Not good

Sometimes in life you have to tell people white lies.

Sometimes you have to lie to people you love.

Sometimes, you have to lie to avoid very uncomfortable situation.

That’s my situation, now. And i feel bad. Really bad.

I’m not moralist, really, this is not about doing something wrong. I’ve been thrown in a difficult situation, by people who’re supposed to support you, not to make you feel ill. I’ve made errors in the past – nothing really bad, believe me, nothing related to crimes, drugs, or anything like that – and i’m not proud of them. Sometimes i feel ashame. But been depressed is not a fault, is not a crime, and when you’re ok, when you finally climb out of the hole, people near you distrust you.

I’m not saying i want to be decorated for what i’ve been into. A lot of people go through depression, and a lot get out, like me. I think this was part of my life, and that experience make me tha man that i am now.

I’m not perfect, i still have a lot to learn. But heck, i don’t diserve this treatment from people who’re supposed to love me.

So i have to lie, sometimes. I feel bad about that, and i promise that i won’t put myself into a similar situation again in my life.

And i’m serious.

Being a metaphorically adoptive parent

I stepped into this post on the Dave Seah blog, and found it really interesting. Dave started the entry saying that he had an epiphany about he’s like a child… i had known this for long time, and it’s quite difficult to deal with my child. The difficult part is that i don’t want to kill my interior child, it would be like losing a part of my body, and i believe the child is responsible for being creative, for my imagination, for my dreams. It’s always too easy to say “this is right, this is wrong, throw away all it’s not useful or productive”, in a sort of adulthood foundamentalism. The key is always to think.

Sorry for the absence

I’m really sorry for the absence, i was wondering about a lot of things… i needed to make some decisions about the blog:  find the proper platform, be really convinced to write on a blog periodically, what language sto use… and so on. Yes, i always think a lot on things, but usually when i make a decision that is, forever. Likely

It’s 27

Thursday 12 I’ve grown 27 years old.

Speaking with some people and thinking deeply, it’s time to draw some serious lines, taking decisions and gain complete independence. Let’s start softly.

Organization, organization, organization

I understand deeply that I need to put a serious organization in my life. I need discipline. Unfortunatly I haven’t done the military service (9 years ago, here in Italy, it was mandatory) and I never had the occasion to learn from the Navy the true meaning of that word, so I have to work on it on my own. Discipline is not the key word at University, even if it can help a lot, so I really start to feel this need only recently. And discipline is very hard to learn on your own. I must learn some tips and tricks to work on it, and I need them soon. To achieve this, I understood I can’t put patches to fix my life, you can’t try to do the gardening in a spontaneously grown forest: you have to blow it off, make a tabula rasa, and start planting again. But this time, you’ll know where to plant your seed, and how to have care of them. To don’t waste time, you need a lot of care to make them grow quickly and healty, so I’ll do the same.

Independence

To really live your life, you have to be independent from all the opinions, suggestions and constrictions people build around you, and the tighter ones are the ones tied around you by persons you care of: parents, relatives, friends, even girlfriends sometimes. I need to cut this ropes, and travel alone. I’m not saying I have to behave like a 14 years old boy with teen rebelling attitude, this can be worse than ever. I’ll consider people suggestions, thinking about them twice or thrice if necessary, giving them a chance only if I’m conviced that’ll be the best for me. No more constrictions or psychological blackmails, I’ll start to say no, accepting the consequences whatever they are. I also need money, they will help greatly, but at this time finding a job here is quite hard, not to tell a tech job. I’ll start to do some tecnical repairs, maybe I’ll give some math lessons too. If I can’t find something in the IT soon, I’ll look for any other job, maybe a sale assistant in come commercial center, like I’ve done before. I won’t care about that if my final purpose, the study of science (in particular math and physics, alongside with the actual computer science), could be pursued anyway.

Time management

To accomplish all of those, I need a lot of time to study and learn money together. But time is a limited resource, and I haven’t enough gravity to bend it for my aim… so I have to rationalize the 24 hours at day given to me. I’ll start cutting off time waste and getting count of what I do and when, to move after on more advanced techniques. I already quitted with online games some time ago: I didn’t play them all day long, but it was difficult to say “stop” at a certain hours of the night when other peoples where involved. I still play, thinking this is a good way to relax, have fun and be creative, but I’ve turned on offline games, where I can play the exact amount of time I reserved for them. And again, thanks to Dave Seah, I’ll start to apply and develop some new techniques that can empower my productiveness.

That’s all for now, but every month, hopefully day 12 in reference to my birthday, I’ll write down how good I’ve been in all this.

Sci-fi babes, w00t

Today I checked a link a mate on Twitter made, and I found it very funny: welcome people to the Sci-fine: Geekdom’s Baddest Babes!

A few comments on that girls: a lot of them are not very hot, as Princess Leila, but other are really interesting… Here are my three favorites:

First of all: Claudia Black. She’s absolutely my favorite. Before reading that article in the Maxim webzine I haven’t realized she was also in Pitch Black; as a matter of fact, I know her from Farscape (which I saw only a couple of episodes) and Stargate SG-1 (followed all the 10 seasons). I really loved her character of Vala Mal Doran.

 

My second choice: Milla Jovovich. I watched all the three Resident Evil movies, but above all I loved her interpretation of Joan of Arc. Even my girlfriend likes her, unbelivable.

 

 

And third: Gillian Anderson. I inserted the Wikipedia link for completeness, but if you don’t know who she is, shame on you!

 

 

A really hot babe is also Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica, but I hated her sexy character of Number Six/Caprica (not for her interpretation!), so she’s not in my first three

If you’re not a Sci-fi fan, I’m linking some videos of the show mentioned above, just to have an idea.

Have fun!

 

Stargate SG-1

Joan of Arc

X-files

Battlestar Galactica

I’m back

I’ve been absent for a month, it’s been a tough one.

old pc ironic

I’m doing an European Course of Web Design, and after that life took a big piece of what’s left. For the end of the month, I’ll write an article on Darwin (yes, the naturalist) for a school magazine. This article is the fourth one, and I’m very excited about this collaboration.

I promise to be more constant, I’ve got a lot of things to tell about.

I’m fixing a pc of a friend of mine, and here one thought: how can people use a pc with a Win XP O.S. without any Service Pack, anti-virus and anti-malware installed? My God. And then they run to you saying: “Nothing’s working!”.

Ok, ok. Stop whining, a good format and go! A brief list of what I’m putting inside this Celeron 1,5 GHz with 512 Mb of RAM:

• O.S.: a fresh new Win XP SP3;
• Antivirus: Avira Antivirus;
• Antimalware: Spybot Search & Destroy;
• Internet browser: Mozilla Firefox;
• Email client: Mozilla Thunderbird;
• General utility: CCleaner.

I think will be enough for a common user

And the Autumn Came

It’s been some days now that the weather suddenly changed. From the extremely hot and wet, know it’s gray and rainy.

Yesterday was the first day of school for the high schooler here, and it was the tipical school day: rainy, a bit cold, sleepy. I wake up moderately early, about 8.30 AM, to fiund my father mumbling while he was shaving himself. With a glance out of the window, it brought me 10 years in the past, when I was preparing myself to going to school when i was about 16. Ow, now it’s quite a time I’m feeling like I was younger, I’m wondering why.

The last week I received my limited copy of Space Hulk, and I worked a little to assembly it; at the same time, I bought a copy of Charles Darwin‘s Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle and started to read it: it’s very illuminating, even if not an easy reading.

I’m starting to register the use of my hours, on the way of Dave Seah‘s one (sorry but Dave is a very creative and productive writer, and I can’t recover the exact article). Maybe at the end of the week I’ll post it.

See you soon, with something more specific

A Productive Week End

So, it’s Monday, and I’m thinking if I had a productive week end or not.

I would categorize my activities in these 2 days in the following areas:

• social
• family-related
  
• self-improvement
• study

For social, I had a dinner with my parents and some friends on Saturday. It was a friend of us birthday, so we went in a nice place where we ate a good pizza, a good dessert, and I drank 2 pints of a good blonde beer, the Pedavena. It’s quite a lot for me (it was not when I was 18, you know, but after 22 I promised to be more virtuous) but after 4 hours of carpentery work I felt very hungry and thirsty. Today, after visitng my grandfather, I went with my father for a walk in our local main square, and we drank a couple of Spritz. I think I had a decent socializing this week-end.

For family-related things, I went visiting my old grandfather with my father at the old people’s home. He’s 94, and he can’t hear very much. He ate his cream croissant, had his coffee, and spoke by my father’s cell phone with his far sisters (they live in Rome). On Saturday, I tryed to visit my other grandparents, my mother’s parents, but there was nobody at home. It’s a pity, anyway I think I cared enough of my relatives in this week end.

For self-improvement, I upgraded my study postation: I added 4 small wheels to my desk, to help little movements for cleaning and avoid my mother made things fall off from the top when she’s doing the washing (last time the Netgear router fell down!). By the way, I added some little reinforcements to the desk structure, and built with some wood planking 3 drawer organizers for my desk drawers. I found the idea here, a very nice web site in my opinion.

For study, I did very little in the week end. I’m start thinking of studying more during the week, and reserve my week end time for various improvements.

At the end, I think I had a generally good week end.

More coming on the week itself…

About Dario Pica

My name is Dario Pica (as you can guess) and I actually live in the Venice mainland, Italy. My primary interests are computer science, reading (a lot of different stuff), writing (from scientific articles to small novels) and new ways of doing things. Obviously this is a very general list, and includes a lot of different things.

From my experience a lot of things in our life (study, business, social meetings and so on) are run in a very old style, very uncompetitive or undesiderable. The economical crysis of this year (2009) puts in evidence that all our business processes need to modernize and offer new quality standards, from services to production, and I hope countries all around the world would understand this.

I’m not a big company CEO or something like that, I’m not immune to mistakes; I just want to show how technology, new media and innovation can bring us a better life.

Hope you’ll enjoy this