Yet Another Birthday.

It's my birthday, again.

The fourth blogging birthday.

Even google knows.

Best wishes to everybody :-)

My partner Fabrizio has just finished wasting a few hours trying to figure out how to solve a relatively little CSS display issue while designing a web page for a new customer. As he finally managed to get the page to display as intended both on IE/Win and all the other browsers we all cheered. He found a nice little trick to fool IE.

But wait. Isn't this 2005? Cannot we have a design tool allowing us to drag and drop an object to a page and see it properly on any browser without having to manually tweak CSS styles in order to avoid browsers' bugs?

We are using Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive, they help but both products are not solving desing problems which are only slightly more advanced than what very basic web pages require. And now that the two companies have become one and we cannot even expect some good competition.

Unlike some friends I don't attend to many international conferences, it's hard to compare Les Blogs to similar events. What I can say, a couple of days later, is that it has been exciting and refreshing.

Trying to sell the concept of blogging and social software to most business customers often requires a lot of de-hyping of the whole concept. Going to big company execs sayng that they are about to be swamped by the next revolution in communication curiously doesn't usually catch their attention. This leads to very balanced presentations and measured words in order to convince them to get the tools and learn how to use them.

Well, for a day it felt good sitting in a room with a lot of very smart people discussing how this is the next revolution and it's happening today in the whole world!. It has been a great opportunity to share ideas, I think that everybody walked home from this event changed.

Thanks to everybody and thanks especially to Loïc, Geraldine and the Six Apart staff for organizing this all. See you next year?

[lesblogs]

On the way back from Paris, on our Ryan Air 737 we could read: "Dites non a la surcharge kerosene d'Air France". Something similar was written in German about Lufthansa on the way in.

Apparently at Ryan Air they feel this issue is important enough to paint it on their airplanes but not to mention it on their web site (or at least not on their home page). Coming from a company that handles a significant part of its business on the web this looks pretty silly.

Yesterday has been the first unofficial, pre-conference day. It was great to meet Halley, Doc, Mary, Andrew, Ross, Jason, and, of course, Loïc. Very interesting conversations, great food. As far as fois gras is concerned, yesterday night I saw the light!

[lesblogs]

We are in Paris, just in case you missed my live reportage on Flickr.

It has been 12 years since we came here and I must admit I had forgotten how beautiful this city is. Actually, maybe 12 years ago I hadn't fully realized. It's great to be here.

We had a good (Japanese) dinner and we have fetched a bottle of Champagne and some additional good food for the rest of the night.

Too bad I don't speak a single word of French (well, maybe a couple, but definetly not enough).

Travelling day tomorrow and then... Paris!

Lots of things to see, lots of people to meet. Should be able to get back on line on dreadfully expensive 3G roaming fees or maybe some free wifi node. Pictures will be routed straight from phone to Flickr (oh, btw, I have two Flickr Pro account available, is anybody interested?). Stay tuned and see you at Les Blog.

Phew... with this name my google ranking is safe. ;-)

My G5 just froze for the very first time. The mouse was still moving but no feedback from the GUI, I had to reset it.

Before restarting I was writing a post about buying stuff, smartphones reading barcodes with the built in cameras, RFID and GPS antennas, Google and Yahoo, weblogs, RSS and tagging...

But now the inspiration (and time) has gone. :-)

You don't need to understand German, pictures are quite explicit. (hint: move the little dot with the mouse without touching the walls). [via Paulista]

My partner Simone just got Rome and joined the 14 hours long line to view the pope's body inside St. Peter's Basilica.

This is a picture he has just sent via MMS.

PS: they made it. Here's a few picture he has just sent.

I'm happy to read that according to Pew 6 million have heard podcasts [via Dan Gillmor], I appreciate the idea and the technology, but the more I hear about them, the more I realize that listening to podcasts is not for me.

In part is a matter of time. Home to office travel time is about 5 minutes, hardly time to listen to anything. I cannot listen to podcasts while I work since they tend to be long and distracting (I do check my aggregator several times a day, but it's a much lower impact activity). I do take a walk almost every day, but I do this with my wife and we talk why we walk.

Over the weekend I did some gardening, I loaded a couple of podcasts that I wanted to hear on my iPod and started working. After a few minutes I switched to music: having somebody chatting about technical stuff while mowing was quite annoying.

I must have the wrong kind of life... :-)

17 years for Frontier, 8 years of Scripting.com. Whew!

We have built a business on Frontier, and a significant part of it was created "stealing" concepts and ideas that Dave Winer has been generously sharing with all of us on the web for all this time.

Congratulations Dave, thank you very much for your work, your commitment and your enthusiasm... and keep diggin. ;->