Maggie (Marianne Faithfull) is a British widow in her mid-fifties. Maggie’s grandson is dying of a rare disease and the only possible cure is in Australia. His family already spent all they had to buy medicines and now they can’t afford the travel. Maggie, driven by that love any grandparents have, is determined to help with the money but she’s old and nobody wants to give her a job or a loan. When she finds a notice for “hostess wanted” on a door in Soho she unintentionally enters a night club. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last few days I’ve been experimenting with ActiveMQ, a JMS broker implementation by the Apache Foundation. I’m looking for innovative solutions to make our enterprise infrastructure more robust and flexible and this project looks very promising. Read the rest of this entry »

Merry Christmas and happy new year to all of my friends!

The title is a tentative translation from an Italian song by Elio e le storie tese, one of my favorite when I was a teen-ager. We’re two days from Christmas and I should be busy wishing happiness and merriness to all of my friends, but this year there’s a different feeling. It’s that kind of tension and uncertainty you get when you go to the beach and there are heavy clouds, announcing some possible storm. You get busy thinking to B plans and even if the clouds end up disappearing your leisure time has been ruined. It’s not me. Lately several prominent newspapers wrote about the unhappy Italian mood and I’m surprised by how precisely they painted it. Apparently, even friends that moved abroad feel the same.

I know how it feels…

There are countries where it is customary to kiss on cheek while greeting or saying goodbye, as a display of friendship and affection. There are countries where it’s not. The problem is, when you travel you never know where it’s OK and how many kisses are required. As this article points out, the number of kisses can range from one to four, also depending on the gender of the person you’re greeting. Same as in France, Italy has a different behavior depending on the region, with more kisses in the South. To make it more interesting, I’ve found that in Europe you kiss the right cheek first, while in Brazil it’s the other way around. In my trips to Rio I’ve made cheek kissing mistakes several times.