No, I’m not at the concert of Depeche Mode in Bologna, even if I would love to be there.   Michele had bought a ticket for me, but I had to ask him to find someone else.  In fact he had no problem, it took him 20 minutes to confirm he had found a back up.

No, I’m not at the dinner of the acting course (did I tell you I’m now studying how to act?), even if this is the 1st dinner, called on purpose to better know each other and blend together and the other participants are all women and pretty and fun.  It is an “everybody brings something” dinner and I had prepared some specialties from the traditional Ferrarese cuisine that I’m very fond of.

I’m currently at home, idling, bored.  Unfortunately caught a flu and I have had fever and general sickness in the last 4 days.  Let’s try to find a positive side of the coin.  It was long time I didn’t have that much spare time – you can clearly see from how slow I have been posting new articles to this blog.

In the last few days days I watched some movies, caught up on some RSS feeds, including blogs of my friends, posted a lot of nonsense to facebook and added some info to my profile, listened to some music, reordered paper stuff, hacked some code for the fun of it, overslept, and also worked (email, some phone calls, a few skype chats).  In fact I can’t seem to be able to detach from the office.  At least I’m enjoing the new home (did I tell you I moved to a new flat?).

So… last time I blogged was months ago.  Back then I was in Brazil.  Where have I been since then?  No, I was not kidnapped in a favela.  No, I was not out of topics.  Actually, I had many things to write.  Just for starters I traveled back and forth to Brazil, drove to Berlin, joined a gospel choir and sung in a famous theatre.  The problem is, I just got sucked into Facebook.

At the beginning I used Facebook to keep in touch with my friends abroad.  For this usage pattern I think it was a good tool, because you receive a constant feed of updates from your friends: their mood, their pictures, their friends, their new interests and so on.  You can filter and prioritize stuff and organize your daily dose of updates.

One the other hand, FB can be a total disaster for you privacy, much more than any other social network, because everybody appears with their actual name and everything you write (and everything you friends write and tag about you) is immediately forwarded to all of your friends and God knows who else.  Even basic good practices like keeping a clear border between your work and your private life can be very difficult.

So there are pros and cons.  Is it worthwhile?  I don’t know.  For sure the potential is great because in July this website was basically unknown in Italy (I used it only for foreign friends) and now I have most of my Italian friends on it.  It’s so popular that yesterday I was walking in the city center and I heard everybody and his brother talking about it.  Some of my friends even taught it to their moms and at the Xmas lunch my aunt used my laptop to check out her page!  Go figure.

On nice thing is that suddenly I started to receive connection invitations from friends I had last heard last century.  This is great!  Through Facebook I could reconnect to friends I had totally lost!  The problem is, this service is growing exponentially both on the usefulness axis and on the danger axis and I feel like the thing is quickly going to out of control.  There are already many reports of identity thefts performed through Facebook and their privacy statement is particularly scary.  The fact that Facebook is located in a foreign country ruled by an administration that showed absolutely no love for privacy doesn’t help either.  It does not surprise me that among the investors in FB there are venture capitalists connected to the CIA.

One thing I totally hate is that immediately after you complete the subscription process they ask you to enter your gmail login so that they can fetch your data (e.g. your address book) from there.  They say this is convenient but to me this looks outrageous.  I mean, if you login in my gmail account you have access to: my analytics, my documents, my calendar, my email, all the password remainders I received from other sites.  And from there you can read more password reminders just by going to a website and entering my email address, including the one for my bank account.  This is the same as giving away your entire life!

Unfortunately my brain bandwidth for online time was limited and when I started to use Facebook on a daily basis my time budget for this blog went dramatically down.   I’m sorry for this because I still like this blog and I think Facebook is no substitute for it so I think I’ll try to use less Facebook and move back to this place.

This is post number one hundred! This blog was born 445 days ago, so on average I posted once every 4.45 days.

This is a great accomplishment, congratulations to myself. Started as nothing more than a joyful experiment and a way to improve my English, this blog slowly changed in something that I care for. My posts are still mostly useless, but maybe some of you will like them.

I was a bit busy working and traveling around and laziness temporarily won, but don’t worry, I’ll keep on blogging!

UPDATE: there was no robot, there’s real people scanning the internet and posting comments! OMG, this is a lesson on marketing 2.0!

I found this article on EFF website very interesting, with lots of suggestions about how to blog safely.  I’m not scared, but I’m adopting some of this measures anyway.  Better safe than sorry.

I’m italian and I live in Italy, so why this blog is in english? No, I’m not a snobbish xenophile and I do care my friends can read my blog, but you know, nowadays more and more of my friends don’t speak italian while more and more of my italian friends do speak english as a second language. And I think it is a matter of fact that english is the language of the Internet, even if writing in the local language is perfectly OK. Last but not least, I like to practise my english and this blog helps me learn new words at every post. For example in this post I learnt the use of xenophile. OK OK, I don’t think I’ll ever use this mostly useless word again in my life, but then again… Now that I think to it, at work we’re adding a lot of stranger people lately. In our offices we’ve already gathered at least a dozen non-italian people and I really love to work in such a international environment!

I’m gonna write whatever useless thing comes to my mind, just to fill the page, so please don’t take it seriously.