The magic of AI search

I just built yet another MCP experiment.

First I created a Python script to process .md files: chunk them, create embeddings, store everything in a PostgreSQL database.

Then I built an MCP server which can search the database both using semantic search (embeddings) and more traditional full text search as a fallback mechanism.

I find absolutely fascinating watching Claude interacting with this tool, because it’s not just about converting my request to a query, it’s the reasoning process which happens in order to find what it needs which is brilliant.

Let me show you an example:

Building a WordPress MCP Server for Claude: Automating Blog Posts with AI

Building a custom MCP server to connect Claude directly to WordPress, enabling automated blog post creation with proper formatting and intelligent categorisation.

Third day, third MCP experiment (inspired by a quick conversation with Dave).

This time I connected Claude with this WordPress blog.

At the end of the chat that I used for the whole process of writing, building and installing the tool on my Mac, I asked Claude to write a post about the experience.

Of course I wouldn’t allow Claude to post unsupervised original stuff to my blog like I just did, but as Dave was pointing out, these are our new writing tools, being able to post directly without having to copy and paste just makes sense.

To be honest I would rather do this with ChatGPT, but apparently MCP integration is not available yet in the UK yet.

Check below to see Claude’s original post.

PS: it also categorised and tagged the post automagically ❤️

And here’s the recipe

I’m not confident enough in the tools I built this week to share them around just yet. As long as they run on my Mac, I’m happy, but I can’t really take responsibility for how they’d work for anyone else.

Still, while I’m not serving up the dish, I’m definitely happy to share the recipe!

If you plug this prompt into Claude or ChatGPT, you’ll get pretty close to what I’ve got running. Then ask how to build it and how to configure Claude and you should be good to go. Good luck, and let me know how it goes.

(I think that sharing prompts is an act of love.)

More MCP fun: Claude talks with ChatGPT

I started with a new idea this morning: create an MCP server that allows Claude to talk to the various OpenAI models.

Now I can ask Claude to ask any of the openAI models.

What I find more fascinating is how Claude is figuring out how to use these new tools. The key is in the description of the tool, the “manifest” that Claude gets when the server is initialised (and is probably injected at the beginning of every chat).

PS: if you want to try this at home, here’s the recipe.

As an example, here’s how the description of today’s MCP server looks like:

Spotlight → MCP

This morning I asked myself if I could make Spotlight on my Mac talk to Claude. Just a small experiment.

I ended up building a minimal MCP server that exposes Spotlight’s index—files, apps, recent items—as JSON-RPC tools. With that in place, Claude could search my folders, read files, and understand what a project is about.

I tested it on a real directory. It worked. Claude read through the files and summarised the purpose of the whole project in seconds. Something that would usually take me a while to piece together manually.

The whole thing took a few hours. Nothing fancy. But it opened an interesting door.

Here’s a quick demo:

PS: as usual, I didn’t write any code. In this case I was assisted by Claude. Which was kind of funny, we writing and testing the tool in the same thread. At some point I wrote “hey, now you can read files”, and it seemed pleased. ;)

Scraping Challenges and Open Standards

Following up what I posted recently about Scrape wars, I wrote a longer post for my company site. Reposting it here just for reference.

We’ve talked before about how everything you write should work as a prompt. Your content should be explicitly structured, easy for AI agents to read, interpret, and reuse. Yet, despite clear advantages, in practice we’re often stuck using workarounds and hacks to access valuable information.

Right now, many AI agents still rely on scraping websites. Scraping is messy, unreliable, and frankly a bit of a nightmare to maintain. It creates an adversarial relationship with companies who increasingly employ tools like robots.txt files, CAPTCHAs, or IP restrictions to block automated access. On top of that, major AI providers like OpenAI and Google are introducing built-in search capabilities within their ecosystems. While these are helpful, they ultimately risk creating a new layer of dependence. If content can only be efficiently accessed through these proprietary AI engines, we risk locking ourselves into another digital silo controlled by private platforms.

There is a simpler, proven, and immediately available solution: RSS. Providing your content via RSS feeds allows AI agents direct, structured access without complicated scraping. Our agents, for example, are already using structured XML reports from the Italian Parliament to effectively monitor parliamentary sessions. This is an ideal case of structured openness. Agents such as our Parliamentary Reporter Agent and the automated Assembly Report Agent thrive precisely because these datasets are publicly available, clearly structured, and easily machine-readable.

However, the reality isn’t always so positive. Other important legislative and governmental sites impose seemingly arbitrary restrictions. We regularly encounter ministries and other government websites that block access to automated tools or restrict access based on geographic location, even though their content is explicitly intended as public information. These decisions push us back into pointless workarounds or simply cut off access entirely, unacceptable when dealing with public information.

When considering concerns around giving AI models access to content, it’s essential to distinguish two different use cases clearly. One case is scraping or downloading massive amounts of data for training LLM models (this understandably raises concerns around copyright, control, and proper attribution). But another entirely different and increasingly crucial case is allowing AI agents access to content purely to provide immediate, useful services to users. In these scenarios, the AI is acting similarly to a traditional user, simply reading and delivering relevant, timely information rather than training on vast archives.

Building on RSS’s straightforwardness, we can take this concept further with more advanced open standards, such as MCP (Machine Content Protocol). Imagine a self-discovery mechanism similar to RSS feeds, but designed to handle richer, more complex datasets. MCP could offer AI agents direct ways to discover, interpret, and process deeper levels of information effortlessly, without the current challenges of scraping or the risk of vendor lock-in.

Of course, valid concerns exist about data protection and theft at scale (curiously the same concerns appeared back in the early RSS days, and even when the printing press first emerged… yet we survived). But if our primary goal is genuinely to share ideas and foster transparency, deliberately restricting access to information contradicts our intentions. Public information should remain public, open, and machine-readable.

Let’s avoid creating unnecessary barriers or new digital silos. Instead, let’s embrace standards like RSS and MCP, making sure AI agents are our partners, not adversaries, in building a more transparent and connected digital landscape.

Daily AI Tools

Here’s a snapshot of what AI tools and how am I using them on this 27th of May 2025. Things change fast, I’m writing this for my future self who will be moved while reminiscing these pioneering times.

I more or less always have the Claude and ChatGPT apps running. Recently I have also created a Gemini app (using the Safari’s 'add to dock' feature). I prefer to use separate applications than tabs in a browser, I can switch faster between apps. I’m old school.

Of these three:

ChatGPT has far better context about who I am and what I do. Every time I need to write something work related I will gravitate towards ChatGPT because I don’t have to explain too much. I also like how ChatGPT can see my other apps, so I don’t have to copy and paste back and forth all the time.

I find Claude better at handling large attachments (it has a better “attention span” than ChatGPT while reviewing large documents), but it did fail spectacularly recently (it couldn’t read a file and started making s*it up), so I’m trusting it a little bit less.

I have also started using Gemini recently. The fact that it doesn’t have an app creates some resistance, but the huge context window makes it useful in cases where I have big documents to process.

On mobile, I can talk with the Gemini app much better than with ChatGPT (which keeps tripping into its own speech).

Since ChatGPT has included o3 model with search, I have been using Perplexity much less. I might not renew my subscription. A few weeks ago I posted a photo of a shelf of prosecco bottles in a supermarket and asked for advice… it worked like magic).

For image generation I prefer Midjourney for the “feel” of images, even if ChatGPT understands better my prompts. Let’s say that ChatGPT is smarter, but Midjourney has more talent (and is dyslexic).

For coding jobs I jump back and forth between different tools: Gemini does seems to be pretty good at the moment, but I also find Codex quite impressive.

“Create a Muppet version of me”

Gemini

ChatGPT

Midjourney

(using my profile picture as a reference)

Mem’ries… light the corners of my mind

For the last few days, I’ve had access to the “Reference Chat History” feature in ChatGPT (I think it had been available for a while in the US, but it just landed on my account in the UK).

Wow… what a change!

I was putting together a page to describe the various tools we’ve been working on, and I just tried randomly asking ChatGPT to insert a description of “Gimlet” or “Old Fashioned”: it just did it. No context necessary, no links, no pages. It was just there, part of the memory I share with the app.

I do continuously switch between AI tools based on which one I think can perform better on any given task – or sometimes just to compare how they perform – and this feature makes ChatGPT more attractive: it has more reusable context than any of the other tools.

It’s quite likely that all other tools will develop similar features, but this will mean trying to silo users. I’ll tend to go where most of my memories are, and I won’t be switching and leaving all my memories behind.

My memories.

Hopefully a shared standard for memories (maybe MCP?) will soon emerge, and we won’t end up siloed again.

Scrape wars

There’s a lot of scraping going on these days.

It looks like most AI applications that need to access content online are resorting to scraping web pages.

Many AI agents we’ve been working on rely on having some sort of access to online content. Of course, we started with a simple RSS aggregator: it’s clean, it’s efficient, it’s a rock-solid foundation for any application.

But not all sites have feeds. More than one would think (many sites have feeds but don’t advertise them, some of these might very well be just a feature of the CMS used, not a deliberate decision by the publisher).

But for those sites without feeds… well, we scrape them (and drop the content into a feed that we manage, using the aggregator as the central repository).

Some sites don’t want us to scrape them and put up a fight. In most cases, we scrape them anyway.

If most publications were publishing feeds, we wouldn’t have to do this. They would control what is shared and what is not. Everyone would be happy.

Meanwhile, all my sites are getting tons of traffic from places like Boydton and Des Moines, that’s where big server farms sit and tons of bots are scraping the web from. Wasting lots of resources (theirs and mine) instead of just polling my perfectly updated RSS feed.

PS: I wrote this post on Wordland. Refreshing.

23

Not that it matters much, but it’s yet another anniversary of my first post.

Vision Pro, the first few days

I picked up my Vision Pro last Friday, as soon as it became available in the UK. These have been busy days, so I haven’t had much time to play with the new toy, but I want to share my first impressions.

It’s an impressive piece of kit. While I’m not sure the steep price is justified, it does feel expensive. The Apple Store experience starts with a guided demo. There’s an initial surprise with the see-through experience (which is very good, though my expectations were higher given all I had read about it) and a quick familiarity with the new gestures and hand-eye coordination.

After using it for a while on my own, I realize that while the gestures become familiar quickly, it will take some effort before they become second nature. I still find myself fumbling with overlapping windows and navigating through features.

What I love about the experience is the ability to use your entire field of vision to manage information. You are not limited to a screen above a keyboard or an even smaller screen in your hand. Now everything can be a screen, and even after just a few days, I feel drawn back to that experience in the same way I sometimes feel drawn back to a full-size keyboard while fidgeting on my phone.

One of my favorite experiences is using Zoom on calls with many people. I can make the Zoom window large and see everyone in great detail. Unfortunately, all they can see of me is a floating digital avatar that somewhat resembles me (after installing the beta of VisionOS 2, the quality of the avatar improved significantly: from embalmed Lenin to TV preacher).

The integration with a Mac is seamless, allowing a large virtual screen that blends with other elements and your environment. Also, the way the Mac keyboard and mouse interact immediately with the native apps as soon as you look at them is quite smooth.

I’m still figuring out what this is for. There is a lot of entertainment value, but I would like to find ways to integrate this more into my work routines, and I’m taking my first steps in figuring this out.

I’m absolutely not confident enough to wear this in public. I flew to Italy yesterday and I’m on a train writing this. While I see the value of being able to wear it, I feel it would attract too much attention.

It’s early days. I do remember my enthusiasm on the first days using a Mac or when using an iPhone. I also remember the same enthusiasm using a Newton.

The “think of a number” fallacy

Some time a go a colleague commenting on the idea of iterative prompting, suggested to ask GPT to “think about something” and then make a decision on what to write or not to write.

The problem with this approach is that a session with an LLM doesn’t really have a memory outside the actual text being created by the chat, consequently it cannot “keep something in mind” while completing other tasks.

But it can pretend it does.

To test this, you can ask to a LLM to “think of a number, but don’t tell me”. At the time of this writing most models will respond by confirming that they have thought of a number. Of course they haven’t... but because they are trained to mimic human interactions, they are pretending they are.

This is something to always keep in mind while prompting.

For example, it is not effective to prompt a system to “make a list and only show me the part matching a criteria”, but you can request to print the full output and then generate a final list (“print the list, then update it with the criteria”).

GroceriesGPT

A friend this morning shared a list of vegetables, noting how hard it is to eat 30 different ones in the same week.

I immediately turned to my AI chatbot to ask to create a list of commonly eaten vegetables, and of course I got a very good one.

At that point I thought that it would be nice to add that list to my next grocery order on Ocado.

And this is where the magic ended.

My chatbot doesn’t talk to the Ocado app. And I actually use more than one bot, sometime I go with ChatGPT, sometime I go with Claude, they are both good and continuously improving and I like to pit them against each other.

ChatGPT has a plug-in architecture which potentially would allow to connect with other applications creating custom GPTs, but so far I haven’t seen any particularly good application. And what would be the idea there? That Ocado would have to build a custom GPT? And what about other chatbots? I don’t really want to be siloed again. I’m happy to pay for services, even Google, but leave me free to connect.

Meanwhile I’m sure that somebody at Ocado is already thinking on how to integrate an AI in their app (if you aren’t, call me), and while this will be a nice feature to have, it will be yet another AI agent unable to talk with my other agents.

Maybe the solution is similar to what Rabbit appears to be working on: teach AI to use UI. Avoid altogether the challenge of getting companies and engineers to agree on open standards and just teach AIs to use shitty incompatible interfaces of our apps.

AI interoperability might be one of the most interesting future problems that we will face.

I want the AIs I pay for to collaborate, not to compete.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.