Tag: travels

U.S.A. and back

I’m back from a long holidays in the U.S.A. More than 3 weeks spent there with my wife and Matteo, our 14 years old nephew.The places are wonderful and amazing. We landed at San Francisco, then moved to Utah, Colorado and Arizona, visiting most of the parks we encountered, hiking around on moderate/strenous trails, and then we get back to California to catch our flight from Los Angeles.
We shot about 500 analog slides, about twice digital pictures and two hours and half of digital video. My log ran about 23 pages though composed by brief notes that have to be expanded in order to be human-readable.
All this will take some time to be ready for making it on-lineable.
I’ll be back before with some travel impressions.

Alsace on-line

The more ESP talented of you have already noted that I made our [images/photoalbum/Alsace/200704/index.html|last vacation photos] on-line. For those who can read Italian I just uploaded the [downloads/Diario_Alsazia_2007.pdf|travel log] as well.I hope you enjoy both. As usual comments and critics are welcome.

Easter Aftermath

Happy Easter… usually it starts with something like this, then you find 4 days later at the workplace wondering exactly what happened… Well it happened that supermarket shopping on Friday evening is always nefarious. Everyone, his friends and his brothers are there to shop for the weekend. People with no other goal than staring absent mindedly to shelves while keeping their cart across the corridors. Crowds of long unseen old friends clustering together (and usually complaining about people stopping in the market or about new generations without good manners). This time it had been a bit worse, because someone took our cart at about one third of the process and we had to restart from the beginning.
Then on Saturday it was the Shoes-Day, I spent the whole day with my wife in and out from shoe-shops and outlets in Parabiago. We also succeed in smashing another car door, fortunately no injuries for anyone and not much damage for our car (anyway our insurance fee will raise). We started about at 9:00 and we got back home after 20:00.
On Easter and Monday we paid the belonging to our families.
During this holidays evenings we tried to figure out the best accommodation in Las Vegas for this Summer U.S. travel. When traveling to Norway, two years ago, we found very helpful the website to make hotel reservations in Germany. Unfortunately there isn’t anything so complete for U.S. and we are browsing through endless lists of hotels, motels logdes, bed and breakfasts, inns and so on. At last (after three evenings of hard search and comparison) we found a Travelodge on the strip, close to Bellaggio, at a convenient price.

Back from Sciliar

I had great days on the Alpe di Siusi (Alp of Siusi) or SeiserAlm as those who live there call their home. It is a lovely and smooth plateau at around 1800m, braced by imposing Dolomite pikes. Sasso Piatto (“Flat Stone” a sort of understatement) bounds the East side, while Denti di Terra Rossa (“Red Soil Teeth”) bound the South Side and ends with the tooth shaped Sciliar pike.We had sun for nearly seven days and, despite of the warm winter, snow was enough to ski.
Alas, in order to appreciate great things, we have to compare them with the grey, dull industrial landscape of Castellanza, that’s why (I guess) I’m back home and at work.
The first interesting surprise hitting me at work has been the anticipation of the milestone I was working for. Our customer product has been selected for a design prize, so we are expected to deliver the working product earlier. Anyway we’re working hard, against time and hardware shortage to hit the milestone nonetheless.
At home, Santa (in the person of my wife) gave me a Xbox 360 and I started playing a not-so-Xmas-spirit game: Gears of War. I’m about the first boss and I should say that it’s great. From the technical viewpoint I think this is one of the first real next gen game. It runs on the Unreal 3 engine and the look is as detailed as awesome. The gameplay is based on taking cover, i.e. as soon as enemies are encountered you should take cover or you get badly shot. This is somewhat different from the classical shooter where the player drives a Rambo-like bullet-proof character (well, in Serious Sam, this was intended). The first boss is a chasing game play – run away from the monster, let him smash the doors for you and eventually take him off. Great.
While I was so fresh from the holidays and relaxed from Gears of War, I decided to update my notebook to the latest linux available. I gave a brief look to Sabayon Linux, only to discover that it behaves badly with the Toshiba touch pad and apparently has no support for my wireless adapter (I can’t believe that today distros still do not support the Centrino wireless adapter that is so widespread and at least two years old). So I turned to what I know quite well – Fedora Core 6.
I opted for the upgrade option instead of the install. Years ago I was used to upgrade, only to find that the system resulted in something that wasn’t completely new nor old and often was prone to glitches. A friend of mine suggested me to never upgrade, rather to backup the /home directory, install and restore it. This time I was so light from the holidays that I decided that an upgrade could do.
Well, I was wrong.
Yes I got a sort of FC6 tailored on my previous FC4 installation, and, yes, the wireless adapter sorta worked. But I could only browse the google website. No matter how I set the firewall/SELinux properties, there was no way to browse the rest of Internet. But this is another story.

Back from holidays

A body on holidays tends to stay in that state unless some external events force it to get back to work. That’s exactly what happened to me and my wife, that caused us to terminate our holidays on the Alpe di Siusi. The process involving the return home had been hard and extremely painful since it took 8 hours and half to drive through 340km.
But this minor drawback doesn’t take anything from the wonderful holidays we had. Have a look in the photoalbum at our photos we shot there.