Some time ago I set up a blog for my mother's pub, Naklar in Rome.
Here is a taste of what goes on over there:

..my mother on the left, with some freaky glasses and an equally freaky mask that she bought recently on her trip to Japan 8)
So, next time someone wants to make fun of me, please keep in mind "where" I come from !

Speaking of blogger. Because I publish the blog on a custom domain, I use the custom domain option in Blogger which uses FTP access to the site I host through a separate provider.
Apparently the FTP feature has been broken for a while now and it's a well known open issue.
In theory Blogger (Google) should be able to tame that kind of errors, in practice it's really not safe to rely on those kind of services. I should have setup another blog with Drupal, but instead I figured that it was going to be easier for my mother and her friends to use Blogger with their GMail accounts.. and now we're stuck with a shaky service !

bha

Let's see if I can update this blog in 4 minutes 8)

Yesterday and today I finally prepared my presentation for my company about Siggraph 2007.

The presentation itself is divided in 3 groups. Every group has a different approach. For my group we decided to do 4 (all members excluding one that is on holiday) quick presentations of 5 minutes each.
Well it's actually 4 minutes as 1 minutes is needed at the very least to change places and load up the PowerPoint slides.

I did my 6 slides in English and then planned to present them in Japanese, but I was definitely being way too optimistic.
So tonight at home I did a few trials and quickly decided to go for English. Not many people will understand me but I'll be a lot like being at Siggraph itself 8)  read more »

今日は東京に帰りました。先日あの同僚はディジカメをなくしました。その次僕もカメラをなくしました（；＿；）
お金はあまり問題ない…問題は最後の日のパーティとかの写真はアップすることはできなかった。
明日から新しいカメラを買うと思う。

Today I came back to Tokyo. Recently a coworker's digital camera disappeared. After that my digital camera disappeared as well（；＿；）
I don't really worry about money but more about the fact that I couldn't upload the pictures of the party on the last day.
Tomorrow I will probably buy a new camera.

最後の日をカメラなくしましたけど、もっと大きいの問題あった：ある同僚は消えた！
その件に細かい探すことできないけど、結構大変なことみたいです。  read more »

今日は早く朝起きて（5時位！）ランドリーをしました。

Today I woke up early (about 5 AM !) and did the laundry.

ランドリーをしながら朝ごはんを食べた。このホテルに朝ごはんは無料んです！…食べ物はすばらしいではないのに（＾＾；）
実はここがホテルじゃなくてモテルです。登録したとき、車のモデルと色を聞いてた 8P

And while doing the laundry I had breakfast. Breakfast in this hotel is free, but the food is far from great （＾＾；）  read more »

2007_08_san_diego_siggraph

Siggraph is cool. I could spot around Jim Blinn and Michael Cohen. Ravi Ramamoorthi got an award this year.. definitely deserved !
After that there was the papers' presentation.. where presenters got wild and tried to push the envelope of bullshit pseudo-funny comedy.. just be serious and present your paper.. if I want to laugh I will watch a movie or something.
But in the American culture, you have to throw in half-assed jokes for those that like them. Sure enough, there usually is some 40 years old guy in the back that goes "ho ho ho".. bha !

Anyhow.. it's all going well. I met a cool Italian programmer yesterday that told me that he spent most of the day checking out the Japanese girls at the event. eheheh not so many really, but I suspect he meant Asian girls as a whole 8)
That reminded me that I can't wait to go back to Tokyo !!

wooooo

I arrived yesterday at about 5PM. Went straight to the hotel, took a shower and then out with some coworkers.
The hotel is actually a motel and it's 5 miles from the convention center. On top of that, because there weren't enough rooms, I ended up in a quite small room with a coworker of mine.. (^^;)
There is a king-size bed + a crappy temporary bed.
The less in all this is that it's important to book very early or it's going to be a pain trying to stay in a decent location for the Siggraph.
Luckily there is a bus that dedicated to move back and forth between my motel and the convention center.

Speaking of organization.. the Wireless connection seems to work great !!!
This is a big step forward compared to GDC 2007 and Perforce conference were the connection was unreliable at best..  read more »

Just as I was going to move back to Gallery2, PicasaWeb extended the free space to 1GB (and counting). So, i could upload more pictures from GDC and San Francisco downtown around the GDC.

The second day was again about lectures. I started off with the Physics for Games Programmers tutorial, but quickly realized that it was going to be pretty basic, so I switched to Large-scale Engineering for Online and Offline Games. It was an interesting lecture, on how to distribute and organize workforces, in the same office or spread around branches.
What I didn't like much was some guy from Unreal, talking about pair programming as a way to get programmers to work with much less distractions. Nice.. for you !!!  read more »

2007/03/04-10 - San Francisco, GDC

..I dunno.. lots of lectures, technical lectures are boring. Agile Development was funny.. It's morning and I've been up all day mostly trying to sort out picture dates. Of course I forgot to change the camera clock as I arrived. Then I found some software that supposedly was going to help me shift time in the EXIF data, but it more or less fucked up things. Nice going.. it seems like most of the software out there sucks and one just needs to write his own to get things right ! For note taking I've been using TiddlyWiki ..it's very simple, just great, using a decent theme and plugins (even supports math notation through MathML) ...forget MediaWiki, Apache, MySQL.. fack those, I spent countless hours trying to run them on my PC.. die complex crap !! we try to zzzzzzzz ! poof

Italiano in fondo. Italian version comes later.

English

I arrived today at 7:48... so said the airplane pilot.

Totally ignoring the suggestion from my company (I didn't remember that at all.. possibly because all the notes where in Japanese), instead of going to register for the GDC, I went to sleep. I went to sleep at around 12, after some internetting from the hotel and woke up at 5pm when a coworker called me.

The very first thing I noticed about San Francisco is the homeless people. There is a lot of them and they are all black.

This is not a discriminatory remark, it's only a remark. I remember Michael Moore claiming that you can't find blacks in California... sure you can !!

At 7pm I had a company dinner in Chinatown at the Chinatown Restaurant, nonetheless. The restaurant was the more or less opposite of Japan. The waiters didn't look like waiters but rather a couple of Chinese guys (possibly closer to the owners) dressing with a shirt with their sleeves rolled up. One of them actually managed to throw the "wet towels" to a couple of my coworkers, because of the distance.  read more »