FCHouse

Books Underground: Eragon

Posted by Carlo - 24/04/07 at 09:04:05 am

Yesterday night, when Fabiana was already sleeping and I had cleaned away all the mess in my mind, I finished Eragon. A lot of people told me about this book, and a lot of them used great word to describe how a fifteen year old had been able to create such a great book.

I have to admit that the first hundreds of pages has been great. Christopher Paolini has a good style, very linear. I like it. More than this the story is quite interesting, the landscape he painted as the background of his book was good, even if a little too skinny.  The dragon, Saphira, has been the masterpiece, even if sometimes I was following my own ideas of “Fantastic Dragon” more than his own… but maybe because, being a heavy fantasy reader for many years, I have developed a sort of love for these creatures, that I have my own very personal ideas on the matter.

When the last page was gone, I was still undecided if I liked the book or not. And I still am!

In general the book was good, the story interesting, but some events in the books has been treated too lightly. Characters that appears and disappears in few pages, leaving few traces of them behind, big decisions taken light hearted even from the thoughest characters…

…definitley there is something that didn’t convince me completely. I also have Eldest in my bookcase, but for now I’ve decided to move to a complete different reading, just to wash my mind from it, restarting from scratch with Eldest!

The book that now lies in my hands during my daily underground route is “Making History” by Stephen Fry. I love the way he speaks and, judging from the first pages eaten this morning, the way he writes is exactly the same as he speech. Good.

Submerged by spam bots…

Posted by Carlo - 23/04/07 at 07:04:57 pm

In these days my time is extremely limited. I have a lot of projects going on and a lot of things to finish in the new house, therefore my time on FCHouse has been drastically reduced. I’m sorry.

Looking at the stats today, I’ve noticed that in these weeks I have reached a peak of visitors that I would have never expected, unluckily Google tells me that all the requests I receive are not real, are not human visitors, but simply bots but (more scary) a lot of them are Spam Bots. Spam Karma and company are stopping hundreds of spam comments and, to tell the truth, I still ask myself why they try to do it if:

• all the spam is blocked
• The number of human visitors are so limited

Only some idiots would do it. Yes, of course they are, they are ignorant (because they ignore these two things) and they are wasting their machine time, my bandwidth and my time to clean up the mess…

…more than this some stupid Troll is going on pretendng to be the king of the world: for the first time I’ve decided to ban someone. Why people are so rude?

Well, I will put my hands on the thousands of things I’m still working on…

…I promise I will be back on line (with some constant posts) as soon as possible!!!!!

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Posted by Carlo - 19/04/07 at 09:04:23 am

Yesterday Fabiana and I went to a Concert here in London. I have to admit that I had never listened to the group we watched at the Astoria: the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Being there without a clue I really didn’t know what to expect from this American band. With the songs going on I wasn’t able to understand a clear style, but just a mix of styles, arranged in a good way, sometimes a little harder, sometimes with warm notes from acoustic guitars.

The thing that hit me more was the lack of a self-contained style, as the songs reminded me a lot of other groups, as 3 Doors Down and other I wasn’t able to catch.

Today I went on their site, and I’m listening to their song, directly from the net, trying to analyze with cold mind the music: at the GIGs it’s hard to say “I like them”  when I listen to a band for the first time.

Do you like them?

Joost Beta!

Posted by Carlo - 13/04/07 at 10:04:56 am

Some months ago I applied for the beta of Joost (also known as Project Venice) and yesterday I received the invitation.

I installed the application and I did some test, and I have to admit that it seems working quite fine; sometime it is slow and I need some buffering, and the errors management is still rough, but Joost is really able to deliver TV on demand directly from your broadband. The number of channels available is still limited, but I think it will grow fast when the application will come out of beta: I expect nothing more than a success from the mind behind Kazaa and Skype. By The Way: all the available channels are FREE!

My home broadband has still a lot of problems, mainly caused by the great distance from the local exchange in Poplar, so the speed is quite slow, but it seems enough to support the max download of 320MB for a 45 minutes episode. Probably when the HD films will be available my connection will not be enough, but for the moment is it fine.

Sometimes you get some ads in the episode you are watching, ads that cannot be skipped, but you get some free and legal contents, so here’s the deal. One thing that is a little awkward: while the episode you are watching sometime froze, probably buffering, the ads are prefect, in a perfect definition, and fluid… Should I repeat that all the contents are Free????

The contents cannot be saved locally and, as far as I have been able to understand, it’s not possible to buffer a complete episode in order to watch it fluidly. Obviously I have played around with it few minutes, so I cannot guarantee you that this limitation is real or that there are more things to come with the final release, but I decided to try to use Joost as a real final user, trying not to play around too much with the configurations.

The menu doesn’t show me any invitation left, maybe I will give you some more information if I will have some!

Back Online!

Posted by Carlo - 09/04/07 at 08:04:53 am

We’re alive, yes, don’t worry!

These days have been extremely busy: we have moved, I’m going to change my job, we have finally brought here our beloved cats! Enough for our silences?

Let’s set some order in this busy month just passed: the end of february has seen our final decision to look for a new house. A friend will join us, therefore we needed some extra space; more than this we wanted our cats to join us in our new “English Life”, and here we are, few miles from our previous location, now in the Isle of Dogs (yes, it’s really an island) near Canary Wharf. Our new house is set on two floors and has a cute garden! It’s not that big or posh, it’s just what we needed.

Then I decided to take a new job, leaving the Micro$oft world to move to the Open Source completely. There are thousands of things going on, and I needed some more prospects. My new company will be a small startup, where I will manage the web environment. I’m really excited to start this new challenge.  More than this I’m working to realize some personal projects for my future job… but it’s really too early to speak here about it :P

Enough? I think so… the DSL line has been reactivated few days ago, and my brother and his wife left our home few minutes ago, on their journey back to Italy, so here I am to write some thoughts here, in my virtual home!

We are quite tired, but these relaxing days were extremely important for us.

Welcome back, readers, welcome back!

Search

Carlo Nicora is at home in London.