I’m leaving in a few hours… See you soon, Seattle!

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Yesterday I was trying to book some flights for my june and july trips: Copenhagen (Denmark), Tallinn (Estonia), London (UK), Seattle (WA, USA) and Portland (OR, USA) (which is a very nice city, full of nice women and good italian restaurants such as Piazza Italia), and finally Reykjavík (Iceland). As you may guess, it is not an easy trip to book. I first tried with multiple one-way trips, and the total was close to five thousand dollars. ... Read more

Dopplr is a great idea… Otherwise, could you guess the mess in managing something like this?

I had a great evening with our big team at the Wingdome in GreenWood (north of downtown Seattle), and easily earned my Platinum Tatonka Award (25 chicken wings, plus 5 with more sauce), first in a row of a dozen people! Well, I have to admit that I didn’t sleep very well tonight, but… Hey, it was fun!

Jenny invited me for dinner at his house, together with his husband and a friend. What a wonderful evening! I brought some Dolcetto d’Alba wine, which I didn’t know before… and it was good! I suggest you to try it :-) Richard is the guy who suggested me the wine… He has been in Italy about forty times, and knows Umbria very well (Umbria is the region where I come from, and Assisi is my home town). ... Read more

This video is impressive: Dean Kamen and his team created an I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E Robot Arm, which could be put into production in the next few years. It will mean a revolution for armless people, but I’m sure that its innovations will expand to legs, and other things as well. Oh my, I really believe that the following years will be hugely surprising for us, and humans will benefit a lot from technology. ... Read more

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Ruby on Rails is a tech thing, a framework to deploy applications, and RailsConf is a conference regarding Rails.) I’m just back from Portland (OR), where I’ve been at the RailsConf, organized by O’Reilly. About 1,700 attendees, lots of interest, a good community. This is Joel Spolsky during his Keynote (here on wikipedia, and here his famous blog). I’d like to share with you my pictures of the conference, and the pictures I’ve taken at the Message Board. ... Read more

Had a great, great, great dinner and superb espresso at Piazza Italia in Portland (OR), led by Alessandro, an almost 70 years old cool guy from Bari. Didn’t have my camera with me, what a pity :-) By the way, in Oregon you don’t have sales tax, so basically everything is about 4-5% cheaper than in Seattle (including Apple products, to which I can add my 8% amazonian employee discount too). ... Read more

I’ve just been at Working Worlds, a virtual job fair in Second Life (here my SL blog), as an Amazon.com recruiter (positions in UK, DE or Lux). It has been an interesting experience, and I can say that some of the candidates were really interesting persons. There was also a Luxembourgish journalist, who wrote something about me (semi-translated in english for you, or here in french). There is a great potential in these kind of things (virtual worlds), yet to be unleashed. ... Read more