Apr 19 2010
Hey guys,
I’m just trying all media I can 
I’m stuck in Rome and needing to back to A’dam ASAP… so if anyone is going back north out of Italy by car or whatever transportation…plz plz let me know
I’m also tring to get this done using a nice road sharing site…
Carpooling on the route Roma, italia - Amsterdam, paesi bassi
thanks in advance for any help!
Nov 10 2009
Today is a shiny day in my humble open source geek existence: after about 9 months after having been awarded the Apache Chemistry committership, I finally did my first ASF code commit.
About the slowest ever…
When tweeting about it, I go this interesting consideration by my friend and ex-colleague Mario :
“@mindthegabz Congratulations! 9 months for a commit is like a childbirth…“
While I tend to agree on the quite same importance of having a kid and doing an Apache Commit :p ,
does this also imply I should start seriously thinking about a larger family?
Don’t see it mentioned anywhere in the New Committers guide, am I missing something ?
May 23 2009
How come writing is always the last thing?
Before it was blogging, now fashion says we must micro-blog, and we even don’t have time to spend a few words on what we do. Effective as business, but blogging gave us a bit of writers pride, isn’t it? But it goes much earlier than that…the vast majority of software projects is developed almost until the end without any piece of seriously meaningful documentation.
Ok, ok, stop!
I was just finding lame philosophical excuses for not having blogged anything in this period of my life, such dense of changes in many aspects of my life and career. And this blog post keep staying in the infinite backlog of my TODOs.
“May you live in interesting times“
seems to run a famous Chinese or supposed to be Chinese curse, which I actually heard for the first at the Alfresco Rome’s meetup during my new CTO - John Newton - presentation, but that reflects the current status of my life, career and more in general world there days. Continue Reading »
May 17 2009
Jan 29 2009
It’s probably my first real recognition in open source matters. More soon will come, as I’m really putting my heart in the cause.
It was a nice surprise in fact to get to see my big face on Alfresco’s wiki home page, having been nominated January’s contributor of the month for the work on Alfresco and the Maven Archetypes.
Even if, I guess, the photo I sent the Alfresco guys reflects my vain nature 
Good stuff, especially as I’m trying to release the 3.0 version of the archetypes in a matter of days. Stay posted on 3.0.0 branch and on Sourcesense’s repo. And why not contribute?
Jul 28 2008
Yesterday night I flew back to The Netherlands from my (first bunch of) holidays, finding (expectedly) the typical, so too typical, dutch rain and (pretty much less expectedly) a oustandingly hot temperature but far more humid than the weather I just left: I’ve been in fact to the best place ever to have vacation, guess where…Italy of course
And particularly I enjoyed Ponza, a wonderful island between Roma and Napoli, in the so called Pontine islands. Special time, relaxing time, during which I realized what was probably inconsciously already motivating my last years decisions to expatriate from Italy and work in Holland, and that is:
Italy is the country of your (or my) dreams when it comes to holiday, relax, well being, easy life, good food and emotions; wherever you go you will find sociality and nature, fun and good mood no matter what.
Holland is instead the ideal place to work, to do your (or my) business in the most optimized possible way, offering a noticeably positive balance between quality of life and quality of work, and a wage/tax conditions people of my same age/education in Italy can only dream about.
But warning: don’t let homesickness gets you mistaken, don’t think that you miss Italy 100% until you come back there and just gave a fast glance at what’s going on down there, the sad staticity so well depicted by the Ecomonist (not exactly one of those “communist” newspaper Berlusconi keep on threatening Italians about) and in general the stressed (because money is running out) but still boastful country in which people keep opening mortgages to go on vacation, almost at the point not to eat to save money to show out a little bit.
“Not too bright folks, not too @$%#!ng bright”
(just to quote a genius men called George Carlin, recently passed away, as he would have hated to say he was dead
So I realized that until things don’t change, Holland or any other real country (sadly under too many POVs) is the only solution to have a rewarding fair career which does not overburn you, that maks you feel capable of moving, of evolving.
But then as soon as I can have holidays, well, then no comparison is possible: sun, seaside, culture, landscape variety (can’t stand anymore flat low land ), colors, food, family, friends, mood, empathy and too many other things make Italy the place where I really would like to be.
To everything there’s a season, said someone in the past. And I probably found it out now.
Jun 12 2008
After more than five months, I went back to the beloved mother Italy, for both business and homesickness reasons.
After 4 days spent in Milan for the Advanced JBoss training for J2EE developers (which was interesting but not outstanding, considering the quite out of date material and the basic nature of the course), I ran to Rome on Friday 6th in order to see my friends and my parents. Brief parenthesis here, thanks to Trenitalia for raising the Rome-Milan Eurostar ticket of 10€ in less than 2 years. Impressive €uro effects…
But apart from that and from the typical good weather and mom’s food which keep on being the most important roots that bring me back to my country, I was able to join one of the most crazy private parties in Rome which I can remember: have to say that living in Amsterdam, wild parties are pretty common, but I found quite difficult to have the same level of fun (maybe directly correlated to the level of beer) and empathy between people in parties in Rome.
Well, it’s the second year in a row I join these kind of parties (organized by friends of mine which I know since the times of Scarpetteria ): last year it was basically a Pimps and Hookers theme party in which we (me and Mau) masqueraded ourselves with pretty cool results, while this year, supported by all kind of social networking marketing campaigns , the Ancient Roman theme party Baccanalia party had its birth…
And what a successful birth considering that I ended up as you can see in the photo below (ok, heart shaped glasses are not really latin style but they are SO COOL … and they allow me to meet such cool photographers PS: well, for those who did not notice before, I cut my dreadlocks
May 06 2008
The few fellow readers (or just occasional surfers as Google Analytics cleverly notifies me) of this blog may have worried about my health, knowing how social and verbose I am, when seeing this blog silent for more than one year. Not that before this was the most active blog ever, but almost 15 months of silence, well, that’s sound kind of rude to the whole social revolution I’m taking part in.
Especially because it’s in the last 12 months that the biggest change in my life happened, both on the personal side with relocation to Amsterdam, working for Sourcesense Netherlands, and on the professional side in which I grew enormously to the role of Alfresco ECM Architect.
Oct 01 2007
Hi guys…
a server migration is undergoing with old (few actually posts…coping with conferences and work, I hope that this blog will find a new shiny life ASAP.
TTYL!
Gab
