So here’s my first post from Milan, where I arrived yesterday and had a few hours to look at the city with my personal guide, Entrances’s Little Susan (Susaninha de Entradas). We didn’t saw each other for more than 10 years. She is in first picture below:

Second picture (above) it’s me smashing the balls of some bull illustration somewhere in the Duomo’s mosaic floor, which they convince me it would bring me lots of luck doing so. I wait for my turn after a dozen of other tourists and do the ritual. I was not that convinced about the good luck thing but I gave it a chance. It would be harder to convince me if it was a real bull, specially in a public place. There was already a huge hole on the floor. The balls were not visible at all, and they told me they just did a restoration of the mosaics less than one year ago. Poor bull.

I am kind of exhausted at this moment writing a post in a less than 10 minute break between two sessions. Kind of exhausted because after arriving and dropping my stuff at the hotel, wired everything and left the laptop doing a never-ending data restore from an external drive (details below). Then was walking around the city with Susana and Gian-Luca (her boyfriend), shopping at Armani for some gifts for my niece and nephew, and arrived back to the hotel a bit late after eating almost 1 Kg of Susana’s excellent home-made lasagna. And lots of cheese and sausage before that. With beer. And she was able to force me to eat a huge bowl of fruit salad, after all that.

After the food overdose I had to recover data and reinstall everything since my mac laptop, the one where I had everything, decided to die Friday afternoon, and Saturday my company got this new one I’m using now since it’s weekend and the dead one has to be sent to apple. By the way, recovering data trough migration tool into a new installation from time machine backups doesn’t work that smoothly, so don’t trust it religiously like most mac users. Specially applications seem kind of erratic and I might have to uninstall and reinstall everything in order for them to behave normal. The one I need most (Flex) had to be reinstalled about 7 times before everything was OK. I was burping lasagna (silently) between every installation. The sessions for 360 Flex started quite early and to be able to get in time for breakfast (as if I wasn’t still digesting that lasagna) I had to sacrifice even more the few hours I had left for sleeping. Anyway, coffee does wonders. The giant pizza I just had for lunch is probably having a chat with the lasagna (and maybe the full english breakfast) since my stomach is doing odd noises randomly (very convenient for being at conferences).

By the way, for everyone thinking that programmers and computer geeks in general do not have any kind of sense of humor look how Koen engaged people before starting his session, against 3 in other rooms (click picture to read):

OK, there’s still one (long) session to go today, then I just wanna sort out some stuff online and get out for a Tiramisu, or two. Arrivederci (or whatever it is for goodbye in Italian).

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 17:41 and is filed under Geek, Trips, Weekends & Breaks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.