience path (programmer turned web designer turned project manager turned interaction specialist turned researcher turned again project manager) has in the years just lightly touched the “hardware” side of the thing, so it’s going to be exciting finding a way to manage all this new knowledge that will flow into my mind in the forthcoming weeks.

Point two. Personal life: even if in our original path our current home would have been “current” for at least something like 10 years this summer (5 years in our counting) we bought a new and bigger one in the Brianza area near Milan. We’re currently restructuring it from the ground up but you might take a look at how it’s going to appear once ready (caveat: our architect designed the home, but the Floorplanner version and its mistakes are completely mine.

Thesis: I’ll try to post as frequently as I can, but need to suspend my pact with you. For a while at least.

Back to paper

As those who regularly read these pages know I’m a guy of the Digital Era: I listen to MP3 music both at home and while on the move, I regularly wear a couple of cellphones, my alterego’s name is Blackberry, I own 3 computers (and regularly use each of them), the main method I get in touch with my parents is via Skype video, etc. etc.

But all these bits are starting pissing me off. I want some more Carbonium (or, better said, 6 athoms of Carbonium 10 athoms of Hydrogen and a twist of 5 athoms of Oxygen).

It all started in early last year. When I get rid of the ugly Word generated fax cover and switched to b-side of used A4 sheets and the use of a pen.

This simple operation boosted my performances when sending data via fax:

• Since I don’t usually use Word templates I’ve always got the need to search for them. Now I don’t do it anymore.
• Since your’re supposed to be creating a - ehm - good looking fax cover you should also give a proper form to what you’re writing. Now I grab my pen and wrote what I have in mind directly on the paper.
• Some times the printer crashes, and I have to reprint the cover and wait for the printer doing its job. Now I just take the first used sheet I find and I’m ready to start.
• And, most of all, I can draw cooler smiles then those you find in Word!!! (actually cooler then those you find in Wordpress too!)

But this was just the beginning. Then I received a present from one of our partners that definitely turned me on. A 365 days Moleskine diary. In full effect.

I’ve never owned a Moleskine book, but apparently all of my marketing/advertising/graphics/creative friends have one (Marcello, you know who you are), and I’ve always been kinda gelous of the particular feeling they have for their Moleskine.

Today I grabbed my beloved stylo and started copying all my meetings from the Outlook agenda to the Moleskine. What I loved more is the soft scraping sound the pen produces as the ink flow on the paper; it’s not a scheduler anymore, it’s a piece of me; an echo of my life tranferred on the Moleskine.

Wonderful.

Now I’ll tell you my friend what are my plans. I still need Blackberry and Outlook since they’re way too comfortable to be left behind. But the paper diary will become my preferred way of tracking appointments, it will be the first thing I’ll look at once in my office (just before opening my Bloglines account) and the last thing I’ll close before commuting to home.

Me, my stylo and my brand new Moleskine: technology for my own sake.

Life tags - 2007 edition

More details coming pretty soon; you might want to take a look at last year edition.

Concentration

Black and green. I mean: green IBM3270 font on a full screen whole black background; no browser, no feeds, no email. Just the black background, your text and you. A cool parenthesis of concentration.

I miss that word so much in my last weeks life: we delivered the most complex release of the Oracle Enterprise One ERP at Gabetti early in December which kept us REALLY concentrated on making all the amount of old data take their right place in the new system (and also fixing some errors inserted in the old systems during years which made OE1 simply mad).

And then there’s the 2008 budget planning, Second Life, analysis to be made and data to be properly understood. And, wow, this is the end of an overwhelming year dude!

On the personal side of life we’re hitting the start of our new house renewal: discussions with the architect, choosing the right pool, planning the suite bathroom (I replicated it on Second Life to help my wife understanding my ideas better), choosing the doors, the windows, managing all the papers…

I’m tired. I’d like to have more time to manage all the things. Need to slow down. Just a little bit. And that’s also why posts lacked here in the last weeks.

Oh… and thank you writeroom for these 15 mins of distractionless writing.

UPDATE Alberto, while back linking this post, discovers a bond I sincerely have bypassed: the concentration feeling you experiment Writeroom donates you follows the same path Ev highlighted in his LeWeb3 speech: it really seems that innovation, more than from making software more complex, arise when you try to make it simpler. Thanks Alberto!

Small world

Today’s been really tough. Francesca just fell asleep and I’m here on the couch watching C.S.I. Miami with my wife laying here beneath; this after 12 hours of meetings, analysis, chats, phone calls, emails, emails, emails, cooking and, last but - really my friends - not least, baby care.

One of my memes says that the higher the quality of your network, the brighter your future. It’s now something like 5 years I’m subscribed to Linkedin, so I should be accustomed with the 6 degrees law (actually Linkedin service is based on just 3 of these degrees).

Sais this, I am always impressed when this law suddenly manifests in front of me.

1) Today I had lunch with some people from Maggioli to discuss about our businesses in Second Life (they publish two magazines on the Virtual World); just before this I discovered that one of the two guys is in business with Gabetti’s investor relations consultant; which, by the way, is the same person who introduced me to Poligrafica S. Faustino (and this introduction eventually led to the Franciacorta Festival on the Gabetti Island). Networking at its best!

2) The other day my wife was travelling to Merano with some colleagues to attend a company marketing event; one of these colleagues started telling about one of his high school fellows that started a successful niche business… and then suddenly my wife realized he was talking about our friend Alex; he was at his wedding too (but we hadn’t met). She worked more then 3 years with him without knowing we had a friend in common.

3) Today I was taking a look at Linkedin managers profiles. Looked at its founder’s and suddenly noticed that I’m just one degree away from him. Me, this humble Italian guy. Not bad, huh?
Three different examples of how this world is getting smaller and smaller. And this networking effects are simply exploding since the birth of the web. Impressive.

Oh, and if you like you can take a look at my Linkedin profile.

The importance of the place

I’m writing from my parents’ couch in Mantua, a small and ancient city a couple of hours from Milan, the city who hosted me for the first 18 years of my life; before moving to Padua for the University and then to Milan to start my “adult” life.

Mantova in the last 15 years has become a liveable city rich in culture events (Festival Della Letteratura, Mantua Jazz Festival, live concerts, etc.), museums and, last but not least, an almost endless choice of restaurants.

My wife always enjoys shopping in Mantua due to the small dimensions of the city itself: you can tour it by feet all its trendy shops in a couple of hours; and you can also stop by an excellent bar for a delicious cappuccino; doing this it’s not unusual to step by one of my childhood friends (just tomorrow I had a chat with Zelo, who’s now working part-time at a local bookshop plus continuing his artistic career).

Life in Mantua is stressless and quiet; you can feel the raising lifestyle od the inhabitants; and the food is terrific.

In Milan everything is fast. You don’t have time for nothing but business. Chaos & disorder are powerful forces in this city. Concrete is everywhere. You barely can use your car to do shopping but public transportation really deserve an empowerment.

But I still leave in Milan. And I’m so happy with this that I just bought a new and bigger house (we’re still in the redesign phase; I’ll post some shots on Flickr once we cosolidate the architect’s proposal).

Why?

I think that part of the answer reside in Richard Florida’s theory on Creative Cities (and Milan is the Design World capital): The Frontiers of Interaction wouldn’t have been possible in Mantua; meeting with top-notch professionals such as Leeander, Simone, Flavio, the people at the Bicocca University, Fabio and many many others barely unthinkable.

But the rest of the answer is about potential; Milan has the potential to become more liveable, to transform itself from the ground up cutting the distance between the city and its inhabitants; continuing to remain an innovative city. Milan is a city for the youngsters, for the makers, for the thinkers.

Milan is a city where this is possible. But this and this too.

My professional life is still based in Milan and my forecast is that this won’t change in the next 10 years. But I won’t age in this city: I prefere move my family to cities more similar to the one I was born in. I prefere a return to my roots while keeping my innovation potential intact.

The power of the Web

I know I know, this is definitely the worst of the start: I promised to write (at least) each Friday evening and I’m posting late on Saturday evening; but there’s quite a bunch of things you still need to know about me (I’ll going deep into this in the forthcoming weeks) that’s bringing me quite busy at the moment. So: I’m sorry dudes.

I’ve read on the last number of MyGabetti News (the newsletter we monthly publish at Gabetti for our site subscribers) of a cool fair about home automation and home security which had my whole attention; and it was held in Milan down town: a bunch of kilometers from my house.

I’ve spent half this week convincing my wife to visit the expo together so we can start to get accustomed to the cream of the crop in home innovation.

[Note: I’m used - mostly at work - to reach any information very quickly; that’s why I fastly become dissappointed when I cannot easily reach what I need to know… this is usefoul to properly understand what follows]

This morning, while my daughter was swallowing biscuits all around the kitchen, I was on the sofa trying to remember more details on the fair: was it in Milan City Fair? Or at the new expo? Wasn’t it at the Datch Forum?

I perfectly knew where I first read the info (MyGabetti News) and I remember where the mail was laying. But had not mood for opening Entourage, looking for the email and then following the link; so I (poor me) chose to google for more info on the fair.

Google, uh? Yes: the result was the “Casa Sicura Expo” (secure home Expo), “The first fair on home automation and home security”.

I don’t actually know how you, my friend read it, but once having paid 5 euros for parking and 16 euros for the entrance ticket I faced a whole plaetora of solar systems, energy saver systems, fuell cells prototype… it wasn’t about home automation! There were no home secutiry experts.

It was a damn save the damn world fair!!!

I admitted with my wife of being wrong: I probably mistyped the site or something this morning and wrote down the wrong address on our TomTom.

So, back at home I re-checked the (damn) site and… I was right! Today is 14, the month is October, we were at the Datch Forum… so: where have all you domotic systems hidden?

This is the power of the web: keeping a wrong information and making it appear correct; even when I personaly verified it was, actually,wrong.

P.S. We came home plenty with energy savings lamp, they were for free.

Update: I’m puzzled. The link I found on Google was actually the same that was laying in MyGabetti News… so the Conference organizers were kidding when designing the websites content? Or were they just trying to gain a couple of thousands more visitors?

Telling a story

I recently finished the wonderful Freakonomics book which, in my 2006 revised edition, came with a bunch of blog posts from the Freakonomics blog. And, my friend, it’s been a revelation: I really enjoied Lewitt and Dubner blog style: they don’t write posts, they tell stories instead (I just subscribed to their feed, by the way).

And here from my decision; I want to start telling stories instead of reporting facts, I want a major personal commitment to my Yellow Line blog: I’ll start with a mandatory Post Day a week, based on Friday evening (CET) and look where it’ll take me from there; I won’t romance facts, I’ll just try to write in a more compelling way; what I want is a blog I’ll enjoy to re-read, instead that a blog I just enjoy writing for.

You, my loyal readers, will be my judges.

Quitting initiatives

Life is really complicated. Enough complicated not to require other complication ignitors.

I’ve started doing things professionally on the web since 1997 (10 years dude ) and I’ve been fortunate enough to start up quite a lot of projects and - quite obviously - to quit them down due to lack of time, low profits or - ups - lowering interest from yours truly.

CIRI was a Javascript then Perl search engine with only Italian Hip Hop sites in its index. It’s been the first (and mainly the only one) in its genre and, before Google entering the Italian market, it was the leader, period. I turned off CIRI mid 2006 due to the impossibility to compete with Google index.
Reason: lack of profitability (due to Google entrance in the same market)

CIRI eventually lead to the creation of the HOTMC.COM network which I co-founded and co-managed till late 2006; the birth of Francesca and my entrance in Gabetti forced me to leave the whole property to my Pal Simone due to lack of time (he’s a great Director and Owne, IMHO).
HOTMC.COM is still the leading Italian online magazine about Hip Hop and its community is an ever growing thing.
Reason: lack of time (due to changes in my professional and personal life)

The last (in time order) project I quitted has been Flashability (I decided to make the decision public yesterday on the Flashability site - in Italian): an online magazine devoted to the spread of the usability culture in Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash CS) helping a lot of developers worldwide to design better interfaces (back button, ya know what I mean?).
During time I lost my interest in the technology and my job wasn’t even bond anymore to Flash, finding good contributors has always been a mess so… why keeping it alive?
Reason: lack of interest

And, you might wonder, what about Mobup (the open source mobile uploader to Flickr)? It’s development is currently freezed, but the project is still in my mind and heart.

Back in town

It’s been a while since I haven’t posted a single line here (also my Flickr photo stream deserve a better treatment) but I’ve been travelling through vacations and busy days (and the deadline for my “Achivieng real business growth through Second Life” hasn’t helped).

But now I’m back with a whole lot of things to says and experiences to be told. And, again, with so few time available to write them down.

So, let’s go with a Powerpoint style bullet list of important things happened meanwhile

• I’ve been interviewed on the next phases of the Gabetti presence in Second Life (interview in Italian, here’s an automatic translation)
• I’ve spent 3 whole weeks on holiday (the last time I had so much vacation I was 17). Photo to be uploaded soon.
• My sister Marianna got married. She’s now enjoying her honeymoon in Polynesia.
• Leeander published a video interview with yours truly (again, in Italian) about the Virtual Assistant that’s now managing Gabetti first line IT helpdesk. More on this soon.

That’s all for now.