Sunday, January 01, 2006

Events

Saturday, March 18, 2006

I've presented "The Open For Business Project" (OFBiz) at the monthly meeting of the Java User Group (JUG) of Padua. For details see this page.
Also, have a look at the post about it I did in this blog after the presentation.

Books

This is the book I'm reading right now:



"Americana" by Don DeLillo.

Started: Sunday 2, July 2006
Finished:
Rate (1-10):
Quote:



These are the last books I've recently read:


"The Collected Stories Of Philip K. Dick - vol. 3" by Philip K. Dick.

Started: Wednesday 21, June 2006
Finished: Sunday 2, July 2006
Rate (1-10): 6.0
Quote:
""It's a machine," Perine said excitedly. "It's dead - blind and deaf."
"But it's in contact with the outside world," O'Neill pointed out. "There has to be some way to get to it. Specific semantic signals are meaningful to it; all we have to do is find the signals. Rediscover, actually. Maybe half a dozen out of a billion possibilities.""

"A Long Way Down" by Nick Hornby.

Started: Sunday 11, June 2006
Finished: Wednesday 21, June 2006
Rate (1-10): 6.5
Quote:
""No, I get it," said Jess.
"yeah?"
"Course I do. You're fucked."
She waved an apologetic hand in Maureen's direction, like a tennis player acknowledging a lucky net cord. "You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one."
She shrugged."


"Pattern Recognition " by William Gibson.

Started: Friday 2, June 2006
Finished: Sunday 11, June 2006
Rate (1-10): 7
Quote:
"Always, now, the opening of an attachment containing unseen footage is profoundly liminal. A threshold state.
Parkaboy has labeled his attachment #135. One hundred and thirty four previously known fragments-of what? A work in progress? Something completed years ago, and meted out now, for some reason, in these snippets?
She hasn't gone to the forum. Spoilers. She wants each new fragment to impact as cleanly as possible.
Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you've seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films that you've been assembling, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure.

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
"


"Fugitives & Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon" by Chuck Palahniuk.

Started: Saturday 27, May 2006
Finished: Friday 2, June 2006
Rate (1-10): 6
Quote:"This year will take me to England, Scotland, France, Italy, and Spain, plus forty American and Canadian cities, but I always come home to Portland.
If this is love or inertia, I don't know, but my friends are here. All my stuff is here. I moved to Portland in 1980 because it rains a tot. I moved from a desert town called Burbank, Washington, where my grandparents had a small farm. I moved to Portland because it's dark and wet, and all my friends from high school moved to Seattle. Because I wanted to meet new people. To hear new stories. That's my job now, to assemble and reassemble the stories I hear until I can call them mine.
I got my wish. What I traded my tonsils for."



"I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson.

Started: Saturday 20, May 2006
Finished: Saturday 27, May 2006
Rate (1-10): 7.5
Quote:
"And he'd thought the past was dead. How long did it take for a past to die?"


"Omero, Iliade" by Alessandro Baricco.

Started: Saturday 13, May 2006
Finished: Saturday 20, May 2006
Rate (1-10): 6
Quote:
"Piombammo sui Troiani all'improvviso, come uno sciame di vespe inferocito. Intorno a noi gli scafi neri delle navi rimbombavano delle nostre urla."

"Books of Blood VI" by Clive Barker.

Started: Sunday 30, April 2006
Finished: Saturday 13, May 2006
Rate (1-10): 6
Quote:
"
We are all books of blood. Whenever we’re opened, we’re red."

"Bàrnabo delle montagne" by Dino Buzzati.

Started: Friday 28, April 2006.
Finished: Sunday 30, April 2006
Rate (1-10): 7.5
Quote:
"Sembra che il tempo ci metta tanto a passare e poi invece fugge come il vento"

"Invisible Monsters" by Chuck Palahniuk.

Started: Friday 7, April 2006.
Finished: Friday 28, April 2006.
Rate (1-10): 7.5
Quote:
"Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct"

"The House of Sleep" by Jonathan Coe.

Started: Sunday 19, February 2006.
Finished: Friday 7, April 2006
Rate (1-10): 7
Quote:
"Huge, grey and imposing, Ashdown stood on a headland, some twenty yards from the sheer face of the cliff, where it had stood for more than a hundred years."

"The Incredible Tide" by Alexander Key.

Started: Saturday 14, January 2006.
Finished: Saturday 11, February 2006.
Rate (1-10): 5
Quote:
"
This is the model city," she interrupted curtly. "The only one finished before the Change. And don’t call the food synthetic. It is the best food ever made, and the most scientific. You’ve been eating it ever since you were rescued."
"I wasn’t rescued," he retorted. "I was captured. And I’d hate to feed your food to a dog."


"Fever Pitch" by Nick Hornby.

Started: Friday 23, December 2005.
Finished: Saturday 14, January 2006.
Rate (1-10): 6
Quote:
"I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically."