From Robert Scoble’s blog, answering to a reader who doesn’t understand why he spends time with “boring” geeky things: _The real thing I’ve been doing for more than eight years now is to try to arrange my life so that I have an interesting conversation every day with someone interesting._ Robert is right. We don’t aspire to a tropical island, with a tropical drink, and tropical cute girls, and nothing to do all day long. ... Read more

Tomorrow I’ll go to Portland (OR), where on friday I’ll attend the RailsConf conference, together with other guys from Amazon.com. There seem to be a lot of interesting projects and startup using Amazon Web Services in conjunction with Ruby, and RubyOnRails. Here, starting tomorrow, you can see a full coverage of the event. I’m particularly interested in learning more about: - Fiveruns, a monitoring tool. - EnterpriseDB, providing PostgreSQL services (based on AWS) - MagLev, scaling solutions for Ruby. ... Read more

Do you still want to complain? I stumbled on Phil’s blog, discovering that his daughter Serenity has Leucemia. I agree that it’s good to keep posting on the blog, since many friends will be able to get news about it. I don’t personally know Phil, but his story somewhat touched me. There is an applet on the right of the page, click it and add something. Thanks. ** Curing Leucemia is expensive**. ... Read more

A great video about the zen of presentations, from the point of view of Garr Reynolds. Garr lives in Japan, and the place seems to inspire him a lot. He’s also a Jazz enthusiast, worked for Apple, and wrote a book I have in Luxembourg (but didn’t read yet): the name, of course, is Presentation Zen.[ ](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321525655?ie=UTF8&tag=brunozzi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0321525655) I think that in my new role of AWS Evangelist, I’ll need to hear his advices and try to deliver good presentations around. ... Read more

I shot a couple of dozen pictures in Seattle yesterday, and I wanted to put them on Flickr. Problem is that Flickr has a monthly upload bandwidth limit, and my Canon EOS 400D creates 3382x2259 images, but for Flickr a 1200x800 should suffice; therefore I decided to resize them before uploading. How to do that with a batch process, rather than by hand? I came up with a nice solution using GIMP (for Linux Ubuntu, but it’s valid for other Linux flavors as well). ... Read more

Using this tutorial, and re-adapting it to GIMP (a very good, and free, Photoshop clone for Linux), I made this sketch from a picture:

With my evangelist superpowers, I decided that today HAD to be a sunny day in Seattle (Jeff, Mike, I told you that!). Despite my best intentions, I therefore decided not to go to work (I hadn’t to, but I wanted to), shelving it for tomorrow or monday (because it’s going to be cloudy again, no doubt!). I left my apartment around 11 a.m., and then wondered around downtown Seattle. I decided to buy a book guide (an architecture-oriented one) in a local Barnes & Noble store (please, don’t tell my boss I didn’t buy it from Amazon! ... Read more

I’m videochatting with my good friend Alberto, from Italy!! Ciao! (the odd videochat window is a compiz effect on my Ubuntu laptop eheh!)

Nicholas Carr blogged about Gwap, a week ago : “_a new site was launched this week, by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, that aims to entice humans into playing simple games that will help computers get smarter. The site, called Gwap (an acronym for “games with a purpose”), is the brainchild of computer scientist Luis von Ahn (who also cofathered the Captcha). “We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see,” he explains. ... Read more

AWS and the New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/3v4828 # Cool street art: http://tinyurl.com/6zbnb3 # Another cloudy Seattle day… but the morale is very high. Amazon is soooo cool guys! Check this out: http://tinyurl.com/5e9l34 # Vertica Webinar: http://tinyurl.com/6kzwnl #