I know

I know what I dislike, I do not know what I like, unfortunately

Feeding

With papers I feed my mind,
with sport I feed my body,
with poems I feed my soul

Have a good holiday

Dear readers,
I haven't forgotten you of course!!!
I haven't blogged anything, basically for two reasons:
- I worked really hard during the last weeks
- When I was free I didn't want to stay at home in front of my pc, therefore when I had time I was at the beach or with other friends.

I was involved in many things, most of them were new to me. Trying to list them:
-I was an assistant professor for an exam
-I'm also a student, it means that I have to take some exams. I passed one of them in July.
-I refined my research better and presented them to my research group
-I was in Rome for a presentation about possible partnership between industry and university
-I went to the sea as soon as I had some free time
-Running and cycling

Well if I explained each point thoroughly I would need to write an endless post...
Going to summarize, as an assistant professor it was quite embarrassing at early time because I wasn't accustomed to be called "professor" (actually at first time I barely dwell upon laughing) and neither to examine another guy. Fortunately, I started gradually, at the beginning I only corrected the written examinations and at the last exam session I also had the viva examinations.
I'm also a student, that is, I have to sit for exams.. weird I'm an assistant professor and a student at same time :)

It is due to the fact that we attend advanced courses that require us to take a final examination.
My research is still at embryonic stage, my adviser told and assured me that I' m doing well, but I'm not convinced and I keep on being quite skeptical.
Rome again, yes! it's officially my second city. I have never left Rome in somehow :) I'm still linked to this city, it is not that bad definitely :)

Since I worked really hard, sometimes at night as well, I needed to get rid of my pc. Some days I spent more than 11 hours (on the whole) in front of my PC,
I wanted to give a relief to my puffy eyes and aching spine-column, thus I deliberately left many tasks to do with my pc pending, like replying to friends, shame on me...
Running and cycling is wonderful!, my body is back in a good shape! I adore these two sports. I practice them on the weekend usually. I cycle to reach out the park where I do jogging for 30 minutes and back on the bicycle for other 15 minutes.

Holidays.. tomorrow I'm going to Munich (Germany) for 5 days I'm hosted by a close friend of mine who I met in Rome. She moved there some months ago. I'm really happy to meet her and to visit Munich at the same time :)
From 21st to 27th August I'm going to Umago, Croatia. It is a different holiday from the previous one, we (some friends of mine and I) will be in a residence for guys.
We will be dancing and sunbathing all the time... not so bad :)
Stay tuned

Serendipity-Fate-Destiny

Do you believe in fate?

I sustain this idea, it is quite simple.

Many things happen to us, we run into unanticipated events, people and places...

When this unpredictable situations occur we make a decision whether to pick them or not.

Decisions deliberately made, without a specific crunchy reasons behind them.

Sometimes just a word, a smile, a distraction drive our life towards another direction.

We can barely control our life, definitely.

Serendipity, do you know the movie?

I do believe that this theory mostly applies to love-story,

love should came out easily, no effort to find the "right" person... like the two protagonists of this romantic movie do

Or conversely shall we create our opportunities, encourage ourselves to take another street?

The Legend of 1900 here comes, another movie.

Shall we act like T.D. Lemmons? Accept to live on a ship for ever because scared of

the infinity possibilities that are beyond our sight or take the plunge and go ashore?

Problems

It is not what kind of problems that makes us academicians, but how we manage to sort it out.

A nice discovery

What Pulcinella are you looking for?

I've seen the statistic for my blog, I noticed that a lot of you research the word "pulcinella" and get my blog about this character. I don't think that it is what you were searching, maybe you were more interested in the "Pulcinella di Mare" that is a popular kind of bird. Please let me know what pulcinella brought you here when you search by "pulcinlla". Thank you.

Hard copy book lover

Can we get rid of books made up of paper?

Honestly, I do not know, I reckon that is something really linked to your personal flavor.

Many technological solutions address the problem to store and retrieve information easily, reliably,

permanently and at low cost. Indeed one of the goals for the next years onwards is to reduce the amount of documents that are made up of papers, the so called "dematerialization" of the documents. A document in electronic format, let's say a "pdf document" has many nifty advantages over a document of paper:

• portable. You just need a usb flash drive to store and bring it everywhere you want without wasting space!
• deliverable. You can buy and get it within a few minutes, you can also pass it out by attaching to an email.
• money saving. You don't need to take a car or bus to get to the library-> fuel not wasted. Additionally, It is not a hard copy made of papers,
• time and energy saving. You just add it to your virtual chart with a click, you can attach it to your email and sending it to your friends without planning an appointment,
• green. You do not increase your ecological footprint because you do not need to take a car or whatsoever to reach the bookshop. Additionally , cut the number of trees hacked up.
• usable. You can write on it with "add comments" command of your pdf reader and change it over and over easier than using a pencil
• copyable, if you hold the proper grant you can copy the text from the it to your document (the well known copy and paste) it 's quicker than typing.
• safety. Less paper in your house harder it blazes :)
• cleanness. You do not have shelfs and books to dust off :)

Despite all these advantages (some of them are really quirky e.g. cleanness but I think it makes sense in somehow) I still do believe that books of paper are far away from disappearing.

I consider myself "a true hard-copy book lover", I need to touch them, to sniff at them, to flip through them, to see them, to blend the upright side corner for reminding me the most relevant pages, to pile up them on my bedside table ... in a nutshell I cannot image a world with no hard copy books..

Are you a hard-copy book lover?

The pleasure of clearity

I've been sending my resume abroad, to be more specific to Swedish companies. I run into some job offers that, in my mind, seemed to match my current qualifications. Unfortunately, they, politely sent me back an email saying my qualifications do not meet our needs/profile. What a bummer!! . Anyway, aside from these dismal responses :( what I want to empathize here it's their efficiency. Even if they are not interested in my application they reply to my job submission. In this way you don't fuel faint hopes, make pipe dreams and I think it's the correct and serious behaviour that a company should have. In Italy, generally, the human resource managers contact you only if they want to interview you...

Do your social media contacts go into your cv ? (1)

During these days I spent some time to update my curriculum vitae (cv, resume) with the new competencies that I've gained since I started to work.
Two questions arose:

• Shall we add our social meeting contact to our cv ?
• Shall we add our blog address (or windows web space or whatever you use to "post your thoughts on internet") to the cv ?

Regarding the first question, the answer is not immediate and easy.
You can also add your Skype contact, in somehow you can consider it like an additional telephone. I've already seen managers who exchange their Skipe contact, maybe in Italy we are not accustomed to use it in our business meeting, but I bet in other countries it is widely spread for your daily job conversation. But would you write your messenger contact on your cv ?
How can it come in handy for the recruiters ?
I don't think that it's helpful to add your msn contact to your cv for several reasons:
1) Maybe you are not going to add your recruiter contact to your list because you do not know who is behind that nickname, a similar explanation is valid for Skype as well.
2) Chatting does not reveal enough about you and might be misleading. On the contrary, Skype works well because it's like having a job interview at telephone.

Let's shift our focus on the second question.
Nowadays a lot of us get on line in a several different ways. Just to name few social-media: Facebook, Windows web space, blog, Twitter and so on.
Would you allow a recruiter (who still does not know anything about you) to access to your FB wall, or blog ? Would you write your blog address on your cv ?

Well, here the answer is more complicated and crunchy. Proceeding by examples. if you have your "geek coffee on line" and you hunt a job in the IT sector it might interesting to reveal it. Indeed it shows that you're really concerned about technology, you're fond of it :) and moreover you show how you are able to master some kind of technology.

Now, changing the example. Suppose you have your blog where you tell your personal life, your daily experiences, in other words a place where you free up your thoughts. If you give these information to your recruiter, you might reveal more than you would do during an interview.
From the recruiters' point of view, I suppose your blog or FB is an attempting source of information. Indeed the human resource manager is highly interested in your soft skills (organizational. communication capabilities ...) and sometimes they are more important than your technical background or previous work experience(s).
By adding your "on line personal corner" (for the sake of simplicity, I call FB, blog, etc in this way) you expose yourself to the human resource manager and it could even be an advantage.
You're just saying "that's me" , here my true point of views, you can also enforce your candidature with your blogs and show that you're the right person for that vacation.

How would you answer the opening questions ?

Recession... curious signs ?

You can see recession every where, big companies are going to close their offices in some countries, laying off a lot of people... I personally notice a curios sign.
Every morning when I take the bus there is a woman who used to bring with her a handbag branded by a blue chip company... some days ago I went to know that this company was laying off its personnel and coincidence the lady has replaced her bag with another one....

(From) Farewell

I love the love that distributes
in kisses, bed and bread.

Love the can be eternal
and love that can be fleeting.

Love that wants to liberate you
to return to love again.

Divine love that gets close
Divine love that leaves

P. Neruda

Travelling&Love

Travelling is like Love,
excited before leaving like while wooing,
a new place is being discovered, a new life is in front of you.
Happy when you get to the destination, when you give your first kiss.
A soul to love, a place to live
unhappy when you're coming back, when it is over...

To a sweden woman

White blond girl lights my nights,
true beauty, you fell my eyes

Rowing

I had rowed for a long time in the ocean,
I never lost my direction, my heart was my compass
it carried me to you.

All of a sudden

it happened that I don't want to speak in English

to throw the conscious to the wind

is what I would like to do now !

Becoming crazy or feeding my mind?

Dear guys
I've started to study Swedish on my own, unfortunately I can' t attend a Swedish course at the moment.
The pronunciation is really painful (it's a royal pain to me, honestly!) but I'm trying to do my best. The weird thing is how I study it.
Maybe you could suppose that I refer to the plenty of free available resources on Internet, it covers only a small part of my work. I mostly use a self teaching book whose explanations are in English... so to learn a new language, Swedish, I go through to another foreign language, English... at least I can master the latter fairly :)
One friend of mine said to me: it's good, you can train two languages at the same time.
It's true, and it's not maddening (for me)... I'd say it's quirky :)
the final results are:

• I don't use Italian language for my notes (written only in English :)
• When I pronounce Swedish words for some reason, I use an English accent (I had better say American accent). For example I tend to apply the "schwa" sound for words like Här, år
  

Curious ...

From "The Great Gatsby"

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us, but that's no matter-to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning

It's a fragment form the last page of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the last book that I read in English.

How I rule myself

Dear

Probably, you've wondered how I spent my weekend in Rome and how the Roman night life looks like...
Well, I was in some places here at night even alone. Indeed most of my friends are from Naples like me, in the weekend they go back home and I remain in Rome. After my first weekend in Rome spent at home what a pity ! it was upsetting, I firmly decided to go out even if I was with no friend ! I don't want to give up!

So sometimes I visited Rome at night and I found it amazing and extraordinary. Also, I was a moron I left my camera at home !! But no pain for that, I'll have time to get lost in the Rome's night again :)

Yesterday I was at "literary coffee", really nice. When I was in Naples I didn't use to go to these kinds of places, honestly I don't know any of them in my city !
They are buzzing places where you can sip your coffee or cocktail or whatever you like and read a book, talk or simply surf on the web. While I was picking my book I saw one guy that I met months ago, he was a friend of one friend of mine... it's a long chain :)
After one minute I was with him and his friends...
I found it wonderful because you don't need to arrange everything,
sometimes you can enjoy yourself easily, just to take the first step, a bit of willingness...
If I hadn't taken the plunge to go out, even when I was alone, I'd have never met that people !
Living is exciting !