I've been quite busy with work and social life.
With the winter season, some friends came to Tokyo for business and fun. That took quite a chunk of my free time. It's always nice to meet old friends, but that affects my Internet activity 8)
Friends from Italy keep insisting that the situation in Rome is getting worse every year. With people from poor countries flowing in large numbers and criminality raising. While keeping the same old culture of inefficiency and rudeness towards customers.
Oh well, at least Rome doesn't have trash rotting in the streets like for Naples 8)
If you plan to travel to Italy, don't go to Naples. Italians themselves try to avoid it. You'll get robbed, but you'll get robbed in Rome, too. ..what a great country Italy has become !
Italians themselves complain a lot, but it's never enough. They can't really tell because they normally don't see any better. Try to live in Tokyo, then go back to Italy, and notice the difference.
Every Italian, by law, should have to try go live in an a more civilized country, to learn and spread.

By the way, it's official that (romantic) relationships do suck.
The thing that is really strange in relationships is how one can profess love to a person for years and then just stop seeing that person. It takes a long time to shake that off (at least for me !). It's a lengthy painful process, an emotional roller coaster generated by the fact that as two people come apart they slowly get out of sync with their high and low mood states (? whatever ! 8).

Moving on is however usually the best solution. In relationships and in life in general. The trick is to balance things.. how much time and effort should one put into something before giving up ?
The one gives up on something and suddenly it seems like it was one minute too soon. Tricky !!

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