May 2006

Workplace Safety in Italy

May 21, 2006

I’m learning some new things about workers’ rights in Italy. At TVBLOB we have to elect (or, more likely, dragoon) a Rappresentante dei Lavoratori per la Sicurezza (Workers’ Safety Representative), who must take a 32-hour course (during working hours, paid for by the company) on how to keep us all safe on the job. In our case, the most [...]

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Shotgun Wedding

May 19, 2006

May 28th will be the 17th anniversary of the day Enrico and I had our party wedding. We had been legally married – for health insurance purposes – since that January, and I had moved to New Haven and started living with him around March, in an apartment just for us furnished with hand-me-downs from [...]

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Italian School Culture: Encouraging Unity in the Classroom

May 13, 2006

One interesting and very successful aspect of Italian schools is how the entire system works to promote social cohesion among the students. The basic unit at all school levels is the class – not in the sense of year (grade), but subsection of a year. There are usually multiple sections per year, identified by a [...]

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To Flush or Not to Flush

May 13, 2006

The local newspapers last week reported with glee that Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, never flushes the toilet after peeing – he stated this publicly, hoping to increase awareness of the global need for water conservation. The immediate reaction of a reader of Metro (the freebie paper that I read on the train) was [...]

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KidSpace: Public Places Where Kids Can Be Kids

May 13, 2006

If I believe what I read in the media (and some bloggers), American parents are getting hysterical about MySpace. For those not in the know (if you’re over 25 but don’t have a teenage child, that likely includes you), MySpace is an online community with tens of millions of members, most of them adolescents and [...]

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KLM Tries Harder… But Fails

May 8, 2006

In my Silicon Valley heyday I was a Platinum-level frequent flier on both KLM and British Airways, thanks to business class flights from Italy to San Francisco four or more times a year. When I quit Roxio in 2001, I stopped flying business class (in fact flew far less in any class at all), and [...]

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Cambio di Stagione – Changing Seasons in Italy

May 4, 2006

For several days last week, the spare bed in my studio was covered in piles of winter clothing. Mimma, the wonderful woman who cleans our house, would normally be unable to tolerate such a state of disorder, but she merely looked at it and observed: “Cambio di stagione.” “Change of season” isn’t a precise period [...]

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Trainwriting

May 3, 2006

Visit the new gallery here. One that got away: I didn’t get a picture of it, but a few months ago, coming into Milan’s Central Station, I saw a train engine on which someone had scrawled: “Sex is boring” (in English). Poor dear. Must be doing something wrong. Graffiti-ers in Italy are called “writers” (using [...]

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Muvee: Fun Software for Home Music Videos

May 2, 2006

Some months ago I was invited to try Muvee AutoProducer software (and become an affiliate marketer – if you click on the banner at the bottom of this page and buy the software, I get a cut). I didn’t have a lot of time to play with it then, and my first reaction was that [...]

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