Halloween!!

Wow! It’s been busy here. I’m looking forward to tonight. Some friends of Frank’s are having a halloween party and have asked me to come too. We’re all supposed to dress up, but I haven’t had time to think about it. We were talking about it last Sunday at “brunch” (I’ll really miss brunch when I go back to Italy!!!) and I was thinking about dressing up as a pirate or bandit or something, but then I thought that I should be something funnier – so I’m going to dress up as an alien. I’ve got some attenae that I made from a coat-hanger, and make-up is no problem, but I’ve got only a couple of hours this evening to find the rest of my costume!

Work is really busy. The pace is very fast here. I’ve got to give a presentation next week about our progress. I must say, I’m really nervous. It’s one thing to work on this and have successes and failures in our office, by now I know everybody pretty well. Next week, on the other hand, there will be various office and department directors. Frank said that I should give the progress report because the other directors will probably be nicer to me than they would to him! I told him that I would play a Halloween trick on him if he made me do it, but he is making me do it anyway. I suppose it will be good for me.

I’ve never really spent much time doing presentations like this. I suppose the most public thing I’ve done is this blog. I’m supposed to use power-point too. Anybody have any suggestions? Anyway – tonight is Halloween, so I’ll worry about this tomorrow.

It’s nice here, there really is the tradition that all the little kids dress up and go “trick or treating”. They go to all the houses dressed in costume and carry little bags or plastic pumpkins that the people at the houses put candy in. It must keep the dentists busy!!! Actually, Frank was saying that some people get carried away or get violent etc. at halloween, so parents are sometimes scared to send their kids to strangers’ houses. He said that when he was a kid it was a lot nicer and calmer. Anyway – it still seems like fun to me. Is anybody out there going to do anything for Halloween? It reminds me of Carneval back home, but the costumes are really more “creepy” (that means scary but in a way that makes you a bit nervous and suspicious).

The technical side of work, on the other hand, is progressing. I really can’t keep my mind off it!

The expression of the day is: “to be wound up” (pronounced “waound” up) – it means to be nervous and excited about something. I’m wound up about this presentation.

Sunday…

Aaaahhhhh…. Yawn… I’m planning a very slow Sunday.  I’ve been in the US for almost 2 months now. It’s a bit cloudy and cool today. They say it’s supposed to get cold by the end of next week – so I’m looking forward to seeing what all the exitement is about. Time is really flying by! The project is keeping me really busy. I’m almost always at work. Last night, however, we (guys from work – and I went out – and I mean OUT!) I must have got home at 3. Then the cure is supposed to be breakfast at a diner. We’re going to meet in an hour at Nick’s on State Street. I’ve never been there, but Frank says that it’s got a good 1960’s feel to it. It’s brunch! I’ve heard about this – not quite breakfast and not quite lunch – but should be greasy enough to make the hang over pass!

Anyway – I’ve got to get ready to go. I’ll try to be back later. I’ll tell you all how it went!

Bye for now!

Urbino’s Web Radio

Congratulations Big Brother!

This evening at 6 pm Urbino time, Alessandro Bogliolo is hosting the public listening of the 1st hour of programming for the University of Urbino’s web radio project. I worked on this in the early stages, and just want to say how happy I am to hear that its now going live! Congratulations everyone! Good work!
I think the link is www.radio-campus.it. But if that doesn’t work after this evening, the link will be on the UWiC web site. I want to listen to it too!
Again – good work everyone!

News from Home

Hi everybody!
Marco has rightly reminded me that classes have begun at the University of Urbino, which means that Prof. Bogliolo’s on-line students have been told about our “Big Brother”! So welcome back to classes – all the way from Madison Wisconsin!!! Thanks for the reminder Marco! Welcome to virtual Urbino Kate! Hey Kate, my mum told me that there is the Madison Pro Arte Quartet performing in Urbino for the students – did you know anything about this? What a coincidence!!! Here’s the link from the University of Urbino page. From the programme it looks like they’re playing Beethoven. Cool.

http://www.uniurb.it/it/portale/index.php?mist_id=0&lang=IT&tipo=LRT&page=246&evntID=538

That should get you there! I believe they’re playing tonight at 6 pm (that’s 18:00 for you back home). It’s funny – here the time is all on the AM and PM scale. It’s really commonly used in the United States. I remember a few weeks ago when I arranged to have coffee with Kate – I still used the 24 hour clock and she asked me if I was in the army or something. Heh heh – I suppose it does sound military once you get used to the 12 hour clock. Some of my colleagues gave me a hard time for that too. Anyway – now I’m a 12 hour man!!! Doesn’t that give me twice as many days in the week?

Oh – I’m at work now – and have just been “discovered” by my colleague Frank – he says “hi to all you Italians over there in Italy” and Bob – get back to work!!!”
More later… The expression of the day is “to get busted” – it means when someone catches you doing something you shouldn’t be doing!!! heh heh
Actually – Frank is an easy going guy – and I wouldn’t want to tell you how much he KEEPS HIS CHAT WINDOWS OPEN WHILE AT WORK!!!!

(Bob is a moron)

Ok – that was Frank. it’s getting silly here – I’ve got to go! Welcome and welcome back everybody!!! Feel free to comment and ask questions!!!

It’s funny sometimes how once you begin doing something, all sorts of other things seem to connect. This is really

Multicast overlay

After one month of research on the scalability issues of web radios I haven’t discovered anything new (I wasn’t supposed to in the first month…) but at least I’ve come to a simple and firm conclusion: scalability can be guaranteed only by means of multicasting, but IP multicast is not yet capillarly deployed on the Internet. Hence, the only way to go seems to be network overlay, that means working at a higher level to build a virtual multicast network on top of the real unicast one.

I told my boss about this, and he gave me one more month to put together a proposal to be presented at the first Friday meeting of November… I’m excited and a little scared, but one month should be enough.

I saw Kate again on the week end. Which was tonnes of fun (correction: tons of fun – in US spelling). We went for coffee again and she told me some more about the city. I hadn’t really wandered around the university yet, so we did that – WOW! Talk about facilities!!! She seems really interested in the Urbino on-line course, but I don’t know whether she’s registered or not. That would be funny! We could create a virtual university branch of Urbino in Madison! Think of the savings in administration costs! (heh heh).
It’s been rainy and cloudy here, but not too cold yet – great day to stay inside and work on overlay. I’m looking forward to the cold weather. It gets cold and snowy at home, but everybody tells me that winter here is like in Siberia! Tons of snow and temperatures to minus 20° or even 30° degrees. I still have to get used to their Fahrenheit system. 0° Celsius is 32° Fahrenheit. It makes no sense to me. It’s really funny to hear people talk about cold weather at 45°!!! Anyway – people are beginning to talk about “ice fishing” and preparing their fishing “shacks”. This is where they build a little cabin and drag it out on the lake (which freezes solid to a depth of more than 1 meter!). Then they drill a hole in the ice and fish with little fishing rods. I overheard some guys at a diner talking about this. It sounds fun! Like camping, but on the frozen lake! I think I’d be a little scared of falling through the ice – but it seems that they drag their cabins out there with trucks! They drive onto the lake! I can’t wait to see this – it must be fantastic. Kate was saying that some of her brothers go ice fishing – maybe if I’m nice……..
Anyway – it’s late. VERY LATE! I’m going to bed!

Tonight’s expression is “to sleep like a log”. It means to sleep very very deeply. (I suppose logs don’t move – do they!)