I’ve been on hiatus for the last couple weeks, on a brief holiday back to Rome. We had a wonderful time seeing some friends, going to Italian cinema (Chiamano and La Notte Prima degli Esami), dining at our favorite restaurants, and of course shopping for some Italian fashion.
The photo is from the rooftop terrace of our hotel, looking across the space of Piazza Navona.
But now it’s back to work and back to blogging. I’ve got some queued up posts that I want to write, and I plan to do so over the next few days.
[...] For months I was trying to reach a friend in Italy via Skype IM. When I was over there recently, he said, “Oh, the server is up in the attic and I never look at the screen, but if you call it, it rings on my phone downstairs”. It turns out he permanently set his status to “online” and walked away. This breaks the model — presence no longer has meaning, and IM doesn’t work. You need to go straight to pressing the big Green “call” button. This is a huge step backwards from the virtuous pyramid I talked about above. [...]