the-shrike.net

I suggest you to read this as a appetizer before your dinner. Then, please, take a look at this amazing gallery about Moscow Metro system.
Oh yes, it’s not something new that I fell in love with that charming city, but one of the thing I definitely loved more was travelling around aboard its metro trains, and visiting the different stations all around the city. I’ve not been there enough time to judge it in terms of functionality (but it surely works better than Milan’s one…), but it’s impossible not to be amazed while walking in the underground of it.
Only in Prague I had seen something comparable in beauty.
Worth a visit, believe me!!!

You haven’t seen Moscow until you’ve taken the metro.
(Sean Guillory)

Have a good trip! ;)

Here it is, the amazing view I’m able to see today, outside my window.

I love snow, and this’s something that I really like to see.
Even Milan seems a nice and beautiful city while under the snow, and I really don’t know why (or how) but just looking at it falling down is something that could change my day and my mind, taking away bad thoughts and bad feelings.
I will wait for it to snow a little longer (cross your finger) and then, when it’s going to be darker, I will go down walking a little under all that white! Better to have fun, and not to think about how is going to be driving on iced streets tomorrow, for my work :p

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
- Sir Arthur Eddington -

This is hardly going to be of any help for me now, looking at how bad my day has been so far.
I’d really like everything a lot more, if the answer of everything could really be 42!

From here:

Hayabusa successfully touched down on the surface and ejected the sampling pellet at 7:07 am, Nov. 29th JST. All the sequence has been done normally, and the spacecraft is now ascending from Itokawa keeping attitude stabilized. An amazing thing is that the target marker with 880,000 names deployed last time was visible from a certain height during the sequence, therefore another target marker was not released today. It means that the 880,000 names on Itokawa lead Hayabusa today’s successful touchdown.

That’s a great news, a lot of congratulations to JAXA and all the team from me too! :)

This is something that I read in these past months, and that I’d like to suggest to you too. An amazing journey, nothing more to say about it apart… mhm… did I say READ it? :)

Now all I have to do is waiting for the book.
Thank you David&Lisa for letting us following you around Russia.

(other notes about this could be found here)

I’ve been playing around with vim quite a lot lately, and the more I learn to use it, the more I like his power and flexibility.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the way it manages folders and file-listing and I found on some on-line pages how to create a sort of hyperlinking between files.

Let’s say you’re editing a memo to yourself that looks something like:

…remember to check /home/curson/web_design/test.html for errors

Vim could come in help of your webmastering mind allowing you to directly open the file test.html, of course taking it from the right directory in your $HOME.
All you have to do is to add a little piece of code to your vim configuration file (usually ~/.vimrc):

map gf :new <cfile><cr>

Thus, pressing “gf” in command mode while the cursor is over the “path” of the file you want to edit, will make vim opening that file (creating one if new…) in a splitted horizontal window.
If you add (still to .vimrc, see here for infos):

map <c-J> <c-W>j<c-W>_
map <c-K> <c-W>k<c-W>_

to your .vimrc file too, you will also be able to switch between those splitted windows by pressing ctrl+k/ctrl-j.

Easy and fun!
Isn’t it? ;)

Never… and I want to say never (again) think that your LinuxBox is not going to do what you’re asking. Even if what you are asking is to delete your /home, and even if you’re doing it just because you have fever at 37.7°C and you don’t know exactly what you’re doing anymore ;)

It’s nice to see this operative system works bad when I’m not enough concentrated on what I’m doing.

Anyway, I stopped it in time, and I found out that running my backup script every 3 days is good, but doing it every day is going to be even better.

Damn, I love Linux!

An amazing find in this “I have fever” working morning! :)

Nichelle Nichols, Buzz Aldrin and Ray Bradbury.

…what a nice group!!!

(source: The Planetary Society Blog)

This was definitely a bad day.
Nothing too bad happened, to be sincer, but I really didn’t enjoy this Sunday in any way.
Now, understanding if this is the cause or the effect of my headache is not easy, but the fact that it is still bothering me isn’t helping to make this day ending in any pleasing ways.

Damn, I also drink too much tea. My Earl Grey tea box is almost over… need to buy some more!

No Earl Grey makes curson go crazy ;)

I got from here my Slackware package for the new OpenOffice relase.
I must say I wasn’t in a good mood about installing it, mostly because I saw the new relase installation pack is made up only in .rpm (if you don’t want to compile 106Mb of sources… of course!), and I liked the past installation philosophy more than this new (handling .rpm packages in Slackware is quite a pain where the sun doesn’t shine… possible but not very comfortable ^_^).
Anyway, my sister&mother use my other workstation (called apophis) and they’re not very familiar with PCs, so better for them to have a common suit to write their documents, something easy to use and quite intuitive like OpenOffice and not like VIM ;)

I installed the package (went smooth on Slackware 10.1, just for the sake of a little of feedback) and I found it quite fast and stable at first use. I’ve not stressed it enough to call it as being more stable than the old ver.1.1.4 yet, but I soon will.
Now I’ve to see how it works, to decide if to install it on my laptop too… there’s that voice in my head that keeps repeating: “If something is working and doing what you want, don’t upgrade it…”.
But my geek side needs some amusement! :D

Just a note: what are those stupid I look like OfficeXP buttons on the toolbar?!? Definitely something I don’t like… let’s hope they’re not RAM consuming at least :p

There are moments in my life when I really feel the need to have a simple and very “handly” way of noting down things. Something easy, quick and simple, so that it could be done very fast.
Yesterday night I was oozing around the net reading some stuff, and I came across this article about what I would have discovered later to be something related to lifehacks philosophy (see here and here for more infos).

Anyway, browsing and reading, reading and browsing, I finished up reading Matt’s idea about this, and guess what? I got quite fascinated by that kind of solution about a personal todo-log-memo-all_in_one file where to put all my notes & memo.

Today, after my usual work, I came back to my friend Google and I tried to find out how to implement that kind of thing with my favourite text-editor vim.
Nothing has started yet, not completly at least, but I found some interesting solutions around (which I’m studying on…) and in particular the Vim Outliner page.
Downloaded…
Installed…
Configured…

…and it works really nice to create an outlined structure in a text file.
I think I may have found something very useful for the purpose of creating a well-working “log” file.
We’ll see :)

There is something charming about a city under the rain.
I don’t know exactly why, but I think you’re able to see the “hidden” corners of a place, only through the reflections you see in the water.
Even Milan seems a nice looking city when under the rain.
It’s good it’s raining today, fits my mood and fits my need to go out in the grey city!

Under the sun, there is nothing to hide
Under the moon, the stranger waits inside
People disappear
The music fades away
Splashing through the rain
I’ll dream with them one day
It’s raining, raining,
On the streets of New York city
It’s raining, raining, raining deep in heaven
Dream Theater - Trial Of Tears (I. It’s Raining)