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Showing posts from 2012

Children

When my daughter was baptized, a friend of mine read the following passage from The Prophet of Khalil Gibran. Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infin

Have you any question?

If you ever had an interview, you know it comes the time when the interviewer asks if you have any questions or doubts. There is one question which surfaced to my mind only recently, and I've to admit it is one which would be quite hard to do; and the question is: “Is this an honourable company?” Of course, as soon as I receive a positive answer, I would ask: “What is your definition of honour?” Both the questions could be addressed to a potentianl employee as well: “Are you an honourable worker?” I would be unconfortable on both side of the table, in both cases; but these are questions which will be asked, either directly, or just inside the mind of the employer or the employee; and at least there should be an agreement on what the word 'honour' means, and by extension what an honourable man is. I've read some definitions of honour; I'm still far from understanding them.

Diet, food and activities

Less than a year ago I decided to start dieting; in a sense, I’m quite lucky, because my metabolism just asks me to eat less in order to loose weight. When I started I was at 116 Kg; now I’m around 87, and I had a steady progress of loosing weight at about 0.5 Kg/Week. Staying on a diet taught me a number of things. First of all, it taught me about patience. I mean, you can think I loose weight quite fast, and indeed it was fast; but when you’re overweight (obese is the right term) and you want to regain a more healthy weight, an year can be a very long time. But, and this was another lesson, you can’t solve a big problem in just one day; after all, it took me something like 10 years to gain all that weight. So, solving that problem in just one year was really a deal. But, in the meantime, I remained obese. And this was the third lesson: once you’ve a problem, even if you devise a solution, the solution does not resolve the problem immediately; and in the meantime

Bikers, developers and runners

A couple of months ago I started getting to the office with the bike; it is a moderate long trip (about 40 minutes), and I’ve some slope to climb. You could say that for a real sportsman it would be quite easy, but for a couch potato like me, it requires some effort. Anyway, while climbing the hardest slopes, I thought that there was some parallel I could draw between biking and developing software. I mean, developing software is not a leveled ride, with no slope to face. Sometimes, you’ve a leveled ride, and you employ the gears that gives you the maximum speed; then, you face a slope, and all of sudden, you’ve to change gear, you go slower and slower as the slope is harder to climb, and you go on until you reach the top, at which point you’ve to change again the gear, in order to keep control while descending the slope at full speed. In a similar way, developing software is sometimes a leveled ride: you can use your gears to go at maximum speed; then, all of sudden, you face a sl

Perché ho smesso di comprare dalla Coop

Ho appena finito di "Biondo Depresso" sull'Informatore della Coop. Non sono d'accordo con tutto l'articolo, e in particolare con il finale: "Ma, diciamo la verità: non vale forse la pena pagare qualche centesimo in più per un cibo che dà la sicurezza di essere prodotto ponendo attenzione non solo alla salvaguardia dell'ambiente (acqua di torrente invece di energia elettrica, legna dei nostri boschi al posto del petrolio), ma anche con un occhio di riguardo alla nostra salute (niente prodotti chimici né ogm)?" Dopo di questo, ho deciso di smettere di servirmi da loro.