H3RALD - Tag 'personal' (RSS Feed)

Holiday house for rent

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:54:00 -0000

Part of my family house in the countryside is now available for rent! It’s located in the small village of Sessarego, a few minutes away from the coast, on the Italian Riviera.
We’ve been living there recently for 6 months when I started working and then moved to the city in order to be nearer to my workplace, but we still go there on holidays or on the odd week end, sometimes.

The house is fully furnished, it has been recently renovated, and offers all major comforts and services (utilities, TV, internet, phone, etc.). It can be ideal as a holiday house for writers, programmers, or anyone who would like to take a break from the chaotic city life without giving up all the commodities of modern life, such as the Internet.

For more information, see this page and feel free to contact me if you want to book your stay or you needmore details!

10 reasons why I didn't update my blog

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:30:00 -0000

“It has been a while since my last post, sorry about that”
I read this sentence (or something along those lines) on many blogs on the Internet, including mine. As a matter of fact, I actually didn’t write a meaningful post on my blog for a long time and no, probably this is not going to change that either.

Yesterday I started thinking why this happens, not only to me but to a lot of other non-professional bloggers. A professional blogger &emdash; for what I can tell &emdash; is someone like Michael Arrington or Gina Trapani: someone who has the luck (or course) to be able to just blog for a living.

I don’t blog for a living: my site is self-sustaining via a few very unobtrusive ads, just that. I have a full time job, and I blog in my spare time about my interests, without even trying to make “proper” money from my site. There’s nothing wrong with it: I believe there are some other people in my condition, and that’s quite normal.

That being said, let’s examine the ten most common reasons why I (and you too, maybe) end up not updating my blog, even when I have time to do so.h3. Someone already blogged about it

This is very irritating. I am obsessed with original content. I want to write about something other people never (or hardly ever) wrote about. As a consequence, I often find myself googling the same topic I’m planning my blog post on, and I obviously often get quite a few results, too!

I actually wanted to title this very post “The Blogger’s Block”, but I immediately thought of putting that very title into Google, just to see if someone else already blogged about it. Sure they did! Not original at all, tough luck.
It also happened a few weeks ago: I wanted to write about the current state of tech news sites and Antonio Cangiano comes up with a similar post. Very interesting indeed, but quite annoying as well!

OK scrap that, think about something else…

This can potentially go on for days, and the only solution is of course trying not to worry about it, and just write the damn thing (that’s what I did to write this post).

I didn’t research enough on the subject

This happens tipically with reviews, round-ups, etc. Things I actually enjoy writing, but which may be easily subject to (harsh) criticism unless ou do them right.
I wanted to write a review of the new Treo 750 I bought. I’ve been using for a while, I learnt a few interesting hacks etc. etc. Unfortunately the 3G iPhone came out, so everyone is all hyped up about it. Too bad that I, being Italian and living in Italy, I never actually touched the damn thing!
What has that got to do with my Treo 750? Well, it would be nice to write a review of a Windows Mobile 6 phone comparing to the upcoming Apple wonder, wouldn’t it?

The solution to this would be trying to limit the scope of your post: screw Apple, let’s just focus on my Treo 750 and on the amazing amount of programming languages I can use on it!

After researching for X days, I realized it was all a waste of time

This happens with big articles. I once thought about writing a comprehensive article about all the possible ways to deploy a Ruby on Rails web site. Cool, isn’t it? I started researching about all the most esoteric lightweight web servers, about JRuby, Glassfish, IronRuby, … A lot of things. And new solutions kept coming up, and with them more and more posts, and then even entire books on the subjects.

Very frustrating. I abandoned the whole thing, because there was simply no reason to go on researching: it was all a waste of time.

How to fix this? Again, reduce the scope of your article so that you are able to reduce the time you spend researching about it. Or maybe try to get paid to write it, so that even if there’s plenty of articles about the same subject, at least you have a concrete purpose to write yours.

Erhm, yes, by the way, keep an eye on SitePoint in the next few days/weeks, OK?

I only write when I’m inspired, and now I’m not

Very, very common. I normally think about a very cool article to write in the evening, or early in the morning, or whenever I don’t have access to a computer or the Internet.
Of course I don’t forget about it, but by the time I have a chance to actually write it, I really don’t fancy doing so. Oh, the irony!
It happened today, actually, during my lunch break: I was supposed to write this post but I didn’t feel like it. I lost my inspiration and all my artistic verve, so no, it can’t be done. Tough luck, wait until next time.

How did I solve this? Well, I started writing the post in my coffee break: there was no way to finish it in time, of course, but at least I started it.
I also saved it to my PDA and continued writing it when I had a chance. Eventually, I managed to finish it during my lunch break, the next day.

Try to write whenever you are inspired. If you are not inspired in your lunch break, do some work in your lunch break and then write when, in an hour or so, probably, you feel like writing again.

This won’t make Digg’s front page

Digg, Reddit, DZone, you name it. They are all excellent free tools for promoting your content. Don’t tell me you never wrote a post for the sake of making the front page of one of those sites. I did, I confess.
I didn’t make Digg’s front page in a while, and I’m probably never going to make it again. The reason? When it comes to promoting the right content in a fair way Digg sucks. As a consequence, 80% of the articles which appear on Digg suck. I’m sure you’ll be able to forgive my French when I say that Digg utterly sucks.

No matter how clever your story may be, unless you’re backed up by a swarm or an active community willing to Digg your story, you simply aren’t going to make it. When is the last time a proper programming article made it to Digg? I don’t remember, probably way before I unsubscribed to the Digg’s Technology feed, about a year or so ago.

Just write for the sake of writing. Don’t even submit your story to Digg (unless you’re writing about the iPhone, of course, then you may have a chance): post it to a less-known site, maybe, or to Reddit, instead. You won’t get as much traffic, granted, but you also won’t get tons of idiots writing pointless crap on your site and you won’t risk a server crash. If it’s destiny, then some good soul will post it to Digg, but nobody will digg it. That’s just life, I’m afraid.

It has been too long since my last post: the next one will have to make up for it

This happens when you start feeling guilty because you didn’t post in a long time.

“My next post is going to be superb, long, interesting and everyone will start flocking back to my blog!”

Wrong. First of all because statistically people just don’t “flock back” because you bestowed them of one interesting post (you have to keep up, too), and second because by doing so your mind will automatically discard all those bits of things you wanted to write about, but you never did because you’re waiting for that special next post which will be so much better and will bring your blob back to ~~spam~~ life.

It happened, it happened… again, all you have to do is just post all the tidbits you need, while you’re preparing your big shot: your blog will remain “fresh” and more people will enjoy your interesting posts, whenever they’ll come.

Nobody gives a damn, anyway

I didn’t want to upset my younger audience by using a nasty f-word in the title, but that’s exactly how it feels like it, sometimes.
I went to Rome last week, did you know? I twittered about it, you ought to know! And of course you’ll all be waiting for the usual 10-page-long article on my awesome vacation. Like when I went to London, remember?
No, sadly not everyone may be interested in this crap. So I probably won’t post about it: who cares? When you start thinking like this, you may stop posting for weeks: not everyone may be interested in everything you post, and I believe that’s normal.
Especially for a blog like mine, which is deliberately open to all my interests: programming, technology, travelling, etc. That’s why most blogs try to be themed: they write about a particular subject, even a single programming project, and they (try to) do it well. The trade-off is that a themed blog may run out of posts amazingly quickly, if you’re not carefula and if you’re not 100% devoted to your blog’s theme.
A themed blog will build up a faithful audience, like when I was writing almost exclusively about CakePHP: a lot of PHP programmers where flocking here daily. Then things went wrong and I really couldn’t be bothered to write about the same crap. Which leads us to the next topic…

If I write about this, a large chunk of my audience is going to be upset

This applies especially to themed blogs: if you’re a well-known Firefox addict, you can’t suddenly start writing about Opera, praising its speed and the features it offers out-of-the box!
If you take a side, you’d better stick to it, if you want your audience to stick to you: the ten people who happen to read this blog are probably quite shocked by the amount of times I “changed side”: from CakePHP and PHP to Rails and Ruby, from Firefox to Opera (well, wait until my next SitePoint article comes out, at least…). Probably they are not the same people who read this blog a year or so ago.

In the end, it’s entirely up to you: if you are prone to radically change our opinion (and this happen in technology, much more than in politics), which involves changing the whole theme of your blog, maybe you should consider not having a themed blog at all.
And if you don’t feel 100% sure you want a themed blog, you definitely shouldn’t go for a themed domain name, or you may end up abandoning it afterwards. And when that happens, unless you’re writing damn cool posts like Why, it’s going to hurt your audience. On the other hand, if you’re sure you’ll get ten times more visitors, go for it.
No, h3rald.com stays… I may end up raving about Safari at some point within the next ten years though, don’t be upset!

I’m not an expert on the subject, so I shouldn’t blog about it

This is a common problem I have when I try to write about something I don’t know extensively enough. When I started to learn Ruby, I was eager to start writing about it: it seemed just too cool to be true!
I thought about writing a longish post on learning Ruby from scratch, but then I realized it wouldn’t have been a great idea: I was just starting to learn a new language, I didn’t know all the nitty-gritty and writing about it to teach others was going to be a bit presumptuous, maybe!
Instead, I opted for a lighted 10 reasons to learn Ruby article, clearly stating in the first paragraph that I was just a noob getting excited about his new toy. It worked, actually: people seemed to enjoy it, and I was partially excused for the few mistakes I made here and there.
You don’t have to be an expert to blog about something: you just have to be totally honest about what you know, and what you don’t know.

There are a lot of professional bloggers out there, and I’m not one of them

Finally, this can be summarized in two words: inferiority complex. “Proper” blogs fire out 10+ posts per day, and I don’t even write ten points in a month! Again, those a professional bloggers: they live for blogging (and make an awful lot of money out of it), and they most likely have someone else blogging for them, too!
Think of TechCrunch or LifeHacker, for example: they have a small legion of talented writers working for them &emdash; even if Michael Harrington does rant about Twitter about three times a week himself, though.
At the end of the day, what matters is the quality of your posts. Not the length minf, the Quality. I personally think that non-professionals (I said “non-professionals”, not “amateurs”!) are allowed to write about once a week, if they can provide good content, that is.

But you still do have to write at least once a week (OK, let’s make it ten days), otherwise either you’re justified (you genuinely don’t have time) or you may be a victim of one of these common fears. Watch out, and happy blogging!

I'm on Twitter, anyway...

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 18 May 2008 09:04:00 -0000

I’ve been neglecting my blog, I know. The truth is that I’m quite busy in this period: I have more responsibilities in my daily full-time jobs, my lunch breaks are getting shorter and I don’t have much free time. At any rate, here’s what’s going on:

I’m writing a new article for an online magazine (assuming I’m gonna finish it)
I signed up for a freelance technical reviewing job, for a new Ruby book which will come out soon-ish
I’m getting ready to finally visit Rome (again), this time with my fiancée, for our fifth anniversary.
I’m slowly preparing a version 1.0 of RedBook, which involves quite a lot of refactoring (and hopefully better documentation and tests).
I’m trying to learn a little bit of Haskell: it seems to be one of the few non .NET languages able to produce standalone .exe files, nowadays…

Last but not least, I now decided to use Twitter regularly, so you can follow me there, if you wish!

Review Services

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:24:00 -0000

When it comes to software, I definitely like to try out new things. My collegues takes the piss out of me because every ~~week~~ day I come up with “some new tool they have to start using” and so on.
As a matter of fact, I like reviewing software as well. I enjoy writing and analyzing new things, evaluating all the new possibilities they may offer, and I also tend to have a rather critical eye for what doesn’t feel right. I’ll use a tool for months but still try out new ones which claim to do the same thing — but better — as they come out.
Unfortunately — or fortunately, depends how you look at it — when it comes to software, there are very few silver bullets, and things keep changing: that’s the way it is and the way it will be.

I must try to write up a page (and ideally update it regularly, that’s the hard part) listing all the tools I use, at some point… but at any rate, if you coded some new app you think kicks ass or you found a hidden jewel in the labyrinth of freeware, just let me know: I’ll definitely try it out, and if it’s worth a post I’ll blog about it.

The same applies to books, actually, as I like reading, especially those which are related to Ruby or programming, nowadays.

The cost of such reviews and articles? Depends! Certainly I wouldn’t mind donations or some compensation of some form, especially from publishers or software companies. It may be money, books, software or even nothing: it really depends on what I have to review.
Please be aware that I am not doing this full time, and I already have a job and a fiancée to look after, but I’ll do my best to publish as much as I can on my site or even elsewhere elsewhere [Note: on e-zines, magazines & similar, not on your brother’s friend’s mother-in-law’s crappy blog!].

For any inquiries, contact me (h3rald [—at—] h3rald.com).

Back from holiday

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 02:59:00 -0000

I’m back. I was so eager to go on holiday that I didn’t even bother writing a post about it, too bad. I actually when on holiday for a week but I thought I’d take three weeks off from my blog duties in favor of laziness and relax, but unfortunately my laptop decided to go wrong as well, so I didn’t actually manage to relax that much.

Now everything is fine. I still have to send in my laptop for assistance but it’s usable at least, and I finally found the time (and the money) to buy a desktop PC. I always wanted to build my own, actually, but in the end I decided to opt for a pre-made Fujitsu Siemens, mainly for economic reasons and time constraints. I won’t publish the specs, but it’s alright for me and my fiancée.

So what now? Well… the usual: more posts will soon be added to the Simply On Rails series, a Ruby-related article is on the way (it will be edited by the excellent CyberArmy Publication Editing Staff this time), I may venture in a site upgrade whenever they decide to release version 4.2 of Typo which is supposed to be imminent and I’ll eventually complete another pet project of mine, but that will take more time…

Stay tuned.

In memory of Vittorio Cevasco (1916-2006)

h3rald@h3rald.com — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 03:36:00 -0000

Yesterday my grandpa passed away, due to an aggravation of his health condition, breathing problems and various other complications. He died in hospital, on Liberation Day, the Italian national holiday celebrating the liberation of our country from the nazi-fascist regime by the Allied troops and partisans on April 25th 1945. He died exactly 61 years after that day.

I’d like to remember my grandpa today, because he most certainly deserves it, as he was a really extraordinary person.

“Yes, I’m sure he was, isn’t everybody extraordinary in some way?”

Definitely: everybody is special, and people tend to say that especially when someone passes away. In my grandpa’s case, actually I can say that in a slightly more absolute sense: his life was truly uncommon and very active.

A very active life

Vittorio Cevasco, my grandfather, was certainly the most active member of my family. We’re talking about a man who was still able to drive a car up to last September (he was nearly 90 years old), and used to drive 500 Km on the motorway and mountain roads every year to go on vacation: he went to the same place, Mals Vinschgau, near the Italian-Austrian-Swiss border for over fifty years. He never had particular troubles to walk, and just in the past months started using a walking stick… before that he used to walk around the city by himself everyday, in his endless meanderings. He always had something to do: visit friends, go to public offices, go to our house in the countryside – he still used to cultivate the land with potatoes, tomatoes and basil as a hobby until a few months ago – and so on: he was really a busy man.
I can certainly say that I never though he was really old until after his wife, my grandma, died, about a year ago. Since then he really aged, and quickly, as she probably was one of the main reasons of his existance.

When he was “young” (i.e. less than 80) he used to compete with the lift in his flat running down the stairs. Everyone else was taking the lift, but he always chose to go on foot down the stairs, to keep in exercise. His other exercise was cultivating our land in Sessarego, near Bogliasco (Genoa, Italy), as a hobby more than anything, providing us with fresh biological products like that extraordinary basil essential to make our very tasty local pesto sauce.
He always tried to convince me to do some work there, and he actually taught me various tips and secrets which will hopefully be useful in near future. Sadly, when he was alive I wasn’t too keen on the idea of cultivating and maintain our land from time to time… but I kind of changed my mind recently, and I know he realized that just a few days before he died.

After WWII he did various things, he even was erhm… somehow active in certain international import/export activities of watches from Switzerland to Italy – quite a common thing back in the day, especially considering that the border was at just a few hours drive.
Later on he became an estate agent, working for a local office and then helping out some friends running their activity. In 2001 he hit his own personal record selling a fancy villa worth one billion of the old Italian Lire – which convert to approx. 500,000 Euro, but at the time it was much bigger money than that. With the commission generated by that sale he bought a brand new Ford Fiesta: he was 85 years old.

But no, these are not the most extraordinary episodes of his life of course. He could fly – literally.

He was one of the first man in Italy and the the first in Genoa area to get a flying license, back in 1934. A news which made the local papers at the time, and we still have that article somewhere. He wanted to become a civil pilot, but he never did: the Country needed him to protect our sky, when Italy joined the War in 1941.

The Aviator

My grandpa lived the early years of his youth in the village of Sessarego, where my great-grandfather bought an old house, after taking part in Giuseppe Garibaldi expedition at Marsala (1860) fighting for the Italian independence (he’s listed among the ones who actually landed there).
There his parents used to have a few cows and produce milk, and one of his tasks was milking delivery… no scooters or cars, at the time, of course, and certainly not for a teenager like him: he often had to carry the milk barrels up and down the hill on foot, and I’m talking about 1-2 Km with at least 30-40 kilos on your shoulders!

But my grandpa’s plans were much different: he wanted to fly away, and high – literally. You can imagine the face of my grand-grandfather when he expressed his wish to become a pilot! Nobody ever did that, in the area, and becoming a pilot was, at the time, like becoming an astronaut in the seventies.
The price of the license was really high at the time, 1,200 Lire. That would be like at least 30,000 Euro now, especially considering that his parents weren’t exactly rich. In the very end, my father supported him and provided as much money as he could afford: 1000 Lire.
But he still needed 200 Lire, so after hassling the flying instructors he signed an agreement stating that if they anticipated him the money he’d have paid them back once he started working: it was clear in fact that he’d have became a military pilot, as the Regime needed people for their brand new aircrafts, and the was felt imminent.
He paid them back, eventually, after passing both the civil and military tests. He became a sergeant for the Regia Aviazione (Royal Airforce), with a salary of 20 Lire/month, ten of which went to the flying school, for many months, but he was still earning some very decent money.

One of the most peculiar things about my grandpa was his memory: he was always able to tell you the story of his life, all the events, with the same details and all the exact dates, on every occasion. Even when we took him to the hospital, a few weeks ago, when we asked the nurse if he was self-conscious she said: “Yes… well, he was talking a few hours ago, but I don’t know if he was raving or what… he said he was a pilot, and that he used to fly at 350Km/h…”

Damn right. His old Re 2002 was able to fly at 350 Km/h if pushed, at a standard altitude of 35,000 m, while carrying a 500Kg bomb. It was his plane, and he never forgot that, even a few days before he passed away. He’d tell you all the stats, the mechanics, the technical details and all the tricks to perform acrobatic maneuvers if you asked him… Not that actually anybody ever did, because every time something reminded him of that, even slightly, he’d start talking about the old days when he was commanding his squad patrolling the Italian borders.

Last year, after my grandma died and he didn’t feel like driving 500Km to go to the mountains (for the first time in his life), I had to drive his Fiesta myself in my first long driving journey. At first I wasn’t too sure I’d have enjoyed the drive, partly because of the long distance and partly because I was going to be alone with my grandpa for about six hours, and I was afraid of not be able to find enough topics of conversation…

That fear went away almost instantly right a few minutes after we started the journey.
When we got on the motorway, I started complaining that my dad was going slightly over the limit with his brand new Peugeot 307: “Look, he’s already going at 140km/h and we just started the journey!”

“Centûcäranta chilumetri l’ûa… û më aeruplannu pûeivä fâ ï trexëntusincûanta cûmme ninte!”
[140 kilometers per hour… my plane could easily do 350!]

He normally used to speak in zeneise (“Genovese”), Genoa’s dialect, mixed with some Italian if he really had to. That was it: if you started talking about speed, technology, engines, history or any other topic which was slightly related to his plane, the war, the regime etc. he always started off talking about his past and his plane, ignoring everything else.
My grandma used to get kinda annoyed about it… on every occasion, if he had a chance, he’d start talking about that particular day in 193x/4x and so on: we all knew that, and actually I enjoyed listening to his stories, mostly because they were genuine and authentic relics of an old and glorious past. I think in his mind he wanted us all to remember him in that way, to always keep in mind that he was a pilot and how he enjoyed it, even when he went in jail for it, even when his plane was taken down…

On that day right after he was assigned to a new base, they asked him to perform some exercises in the air, loops and all sort of acrobatics: “ë sölite cöse che së dûviëiva fä in t’ë l’aviäsiûn” [the usual things you had to do in the airforce].
He was just starting practicing the Re 2002 at the time, but he quickly found out that it was extremely maneuvrable, at least to the standards of the time: the equivalent of a top range today’s fighter.
He started off with some usual things, performing various twists in the air, loops, etc. etc. until he had to end his exhibition with a dive from an altitude of 10,000m down at maximum speed to a limit of 1500m… On that particular day a colonel from another base and some other high-ranking officer were down on the ground near the aircraft to enjoy the show, and check that everything was performed correctly. My grandpa was aware of that, so he decided to perform a great show especially for them that day: he went up to 10,000m, and then dove down accelerating, helped by gravity… he went down and down, faster and faster, people down on the ground were staring at him waiting for him to pull up the plane, but nothing, he still went down and down so that quickly the small crowd of captains and colonels got scared and run away in every direction: “He’ll crash, he’ll crash!”
He did not crash, not that day… he went down up to slightly less than 100m and then pulled up the plane: ar real wonderful extreme performance. Now imagine this beast of a plane coming down at 300Km/h and accelerating, making a terrible noise typical of the engines of the time and then pull up suddenly right above your head: one more second and he wouldn’t have been able to tell that story.
He was called by the commander of the base who told him: “Cevasco, you’re hell of a skilled pilot, but now I have to put you in jail for a day for not obeying your orders of staying above 1500m” – That, I reckon, was one of the best days of my grandpa’s life.

He was never captured, but his plane was taken down by an English Spitfire in the South of Italy. The war was nearly finished, and there were just those little air fights from time to time. He really risked a lot that day, and managed to attempt an emergency “landing” completely destroying his plane along as part of his jaw, which was alright after a few months.
Since then he never flew again, and managed to escape to be re-called in duty. But he did like flying back with his memories to those glorious days.

A few years ago my dad showed him Microsoft’s “Flight Simulator 98”, and some other flying games. He was amazed at the graphic, but not so satisfied with the whole simulation thing: not even close to reality, too damn easy.

“Cäu më, te vûeive vedde tïe a fä vûlá û më aeruplannu”
[My dear, I’d have liked to see you trying to fly my plane]

…and that was it: the beginning of another journey back in time.

He always had a very practical view of life and especially of technology. He wouldn’t take you seriously and would not be interested in knowing about programming and the Internet, unless it could produce some concrete result:

“Ti che ti stûddi da insegnë e che ti stë sempre davanti a-û cumputer, nun te puriësci truvä ûn sistemmä de anä in t’ë a banca e piggië qualche miliûn the Euro?”
[You that you’re studying to become an engineer and that spend so long in front of the computer, couldn’t you find a way to get into a bank and get out some million of Euro?]

He’d have loved me to become a [rich] hacker, probably… But the last time I saw him, last Friday, he seemed happy enough to hear that I was just about to start working.

He realized that I finally found a good job after my studies, and then my dad told him Roxanne and I would have moved to the countryside, in Sessarego… He made a big effort to move the muscles of his mouth in a large smile: he was happy.

Thoughts about the Italian Academic Education

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 20:30:00 -0000

I found this article today, buried in my mailbox. I wrote it just over five years ago, the evening after failing the last, insignificant exam necessary to get my degree in IT Engineering.

I eventually passed the damn thing, got my B.Sc., and found a great job right afterwards, while all my former fellow students were still studying pointless crap. Maybe some of them are still studying pointless crap right now, and they’re still living with their parents.

I was very lucky. If I didn’t fail that exam perhaps I would have kept studying for my master’s degree for years, and maybe today I wouldn’t even have a job, or be married!

I decided to re-publish this article because it’s part of what I am, and I’m not ashamed of it. I corrected a few of the most obvious spelling and grammar mistakes, but I didn’t edit it or censor it otherwise.

It may be a senseless rant, but my opinion of the Italian Education System is still the same: If I’ll have a child who wants to study anything technical someday, I’ll tell him/her to get the hell out of Italy and go abroad to study in a real university.

Fabio Cevasco — Saturday, July 31st 2010

The Pre-computer Age

Who am I? I’m just an Italian student taking the last exams to obtain my B.Sc. in IT Engineering. Obviously I’m quite interested in Information Technology and everything concerning computers or the Internet, and – believe it or not – this probably came from my parents’ original dislike of computers themselves.

in Italy, unlike in most of the other capitalistic countries of the world, kids tends to listen to their parents until they reach their “full maturity”, i.e. 25 years of age at least (by the way, I’m 22), so, to cut a long story short, I was allowed to have a computer at home when I was 16 years old. I couldn’t believe it when the technician brought it at home: sure I’d seen a computer before in my life, but that was mine, and I could use it to do something amazing, as I dreamt many times.

The point is, from another point of view, that I felt behind already compared to my friends who were already boasting their records at various computer games. Fools.
On another note, I was a bit different from other Italian kids: I always liked writing and reading in English since I was 6, because I found the language to be quite amazing or even magic for the way it sounded, as I used to say to my friends. Friends – the Italian ones, that is – who never really understood me totally, and in particular my
passion for the Anglo-Saxon cultures: for them, writing and reading in English were just boring and difficult things you had to do at school, while I enjoyed reading The Tempest by Shakespeare when my English teacher didn’t even teach me the past tense, yet. A fool?

My passion for the English language was soon noticed by my parents, who let me go to England a few times, to college: basically a fashonable way for english schools and travel agencies to rob honest families, promising them that their kids would have learnt a new language enjoying themselves. Result: the kids enjoyed their holiday a lot, but basically always spoke Italian to each other (and even to English people over there) and the families were happy when they came back because after spending so much money they must have learnt something…

Using the Computer and the Internet

Back to that amazing and weird magic box called computer: I immediately enjoyed experimenting new stuff, playing with Windows (for me the word “Linux” at the time would have sounded not too different from some names of medicines my grandparents were taking), and even playing games, why not, but in English of course, because I never
really liked Italian translations (yes, we even dub video games!).
I remember my biggest fear was not being able to catch up with my friends who had a computer for years: I was so obsessed with that that I often stayed on the PC more than the 2-3 hours allowed by my parents, when they were away. Some time later, and relatively recently, I discovered that I catched up relatively soon, without even noticing it.

I’ve been allowed to access the Internet when I turned 18, because my parents were scared it could be just another bad thing, and still I found myself behind if compared to my friends, who’ve been surfing the web long before.

Only now I notice that perhaps my parents made me discover new things about PCs which my friends never bother learning, even now that they’re graduating. I remember my mum calling me for a silly pseudo-scientific divulgative program where they were describing this new, totally free operating system different from Windows who was supposed to work much better. “It said the name before… it’s Luxi… lixi… lunis…” – Linux.

When I had access to the Internet my life really changed. I do believe that unlike my friends I used the Internet for its very purpose: sharing knowledge, or, in my case, just learning. I also made a vow to myself: to surf ONLY (unless I had to) English/International websites; a vow which I’m keeping still nowadays, which seemed utterly illogic
to my friends and Italians in general.

Immediately a whole new universe opened to my eyes: I quickly learnt how to keep up-to-date on the recent events regarding computers, I learnt some rudiments of Internet and Hacking Culture (thanks ESR for all your papers) and the Open Source movement, and linux, etc. and I noticed two things:

I was definetely catching up with my friends’ “knowledge” in computing
I would have NEVER ever managed to learn even 1/10 of all you need to know about computers: the same as in life, and I was happy with it.

The Pre-academic Period

In the meantime I was studying in a Liceo Scientifico, a kind of scientific high school where basically they make you study all sort of subjects (from geography, to maths to phylosopy, to Latin) mainly focusing – they say – on Science-related disciplines. For those who don’t know, in Italy you don’t get to choose what you want to study: in
High School and University they let you choose basically a type of school, but subjects and courses cannot be changed, apart from a few exceptions.
I “chose” a particular type of scientific school (…the exception!) where basically I agreed to study an additional subject – Computer Science – in addition to all the rest, for a total of more than 30 hours per week. I studied a lot then, because my parents taught me that Culture was important, and that “if you’re ignorant you can’t do anything nowadays”. No, my parents weren’t ignorant themselves, my dad is a Mechanical Engineer and my mum a Latin/History/Italian professor …and yes, that helped my forma mentis a lot.

I studied a wide range of subjects, including something totally irrelevant with my favourite ones: English and Computing (note: I say “Computing”, not Maths), and I did quite well in the end, graduating from High School with a mark of 100/100. While I was studying Latin, Phylosophy and alikes I was thinking that at least at University I’d have studied something really more specific.
Until the end I was undecided on which faculty to choose, whether IT Engineering or Foreign Languages. I was very fond of English and languages in general, but I primarly liked computers, so I thought that if I studied IT Engineering I’d have learnt more about computers and my already half-decent knowledge of the English language would
have helped me in my studies (“Now they REQUIRE a good knowledge of English, at university”) and in my future, when I’d have started working. FOOL.

Alice in Wonderland

That was it, I remember exactly when I went to sign my pre-enrollment papers: IT Engineering. I was so happy to have made it! Now finally I would have studied what I was meant to.

On a side note, I was never too good at Maths, I don’t know why. I just didn’t like it because it felt too theorethical for me, and not as useful as I thought,
especially for programming. In High School I was taught a bit of the Pascal 3 programming language, and that turned out to be perhaps one of the most useful things I’ve ever studied.

The first disappointment came from the courses that they setup for the first year: two BIG Maths-oriented exams in particular, and Chemistry(!). What Chemistry has to do with Computer Science remained a mystery to me, people claimed that we might be asked in the future to do some programs to help studying the structure of matter and doing
chemical analysis… yes, and following the same logic I should have been studying the structure of languages, because AI programs and translators would certainly become key applications in the future.

Oddly enough, they made us just study Chemistry.

“But next year will be better” — I was thinking, after getting fairly poor results in the Maths exams — “next year we’ll study something more exciting”.

Economics.

They made us study Economics because they think that it’s useful to know something about finance and salaries, especially when you start working. That makes sense, to an extent, of course, and it was kind of interesting even. But still I didn’t study anything really useful.

This is a little lie, actually, because we actually had two programming exams (out of 17) in which they taught us a bit of C++, and THAT was interesting, and I even managed to get 30/30 out of the last one: I liked it.

I actually remember when the teacher came in, and insisted for us to use a unix emulator (Cygwin) to compile our C++ programs: people thought that “emulators” were used for running games released for a gaming console on the PC, and what the hell was unix? It looks like – they said – a bad copy of DOS with more difficult commands. (No comment)

I lived my years at University (three, counting this one which will be the last one) feeling superior to my friends for knowing more about computers but at the same time inferior to them when it came to exams: I didn’t really like most of the subjects, especially some rather abstract mathematical models which COULD BE useful, but – let’s
say it all – most people outside Italy don’t really give a sh…illing about. What’s the point in learning the demonstration of Cauchy theorem? Just use it maybe, and it would have a sense… No, they wanted you to study the demonstration and tell them about it, without missing a passage, which normally – for 2/3 of people at least – meant
“learn it by heart”.

Also, unlike in other countries, professors are more similar to Gods than clever people, apart from a few exceptions. Every professor decides how the students have to take the exams, some of them opt for having some compitini (little tests) during the semester and then the average mark on all of them (normally two or three) represents the
exam’s final mark: that’s the best, probably, but it could also mean that people can cheat trying to copy from their collegues, etc.

Normal, get on, it’s Italy!

Some professors might allow you to use the notes you took during classes, but that’s often considered a bad thing because people can potentially copy from one another (“What’s that piece of paper, is it your friend’s?” – “No, it’s part of my notes”), and they often do. On the other hand, if a professor doesn’t allow notes to be used, students
normally do their best to sneak and use them anyway.

This is Italy, after all, the place where everything can be sorted out if you’re cunning enough.

But why do some people cheat? Oh well, simply because either you devote 3 full years of your life to studying pointless crap and forgetting that you’re wasting the best years of your existence, or you have to do something to pass 10 exams a year. Because we REALLY do take 10 exams a year.

My girlfriend (who’s English and living in Italy, by the way) told me that her brother wanted to study Computing at University but switched to Politics & Journalism because they wanted him to learn Java on the very first year. I’ve never been taught Java — I had to learn it all by myself for my final thesis (see below) — but instead I learnt a ton of demonstrations of theorems and mathematical models. Great, isn’t it?

“But you knew you were going to take those exams, because they are publicly available before enrolling”.

That’s true and it makes sense, and I probably should have chosen Computer Science instead of IT Engineering if only it was considered equally important. In Italy if you study Engineering you can (after taking yet another exam) become an Engineer, which — unlike other countries — is not a competent person who knows how to fix stuff and can solve problems. Rather, he’s someone who got an important academic title who is treated like a demi-god because he knows (or should know) what’s a differential system and how can be solved but — sometimes — doesn’t know how to use it.

But he’s an Engineer, and he can find work when others can’t.

To explain this concept to non-Italian, I can summarize all this with the following:

In Italy Academic (Skool) Titles rulez – You ain’t got none? You ain’t nothin’ coz I got one and I own you.

And that’s that. In Italy knowledge is dead. (This is an exaggeration, but please try to get my point).

If you need to be competent in something, when you’re working you’ll have to do a practical course (even paying for it yourself) if some “knowledge” is needed. If there’s no risk that things can blow up, you can remain ignorant.

The Vanishing Cheshire Cat

Up to today I could leave with it, I knew that abroad the situation was hopefully different, but I started to cope with the fact that I would have got my B. Sc. and in addition I knew more stuff than some of the others who got the degree at the same time. A few months ago I had just a few exams left and I started going to the lab for my thesis project, with a friend of mine.

At that point — oddly enough — I was told to develop an application in Java, using some libraries, and actually make something fully functional and (somewhat) useful. I couldn’t believe it! I was happy on one side, and angry on the other, because NOBODY ever taught us about Java or about creating an useful application.

The Ph.D. Student who was appointed to help us with the project told us: “That’s the way it works, it’s normal that you don’t know Java, but you know a bit of C++, and now it’s time to research”. That was again very shocking: it was the first time that someone ever told me something like this, and in the end we agreed on the project.

Despite the fact we had to implement some new features and test them relatively at the last minute, we succeeded in developing the program. In particular, I actually played an important part being the one who actually researched something on Java already, and knew more about programming.

Oddly enough, my collegue would have graduated with a higher mark than me, even if he originally thought that “SSH” was nothing but a sound used to shut people up and that HTML was a proprietary standard introduced by Microsoft having something to do with web pages. If you’re reading all this mate, don’t get angry at me: I have nothing against you, I just hate the System, as usual.

He still probabally thinks that POP3 is something like the name of a band and that a shell can be found only at the sea. Mate, it’s not your fault, don’t blame me if I say this, blame the System!

I mean, I don’t consider myself an expert, but at least I’m better than that. I met students, at uni, who haven’t the faintest idea of what a sever was. And that’s pretty sad, if you ask me.

Let’s now come to the end of this apparently endless flow of thoughts: I still had an exam to pass in order to get the degree. Such exam counts 3/180 of the whole stuff we had to study in these three years (it is literally quantified like this on paper), and it’s about Digital Controls. Cool, you may think, but it actually means MORE mathematical models to solve complex(?) situations, more theorems and other crap, even if — I admit — I had to take exams worse than this one.

I admit I constantly underestimated the exam and took it various times without passing it: “it’s so small, I’ll have to pass it eventually”.

This was just the way of thinking they made us adopt, nothing more, nothing less.

I was quite busy testing my program and writing the thesis in this period, although we were literally told not to worry too much about it: “just google a bit on the net, copy and paste, and change some words if you feel guilty…”

To the guy who told me to do so: it’s just an example that is bad to read, but it’s true, you can’t deny it. I don’t blame you, because you’ve really taught me a lot about working on “proper” projects (and this is NOT sarcastic, really), I blame the System.

In the meantime I spent days running around here and there trying to sort out all the bureaucracy necessary to have all the papers ready for my degree, and I also talked to the professor who commissioned the project: he’s by far the most helpful and altruistic professor I’ve ever met, and obviously offered his complete availability for helping
us for the preparation of the degree.

I just needed to pass my last exam. It was the last one, not as complex as others I took, and this time I studied more than the previous times…

I didn’t pass it.

I don’t blame the professor, because probably he’s the only one who’s normal in the whole lot: he’s like me, I think, because I suspect he’s aware that abroad students don’t cheat and professors are not “flexible” on marks. I got 12/30, and I didn’t pass, that was it, I didn’t know his subject enough and he didn’t feel he had to help me to get the degree at all. And he’s right. I can’t blame him, but I DO blame such a “flexible” system which in the end is totally absurd. I learnt the hard way that I shouldn’t have “trusted” the Italian Way, because it has flaws.

Oddly enough, people who can’t even connect a network cable get their B.Sc., and all I get after spending months learning useful things and developing is just a load of B.S.

I learnt my lesson and I’ll probably re-take the exam, pass it, and maybe get the degree: my collegue and friend just emailed me telling me that I HAVE to help him doing the missing chapters of the thesis because he can’t write them, he’s not good at writing stuff, and doesn’t know what to write either. He’ll get his B.Sc. on September 23rd, provided that I actually decide to help him.

I hope people who read this can understand my frustration apart from blaming me for being “lazy” when it came to exams and expecting help when technically I didn’t deserve it. I probably won’t win the nobel prize or get rich like those two american students who own the most profitable Internet business ever conceivable. I’m not as special, and I don’t deserve anything special, and I never dreamt about it.

All I dreamt was being able to learn, and do something useful. It looks like it will remain just a dream, here in Italy.