(Not) too old for this *

By the end of this year it will be 30 years since I registered my first domain name (warning, your browser might throw a hissy fit, I didn’t bother to get a certificate to secure that site, it’s just there for nostalgic reasons, not worth the hassle).

Yesterday I was trying to get a colleague to deploy a simple service that would allow us to save a file on a server and download the file from the server. Apparently it’s much harder in today’s sophisticated cloud environments than it used to be.

Speaking of clouds, I did some house cleaning on various accounts, domains, mailboxes, cloud services today. I got lost multiple times in the complexities of these services (in particular I feel a new and warm form of hate for google cloud). When corporate meets software this is what we get.

I’m not really complaining, every day I’m talking with a chatbot who understands me better than most souls. It’s magic.

Yet there are moments when I miss a world when early technologies were simpler to master. There was some stuff I knew almost everything about.

But at the same time I find amazing coming to work every morning and inventing new things. For the complicated stuff now I just ask ChatGPT ;)

With great responsibilities

Having just started a company that primarily deals with large language models I’m occasionally thinking about the responsibilities that we have when we introduce a new AI agent in the digital space.

Besides preservation of the human species, a good rule that I think we should give ourselves is “avoid bullshit”, and while this rule must certainly be true for any human activity, I think it’s extremely important when you are dealing with the equivalent of BS thermo-nuclear devices.

I’m still working on my list, this is as far as I got.

Every time one of our AI agents produces an output we should ask ourselves:

  • does this text improves the life of the intended recipient?
  • will it be delivered only to the intended recipient (and not to a whole bunch of innocent bystanders)?
  • is it as efficient as it can be in the way it uses language and delivers its message?

If these minimum parameters are not met, the agent should be destroyed.

As with everything else, AI is not the cause of this, there has been plenty of wasteful content well before a computer could start mimicking the output of a sapiens. And because these LLM models have been trained on a lot of this useless noise, they are extremely good at generating more.

So even before you worry if AI can get the wrong president elected or robots can terminate humanity, just make sure that you are not accidentally leaving the BS tap open when you leave.

40 years later

I started thinking about this post on the Mac 40th anniversary yesterday. By this morning in the shower I had the whole idea fully mapped. Thankfully I then checked and it turns out I had already written the whole post 10 years ago. So I won’t do it again.

I have been reflecting on that moment of 40 years ago lately, it has been one of the few truly transformational discoveries. The second one for me would have been in 1994 when I first saw the web, the third one in 2007 when the iPhone was launched.

I suppose that these moments feel significant in hindsight, because I’m still using those same technologies every day. I must have been super excited when I used a Newton for the first time in 1993, but I can hardly remember that day.

I have been more and more involved with AI and Large Language Models for the last year, and this definitely feels as another one of those moments. A class of technology which changes dramatically the way we deal with computing.

I’m also looking forward to Vision Pro. No idea how good or transformational it will be, but I will definitely be at the front of the line as soon as it becomes available on the old continent.

Happy Mac Anniversary everyone! Let’s see where we end up in 10 more years.

I love logos

Sometimes it happens when I find myself walking in a new neighborhood, or maybe when I watch business parks outside a town while passing on a train: I’m fascinated by all these shops and industrial sheds with small companies logos on them. All these logos…

Very rarely the graphic quality is any good, but I have designed enough logos in my career to remember the excitement when each one of mine was brand new. I had spent time thinking, drafting, drawing, testing… and then I was more or less happy. For a short moment that logo was beautiful enough to present to a client.

And then the design was enlarged, printed, cut out, hanged in front of a building. That was a great moment, when you would finally see months of work taking shape in a physical object.

It doesn’t matter that after some time you would start finding the flaws in your design, or that at some point you would find them completely embarrassing.

Every time I see a terrible logo on a wall, I think of that amazing moment of pride and joy.

Heat maps

Once upon a time there was the app Moves, which I used for a few years to track everywhere I was going. From Moves I could export data and generate heat maps of my movements. It was great, but then FB bought Moves, and the app died. Strava offers similar maps, which are not as detailed (I don’t track everything with Strava), but still I find all these maps absolutely fascinating. These are the most beaten paths around my two homes.

I hope this message finds you well

In the last couple of weeks I have been involved in multiple recruitment processes and I find fascinating how candidates have been using (presumably) ChatGPT to interact with possible employers.

In one case we are actually recruiting “Prompt engineers”, so it’s somewhat appropriate for them to seek AI help, but the standardisation and verbosity of the language generated is getting a bit annoying.

GPT-4 actually has amazing language capabilities, it can write in any style, any language, any dialect, as long as it is properly prompted or trained. This is not the case for the vast majority of messages we receive, one of the key sentences that I have started to notice is the “I hope this message finds you well” which ChatGPT seems to be using way more than the usual folks I usually exchange messages with.

I have also developed a certain sensibility in finding reused language: when tasked with responding to a “why should we hire you?” type of question, I could often read my own words from the company “About us” page, just slightly reshuffled to answer the question. I could easily reverse engineer the simple prompt used to generate the message.

I’m sure that we will look back at these early steps fondly, soon AIs will be so well integrated in our ecosystems that they will be able to generate language exactly in our style before we will have even started thinking about it.

In the meanwhile I’m considering setting up a filter to delete all email messages starting with “I hope this message finds you well”.

Robot wars are coming

I recently wrote a little script that reads new messages in my mailbox, uses GPT-4 to decide if they are unrequested sales pitches, and deletes them if they are. Works like charm.

The next step of the project (which most likely will never happen) would have been to engage writers in endless conversations, expressing interest in their products but always finding an excuse to postpone a call. I have the prompt ready, it wouldn’t be hard to implement.

Everywhere I look there are companies developing little CRM agents to generate an ever growing mass of ever more convincing (groan) sales messages.

On the users side of the fence, Google has already plugged Bard into Gmail, Apple is rumored to come out with their own LLM tricks in the next versions of their OSs, while Microsoft is adding AI copilots to every piece of software they own.

Some say that the third world war will be fought by robots. I think it will happen in our mailboxes.

The new programming language

For years and years I have been telling people something along the lines of “it used to be that you had to write books to share ideas that change the world, now it’s time to write software”.

Well… we might be back to books after all.

I have been spending a lot of my time playing and working with OpenAI tools, both ChatGPT and their excellent API. The more I get comfortable with this technology, the more I appreciate the ability it has to interpret even the smaller nuances of human language.

I use ChatGPT a lot to generate Python code. I don’t have enough programming skills to write my own software, but I have been explaining to other people what I wanted for more than 30 years. The ability of GPT4 to understand my explanation and generate code that I can then run to solve whatever I’m trying to solve is just amazing.

The fact that at the end of my long chats I have to copy and paste the code to get it to run in my specific context is just a matter of applying some integration glue (ChatGPT already has a code interpreter built in), meaning that we are just a few steps away to be able to program computer in English (or Italian, Hindi, etc).

On top of this there’s the training part.

Recently I copied and pasted an API documentation page into ChatGPT and asked to write a script which would interact with those API and perform a simple task. The script didn’t run correctly at the first try, it took about 20 minutes to get there, but were are almost there. I don’t need to learn things, I can get GPT to understand them and then help me get to my goals.

It’s a bit more complicated than copy and paste, but the same can be done with whole books or entire libraries. You can turn books to training material for AI and then use the AI to apply the knowledge in the book.

So forget software… write books!

AI humor

For the last few days I have been playing with an silly idea for a joke, I wanted expand and write it down somewhere, but before doing so I decided to try to feed the core idea to ChatGPT, just to see what the fuss is all about.

This was my prompt:

Write a piece about Elon Musk bidding to buy the afterworld, god resigning from CEO, apple running heaven, google running purgatory, facebook running hell with their metaverse technology, with all current users getting a free account

This is the unedited output:

In a shocking turn of events, it was announced today that Elon Musk has made a bid to purchase the afterworld. The details of the deal have not been made public, but sources close to the situation have stated that Musk plans to use the afterworld as a destination for his Neuralink implants, allowing humans to experience eternal life within a virtual reality.

In response to the news, God has announced that they will be stepping down as CEO of the afterworld, citing the new ownership as a conflict of interest. It is unclear who will take over as CEO in God’s place.

In related news, it has been reported that Apple will be running heaven, with Tim Cook taking on the role of celestial CEO. Google will be in charge of purgatory, with Sundar Pichai at the helm, and Facebook will be running hell using their new metaverse technology. All current users will be given free accounts in the afterlife of their choice.

This news has caused a stir among religious communities, with many questioning the ethics of privatizing the afterlife. However, supporters of the move argue that it will bring much-needed innovation and efficiency to the eternal world. Only time will tell how this unprecedented change will play out.

😳

The end of photos

A friend this morning pointed me to an interesting article critical of the current trend of using AI to colorize and restore old photos.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, I like old photos, they are like time travel, I have spent quite some time browsing collections of old photos, and I find old restored photos or videos absolutely fascinating.

But I am very mindful of the fact that when we use AI to treat images, we are actually putting into images information that wasn’t there to begin with. And this doesn’t only apply to old photos: every image we capture with a modern phone is heavily processed by AI.

What we are storing in our phones and sharing on social media is a mix of reality and what a computer thinks reality should look like.

This made me think of a Marques Brownlee’s video I watched recently about DALL·E 2, a project by OpenAI that generates images from a text description.

For example, this is what he got asking for “a blue apple in a bowl of oranges”:

You can see more examples on MKBHD Twitter post.

What is striking is how photo-realistic this computer generated image is.

Forget about AI fixing existing photos, soon we won’t need to take photos, we will just tell a computer to generate one for us.

At that point reality will stop making sense. I will be able to ask for a photo of me, the pope and Fidel Castro riding a pony, and will get a perfectly credible image.

I think that this will change our relationship with photography.

20 Years

Last weekend was the 20th anniversary of my first posts on this blog.

Well, it’s not really this blog. It wasn’t a blog back then, it was a weblog. And it wasn’t running on WordPress, it was running on Radio Userland. And I wasn’t even using this domain name.

It’s a bit like that idea that all our cells change every few years, but we stay ourselves. We just get older.

“20 years” is something I find myself saying more and more often these days. I’ve been blogging for 20 years. I’ve had that pair of shoes for 20 years. I’ve known that person for 20 years.

There isn’t anything special with “20 years”, it’s just that it suddenly went from meaning “a lot of time” to meaning “just recently”.

So, this is it, I don’t have much else to say about this, but I didn’t want the date to just drift by. I guess that something that changed recently is that I feel much less compulsion to broadcast what I think, and I don’t miss it at all.

Well… maybe not just recently… more in the last 20 years.

Travelling between the UK and Italy in August of 2021

Rules change so quickly that I don’t think this will be of any help to anyone, it’s just a note to my future self, to be surprised at how hard it was to travel during this summer… or how easy, depending on what the future will bring.

Part one: from London to San Martino del Carso

I had to take an antigen test 48 hours before flying (cost £39.00)

Had to fill up the EU Digital Passenger Locator Form

Once I had the PDF files for the two things above, I was able to check-in online with British Airways (when you check in there’s a dreadful message suggesting that the document must be verified, but I received a confirmation seconds later that everything was okay)

At the airport everything was pretty much as usual, no additional checks were performed before boarding.

Once on our way to Venice, flight attendands distributed two horrid forms, on paper, 37th generation of photocopy, typical Italian bureaucracy language: one titled “Self Declaration Form Covid-19” and one “Formal Statement Pursuant To Law DPR N. 445/2000 ART. 46,47”. The whole plane scrambled to fill up the forms using the only three pens available (if there ever was a super-spreader event…).

Before landing, they collected the first form.

Once landed in Venice, everything was pretty much normal, quick passport control at the automatic gates, and I was out.

Nobody ever asked to see or collect the second form. Typical.

Once home I had to self isolate for 5 days and notify the local health authorities that I had arrived. After some googling I found the right form on a web site and submitted it. Italian health care is managed at regional level, so every region spends some stupid amount of money to build exactly the same thing 20 times… but at least this worked.

The next morning I got a phone call from a very nice operator who booked for me a 5th day PCR test, which is provided for free by the healthcare system (even if I’m not registered). Wonderful!

Part two: in Italy

In Italy there’s a requirement for a “Covid Pass” or, as everybody call it “Green Pass”, to eat inside in bars or restaurants and to attend other public events. You get a 48 hours Covid Pass after a test, or a more permanent one after vaccination.

I contacted the local authorities to ask what did I have to do to get my vaccination in the UK recognised by Italian authorities, but got no reply.

After a few days it emerged that the latest version of the Covid Pass verification app would correctly decode the QR code provided by the NHS app (the one in the Travel section). I downloaded the app from the store, and indeed it worked perfectly! I even found a nice little web app which converts any qr code to a nice card for my Wallet on iOS.

I was all set… but I never visited any location requiring a Covid Pass.

Once I got back to the UK, I received an instructions email on how to request an Italian covid pass in my region (need to send a copy of the UK vaccination certificate and passport to an email address).

Part three: back to the UK

48 hours before leaving for the UK I had to take another antigen test, €35 from a local private provider.

Then I had to order a second day PCR test from a British provider (since I’m double jabbed I don’t need to quarantine on my way back), another £43.00

Once I had both results, I was able to fill up the UK Government Passenger Locator Form.

Nothing was required to get the BA boarding pass.

Once at the airport, before boarding they checked if I had the Passenger Locator Form (which, of course, they call “PLF” just to keep you confused) and the negative test result. At that point they gave me another paper form to fill up, and a printed boarding pass. They collected them both while boarding.

Rest of the trip was nice and uneventful, again no controls whatsoever leaving the airport, once I got home I found the “test at home” kit.

Got my fourth test in two weeks on the second day, shipped it back to the provider, got my result in 24 hours… back to the usual life.

Can’t say that it was too hard, but testing is more expensive than actual flight tickets, and I wouldn’t be doing this once a month as I used to.

A week with my Oculus

When Facebook announced Oculus Quest 2 last October I almost immediately visited their web site and put one in the shopping cart. But then I didn’t buy it.

£299 is a relatively affordable price, and it’s something I really wanted to try playing with in order to understand where this whole VR thing is going. I had tried headsets before, including when I visited Facebook HQ a couple of years ago, but I wasn’t really sure about the quality of the Quest 2: did it have enough resolution? Was it fast enough, considering that it’s a self contained device, without a beefed up PC to calculate triangles position in real time?

Then a colleague brought one to the office. I tried it on for 10 minutes. I went home and ordered one.

Here’s a few notes after about one week.

It’s pretty cool and well thought device, you can see that this is not a first generation product.

I had not realised that you could “see through” using the built in IR cameras. These cameras are for tracking, so no great quality, but the fact that you can poke your head out of the safe grid and see your room is one of the coolest features imho.

Watching VR content is interesting and different. There isn’t a huge amount of stuff, but for example visiting the White House with Obama was cool. Sitting in the Oval office and looking around is completely different than watching a documentary on a TV, however large it is.

Playing is fun. I bought a sniper game, joined the Italian resistance during WW2 and I have been shooting Nazis since. The fact that you can move your body to peek out of a hiding place is awesome.

I tried an app that allows me to create multiple huge virtual screens for my Mac. It works well and it’s pretty cool, but since I’m wearing the headset I can’t see my keyboard. While I can use the keyboard without watching most of the time, it turns out that I still need to peek at it every once in a while. It’s an interesting experiment but I don’t see myself really using this anytime soon.

I haven’t tried any collaboration tools yet. I think that not being able to write quickly in real time will not make using these virtual whiteboards very effective. I spent 5 minutes trying to put a sticky note on a wall… fun, but in a real meeting it would have been frustrating.

Overall it’s a pretty good toy, I’m happy I got it and I think I will mostly be using this for games and content.

Most likely Apple will introduce a version of this sometime soon, it will be 3 times more expensive, will run a version of iOS called vrOS, it will be much better and will take this whole industry mainstream.

Got a bunch of Nazis waiting for me, see you soon.

Figment

I’m in Seattle.

There’s an Illy coffee sign, a big red cube rotating on top of a pole at an intersection. I consider how Illy has become an international brand.

I’m in a diner. The person I’m with tells me a story about an asian restaurant with food so spicy that the owner gave him direction to the toilets, in case the food was too hot. But my friend hardly broke a sweat while eating it.

I’m about to tell him my usual story of how my tolerance for spicy food has increased over the years.

Then the 6:15am alarm goes off.

I wonder where this story came from. I mean, I know I imagined it, but it’s not as obvious as other times what memories triggered this fantasies. This didn’t look at all as the Seattle I remember, I don’t recall seeing the Illy cube sign, I literally don’t understand the food/toilet reference…

I now wonder how much of this story I actually dreamed, and how much of it I made up while trying to remember the dream for the last hour, and then writing it down, adding thin layers of details, turning fantasies into memories.

Oh well, time to get to work… unless I wake up.

Or you do.

My July 2021 routine

We go to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we work from home for the rest of the week. This is more or less the new routine.

Even when we go to the office, mostly I don’t use my desk, I sit in our conference room. After all the whole point is meeting other people. Basically my office desk is my dining table at home (the fact that I live across the street from the office makes this whole thing pretty easy to manage).

My office desk / dining table, early July, 2021..

We check ourselves on office days with the freely provided lateral flow tests (or at least I do). These are easy enough to use and at this point not too uncomfortable, especially once I learned how to perform the part of the test that comes after the swab while sneezing violently.

A little problem with this new routine is deliveries: I need to plan deliveries at home or at the office based on where I’m planning to be. Not too difficult with next day deliveries, but it can get tricky with “3 to 5 days” ones.

As of today I don’t think that we will ever go back to a full time office routine. Maybe it will increase to 3 days in / 2 days out. We’ll see.

Be good. Stay safe. Check the last episode of our podcast.

Thoughts for food

I spend a lot of time thinking about food. Eating, cooking, buying, finding, it’s all about food. When I get distracted during meditation, I usually find myself planning a meal or thinking of a recipe.

I travel for food. I will schlep to the other side of town to find an ingredient I need. I only buy specific ingredients from specific shops. I’m not a foodie, I’m a snob.

When I moved to the UK a relative I met at some family celebration asked all concerned: “can you find good food in London?”. Apparently they had visited years earlier and ended up eating some horrible Italian food in the wrong hotel.

Needless to say, London might be one of the best places on the planet to eat well: any kind of food from any corner of the planet is available in London. Maybe not cheap, but available.

My new basil.

But there are some small differences between here and back home that still baffle me.

For example, in any Italian supermarket there’s a wide range of frozen soups. Mixed vegetables for any type of minestrone you can think, just add water, boil a bit, and you are done. You can get them with beans, with mushrooms, with chestnuts, with barley… you name it. But here? Nothing. No such thing as frozen soups that I could find.

But here I can find frozen puff pastry made with butter. No such thing exist in Italy: they always replace butter with some horrid vegetable oil I don’t even want to consider (snob, remember?).

Or even something as simple as fresh herbs, which are available in every single supermarket here (probably imported from warmer climates) is a rarity in Italy. I remember trying unsuccessfully to find some fresh mint a couple of Christmases ago, and not finding it. And don’t even get me started with fresh coriander… no way to find it in Italy (but I did find it a couple of times hopping to the other side of the border in Slovenia).

Buon appetito.

Variants

Got my jab last week.

Very well organised vaccination center. In and out in 20 minutes. Go a shot of Pfizer. Stirred, not shaken, with three olives.

I didn’t have any side effects this time. So far, so good.

Now the concern seems to be the Indian variant, which is rapidly becoming the dominant variant in the UK. So maybe they won’t be removing all limitations next month after all.

Most countries which had very widespread contaminations developed their own variant, in Italy the “English variant” had huge success.

Here they actually call it “the Kent variant”. Must be something like the “Crema Inglese” (or Crème anglaise), which doesn’t exist in England. Then the “Brazilian variant” . The “South African Variant”. Now the “Indian Variant”…

I wonder why we didn’t manage to market an “Italian variant”. We are usually good at this stuff! Everybody would have been happy to get the Italian Variant. It would have been way more stylish and expensive than all other variants. An opportunity missed. Come to think of it, there hasn’t been a very successful US of A variants either. No Starts and Stripes variant.

The weather got a little warmer today, hopefully we are at the end of this endless cold spring.

I have a few meetings booked for the next weeks. In person. In town.

There’s a whole new sensitivity around meetings, everyone has a different perception of risk and is more or less willing to travel/meet/engage. There’s a whole new language around asking politely if somebody wants to meet in person or if they would prefer a zoom call.

I guess I’m more or less in the middle of this spectrum: I’m very cautious, get tested all the time (you can get free lateral flow tests here, which is a great thing), wear my mask. But at the same time I’m happy to start booking a few meetings in person or hang out with a few colleagues in our office.

Stay safe. Be kind. Get a Martini.

Odd Ads

Three examples of targeted communication campaigns I noticed in the last week.

M&S Asparagus

Got this in the mail as soon as I got home from the grocery store. As we discussed recently on the SotN Podcast, it’s not that you don’t know that these companies have your data, it’s when and how (or if) they decide to let you know which might be disconcerting. In this case, I felt that the immediate message about a purchase, without me asking anything, went a bit too far.

State of Israel

This just happened in the regular rotation of ads on YouTube. It’s a 30 seconds commercial with scenes of rockets and bombings and people screaming, which finishes with this. Interesting how states too can now completely bypass the press and deliver their messages to carefully targeted audiences.

Simplicity Cremations

Well… they will always have business, and they need to advertise too. But why YouTube? And why me?

On the way to normal

I’m free!

I’ve done my 10 days of self-isolation, I took my tests, answered all the government phone calls, and now I’m free to do… well, not exactly everything, but at least I can leave my flat.

As of today some of the restriction have been removed in England (we can eat inside restaurants, yay), but a few are still in place. According to the roadmap, more restrictions will be lifted in June. Every time they give back some freedom there’s so much enthusiasm that I wouldn’t be surprised if by July they will make smoking in bars legal again ;)

Last week I’ve been to our office. There were just two of us and I can’t say it felt in any way special. I don’t really see myself doing the every day like we used to. It feels strange to think we ever did.

Office life.

I also went to Central London over the weekend. It was a bit sad to notice all the empty shops on Oxford and Regent streets. I didn’t really care about most of them, the only shop that I did visit and I won’t be able to visit anymore is T.M. Lewin, it looks like they have gone on-line only.

In other news, the weather sucks, nothing like the beautiful spring we had last year, but I should get my first dose of vaccine this week. Exciting stuff!

Be good. Or don’t get caught.

Quarantined again

Last Sunday I flew back to London, so now I’m on day #5 of my 10 days compulsory quarantine for people travelling back to the UK. It’s strange to be back in my flat, lots of memories of the last quarantine. I’m also getting daily calls from UK government track and tracing team, reminding me every day of the rules to follow (I do wonder if this is the best way to user their time).

I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again.

The trip was quite good. Almost no people at the airport in Venice, plenty of room on the flight, I got from landing at Heathrow to walking into my flat in about 50 minutes. Never had it so good.

My groceries were delivered perfectly on time, I have booked both my vaccine shots, and I’m adding actual in person meetings to my calendar. As smooth as China silk.

I turned 50 last week. While I appreciate that it’s just a day like any other, I have the feeling that I’m at the beginning of something new. We’ll see how it goes 🙃.

Stay safe. If you can, go get a beer.

I am very well, thank you.

For the last six months I have been eating less and exercising more. Besides what is reported by my scale, one other progress indicator is my “Cardio Fitness” measured in VO2 max as measured by my watch on my daily walks.

Recently I zoomed out on the Apple Health chart on my phone:

I love the fact that no matter what, by the end of this month I will move from my current “below average” condition to a pretty healthy “above average” situation. One of the advantages of the upcoming big five-o birthday, I suppose.

Charts aside, I feel in great shape. Even considering the several little health issues bugging me, I guess that good health is much more in one’s attitude than actual measurements.

So I’m doing very well, thank you. And how do you do?

Shitty software kills people

How the public healthcare system in Italy is using software to support the vaccination effort is appaling.

I’ve spent a good part of the last 30 years trying to convince people that software is important. Of course I was mostly trying to sell something, but I do believe that software is perhaps the most effective leverage homo sapiens has ever created, an incredibly effective multiplier of effort, especially since computers have been connected to a global network.

And while this has been widely understood all around the world for a relatively long time (to put things in perspective, this blog is 19 years old today), decision makers in Italy have never taken this seriously.

Yes, there have been forever companies controlled by the public administration, dedicated to creating software for its citizens, but they have always been a joke. Just huge organisations, filled with mostly mediocre people, with politically nominated leadership which would change at every election.

They have never been able to produce anything even remotely decent: just old technology, hardly working and unusable, simply projecting a bit further the horrible and mind numbing bureaucracy of the state.

Now this software is killing people.

Because while we are locked down and in the middle of a pandemic, after years and years of development, of citizen portals, of centralized booking systems, of call centres, of digitised clinical records, if you think you are at risk and you want to get vaccinated you have to download a bloody pdf.

Then you have to print it.

You fill it up with a pen, trying to remember, find or recover information which you might or might not have access to (but that you know for a fact that it’s stored in multiple databases behind some firewall). Then go to a physical location with your little printed form, queue up, and hope for the best.

I understand the complexity of software. I know that managing large amounts of data across multiple organisations might be difficult. But I also know that it is not that difficult, especially considering the time and money that has been spent.

I can see how the system is working in the UK. It is possible to receive a notification from your GP. It is possible to book online. It is possible to manage all these records in a state of emergency. Of course there have been problems, glitches, bugs and fuck-ups, but overall the system is holding up amazingly well.

In Italy we are witnessing the results of decades of ignorance in power, and frankly I don’t have much hope for change.

Thinking different

When “this” all started about a year ago, we were all wondering how long would it last and if some of the changes we were forced into would actually stick in the long term. We can’t really say, since we are not out of “this” yet, but I wanted to write down a few notes today, perhaps to come back to them at some point in the future, and check out what actually happened.

Here we go with my list: in the 12 months…

I haven’t been to India and I haven’t met any of my Indian colleagues in person, but I have built this beautiful Lego auto rickshaw.
  • I have not spent a whole day in the office.
  • I have met some of my colleagues in person half a dozen times, two only once, one I never met (she was hired post lockdown). But we do talk every day.
  • We have started working on three major project with new startups, without having ever met the founders in person.
  • I have not had a single business meeting in person. The last one was at the Institute of Directors on Mach 11, 2020.
  • I did pay for my IoD membership for the last year, haven’t swiped my card once. I don’t think I will renew this month.
  • I also paid for my memberships at Kew and the V&A, and hardly used them. But I will keep those active, hoping to go back soon.
  • I didn’t wear a suit or a jacket or my dress shoes. I did wear one of my waistcoats on Christmas day.
  • I haven’t had any Indian food. Nor Thai. Chinese just once. A couple of Vietnamese and a few supermarket sushis. I miss Asian food.
  • I have only been on four short flights, haven’t travelled anywhere except Italy and the UK.

I might add more items later, I would love to read yours in the comments below.

One year and counting

Yesterday it was exactly one year since my first quarantine post.

The day before we had decided to close the office, at least for a week, and then see what would happen. One year later I have gone back to the office not more than 5 times, and never spent any time there doing any regular “day at the office” kind of work.

But what a year, uh?!?

While quite a few of my friends in the UK are getting vaccinated, as of today here in Italy we are back in full “red zone” lockdown. Oh, and my flight back to London has been cancelled, so now I should fly back to London on May 1st.

London… I think I have been less times in central London in the last year than in the previous dozen years. It’s odd.

But I have definitely spent more time at home in Italy than in the last six years (since I moved to London). It has been good.

Photo of our house taken earlier today, we need to replace the deck and I was documenting the status quo.

Red zone means that you cannot leave your municipality, unless you have real needs, and in that case you must print a permit in case you get stopped by police.

These limitations to movement between municipalities got me thinking about borders. A while back I came across this post from 2007 I wrote on the day Slovenia entered the Schengen treaty, and how incredible it felt when that border disappeared. We were just not used to borders anymore. Now I’m mindful of the borders of my tiny municipality, aware that if I want to leave it I need to carry some sort of pass (let alone travelling to another country, which is a much more complicated and in some cases completely forbidden matter).

Of course this will all go away soon enough, but I think that I will be even more mindful crossing borders (especially when I will have to cross the border to the UK for the first time after Brexit).

Keep calm, get vaccinated and carry on.

Down memory lane

This week I renewed for another couple of years my first internet domain: studioidea.it. I haven’t been using it for years, but it’s a piece of my past I just cannot let go. Who knows, maybe I will use it again some day.

I registered the domain in November of 1995. Official records say that it was registered in January 96, but I’m pretty sure it was 95. Probably they had not established modern protocols for domain registrations, or perhaps they had not invented calendars yet, I don’t remember.

Anyway, a little calculation revealed that sometime in the last year I passed the threshold of having spent more than half of my life connected to the Internet. Which sounds like a lot, but it also means that I have very clear memories of life before being online. Many people I work with just don’t have that notion, if not from the adventurous stories of us old farts. Many people I work with are younger of my domain name. Can you imagine?

Speaking of memories, I read that Fry’s Electronics shut down their stores this week. I remember going to Fry’s with my dad for the first time in the early 90s. At the time we would visit San Francisco every January for the yearly pilgrimage to Mac World. Discovering a shop which sold under the same roof computers, consumer electronics, junk food, books, electronic components and every other product a nerd my fancy buying made me think for the first time that there were other people like me on this planet (but maybe not in my neighborhood).

I visited Fry’s shops countless other times. I have fond memories of taking there several friends over the years (mostly to the Western themed one in Palo Alto). Last time I went after a long hiatus was in 2018, and it already felt like something from the past. In the post Amazon world a place like that didn’t made much sense anymore.

In other news, it’s the warmest end of February on record in Italy, and I have booked my flight back to London for the 6th of April. I booked before realising that Easter is on the 4th, so now I will have to figure out how to get a Covid test (with an English certificate) on Easter weekend. It’s going to be an interesting challenge.

That’s all folks, enjoy the early spring if you can, stay safe, be kind.

Happy February

Another month flew by, and not much has changed. The sun is rising about 20 minutes earlier than at my last post, and we should be gaining another 40 minutes this month. This is relevant because every morning I wait for some light before going out for my walk: my days are getting noticeably longer.

I have finished listening to Obama’s audio book (interesting but long), and I’m now enjoying P.G. Wodehouse read by good ol’ Stephen Fry. Always a pleasure.

Sunrise on the Carso hills, one of these frosty mornings.

In other news, we have just posted a new episode of our podcast. If you want to hear Euan and I chatting about current things, you can find us on Apple, RSS or just clicking below.

You will appreciate how careful we are about finding new problems without ever trying to find any solutions ;->

Not much else to add, I’m still in Italy, with no real plans to head back to the UK anytime soon (perhaps mid-March?). It looks like they are doing a much better job at vaccinating people than in the rest of Europe, so it will be worth going back just to get in line for my jab.

That’s all for today. Toodle-oo, pip-pip and all that.

What a difference a day makes

Well… here we are: it’s 2021!

I was asking myself, why would a date change make any difference to what is happening to us all?

I guess that while viruses are not aware of calendars, people are, and it seems that a lot of people are expecting a lot of change: the sheer force of these expectations will move something.

And some change is already happening. Brexit has already happened. Italy is preparing to spend a big chunk of EU money to try to reboot the economy. Trump is on his way out of the White House. It sounds like the new front of the identity politics battle is going to be vaccines. Change.

I have spent the last five days of 2020 mostly in bed with dizziness and nausea due to an inner ear disorder. No food, no talk, no screens and 18 hours of sleep a day. Time for meditation. People pay good money for this type of experiences!

Anyway, while still a bit off balance, I’m starting to feel better this year.

Fog captured by smoke tree flowers on one of my morning walks.

The UK seem to be heading for a long period of lock-downs, so I think I will stay in Italy a little bit longer than originally planned. I’m missing London, but there’s no point going through the whole process of travelling to another country and then still be missing London while confined in my flat in Ealing.

If 2020 taught me anything, it is that there’s little point in planning for the future and even less on dwelling on the past, but most of all the importance of having a positive view on the moment. I’m not any good at this, but I think I’m improving. Hey… right now I’m all dizzy, and I haven’t had a drop of alcohol yet. How cool is that?

You all stay safe, be kind, and enjoy this first day of a new year.

Magic morning

It’s the shortest days of the year, in the morning I have to wait for sunrise before going out for my walk. On some days the colours are just fantastic. This was one of those days.

PS: those who post photos tagged #nofilter have no idea of how modern smartphone photography works.

A code orange region with a code yellow weather.

We are in lockdown level “orange” in our region. Which is better than red, but worse than yellow. Shops are open, restaurants are closed, we can’t leave our municipality unless we have a good reason. There are a lot of discussions in the family around what count as a “good reason”. In any case this situation has zero impact on my life: I go out for a walk in the early morning, and then spend the rest of the day on zoom calls. Every. Single. Day.

To make things even more exciting, today the news are reporting that there’s a “yellow” bad weather alarm. Actually the weather has been exceptionally good since I got back, with a long serie of crystal clear days. Today it has changed, and we finally got our first dark, windy, rainy, snowy, cold winter day.

Beautiful weather.

In other news, for the last couple of months I’ve been using an app to track calories intake and my weight. With a little attention and no big sacrifices I’ve lost a whole bunch of kilograms: let’s just say that I’m back in the 80s, which had not happened since the 90s.

I’m also starting to think about heading back to the UK in early January. Haven’t booked a flight yet. We’ll see how the situation evolves in the next few weeks.

Chatting with my wife we were wondering who of us will get the vaccine first next year. At this point I cannot really say if I trust more the Brits or the Italians with anything healthcare related.

Stay safe, be good: it’s almost Christmas.

New Normal Random Thoughts #11

I have been back home in Italy for 10 days, and it looks like we are heading for a new lockdown.

Back in England I was waiting for my new driving licence. It was one of the reason I went back in September. It was supposed to arrive in three weeks, but of course there had been Covid related delays, and when I called the DVLA they had no idea of the status of my application. My main concern was my passport, which I had to send them as proof of identity. I could still travel with my Italian identity card, but the idea of my passport being left for a couple of months, all by itself, with the Royal Mail was not reassuring.

Luckily, the very day before I was supposed to leave, two envelopes arrived, with my passport and my brand new UK driving licence. It expires on April 28 2041. I’m counting on the fact that by then cars will self drive and I won’t have to renew it.

The colours on my hills are magic in this season. I’ve been enjoying them in my daily early morning walks.

Once I got back to Italy I was supposed to be tested and self-quarantined until I got the results. There was zero information on how to get tested at the airport, the police woman who checked my passport didn’t have a number or any other useful information.

After some useless phone calls and some digging on a number of local healthcare web sites, I found an email address. I sent a message and within five minutes I had a reply! Next morning we went to a drive-through testing facility near a local hospital, there was no queue, got swabbed and a few days later a nice lady called to say that I was negative and free to go.

So here we go, two experiences with European bureaucracy which turned out to be not bad at all.

Stay safe. Stay home. Vote. Hug your pet.

New Normal Random Thoughts #10

So I’m flying back to Italy this week. I don’t know how the situation has changed there over the last six weeks, while I more or less follow the news I’m missing the day to day experience, but I’m looking forward to get back to what seems to be a much less stressful environment.

Meanwhile I’m loosing some of the admiration I had for my new home, this article on the NY Times captures well the feeling and the situation in London:

The current crisis seems exacerbated by an offshoot of the very virtue celebrated in the conventional historical narrative — an admirable refusal to bend. The national mantra, “keep calm and carry on,” seems to have been reconfigured into the misguided notion that nothing is amiss.

The sense of permanent confusion here is just unnecessarily stressful, there’s a continuous flow of contrasting information coming from all sides, and while the Prime Minister likes to compare himself to good old Winston, instead of delivering “we shall never surrender” speeches they seem to be afraid that shutting down pubs would trigger an insurrection. While I have always found the tradition of pubs interesting, I had never realised before the importance of the “right to get drunk” felt by what appear to be sizable parts of the population.

Weekly laundry in 2020.

Then last week there was a debacle with the track and tracing programme (which government here defines “world-beating”), where some 16,000 test results were lost for a few days.

Many wrote that the problem was somehow related to using Excel to process some of the data. I feel bad for whoever was in charge of setting up this whole system: I have recommended myself to just dump data to Excel if you need a quick way to manipulate large tables: it’s almost as available as a web browser and it is usually a much faster and more effective tool than building custom software.

So while I don’t know what really happened, I’m pretty sure that whoever had to put together a highly scaleable solution with little time and resources and then hand it over to thousands of untrained users is not the one who chose to call it “world-beating”.

Meanwhile on the streets and the shops of London there’s still plenty of people not following social distancing rules, and recently I’ve heard been defined “fascists” those shops imposing them in a slightly more assertive way.

On Thursday I’m leaving this all behind. I’m not saying that everything is going to be perfect, but at least we have plenty of experience with fascists in Italy.

Hope to be back soon, in the meanwhile be kind, and good luck.

New Normal Random Thoughts #9

Two weeks since I came back to the UK, three weeks to when I go back to Italy. I’m not counting the hours, but I wonder how much worse the situation is going to get in these three weeks.

Yesterday I installed the brand new UK contact tracing app. It has a couple of features more than the Italian one: it tells you the risk level in your area and allows to scan QR codes that are supposedly installed in all venues. Tried it yesterday at the local Vietnamese restaurant. It works, and it takes away the annoyance of having to fill name and contact information by hand on a notepad, which might help make it a bit more popular.

But this app arrived almost four months later than the Italian one, gotta wonder how many cases could have been tracked in this period if the local authorities had not tried to develop their own approach against Google and Apple’s one, only to end up having to give up and implementing what everybody else already had.

Alongside the new app, a new set of social distancing rules have been introduced, as confusing as ever. Now you can only have 15 guests at a wedding, but you can have 30 at a funeral. I’m not saying that there isn’t a logic in this, but it makes the whole effort feel less serious.

View of the Thames, last Sunday at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.

Meanwhile it’s Autumn, temperature and leaves are falling, and it turns out that in London’s chilly mornings wearing the mask keeps your face warm, making it almost comfortable. Soon we will feel naked without.

Be safe, keep warm, and wherever you are, install that tracing app.

New Normal Random Thoughts #8

I’ve been back for a week, and it mostly feels like lockdown again.

But somebody in government did spend time to come up with new slogan: “wash hands, cover face, make space”, brilliantly shortened to “hands, face, space”. FFS.

We have met in the office a couple of times, it was nice but there clearly is no appetite for going more than a day a week from anyone on the team. So I’m just doing zoom call after zoom call sitting in my flat, going out occasionally for a walk around the block or to get some groceries. Just like April.

I have booked my flight back to Italy in mid October. I would have booked earlier but I needed to renew my driving licence and I’m waiting to get it back. Besides the obvious comforts I have in Italy, the situation seems to be much more under control there than here. Who would have thought I would have ever said this?

Guess where I would rather be…

It feels like the open society where all ideas are considered and discussed ceases being an advantage when you need most of the population to follow some rules. And here it just seems impossible to get clear simple rules. There are always “buts” and exceptions and discussions and changes and opinions, and everything becomes messy and confused.

For example, while most people wear masks in public buildings, for some mysterious reason employees in supermarkets don’t. Why? No idea. But it just contributes to the madness.

Meanwhile numbers keep climbing, local lockdowns are ordered across the country and a national lockdown is quite a possibility. I’m not even sure I will be allowed to travel in a month time.

Walk in the park.

Be safe. Be kind. Hands, face, space. ??‍♂️

New Normal Random Thoughts #7

I’m back in London!

The new normal of travel appears to include a lot of forms:

  • There was the form to travel in Italy, which was easily filled while checking-in on the Alitalia app (except that the app prevents pasting stuff, which makes everything cumbersome)
  • There was the form to fill to leave Italy, which was requested when boarding the plane in Rome and literally nobody knew about. So every passenger had to leave the line, find a pen, and fill up a badly photocopied form on paper
  • And then there was the form to enter the UK on the .gov.uk site, which was advertised at the airports in Rome and Heathrow, with designated areas to stop and fill it before getting to passport control, with PA announcements saying that you would not be allowed to enter the country without… but then nobody actually checked if I had it. Maybe it was just one of those behavioral science experiments…

I spent a day in Rome, going to an actual business meeting. In person. In an office. Everybody around the table was wearing masks, but nobody even notices anymore.

The eternal city was as beautiful as usual, social distancing was mostly observed wherever I went, except for a pretty crowded piazza in Trastervere full of youngsters being very close, exchanging fluids and mostly not wearing any protection. Gotta admit that I felt slightly uncomfortable crossing the square.

London still feels half empty.

I wonder how long this can continue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of empty public transport and having more room in general, but all this infrastructure is not build to work at half capacity, at some point governments will stop subsidising it and either prices will go significantly up or some systems will collapse.

I also spent a day in our office with a couple of colleagues. It felt good to be able to communicate without the constraints of zoom. I might do it again sometime.

It’s a little like when I can speak Italian after a long period speaking English. It’s not that I cannot express myself in English, but there’s definitely less brain post-processing power necessary when I can use my own language.

This is it. Be kind, stay safe, bring a pen in case you might need to fill a form.

New Normal Random Thoughts #6

I’m flying back to London this week, after a quick trip to Rome for a meeting on Wednesday. So there’s going to be bit of travelling for me with all the excitement that comes with it.

I’m not really sure about this decision: I want to see if there’s any advantage being close to the office, perhaps meeting colleagues every once in a while, maybe even meeting somebody in person.

I’ve just checked and a Ryanair flight back next week it’s just £12,99, so if I don’t like the feeling I can get back very quickly. But most likely I will stay for a while and see how it goes.

It doesn’t make much sense to work on detailed plans, living with uncertainty is the defining trait of these days. I suppose that the truth is that we have never had much control on our destinies, but I gotta admit that it felt good to think we had.

Meanwhile we have spent the last couple of weeks visiting Ikea multiple times buying bits and bobs and revamping our studio at home. We are quite happy with the result.

Each drawers unit takes half the time to build then the previous one.

Numbers of cases in Italy have been increasing, but not as quick as other European countries. Numbers in the UK appear to be increasing faster. Numbers in London seem to be relatively low. Overall I have been trying to ignore the news and I feel just fine.

It’s going to be exciting.

That’s it for today. Be kind, wash your hands, see you in London.

New Normal Random Thoughts #5

Not much happens during August in Italy. Even less in this strange year.

The numbers have slowly been going in the wrong direction. Nothing dramatic for now, nothing exponential yet, but the media is all over it. It’s the youngsters in dance clubs! No, it’s tourists coming back from Croatia! No, it’s the immigrants! Now we have to wear masks even outside, but only from 6pm to 6am, and only in crowded situations. And then there’s a lot of chatter about kids going back to school and some amazing one-seat wheeled desks that they will be using.

The best piece of news I heard today is that apparently a molecule derivate from cholesterol it’s a virus killer. This is exactly the type of news I’m fully ready to believe in. I’m looking forward to sausage therapy. Forget Nightingale Hospitals, at the beginning of the second wave we will take people to McDonalds.

I have Immuni installed on my phone, the Italian proximity tracking app. It’s a nice app, using the Apple/Google tracing system. While the app is perfectly fine, they botched the launch, allowing a whole number of silly conspiracy theories to propagate, which means that the app hasn’t been widely adopted: only 4.6 million people downloaded it by the 1st of June (that’s about 7% of population, clearly not enough density to be useful).

Anyway, every once in a while I get a notification like this:

I checked the logs, which should keep track of the anonymised ID of other devices I came into contact with, and apparently I haven’t come in contact with any other user with the app (which now that I think of it it’s odd, since I know for sure that other family members have the app installed).

I’m sorta planning to go back to the UK on the 10th of September. I haven’t booked the flight yet, but I want to go and check how things are, see if there’s any chance of starting to do some work in person again. While I’m fully expecting to keep working mostly from home, it would be nice to have some meetings outside a zoom window, and we have a beautiful meeting room with a huge table which can guarantee appropriate distancing.

If it doesn’t work, I will just get back to Italy, where I fin the quality of life much better.

That’s it. Be nice, eat an egg, just to be safe.

Serendipity

The B&B where we stayed in Venice was called Bianca Cappello House.

Possibly Bianca Capello de’Medici.*oil on canvas .*68.9 x 57.2 cm

Turns out that Bianca Cappello is not the name of the nice lady who owns the place, but that of a Venetian noblewoman born in 1548, who according to wikipedia, was the mistress and afterward the second wife of Francesco I de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

She was very beautiful and several portraits were made. A couple of centuries later, English writer Horace Walpole would fall in love with one of these portraits and, in a letter to a friend about one of these paintings, for the first time he used the word serendipity.

Horace was loosely related to Spencer Walpole, after whom is named the park at the end of my street in London.

New Normal Random Thoughts #4

After 5 weeks in Italy, I’m starting to reach the edges of what in the old times might have been reasonable expectations from service providers, but I am discovering they are no longer compatible with the new normal.

For example, Three has decided that I have used more than it was fair to use of my roaming allowance. It doesn’t matter if I have an unlimited account, it turns out that “unlimited” is actually 20Gb. Not clear if 20Gb per month, per year, per lifetime. All I know is that I need to go get another sim with another provider.

Also NowTV has decided that after a month not connecting from the UK, I’m no longer allowed to watch their shows.

No big deal, I’ve cancelled those services, and anyway I’m too busy re-watching The West Wing on PrimeTV. It’s 20 years old, but what a show! It was probably complete fantasy back then, but watching it today feels like we felt back then watching any dystopian future show. But anyway, who cares? Ironman is not realistic but it’s fun. President Josiah Bartlet is even more fun.

We spent last weekend in Venice.

Venice is close and beautiful, and while it takes about the same time to get there from our home in San Martino as it takes to get to the other side of London from Ealing, we only visit for short trips when somebody is visiting, so it was great to spend some quality time there.

We have always avoided Venice in August because of the crowds, so I can’t really compare, but it didn’t feel crowded at all. Yes, there were tourists, but at no time it felt uncomfortable. Most notably for Venice, there were no Americans.

We found a lovely B&B at a very reasonable price smack in the centre of everything, had great food, plenty of spritzes and cicchetti. If you like visiting cities, this is a great time to go to Venice.

I did appreciate how seriously masks are enforced everywhere. The “captain” of a vaporetto refused to leave when a family of four boarded with some plastic contraptions which were clearly not proper masks. Turns out they did have proper masks, and once properly masked we left.

I love the crooked bits of Venice.

Another “new normal” feature is that pretty much all bars and restaurant have a QR code sticker on every table which links to their menu. It always works and once you start thinking about how many people have touched those old menus before you, you never want to go back to the old ways.

Stay safe, keep cool, be kind.

New Normal Random Thoughts #3

It’s more than a month since I landed back to the new normal, and there’s something quite clear about these days when compared to the quarantine ones: I have less time to think.

It’s the main reason why I have been writing less on these pages: it’s not just that I don’t have much time to write but I have a lot less time to think about what to write, which clearly I had plenty of when I was living all by myself, never leaving my little flat in Ealing.

The situation in Italy is still mostly stable, so far Italians seems to be doing better than all other countries that were hit hard. As strange as it sounds, I wonder if this is related to Italians generally having very little trust for authorities and being more inclined to figure out things by themselves (especially when scared).

I haven’t booked a flight back to London yet. I’m still undecided. It doesn’t look like “going to the office” is going to become normal again any time soon. If the future is working from anywhere, it might be worth just accepting the kind offer from the Government of Barbados.

We got a new car last week. It’s a cool new toy, it’s all modern, digital, it parks by itself and it has an intimate relationship with our iPhones, but I want to leave one last thought for the old car which we sold. The little yellow Ka had 20 years, it got us everywhere we needed to go, it has been sitting under the weather for all this time and the Ford CD player still worked!

I’m pretty sure that in 20 years the new car will not be able to connect with my iPhone (or whatever people will be carrying with them in 2040).

Good bye to the old Ka.

Speaking of upgrades, I have updated all my devices to the latest betas of Apple new operating systems. I have also been playing with CarPlay, which I had never seen before and it’s supported by the new car. I’m surrounded by new user interfaces and enjoying every second of the experience.

Generally speaking I’m not a huge fan of change, but when it comes to trying new things, even if this means dealing with unstable and buggy systems, I always enthusiastically embrace change as soon as I can. I wonder why.

Well… that’s it for today. Be safe and be kind.

New Normal Random Thoughts #2

I’ve been back in Italy for almost two weeks now. Things at work are quite busy at the moment, so days are still long sequences of zoom calls, but it’s nice to be able to take a break in the garden, or chat with somebody in person between virtual connections.

I have been able to go for daily walks in the woods around here. I love the fresh air of the morning, the smell of nature waking up, the occasional encounter with the little animals of the forest.

On one of my standard routes I often walk by the cippo Corridoni, a big lump of stone loaded with fascist symbols, commissioned by Mussolini himself. It doesn’t disturb me, I find it healthy to be reminded of our history, but I often wonder how this thing is still here after all these years. I guess it’s just too far away from the main roads to be noticed.

Cippo Corridoni.

Things appear to be going relatively well in Italy with the pandemic. Number are still low and most people are still following most rules. I must admit to feel a bit of pride for how this country managed the crisis: it was hit early and hard, but after fumbling the initial response it was able to control the pandemic and bring the numbers down much better than many others.

It’s disheartening to follow what is happening in the UK, with face masks only now being required in shops, but only from the 25th, but only for clients, but nobody will enforce it, but yeah, but no, but yeah, but no… That is the country I chose to move to, and to be honest I would have expected them to be able to manage a crisis better than Italian. Guess I was wrong.

On the other hand I had just a couple of occasion to deal with the Italian bureaucracy and in both cases I just wanted to just drop everything and head back to the airport, promising to never ever try to run a business in Italy again (“never ever” on this blog should be read as “At least 5 years. Maybe 3. Definitely not less then 6 months”).

This always reminds me of a conversation I had with Dave Winer while walking around the Duomo in Milano, perhaps a dozen years ago (details might be wrong). I was complaining about how things were in Italy, he told me that things actually appeared pretty good to him, that looking around he could see a functioning society, and that everywhere you go there are problems.

Of course I thought he wasn’t getting it, that the situation in Italy was special.

Of course he was completely right and I was wrong: at the end, we are all special.

Stay safe, be kind, keep in touch.

New Normal Random Thoughts #1

Last week I got to Italy without too much trouble. There wasn’t a lot of people at the airport, all restaurants were closed, everything was happening slightly ahead of schedule. The flight was quick, everybody was wearing a mask for the entire duration of the flight “except for drinking and eating” (every time I heard the announcement I was tempted to ask “and what about smoking?”). The flight was probably around 60/70% full, the seat next to mine was empty, but I had people sitting right behind.

Sitting at 1A, I was the first one off the plane and through passport (and temperature) control. In all effects I was the very first international passenger to land in Trieste in three months. The flight was in the local news, but by the time a photographer showed up I was already at home sipping a glass of wine.

Things in Italy feel quite different from the UK. They started their lockdown ahead of all other Western countries. Shops, restaurants and other services have been open for almost a month and it looks like people are already used to the new normal.

We went to a couple of restaurants, supermarkets, various shops, even a car dealership, unlike the UK face masks are compulsory and people are just used to slip on their masks as soon as they enter (you can take off the mask once you are seated at your table in restaurants). There are sanitizer dispensers at the entrance of every establishment.

My much needed haircut was pretty straightforward: had to wear a disposable mask (except while trimming my beard), and the one tool they couldn’t use is a brush to remove hair, since those cannot be sterilised.

I decided to keep my hair long-ish (didn’t go back to my pre-covid length), apparently this has been the case for a lot of other people, some who had a chance to grow their hair longer for the first time.

According to my hairdresser, some people are also reluctant to go back to more formal fashion: they just got used to wearing tracksuits all the time and they are sticking with the comfortable option.

Buying fish on a Sunday morning.

Masks are yet another fashion item telling people something about yourself, and of course Italians are embracing it! It’s not only about what kind of masks (disposable, reusable, flat, shaped, cotton, linen, coloured, patterned, black, etc.), but also how you wear it: for example it looks like older people tend to wear it with their nose out, making them pretty much useless.

Then there’s the whole thing about where to keep your mask when you are not wearing it. Under your chin? Hanging from one ear? On your wrist? In your pocket? Everyone has a style.

That’s all for this update. Stay safe, be kind, keep in touch.

Quarantine random thoughts #24

This is the last post of this series. I’m at the airport, on my way to Italy, once I get there I cannot keep calling this “quarantine”. It’s a bit surreal, the information screens that I have spent hours checking, exploring the list of destinations are now almost empty.

I’m happy to be heading home, but at the same time I feel strangely sad about the end of this weird period. The truth is that in many ways I enjoyed it, it has been a good time for reflection. People pay to go to meditation retreats like this!

I have completely emptied my fridge, eating everything I had (except for a single red onion that I threw away). At this point I’m planning to be away for a couple of months. Then… we’ll see, this doesn’t seem to be a good years for plans, anyway I don’t have any flight booked.

Speaking of eating all food, I added some extra garlic in my pasta yesterday. Life lesson #386: if you eat extra garlic and then you happen to be wearing a face mask, everything is going to be all right until you try to talk.

Well… that’s all folks. I’ll go have my haircut tomorrow morning, and there’s a lot of barbecue in my future.

Stay safe, be nice.

Quarantine random thoughts #23

The temperature should reach 31º today, which by London standards is “quite hot indeed”. Having failed to successfully launch Zoom Bikini Day™ with the rest of the team, I think I will just remove all my clothes between calls. Or move my workstation in the shower. Another advantage of working from home!

I’ve been back to Central London a couple of times in the last week. It was nice to go back, it’s still much less crowded than usual (all tourists are missing!).

Good old Horatio all by himself on a Saturday afternoon (later in the day the square was actually quite crowded with protesters).

I followed the WWDC keynote this week, had a good chat with Euan about announcements in an upcoming podcast.

It reminded me of WWDC 1995. My dad attended the conference, and when he came back to Italy he brought with him an early beta of the QuickTime VR authoring tools.

Two big plastic binders of documentation and a bunch of CR-Rom. It was the most exciting thing ever! We had to take photos with a special rig using a professional camera with very wide angle lenses, send out the film to be scanned on PhotoCD, then use command line tools to stitch photos together, slice them and convert the file into a QuickTime VR file. We actually made a business out of this for a while.

I have a special appreciation for how you can shoot pretty good panoramas on any phone these days.

Also, I went to the office to work with a couple of colleagues yesterday.

It was odd and familiar at the same time. We met because we had to shoot a short video, not really planning to go back to the usual routines. Since I’m flying back to Italy in a week, I don’t think I will be back in that office for most of the Summer.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch, and shoot a panorama of your living room, it will be nice to find it in a few years.

Quarantine random thoughts #22

Had a bit of an adventure on Friday. I was walking out my local Mark & Spencer shop after buying eggs, double cream and courgettes for my quiche, when I was stopped by two security guard and escorted to a dingy room in the back and ordered to sit on a foldable chair.

2 minutes earlier…

What had happened is that I was shopping using the M&S “Mobile Pay to Go” app, somebody in the shop saw my picking up products and dropping them straight in my shopping bag and had alerted security.

I was asked to remove my mask and to provide an ID (which I did not have). The attitude was quite aggressive until they finally accused of theft and I was able to show the receipt on my phone. At that point they apologise profusely, claiming that the app was a new thing (it isn’t) and they were not aware of the fact that it was available in that shop (duh).

The quiche came out all right.

My two random thoughts about this

Companies work at different speeds, especially large companies. I was caught in the space between somebody releasing an app one side of the company and people providing security on site on the other. It would have been simple for them to just ask for the receipt when I was stopped at the exit, but it looks like the idea of a customer leaving with products without going through a traditional payment process was not even considered.

I wonder if the fact that I was wearing a black face mask and a black ball cap had anything to do with me being stopped, after all I had used the app a lot of times over the last six months while wearing my usual middle age (and white) face. If this was the case, and masks remove a little privilege, I think that overall it’s a good thing.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch, make yourself a nice quiche.

Quarantine random thoughts #21

Damn… it’s Friday again. For the last couple of months my weeks have been: Monday, Friday, Sunday – Monday, Friday, Sunday… everything else is lost in a blur of zoom calls.

I did manage to go to Kew Gardens on Sunday. Weather was meh, most services in the park are closed and the flowerbeds were empty, but it’s still one of my favourite places.

Since I rebooted this blog I see blogs as the solution to everything (if all you have is a hammer…). In particular with people working apart (in different locations, different companies, different time zones) writing daily updates in the form of blog posts seems the most natural thing to do to avoid having more zoom calls and move more communication to asynchronous channels.

Except that even the concept of what is a “blog post” is not that clear to most people who never had the experience of a thriving community of bloggers. I’m trying different things, for example using a Slack channel as a blog, so far without too much success.

Or maybe it could be something else? Maybe podcasting or sharing videos could be an alternative. There’s no lack of tools or forms of expression, the challenge is convincing enough people to lead by telling good stories.

Meanwhile I’m looking forward to my haircut. Already booked, in exactly three weeks!

Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.

Quarantine random thoughts #20

End of week 12. When I started I wasn’t expecting to write 20 of these posts. It doesn’t look like it’s going to end any time soon.

Chatting with a friend yesterday, we agreed that one of the best things you can do these days is cancelling a zoom meeting at the last moment. This used to annoy me to no end, but nowadays it’s bliss!

Have you ever tried an onion bagel with a fried egg?

It must have been around 10 years ago, in Don Winslow’s novel The Winter of Frankie Machine the main character describes to great detail his favourite breakfast: an onion bagel with a fried egg.

Wow…

I immediately though that it was a great idea, but at the time I was in Italy and had zero access to any type of bagel, let alone onion ones. Luckily in the period I was spending a lot of time on the West Coast. On my next trip I couldn’t think about anything else for the whole flight, as soon as I landed I dropped my stuff in my studio apartment in San Francisco, ran out and bought a bag of bagels, a carton of eggs and some butter.

My life has never been the same.

Since then I have eaten hundreds of bagels. After moving to the UK I found out about “proper” bagels from North London bakeries. Proper onion bagels make everything in your bags smell like onions for a week, but when they are fresh and still crunchy nothing beats them.

I tried different types of bagels, different eggs, tried them with smoked salmon or bacon, learned to keep my egg runny (unlike Frankie I eat them right away in a plate, not later a linen napkin).

Now I’m listening to Broken, Don Winslow’s latest collection of stories (narrated by Ray Porter, one of my favourite), and sure enough at some point one of the characters asks “have you ever tried an onion bagel with a fried egg?”.

I had to drop everything!

Thanks Don, you have changed my life.

Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.

Quarantine random thoughts #19

It looks like the weather won’t be so great this week. Which is remarkable considering that it has been beautiful for pretty much the whole duration of this quarantine. Some say it’s the driest spring since 1929, I haven’t verified the claim, but it kinda fits that major economic crises of the century come with good weather.

I have done some house keeping on the site, now it should be more readable on mobile and if you want you can subscribe via email leaving your address in the form on the side. Subscribing via email sounds a bit a thing of the 90s, but looks like it’s all we have outside social media (I do encourage you to figure out RSS aggregators if you have some time, it’s still totally worth it).

Last week I watched the launch and docking of Crew Dragon. Quite a show! There was a lot of waiting for things to happen, but there were moments even better than Apple’s product launch events. That booster landing back on the drone ship is always amazing!

I’ve been pulled down a rocket science rabbit hole on YouTube for the last few months, so I found the whole thing even more interesting. It did remind me the excitement of watching the first launch of the Space Shuttle with my grandfather when I was 10.

Space Shuttle vs. Crew Dragon

Many have shared a picture comparing the Space Shuttle cockpit with thousands of buttons to the Crew Dragon one, with three touch screens and a couple of dozen of buttons. I think that the most remarkable thing is that those buttons could very well have been used by astronauts to switch between Netflix and Amazon Prime, after all the whole mission was self-driving (the same hardware flew a couple of months ago with an empty suit sitting on the chair).

Imagine these two guys, who made their career out of trying to control the most advanced and uncontrollable vehicles that humankind had ever built, just sitting along for a ride. Actually the instructions they got just before docking on the ISS was to stow away some shit and wipe the screen, just like any other cleaning lady.

I got my new Etsi mask this week. Looks great. Stay alert, scare the virus.

Ready to go grocery shopping or join the riots.

Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.

Quarantine random thoughts #18

We are getting to the end of the 11th week, 75 days in self-isolation, the weather is beautiful, it’s getting warm and frankly there’s not much else to be reported. I have been a bit more social lately, having conversation in person with three different people in two separate occasions. Other than that, it’s all zoom.

Did you notice how this pandemic has sent everybody down memory lane?

Maybe because we cannot visualise the future, we turn back to the past, which now feels safe and stable. I find myself having odd feeling of nostalgia for the 80s or even the 70s every time a friend posts an old picture.

Or maybe it’s just that we have more time to organise our photo archive. I love how Photos on all Apple devices is keeping my 25K photos all nicely tagged, organised and synchronised. In the last few years I have also scanned a decent amount of printed pictures, trying to date and tag them appropriately and merge them seamless in my archive. This makes falling in nostalgic time-space wormholes incredibly easy.

We all look better or cuter (or both) in old photos, and sometimes on social media they are a good excuse for a bit of name dropping, bragging and back dating: you know, those who “were on the web” well before Sir Tim invented the thing. It’s fine, we all have history.

My, writing my first blog post, 1972.

I got a new pair of AirPods this week. I went for the Pro version, with noise cancellation. Quite expensive, but I have used my old pair almost every day for 3 years until battery life got too short to be usable, they are one of my favourite Apple products. These new ones are good, noise cancelling is very effective but transparency mode is what makes them amazing. We’ll see how well they will work with my daily dose of zoom calls.

Maybe I’m doing this wrong, but I find all these calls draining. After a full day of speaking with a slightly louder tone of voice, without being able to move much, struggling to understand people who could not be bothered to use a headset, having to constantly decode another language and a ton of different accents, my brain hurts. When work is over I might like to have a chat with friends and family, but I really struggle to convince myself to start yet another zoom call.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch (but don’t call).

Quarantine random thoughts #17

43 days until my flight home. 44 days until my haircut.

I’m preparing for my trip. I have procured face masks (thanks to those who helped), and it looks like there won’t be the need to self quarantine once on the other side. I’m conscious that taking the Central Line, then a train, then an airplane is significantly riskier than never leaving my flat, but at this point I feel like risking a bit. Maybe I will self quarantine anyway for a few days, just to be on the safe side.

Yesterday I went out for the weekly groceries run to Waitrose, it was a beautiful and warm day and the park was full of people. Things are starting to feel normal.

I don’t mean “normal” as “back to normal” but in the sense of “not exceptional”.

I suppose that many are just growing tired of the exceptionality of the last few months. I have mostly given up following the daily updates or frantically checking the stats every day.

Last weekend I went for a relatively long walk to Richmond, but the most exciting thing is that I actually met a friend. Like in person! We bought lunch at Whole Foods Market and then ate by the river. The best day in quite a while!

Richmond upon Thames

Being outside my flat for six hours felt nice, but it’s curious like many of my friends and people I interact with regularly are not finding this new lifestyle all that distressing at all (and in some cases are dreading the idea of going back). This is a good time for us introverts who can cook.

Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.

Quarantine random thoughts #16

Finished another t-roll this morning. The third since the beginning of the quarantine. For some reason I take a picture every time, here’s the complete collection: April 12, April 27, May 14. This is history.

Even if I never had any problem (I didn’t even try to buy any toilet paper, and it was only missing from shops for the first couple of weeks), I don’t think I will take it for granted for a while. Who knew that it would have been the first sign of the end.

The rules are changing in the UK, “Stay Alert” is the new “Stay Home”. Day after day we are learning what this actually means, on Monday I heard a prominent politicians explain that: “People should assume they should go to work rather than presume they should not.” Unless they can work from home. And you can meet one person. Outside. Not closer than 2m.

On Tuesday another member of the government said “The number of people who died has come down”. Basically, it’s the zombie apocalypse.

I found this interesting site displaying the curves of daily new cases using an arbitrary unit for the vertical axis, which makes them easy to compare. Here’s the two countries I’m most interested to follow:

So I have booked a flight home. I visited the Ryanair site and they were offering seats to Trieste starting on the 2 of July. I’m booked on that flight. Still not sure if it will happen, but at least it’s a date on the calendar.

There will probably be voluntary quarantine on the other side, and then again coming back, but it’s not a problem, I’m planning to spend the summer in Italy.

Most likely I will have to wear a mask on the flight. I don’t have one and need to figure out where to find it. I wonder why Ryanair didn’t offer me a mask, instead of the Samsonite trolley which I have been refusing to buy from them for the last 18 years.

Since a lot of friends were recommending it, I have been watching Money Heist. It’s a good show. Since I cannot stand dubbing anymore, I’m watching it in Spanish with English subtitles. So it often happens that I have whole dreams in Spanish, which is odd given that I don’t really speak Spanish.

And here’s a new episode of our podcast:

That’s all folks. Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.