Since I am moving tomorrow and DSL won’t be started until the 5th, the site will be temporarily down. I will have diva.homelinux.org point to www.marcogazzetta.com and remove the redirect there, but the content will not be updated.
If you get a chance before the site is down, check out the pictures of the new house!
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Well, if the headline doesn’t say it all… They even had an interview on NPR with the head of South Lake Tahoe CC, and he was extatic!
Sunday? Anyone? I’ll be up, and it looks like some of my colleagues are going, too.
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{moszoomimglink:44. Hazelwood}So I got lucky! I was struggling to find anything livable during the whole month, and got deals denied at the last second because the owner didn’t want cats, after all… In the end, a strange mix of serendipity (I had read about this open house because I had typed in the wrong search), circumstances (the owner wasn’t able to rent to anyone else) and perseverance (I stuck with this house throughout my search) got me in at the last second, after all other options were exhausted.
The house is charming, and the commute is going to be a little easier. Most importantly, though, I finally will have all the space that comes with a house. Actually, this one is really generous in space: the basement is the same size as the house itself (the living space) and will give me many a chance to store stuff. Moving out will be another nightmare!
Unfortunately, having to move of course means I couldn’t visit Hawai’i this month. Well, planning on doing so soon…
Well, what did I expect? A bunch of teenage rowdies crowds to the opening game of the season, gets stranded in a back country hole and all hell breaks loose. Predictable to the point that my main activity during the movie was hitting fast forward on the remote, and the whole experience shrank down to possibly 30 minutes.
Someone had told me this was the best horror thriller they had seen in years, so I thought it can’t hurt if I watch it. Wrong! I should have read my IMDB before renting it: turns out the whole cast was chosen around the firmament star Paris Hilton. If that wouldn’t have been the clue, then seeing Chad Michael Murray play the bad hero would.
That’s one movie that I wish I hadn’t seen.
2004 (when the movie was released) marked the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. The majority Hutu people killed about a million minority Tutsis to free themselves of the spectre of tyranny. Within 100 days they carried out one of the most vicious and devastating attacks on fellow humans that a nation ever attempted.
Why do I wish I hadn’t seen this movie? Because I was sitting at the sidelines, unable to help, unable to do anything, praying that someone would finally send troops to help in Rwanda, to help stopping a senseless slaughter whose main weapon ended up being the machete.
I was continuing to learn about Mambo and thought the next step forward would be to create a component. I learned how to do Mambots (really easy) and now it was time for something more complex.
Components in Mambo have two things in particular:
I was struggling to find something that I could contribute in the area, then I realized it was staring at me!
Growing up in Italy is a bitter-sweet. Italy’s culture is strong, rich of an imagery that had thousands of years to mature. In particular, design, architecture, music, and movies are world class, as many have recognized.
While Italian design has world renown in cars, furniture, and – to possible parity with France – fashion, the other items are not widely accepted to be part of the Italian strengths. Architecture, for instance, is something that most people associate with past centuries, and they see no new contributions. Similar fate awaited the Italian movie industry, once leading the pack of avant-garde movie making. Today all the common man knows is Il Postino and Life Is Beautiful.
In music, though, Italy’s vitality is unprecedented. There is nothing that is more Italian to my senses than its music: melodic lines sung by artists that typically write their own songs, with minimal instrumental aide, but a lot of background chorus. When these songs start soaring, it feels as if the whole world revolved around a medieval piazza, with young folks flirting with each other and old folks staring gently.
Ah, so this city is not New York or Los Angeles, and celebrities are not as frequently visible as they are there. But we have our own A-list, made up of actors (Robin Williams), directors (George Lucas), singers (Barbra Streisand), tycoons (Larry Ellison), and the like.
Well, ibam forte via sacra, and at the corner of Castro and 18th a random guy calls out my name. I turn around, and it’s someone I have never seen before. He introduces himself: it’s Kevin Caudill, known photographer of male nudes!
I don’t think you could cross my plans worse than happened this year. First, I was looking forward to 6 days in Hawai’i, with invitation to Thanksgiving dinner already extended and accepted. Then I had to move and it was clear I was not going to be able to make it. I thought: no big deal! I can still go snowboarding! Forget about that: this year the season starts late, to make up for the early start last year.
Sigh… I ended up staying at home with the cats, watching a horrible movie (Kinsey), eating junk and drinking port. Maybe I could have gotten myself invited to somebody’s Thanksgiving dinner, but it’s not really my kind of thing, anyway, and I would have probably spoiled the spirit.
Somehow this application follows me like a curse…
The PHP version of the weight table is available as a Mambo/Joomla component. It was my first attempt at a component, and I have to admit it was much easier than I thought. You can download the component from the Remository.