Recent blog entries for ciro

A quick update, to remind myself where I am:

• worked for 8 months at the University of Michigan (loved it)
• in the meantime, Innominate evaporated (Doh!)
• moved back to Italy (still feels nice)
• rented an apartment downtown Perugia
• moved in with my girlfriend (loved it)
• got PhD (it was about time!)
• ...now moving to Tokyo real soon!

Confusing uh? ;-)

I won't try to summarize all the things that have happened since last time I updated this diary! Most of them have been good though, so I won't complain. :-) I'll refer my italian-speaking friends to this diary.

Overall, I'm having a great time at the U of M. I'm just back from San Diego,
where I served in a review panel on Information Technology Research.
A new and extremely interesting experience.

You can't sleep at night and decide to fly to Italy right away,
to appear in front of your girlfriend the moment she comes out of the room where she has just defended her thesis. :)
I feel alive!

I've landed in Detroit a couple of hours ago.
The warmth of Rome, this morning, is definitely far away.

Long time I haven't updated this diary! I spent one busy month in Italy,
but luckily had time for my girlfriend, my family and my niece (she now calls me "chicco").

I just moved to Ann Arbor and have started my research work at the U of M.

I rented a nice apartment nearby the campus area. So I'll be able to do away with cars - I hate to drive.
I'm now in the progress of bootstrapping my life here: phone, DSL access, bank weirdness, university paperwork, stuff in the fridge...

And, well, life is strange: when I was in Italy I worked for Linuxcare.
Now that I live in Michigan, I ended up working for Innominate AG, which is based in Germany.
Somehow, I'm bound to work as a "real remote remotee". ;-)
I hope things will work out nicely with this new job - I'll be playing with embedded Linux projects, which sounds good enough to me!

Back to Italy. Girlfriend, warm sun, pizza... is there anything else a man could possibly want? ;)
Now if I only had my luggage... :/

Out to lunch with Daniela, joke, eugy!

...plus some 100% european dessert and coffee ;)

Well, to convey the idea of how I'm doing it will suffice to take a look at this and this.
Do you have any idea of what it means to somebody who grew up in Italy?! ;)

Nonetheless I survived, and in two days I'll be back in my warm home country,
ready to enjoy the Christmas vacations with my girlfriend Daniela and our friends. Happiness!

What else? I'm waiting for my J-1 visa. I also took a look at my future home here in freezeland. It's very nice!

And I wrote an event-driven engine to simulate the dynamics of granular assemblies.

I love to work here! :)

Spent most of the day digging into data sets. Attented a couple of good talks.
I also created a few beautiful images using IBM's OpenDX software.
I feel a bit guilty because this is the first non-GPLd program I use since months...

This morning I woke up in Ann Arbor. Which is good, since it means that I managed to survive the pre-departure frenzy!
I'll be working here for one month, under the guidance of Franco Nori.

Yesterday I took a few pictures from the plane. They look nice, especially one shot of Manhattan at sunset, taken during takeoff from Newark.

Since I'm hungry (4pm!) I'll go eat something at my favourite chinese restaurant in town. Slurp!

Came back from Padua. Went to Rome, attended the LiMe, didn't quite like it, came back. Went to Padua, long meeting, came back. One more trip to Padua, then I'll be ready to leave for Ann Arbor - hopefully!

I played with the MPI support of ScientificPython, on my mini-Beowulf (8 CPUs). I added support for LAM and fixed a few bugs. As a result, release 2.1.5 of ScientificPython is now out.

I developed preliminary Python bindings for the VIRGO Frame Library. I'd like SWIG to allow for better control over shadow classes generation.

Linuxcare Inc. is shutting down its European operations with immediate effect. This includes Linuxcare Italia (former PROSA) whose closing procedured have already started. We're receiving lots of offers, so I'm positive about our future as a group.