... when it offers such great words?

I was looking for an answer. It’s the question, Neo. It’s the question that drives us. It’s the question that brought you here.

This is a quote from the Matrix. Not that I would ever had put a movie quote in my About section if I hadn’t have this idea from a great friend of mine.

The humble origins

I was born in 1985, so do your maths. Full-time LEGO player in my infancy, I have grown old (old?) using a lot of different OS/Platforms: AMIGA, MacOS 7 and 8, Windows 3.11 and the subsequent (not very successful) attempts to improve it.
The little hacker that lives in my head was born when I picked up an HTML manual (that my brother bought for himself and never managed to read) and started messing around with tables and tags in BBEdit. Beside that, my informatic imprinting comes mainly from 2 server/client communication suites, Hotline and Carracho. Inside these networks I met lovely people that really played a very important role in my life. In particular I’d like to wave a hand to Cam, Pinolo and Casanunda: thanks!
I finally landed to the Free software world when I installed Mandrake. Convinced by the insisting invites of the afore-mentioned Pinolo that surprised me with the ease of installation of Apache server (“it’s as simple as typing apt-get install apache php“), I moved to Debian and, after a couple of years of undisruptable loyalty to it, I switched to Ubuntu (I see this as an evolution rather than a betrayal).
On August 2006 I bought a new laptop where I installed Gentoo for the first time in my life. I was forced to choose this distribution for technical reasons but I have been pretty happy tweaking and using it.

Getting dynamic or how you get computers to manage web browser input

Since the day I grabbed that infamous HTML manual I always strived to widen my skills in any directions. As soon as I learnt about the FORM tag existance, I realized I needed a dynamic language to handle the input, so I entered the PHP world.
The little hacker was getting older meanwhile, so I felt like keeping it fit entering some hacker challenges (nothing harmful, just a way to “put your hacking skills to the test through a series of computer security challenges”).
One of them brought me to enter the Topgamers IRC network which later changes its name to Idlemonkeys (mainly because the young people that used to animate it grew up and started idling in the channels because they had something more important to do than beating and discussing challenges – read work). Hat tip to l8nite, Stu, mark and Opa[TROLL] among others.

“All your content are belong to us” or the bright Drupal experience

After some not so delightful attempts to build a working but poor CMS by myself I entered the Drupal world since version 3 and never really left it.
On April 2005 I needed to develop an app to manage some cash/orders at a local festival. At the time I was fascinated by all the great talk everyone was doing about RubyOnRails. It was love at first sight and from that moment on I decided not to accept any PHP job any more, beside Drupal installation and customization (because it’s simple, easy and is a strctured development framework – in a sense- that helps you getting things done fast and clear).

Leaving the bird’s nest

I kept on building experience and passion for Drupal and admiration for RubyOnRails. During October 2008, I graduated and started to get serious with my Drupal interest and dedication. Finally free to be a full time Drupal freelance, I am getting a lot of satisfactions out of my job. I have wonderful clients which I respect and appreciate a lot.
Honourable mentions are for the Skin Doctors’ Center which during 2008 has broken the 10k monthly visits, CallingGuides network and Taufi which gave me the chance to have great fun doing my job.
I am also having more time to “give back” to the Drupal community. In particular, I released two little modules, GetSatisfaction and Custom (Form) Destination I have also recently become co-mantainer of Worldclock module for which I am developing a very great v2. I will be soon try to get involved with the development of Drush tool and with bug fixing in Core too.

Being meta

I read this article by Amy Hoy and thought that’s all about me. But what really got me was the starting quote by Richard Farson :

Be meta. Try to become a meta designer, or meta whatever area you are in. What being meta means is to look not just at the details of what you are doing, be it design or business or whatever, but take the big picture view, the ‘meta’ view, and see how every action you take has a larger impact above and beyond the obvious.

Drag'n'drop. This will be pretty much my summer keyword. I mean my calendar for this summer is a zebra of holydays and stuff to do, I hope I'll manage to work everything out...

Yesterday I had a photo session around. I took a photo at some pieces of furniture in my kitchen. When I looked at the photo I was inspired. Et voilà, I wiped out the old design I was working on and started coding the new one.  I am determined to launch it as soon as tomorrow. It's plenty of bugs, but if you don't release soon, release often you never get anywhere (I am always full of doubts when I write sentences full of negations as the last one in english). I am also not fully happy with the choices of the colours for some elements, but I think I will figure out what's best actually using them instead of glancing at them for a couple of mins in a lack of inspiration during a self-imposed uninspired design session. So expect some uber-brilliant new design in 24 hours from now. I am also making some plans for my already busy summer. And I am getting also some good news about some jobs I could get my hand on very soon.

I am finishing a Drupal customization job. When I first was offered to do this job, I was reluctant to accept it. I was convinced by a friend. The site at the beginning needed to be localized in 2 languages. Today, the delivery day, we were told the only need one language. WHAT-THE-FUCK?! Getting the site localized was the task that sucked most of my time and now they tell me they don't need it. Unfortunately I am not managing the contact with the client otherwise they would hear something from me. The 2 bad things are that money I am getting is still the same and they may think everything is alright if you say you need a site in 2 languages and then, weeks later, you say you need just one. Gah. I am really angry now. Surely this teaches me something.

AcHtUnG! Lame post parental advisory. I have a bunch of blog post ideas written down in my todo book, but I never find the time or the mood to write some posts. In the meantime, have a nice time.

Saturday evening I watched a TV program with some friends about the atomic bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "People dissolved into atoms". "Crew  members of the 2 atomic bombers do not feel guilty for what they've done because they believe they helped bringing the war to the end and they saved a lot of people that would have died if the war continued". "3 years and 6 months after the bombing, I was finally released from the hospital. In my 60-years-long life, I had 19 surgery operations" (a survivor). A link.

Last 2 weeks have been busy for me. A couple of social project I have been "working" on finished, so we were all busy to verify how the projects went through this year.  Right after the end of the projects, I started writing a web-application called "Sagration". When I start working on something serious, I decrease a lot the percentage of time dedicated to online fun (as keeping updated reading articles and blogs). As a result, my BlogLines unread articles are 367 in this very moment. Sagration will be going live at the end of the next week and I am really excited to the idea. 

I have been waiting for this release! Backpackit, the new 37signals child! I bet you would recognize their style without knowing who did it. The only thing I don't like is about reminder via SMS (yes, you can do even this!). It's not clear how you should set them up, they just leave you alone saying "Please check with your provider for details.". I'll wait and subscribe to this forum thread.

Web and the libraries' shelves have lately been getting filled with books and articles about Getting-Things-Done or Organize-Yourself. Last bit to this tendence is "Time Management for Anarchists: The Movie". Many tips well suite some aspects of my life. I think I will be taking that style up soon.