Mostly about me, too boring?

The caption reads "in the most difficult time, being confused is much easier".

It's the ad for obituary services.

And this is the view from my hotel in Ivrea.

Quite nice! :-)

This is the first day of the rest of my life.
Today I came to Ivrea, a little town near Torino, in north-west Italy.
This is a key location for one Italian main telecom operator.

During my time in Italy I will spend few days a week here. I don't really fancy the idea to drive 250km (125 x 2) every week, but I got the impression that this is a kind of "my way or the highway" situation.

Today it's a nice and sunny day. Promising! :-)

In the picture, an old monastery now acting as restaurant, where we had lunch.

Alfonso

For all of you that don't speak German, the title means "the bill, please".
It's actually one of the first things I learn in a foreign country. Meaning is: an other project is ended. My time in Vienna is over and next week I'll start in Milan.
Yes! Back "home". I'm very happy that I'll see all my friends.

Just for my personal diary, I'd like to mention a couple of things I've done during my last week in Vienna. The great Giger exhibition at the Kunst Haus Wien. Giger is the artist who "invented" Alien. I really liked the whole show.

The World Press Photo. From their website: "first and foremost, World Press Photo is known for organizing the world's largest and most prestigious annual press photography contest". The pictures vary from sport, nature, life, news and so on. Some are a real fist in the stomach. But this is the world we live in. So it's good to know what's going on around it. You can look at their pictures also online.

Finally, the picture attached was shot in Helsinki, yesterday night. Summer is over, but still the weather is quite nice, so the youngsters are still willing to enjoy some open air activity. ;-)

Hi...

Few days ago I got my new phone (Nokia N93) so I thought it was time to test some new application to directly blog from my phone.

The picture I used for this test was taken last December in Ecuador. It's me, bullfighting! ;-)

Be aware, I'm about to talk about some boring technical stuff...

With my old phone I was blogging using MMS to email feature. In practive you create a normal MMS and you put an email address as a recipient. Very easy, but MMS have the bad habit to resize my pictures before it receives the recipient, and so they look very bad when they get uploaded to to my blog. No big deal, since the camera of my old phone was not very detailed. But now my new phone has a 3Mpixel camera.. ;-)
I can't allow MMS gateways to ruin them!

So I remembered of a blog that wrote about how to Flickr from an S60 mobile phone:
- How to Flickr from ShoZu?
- How to Flickr from Nokia Flickr Uploader?
- How to Flickr from Nokia Lifeblog?

At first a tried ShoZu but I didn't like it so much. The application itself was slow, and for any reason I was having some error that prevented me to correctly upload pictures on my Flickr account:

A problem with your flickr account is delaying ShoZu uploads.

Your flickr account may be full or you might have exceeded an upload limit.
Visit your sharing site for more information about the problem.

Don't worry about re-uploading your photos, they are safe on our server and will appear on your sharing site once the problem is fixed.

One great feature of ShoZu is that it automatically backs-up your contact list online. This is a great added value, but since the core-application didn't work as expected (couldn't send my pics on Flickr) I gave it up. Also, it was too intrusive. With ShoZu installed, anytime I take a picture I see a popup that asks me if I want to "Save to Flickr" or have "More options". I want to decide when and how to upload my pictures! I don't want to be asked EVERY TIME!

An other quite nasty missing feature of ShoZu is that I couldn't find anyway to choose my Wi-Fi as access point. The only available APN were the GPRS/UMTS ones. Maybe good for telecoms, but not for me. If I'm in a WiFi covered area (e.g. in my home!) I want to enjoy the free ride.

Just right now, I'm trying to use it again to remember what I want to say about it and this time the upload worked. But even so, it went as far as upload the picture on Flickr, but not on my blog (which is the main reason for me to upload to Flickr), so once again, ShoZu is not good for me.

If it wasn't intrusive, I would keep the application just to regularly backup my contacts, but since it's nagging every single time I take a picture, it's going to leave my mobile pretty soon.

So then I tried the "Nokia Flickr Uploader". I will give for grented you read the article that I linked earlier, so I won't repeat "the basics".

At first I didn't understand how to make it work following the blog, but then I found this tutorial on Flickr website and I found out that I needed an add-on configuration file (here).

It worked just fine, but I was only uploading my pics on my Flickr account, not on my blog. Reading around I found out that there were two so-called "server":
- http://www.flickr.com/services/atom/ (to post only to Flickr)
- http://www.flickr.com/services/atom2blog/ (to post on both Flickr and your blog)

The page was focusing on uploading via Lifeblog, but I liked the interface from "Open Online Service". I found it quick and simple. So I had a look in the cfg file, and I saw that it's a simple xml file.

So I created a new cfg file changing few key fields:
- configure_file service_id (I used "flickrblog")
- title (I used FlickrBlog)
and the most important one:
- endpoint_path (you need to put http://www.flickr.com/services/atom2blog/)

If you really have spare time, you could also change the icon associated with it. It's an SVG file encoded using base64 for binary to text translation. Here you can find some freeware to encode/decode base64.

Following the rest of the tutorial made the trick, and now I'm able to directly post on my blog!

I was satisfied with this, so I didn't really try LifeBlog!

Cheers,

alfonso

Saturday I went at the Mumok Museum in Vienna for a photo exibithion.

The title is "Why pictures now". You see, I love pictures.

Pictures of breathtaking views, of great event of history, of habits of people different from me, of cultural "evolution" (ever seen this great picture of guys in Rome whisteling after a girl in short skirt? Italy during the after-war boom), of beautiful women, advertising (especially if old), you name it.
But these were "just" pictures there. It's probably my big ignorance, but I could find any good reason to spend time in that museum during a warm day.


Except for one idea shown in one "art piece" by Emily Jacir called "From Texas with love". The footage showed an endless road, shot in Texas. Below the TV set there were a cd player, a remote control, an headset and a list of songs to choose from.
The caption of this piece of art read: "If you had the freedom to get in a car and drive for an hour without being stop (imagine that there is no Israeli military occupation; no Israeli soldiers, no Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks, no 'by-pass' roads...) what song would you listen to?"
I never heard about most of these songs and I choose "I can see clearly now". Which one would you choose?






I also found this other picture interesting. It was among a number of pictures all by the same artist. The caption reads: "If it doesn't make you horny, it's not art".

Alfonso

Yesterday I went to Vienna Kursalon to hear a concert for tourists.

I had sits for 2nd row, just behind the "V.I.P." row... So to show you a picture of the whole room I had to find it on flickr... ;-)

From the press release: The repertoire spans the works of Strauss, Lanner, Ziehrer, as well as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and traditional "Schrammeln" and Salonmusik.


During some performances, the orchestra is joined by two ballet dancers or by two opera singers.

It's a big mash up from different types of music, ballet, opera, but it's perfect for tourist (like me!). The only downside of being so touristic is that it was full of old fellow from US. Not a big deal, if just this nice lady wouldn't have set next to me. Man, she smelled old! I guess the smell was from some chemical to preserve her sweater from rotting (or maybe her from rotting...).

But at the end it was a very pleasant happening. ;-)

Life at its best.

Sunday I met Kit, a girl from US and yesterday we went out for dinner together.

We were by her hotel, in Stephansplatz (the very downtown of Vienna) and it was already quite late, so we didn't want to walk a lot to find a place. Just next to the hotel entrance there was a nice restaurant with tables on the street (see the google map). You could tell it was very nice, by its look.
We sat down and open the menu, and strangely enough everything was in Italian. So I asked Kit if she planned it (to bring me to an Italian restaurant) or it was just a coincidence. She was as surprised as I was. It turned out to be the Cantinetta Antinori, a restaurant born in Firenze and now present in Firenze, Vienna, Moscow and Zurich. From the menu I understood that originally the reason for the "cantinetta" was to able to have some food while tasting Antinori's famous wine (especially Chianti).

I felt it was time to revenge for the way too many lunches at "noodle house", a crappy chinese I'm forced to visit almost every lunch, and for all the Wiener Schnitzel (a.k.a. "cotoletta alla milanese") that I've eaten here in Vienna.

I went for the "tagliata di manzo" (sliced veal) and I adviced Kit for "costolette di agnello" (lamb ribs). I asked the waiter (a nice girl from North-East Italy) for some advice on the wine and we got a great bottle of red wine from Toscana. Unfortunately I forgot the name... :-(

Even the dessert was full of surprises: Kit choose a basil ice cream and I got for the first time in my life stawberries with balsamic vinegar. Great!

The price was related to the level of the food and service, and I would say it was totally worth the money!

Cheers,

alfonso