“He’s gone to China” – avere un figlio a Londra N4
Primo e ultimo post riguardo la faccenda figlio, non voglio annoiare me stesso, nè le 10 persone che si imbattono per sbaglio in questo post, ma nello stesso tempo voglio mettere giù due note per rileggermi in futuro qualche dettaglio colorito che inevitabilmente andrebbe perso e ricordarmi di quella meravigliosa cacofonia di etnie e strana accozzaglia di personaggi improbabili ma tutti incredibilmente gentili che hanno avuto a che fare con mio figlio già al decimo giorno di vita.
Intanto un po' di contesto: residenti in N4, ci spetta l'ospedale Whittington, che ci dicono tutti essere incredibilmente all'avanguardia e dotato di personale assai preparato; ci spetta inoltre il team "Hornsey Rise" di midwife che ci seguiranno in questa avventura, e anche di questo team sentiamo parlare un gran bene. Entrambi si sono confermati eccezionali, e ripensando ai mesi passati sento necessario ricordare alcuni piccoli eventi che mi hanno portato il sorriso.
Top 5 Albums 2011
Here it goes, in no particular order:
- Noah and the Whale - Last Night on Earth
- Radical Face - The Family Tree The Roots
- Wild Beasts - Smother
- Danger Mouse + Daniele Luppi - Rome
- The Antlers - Burst Apart
Special mention:
- Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
Firenze-Londra, solo andata
Sarà che siamo vicini al Natale e oggi abbiamo comprato l'albero, oppure che mancano poche settimane all'arrivo del piccolino, o magari che stiamo per firmare un mutuo di 25 anni per la nostra casa, o ancora che sto finalmente per chiudere la mia società in Italia... sarà forse l'insieme di tutto questo che mi sta portando oggi a fare qualche bilancio.
A few shots with my brand new Zuiko 25mm f2.8 “pancake”
Our XMas party with the friends @therumpusroom_ was great this year, and Santa brought me a super cool lens for my E-500, the tiny Zuiko 25mm f2.8 "pancake", you can read a review here.
We went for some shopping today, and took a few shots with London at its best, nice way of testing the new lens, good performances on low light conditions, really impressive contrast and colours (a bit tweaked here, but not too much, just a touch of saturation), below the results (and full set here).
Configuring NGINX and CodeIgniter on Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot on Amazon EC2
Few days ago I started the server setup for a web project @therumpusroom_ and, after receiving the traffic estimates, I thought a single Apache server was not enough to handle the expected load of visitors. For several reasons I want to avoid using a load balancer and multiple Apache instances, hence the decision to implement Nginx with MySql running on a separate dedicated server.
The whole infrastructure lives on Amazon Web Services and the web application - still under development - will rely on CodeIgniter. I have read quite a lot of articles on-line and stolen bits and pieces of configuration files, but none of them entirely reflected what I needed. I feel it is quite a common configuration hence I am writing down here the required steps and some code snippets, both for my personal records and also hoping it can be helpful for someone else with similar issues.
wordpress and google+ vanity url
I could not resist, I had to have my google+ vanity url on my wordpress installation, and this is pretty straight forward using a well-known redirection plugin, just pick your profile id from google+ (as in figure below) and setup a 301 redirect from <your_address>/+ to your profile, that's it!
if you want to say hello: http://tom.londondroids.com/+
Range Rover Evoque Interactive Installation – phases and pictures
So the Range Rover Evoque "Sounds of the City" project went live in Madrid at the beginning of June, and it has been a long and interesting path that eventually lead to a red carpet in Kensington, London.
I was involved as interactive producer for the installation and microsite, working with the amazing guys at The Rumpus Room for the agency The Brooklyn Brothers. We designed, developed and built all the interaction for the interactive installation and relative microsite, then shipped and attended to the events in Madrid and London with our buddies at Connect Live, who took care of the physical build of the plinth and all the logistic.
Below is the story of the installation development and deliver through a sequence of images.
Crunchbase visualization tool of Venture Firms
Over the past few days a couple of friends asked me more or less the same thing: retrieve a collection of Venture Firms and visualize a simple subset of important data, such as geo location, average investment, and short description. I have hence decided to spend a little time with some PHP/Javascript and implemented this simple application.
The application crawls pages from Crunchbase to retrieve a set of financial organizations, then update their locations using their API. Details on each organization are fetched through an AJAX request to Crunchbase's API after a marker on the map is clicked. A vector graph is displayed showing the list of the investments of the firm.
The application uses Raphael JS for creating the SVG graph, therefore works on Firefox and Safari only [EDIT: it was then updated to google chart api to maximize browser compatibility and now fully compliant]. If anyone interested in the code or database, just drop me an email using the contact form on this page.
Cantine aperte in Napa Valley
La valle è estremamente larga e ariosa, quasi una pianura raccolta tra due file di colline non eccessivamente alte. Le viti hanno vita facile tutto sommato: al Castello di Amorosa (vedi sotto) ci hanno confermato questa sensazione, dicendoci appunto che i produttori che seguono un gusto di tipo europeo vanno in cerca di terreni più inclinati, dove la vite debba rimanere attaccata e pescare in basso per cercare l'acqua. Per quanto riguarda la temperatura, penso che tecnicamente l'inverno sia di riposo per la vite, ma si parla comunque di un mitissimo inverno tra i 10 e i 20 gradi. Pare che ci sia comunque una buona escursione termica, e ci dicono che la media annuale passa tra i 40-45 notturni e gli 85-95 diurni, in farenheit ovviamente.
Per la cronaca, la degustazione è stata l'orgia del merlot e cabernet sauvignon, una fila consistente di bicchieri che sembravano diluiti nel burro per cercare di nascondere quell'ignorante violenza che può esprimere, come lo chiamano qui, un cab (e ogni volta piuttosto che al cabernet sauvignon penso all'ometto bolso alla guida di un taxi che parla come fosse appena uscito da Eastenders)
Top 10 italian songs
We were recently asked by a friend of ours to list the top 10 italian songs. Without any specific rule, it just had to express our feelings and be representative of Italy. The outcome was a funny pre-christmas night, digging in youtube archives, and this is the result.
- Di cosa si parla in giro? La ricerca di Thomas Alisi #wcap http://t.co/zrNkTdSJ via @workingcapital
- Instant CRUD Interfaces With PHP (CodeIgniter): GroceryCrud - http://t.co/pCCDydpO
- RT @tonyvolpe: Thank you free JSON Parser, you just saved my eyes from bleeding : http://t.co/gReqiXnq
- on CRblog All the fun of the Kinetica Art Fair http://t.co/3aFmxdgf @wylesy
- "He's gone to China" - avere un figlio a Londra N4 - http://t.co/nVO4yjVM (via @grudelsud)
- @tonyvolpe apart from upgrading my status to dad you mean? :-) nope, it just broke with no apparent reason
- #tweetdeck doesn't launch anymore, keeps asking to restore windows and crashes again. #epic #fail http://t.co/iioBryyb
- Visualization of Tweets Clusters in London during the Royal Wedding day - http://t.co/Eu8aMgzd (via @grudelsud)
- @EU_Careers any ETA for the EPSO/AD/228 results held in nov.11?
- nice job, ric! EELS gets SOTD on the FWA http://t.co/yW8254QR
Some photos
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