I have finally returned home from a two year period working for the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, based in Ispra, Italy. I usually don't publish my places of employment on the blog, but this is special, because I know there are very few sites one can get an honest opinion about it. I have not been employed by the EC directly, but through a proxy company that also contracted me as an independent contractor. There is much to be said about that, too, but my main point is that in this tiered society I was the "external contractor", which had a meaning of "lower caste" in most administrative circles and even in some personal ones. But since this will be a long post, let me do it properly.

Also, some people have told me that they thought my post to be biased and subjective. They are right! It is my own personal perspective and I cannot guarantee that any of it is remotely true. Even to myself. Because sometimes I think nothing is real. It's all in my head. Including you. Wait, where did you go?

Location

You can't believe the location of the JRC in Ispra when you first get there. Yes, you probably knew that Ispra is like a small town in the middle of nowhere, but you didn't expect your future workplace to be situated in a huge, green park. After you go through the impressive security gates (which anyone with a little skill can pass through unimpeded) you see trees and grass and some medium sized buildings in their midst, few and widely spaced between them. To understand better, at odd hours when there were fewer cars going in and out I saw wild hares, foxes and even a badger on the premises. I have an entire collection of flower and mushroom photos taken from the place, but it's too big to publish here and I am not sure I am allowed to, since there was a vague "no pictures" sign in the outside parking lot.

That being said, the entire area is placed next to a small patch of forest. In fact, people who come for the first time to JRC (and are not externals) can be housed in the Foresteria, which is like a student housing place, with large spaces, but bad accommodations, where you pay a percentage of your JRC salary as rent. Myself I was housed in Millennium Residence, a small motel like thing situated right in front of the JRC main gate. I don't drive, so it was great for me. Ispra is right next to Lago Maggiore (which, in case you are trying to translate from Italian, is a big lake, but not actually the biggest lake in the area), so you have a lot of opportunities for walks and drinks by the lake and stuff like that. Great, right?

Now comes the bummer, once you exhaust the few things you can walk to and from in the area, you realize that you are screwed without a car. There are a lot of restaurants in the area, more than they should be - because of the JRC there, but their quality and pricing vary wildly. Plus, when I say "area", I am talking places you get to by walking at least 15 minutes. Of course, a bike helps tremendously, but everything in the region is ups and downs; it may take a while for getting used to. Forget about anything else fun. In Italy, everything closes at around midnight. There is only one club called ANPI, which is like a reminiscence from the war era, one bar - which is great but small, a bar-restaurant next to the lake called Cafe del Lago (ask Mauro there for a Sputtafuoco focaccia sandwich and say the Romanian guy sent you ;) ) which is acceptable, but closes early and the Club House, where people go to drink a cup of tea and have decent Internet. Oh yeah, I'll get to that in a moment.

With a car, though, you have access to numerous places in the region, from touristic locations to some beautiful wild zones. There are bigger towns with bigger distractions, though not that big. Not having a car, I am hardly the guy to talk to you about that. Maybe others will fill in the blanks in the comments section.

A big problem with the location is how to get there. The closest airport from Ispra is Milan-Malpensa, which is relatively close by car, but impossibly long by anything else. Assuming you reach Malpensa at the right time, you would take three trains to get to Ispra in more than two hours. If you take a cab, you get to Ispra in half an hour, but you pay at least 50EUR for the trip. If you weren't an external, you might have access to a cab company that can be used by JRC employees only. The good news is that there are people that work as clandestine taxis in the area. A trip to Malpensa usually takes 30EUR with these people, and they are nice folk, they can wait for you at the airport and since they live in the area it is much more convenient for them as well. Just ask around and you will find someone who knows someone.

Internet

When I first got to Ispra, the place where I was living had no Internet. I went from two broadband lines in Bucharest to nothing in one day. I spent my weekend mapping the Wi-Fi connections in neighboring Ispra and Cadrezzate. At one point I found a spot in an intersection where, if you kept the cell phone up, you got the Wi-Fi connection from the Club House (which was at least 500m away). Moving one meter in either direction from that sweet spot terminated the signal. It was like magic and, while I was getting my mail there and people were staring at me from their cars as they were passing by, I wondered if it wasn't some Internet withdrawal induced hallucination.

Inside JRC, the Internet is good, if you are not in a "secure network" which filters all your access through a 1984 style firewall that doesn't allow you to open games, proxy and VPN programs distribution websites, hacking, weapons or other such suspicious sites, whatever that means. Even so, the download speed is huge and you can have a decent experience at work, if your boss would allow it.

After a while they installed Internet at my residence: an ADSL line that was supposed to be shared by all people living there. There were like 20 apartments, so even with perfect bandwidth distribution that amounted to about 40KB/s. There was not a perfect bandwidth distribution, let's put it like that. And even so, the speed from the provider was not always full on. I had days when the entire bandwidth of the building was around 30KB/s in total. And I am talking about the download here.

Other options for Internet in the area include cellular Internet and EOLO, a system that requires you to install a satellite-like dish. Since the owners of the building did not want to allow that, I was stuck with ADSL, like in 2000. Cellular Internet might seem appealing, if you don't intend to download movies or Linux distributions or whatever, but their subscriptions there are idiotic to say the least. They give you a 10GB allowance, for which you pay like 15EUR (I think), but when you finish it, you need to wait for the month to end to get other 10GB. You cannot buy more than 10GB, either. So you go to them, money in hand, tell them you want to pay for more Internet and they refuse you.

You ask me how I survived in the middle of nowhere with no Internet for six months? I made a program to search for everything I was interested in and download it in a file so I could read stuff at my house from an USB stick. Yeah, that happened.

Also, if you are thinking about watching TV to learn Italian... not gonna happen. All the channels that you are likely to have available are in Italian, even in most hotels, and the quality of the Italian TV is abysmal. Let just say that when I first turned the TV on at night - hoping for better programming - I found Ambra Angiolini with the show "Generazione X", which only aired around 1995.

Life

What life? Heh.

Italians are really strange from a Romanian point of view, but not so, apparently, for the neighboring countries - which probably makes Romania strange. The weirdest cultural shock for me were the hours and days of service. For example, you have to eat lunch at 12:30, you have to eat dinner at 19:00. If you get terribly hungry at 15:00, your only option is a supermarket: all restaurants and most bars are closed. Likewise, if you want service during lunch hours from a non-food related business, you will find them closed for the duration. They also have something called "giorni de chiusura", days in which the business is closed. Makes sense, since restaurants would have a lot of business in the weekend, but not so in certain days. But you never know when that day is. Usually it is somewhere on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, but you might walk by and find them open because they were closed the day before or something. Hint: always keep the phone numbers of the restaurants you want to revisit. And speak Italian.

There are many other areas of life where Italians do things regimented like that, not only in opening hours. If you invite an Italian to your home because you are cooking something, they will insist they come at 12:30 or after 19:00. They simply do not get hungry somewhere in the middle. The dishes are clearly marked in the menu as "primi" and "secondi", meaning first and second, so you know the order in which to eat them, but then there are the drinks/food combinations as well: what to drink with what food, what not to drink and eat after or before something and so on. I have been told of laws from the Mussolini era remaining in their codex, like you are not allowed to congregate in groups of more than five people or something and stop on the sidewalk or if you want to have a party of more than 20 people you need to notify the police. They have a lot of behaviour rules as well, clothing rules, they fucking have rules about anything and everything. And then they tell you "Oooh, this is Italy!" meaning that rules are there to be broken. Still, lots of rules are being followed.

If you are young and you are thinking about wild parties and sex orgies and dancing and stuff like that, forget about it. There are no young people in Ispra, if they can help it. Even the people in the JRC, when they throw parties, you have to first be "in the know", meaning you are part of a group that organizes this kind of things, and then you have to expect something really meek, since all of the people you are partying with are colleagues, or friends of colleagues and there is no sport in JRC greater than gossip.

There are solutions, like getting into your car and going to Milano or Varese, or knowing nearby clubs. Again, I am not the guy to ask. The people that I have met were either not discussing it or not having much of a "life", in the social sense of the word.

How did I do it? Eventually I met a group of misfit friends and we often met at lunch or dinner for many a beer and discussions about software programming, politics and movies. And sex and drugs! We were discussing the lack of them.

Food and drink

Oh boy, I could write a whole novel about what I think of the Italian food style. Most of it would be ranting, though. So I will try to keep it civil here.
If you like pasta and pizza, you are in heaven in Italy. Of course, Ispra being close to Milano, people will tell you that you are "in the North" and that people are good here, but the food is not. They will endlessly compliment the food of the southern regions, telling you that the food you eat is nothing compared to something similar done a few hundred kilometers down. Asked how come they don't move the food from there to "the North" (I felt like I was surrounded by Starks, I swear!) you will hear that the water, the air, the very substance of the universe and the laws of physics and chemistry change based on the region of Italy you are in.
I call bullshit. Moreover, I hate pasta in almost all of its incarnations. And I am using words like incarnation because I am mostly a carnivore and when I am not I favor tomatoes, garlic, onions, chilly peppers, fried potatoes. None of that is abundant in Italian food near Ispra. When you ask for a steak you get a half a centimeter piece of meat that would envy any well beaten piece of schnitzel, when you ask for pizza sauce they give you oil, not tomato sauce, they use so little garlic that you need to always ask for it extra, they don't use fresh chilly peppers, only dried ones or already cut ones - for the pizza, and their ideas of tomato is either pasta sauce or some cherry tomatoes that seem to have wondered off on your plate by mistake. Ask for a salad and you will get green salad, carrots Julienne and the olive oil+balsamic vinegar thing to prepare it. OK, they might use other ingredients over that, but they are things like: nuts, a bit of grana (dry cheese), rucola, two or three cherry tomatoes, etc.
Paradoxically, in Italy I also ate the tastiest steaks, but you have to find the places that cook these. You have to look for T-bone steaks, what the Italians call "costata". Filetto is another term for a tasty piece of beef. The best is the Fiorentina, which is usually sold at 4.5 euros for 100 grams. Two out of three restaurants that have costata on the menu do it badly. And I am not talking about the "oh, I know food and this is not so good" kind of Italian boasting, but they are so cooked or so thin that I couldn't enjoy them. Talking about the meat, the Italian word for meat is "carne", just like in Romanian. However, for them the term is almost exclusively used for beef steaks or maybe pork. Tired of pizza with a thin layer of dough, a lot of cheese and a few ingredients sprinkled over, I once asked for "pizza con carne" which they absolutely assured me they have not and gave me the weird looks. When asked what about salami, sausage, chicken, fish, pork they looked at me even stranger "of course we have those". The poor waitress thought I wanted a pizza with a beef steak on it... which I did, but apparently they don't do that.
Italians don't know what a soup is. In fact, I was so shocked that I had to look at the Wikipedia page just to see that I am not the one misusing the term. They have a thing called "minestrone", but they don't call it a soup. Sometimes you find something called a soup, but they are all creams, like boiling a plant and then putting the result in the mixer or putting a dust from an envelope in boiling water. Also, things called "zuppa" are not actually soups. It gets very confusing. Enough to say that if you are looking for a soup like in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey or even China, you can't find it.
Garlic. Ahh, some people are extremely sensitive to garlic and while I understand their discomfort when someone smells of the thing, I mostly pity them for not "getting it". Yes, I am a hypocrite, as well. However, in Italy that is the norm. People would smell garlic off you, wonder why you put garlic in this and that and talk about "we use garlic in Italian cuisine, just the other day I used a clove in one dish and the whole family enjoyed it". OK, maybe using a whole bulb for my evening meal is excessive, too, but surely this fear of garlic is unwarranted. In fact, I read an article about the old days of the Roman empire where the poor people and slaves did not have a lot of things to eat and they could only afford cabbage and other garden stuff like that. And since cabbage usually tastes like crap by itself, they used a lot of garlic to spice it up. Therefore the "citizens" (read "people from Milan") thought that the smell of garlic was a sign of poor social status. Now, if I think about it, there were very little restaurant dishes with cabbage, as well. Even the kebab (if you could find it anywhere) was made with green salad leaves. Yuck!
And talking of kebab: actual Turks doing actual Doner kebab were making these dick sized and shaped things in Italy where they put a few ingredients and called it a kebab. Shameful!
The best part of Italian food for me were the cheeses. Really diverse and really different from what I am used to. For example if you want something like feta - which is the average type of cheese in Romania, you need to buy the Greek one from the supermarket, Italians don't have that. Instead they have all kinds of stuff. Try them all, you won't regret it.

For a while I really adored a small place next to my house called La Fornarina. There were these really nice people from the South that were making huge steaks and I enjoyed being "part of the family". However, they were crap at business management and quickly failed. Too bad. Now the only regular solution in the area is Miralago. Ask for Deborah and tell her the Romanian sent you ;). After a lot of experimentation, we ended up lunching every day at that place. They don't know what a steak is, though, but the pizza is great and the daily menu is very cheap and very tasty and different every day. For a nice steak and really hot chilly peppers, you need to go to a place called David's Club in Dormelletto. And what do you say when you get there? Say the Romanian sent you, of course. Special mention for Il Vecchio Castagno, which is an agriturismo in Ranco. Ask for the antipasti menu, which is a combination of 6 to 12 different types of food, some of them quite exotic.

For the drinks, I really enjoyed the Italian grappa. It's like a brandy made of what is left of the grapes after being squeezed to make wine. The taste is really different from grape type to grape type and I found out that I usually like the grappa made from the grapes of the wines that I don't like. And viceversa. Whenever I felt like bringing something from Italy to my friends and relatives at home, I brought them grappa and cheese. The wine is good as well, however you need to know what to order. I found out that the most expensive wines I did not enjoy, while some cheap ones were perfect for me. Probably because instead of sipping I was drinking them. I found this technique to work with a glass of water: you take a sip of a Chianti or something more special and you feel the taste. Then you take a sip of water and clean your palate, then you sip the wine again. It works, but I prefer the drinkable wine.
One funny anecdote is about me trying to buy wine from the supermarket in the first days I moved to Italy. In Romania we have a label hint on every wine saying if it is dry, sweet or somewhere in between. In Italy this hint is missing. Since I didn't know any of the wine makers or types, I just took two Chiantis (thanks, Hannibal!) and the only wine that had a "secco" label on it, a wine called Florio. When I got home and tasted it, it felt like I poured honey down my throat. It was awful. If you read the Wikipedia page you will see that there are three varieties of this wine which is mostly used for cooking. The sweet one is two and a half times sweeter than the dry one. Damn Einstein and his relativity!
And speaking of sweet, almost everything else in Italy is a sweet liquor. And I mean disgustingly sweet. Moreover, because of a bias in understanding the terms, in Italy if something is bitter or sour, then it is not sweet. So whenever I was trying another brand of Italian drink I would ask "is it sweet?" "Noooo!" and of course it had like half of it just sugar. They had something called "Latte di suocera", which was 75% alcohol. I tried it, sure that something that high on alcohol couldn't have been sweet. Guess what was the rest of 25%! Campari and Aperol are nice, especially in what Italians call a "spritz" which is not wine and water, it's something made with prosecco. My advice: if you haven't tried it before, ask for a bottle of mineral water next to your Aperol Spritz.
One really annoying feature of the alcoholic landscape in Italy (and indeed, every country around as well, including Austria) is that beer is around 5 euros a pint, more than wine, more than grappa, more than any spirit. I mean you go to a bar and you pay 10 euros for a liter of beer. That makes understandable the habit of bars and restaurants to bring you free food with your drinks: you pay a lot more on drinks than on food. You have a lot more variety of beers, like a lot of Belgian beers and artisanal beers, but those you pay even more for. The pint of normal beer in bars is a least 4.5 euros.

The best bar in Ispra (and probably around) is San Martino. Alex the bartender (sorry, I couldn't help make a Misfits pun here) is a great person and a very good bartender. Ask him for his cocktail recommendations and, naturally, tell him the Romanian sent you! You pay rather much on a cocktail, but usually it comes with a full plate of food. Sometimes it is easier (and cheaper) to eat there in the evening.

The work

Now we get to the real deal. You've learned about how to live in Ispra, or how to at least survive, you've learned where the town is and what and where to eat and drink. Those are my favourite past times next to being on the Internet, so it figures. But what about the work? What about the thing that I came all the way from Romania for, leaving my wife to wait for me back home?

The first positive thing about the work was already said: the JRC looks like a park. Now, you need to know that will not last. Why? Because of the reason why it was done like that. You see, when I first came in, my first thoughts were of the sci-fi TV show Eureka, where a guy inadvertently finds himself in a town where the US has secretly stashed all the brilliant scientists, an enclave of knowledge and magic like science where everybody, without exception, was exceptional (see what I did there?). When I saw the vast green of the place I thought some brilliant workplace architect imagined the best way to place buildings in order to maximize the well being of the people hard at work inside the JRC. Well, no. The JRC was home to a nuclear reactor. That is why there is so much security and that is why, wait for it, the buildings are so spread out over a large distance. In case of a nuclear accident, this would allow people to get a lower dosage of lethal radiation - statistically, of course; the nearest people would be screwed. In fact, now that the reactor has been decommissioned, they are building these huge office building like structures that they plan to move everybody into in the near future. These buildings are not only ugly, but they are not even functional: offices have too few power outlets, you get no cell reception in the middle of the building and they are going for the "transparent office space" thing, where anybody from the building can, with little effort, see what you are doing and what's on your screen. But yeah, it is still a positive thing so far.

The second positive thing is the money. Let's face it, if you go to another country to work, you also go for the money and the money is huge. Especially for a Romanian that has to pay a fixed amount of tax as an independent contractor. Not so for a regular person, though. Within the Italian tax framework, a person paid that much needs to give more than half of it to the state. Similar for many other countries. In fact, it may be the norm. Is clearly better than being a software developer in Italy, because they are paid shit, but still, do you know that the permanent position bosses get almost twice what their external employees get and pay almost no taxes whatsoever?

The third positive thing is the people. The hiring process is thought as to get people with experience in their fields. What that means is not that they know a lot, but that they worked a lot with other people and nobody killed them yet. So you can meet a lot of interesting people if you put your mind to it.

That's it. Outside of the Internet speed, I can't think of anything else positive in the JRC. So here come the negatives. I hope you have the time. Otherwise bookmark this, get something to eat, it will be a long read :)

The absolute worse thing in the JRC is this tiered social system. You get the employees of the European Commission, permanent position people who have been there since forever and will continue to be there till their retirement. It is the reason why they are called "permanents". They are paid a lot and they pay almost no tax. Another tier is the "externals", independent contractors that are contracted through intermediaries for a fixed duration, maximum of 6 months, that will be renewed as the JRC sees fit (to a new 6 month period, and so ad nauseaum). That was me. It means that at every stage of the project your boss can simply not renew your contract, effectively firing you, but without the hassle of going through any legislative hurdle. You also get no insurance, paid vacation or sick days and you need to handle all your own finances: accountant, taxes, legal things. Somewhere in the middle are the "grantholders". As opposed to externals, they were not requested for a specific job. Instead, these poor gits have studied and applied for a grant in the JRC, making the effort to get in and be accepted in this wonderful place of research and knowledge. They have a longer contract, usually three years but it can vary, and they are more like employees than the externals, with more benefits, but having also more rules to follow as a result.

This tiered system is absolutely destroying any chance that real work will be done in JRC. I have met only a few people who were content with their work environment, everybody else was ranting to no end of the idiotic conditions in which they have to try to work or pretend to work. Grantholders join the place and their handlers don't know what to do with them and so assign them meaningless tasks. There was one case where a girl tried to get in the JRC, came for the interviews, all on her own money, got through all the tests and requirements, all of three months of effort and wasted money, only to be told that the position she was applying for was cancelled. Externals, on the other hand, are requested for specific purposes - like most software developers in the JRC, since there is no software research in there. But the specificity of the requirements are some of the time just the title of the project. Projects, you see, are different inside the JRC than for the outside world. Instead of having a set of requirements and a time period in which to achieve said requirements, the JRC projects have a budget. Someone was convinced that the project is good for something, so they gave them a budget and now the money must be spent. The general goal of the manager of such a project is not to finish on time and on request, but to keep the project running indefinitely.

Of course, for each of these projects and teams, the task of managing them cannot be given to externals, they need to use a permanent position for it. These people, as explained above, have no real chance of leaving the JRC. The only non voluntary options are a really disturbing mental breakdown, serious illness or death. Some colleagues were actually wondering if dying while being employed would actually make the position available, or the corpse would continue to do the same job as before since the requirements and indeed the training for the job of manager of a project are nil. The only worries of such a person is how to go through the bureaucratic hoops to ensure the annual budget.

You must understand, I am not describing only my work place or my boss, I am not ranting against a specific person here. I don't even think my boss was such a bad guy. The issue is systemic, as observed and described by countless people. The permanents were not born monsters, they are turned into soulless creatures by this grand experiment that should be considered on par with the Stanford Experiments and most of them are utterly pitifully incompetent.

This social layering is visible at every stage of working in JRC. When an external enters or leaves the JRC, they need to validate their electronic card at the entrance; the permanent just waves it joyously. In fact, they tried to enforce the rule of swiping the badge for all people and the response was this hysterical "what is this climate of distrust? Are we robots or animals to be obligated to do this every day?" coming from the permanent syndicate. Of course, that means that, in their view, externals are either less than human. The JRC has this eating place called Mensa. I have not mentioned it in the previous sections because I think it's a disgrace. The food is almost decent, the prices are kind of low, but it feels like livestock feeding. Also, if you are an external, you have to pay a 1.3 euro extra for eating there. Permanents do not. There is a medical station inside the JRC, in case you are sick or something. I have never tried it, but I understand that it only functions for permanents. And so on and so on and so on. Rarely have I seen an environment of such potent social toxicity.

Now getting back to management: they are hiring people for positions of software developers, but they didn't even consider hiring people for the job of software management. It is the same in any domain, I am sure, but for software it is paramount that the person leading the project understands what that project is about. Instead, only a vague requirement lingers in the air, like the smell of a fart, and the daily worry of the external worker is to satisfy the emotional needs of their boss. I am using the word boss, because manager implies some sort of training in the science of management. The daily worry of the boss is different, trying to move any ounce of responsibility on the shoulders of the employees (I am not joking, stuff like "boss, should we do it like this or like that?" "you are the expert, you should choose!") and still convince themselves and others that they are relevant somehow. Stuff like "I don't care if they ask for deliverables, you still have to be in the office for 8 hours every day!". Yuck!

A year in and there came a new "papal bull" from the heads of the EC requiring a list of yearly deliverables for each project. The JRC was in chaos, as many permanents felt the pressure of having to declare what they were going to do before they do it! Maybe even plan ahead some things. Possibly even understand the technical underpinnings of the projects they lead. The chaos lasted for a week or two. I wondered why people seemed to relax suddenly. I got my answer a few months later when someone told me the story of their manager coming to them and asking them to "do something for this deliverable point that I forgot to remove". Get it? They had to give a list of deliverables, but they could edit it at will. In the end, even after "forgetting to delete" one of the goals of the project, all they needed was some document saying that they did something, no matter what.

The result is that you, as a worker, slowly lose relevance yourself. As the world goes forward, you remain behind, even forget what you knew when you came in. You have to make continuous efforts to read stuff, work at home and, most of all, force yourself to not damn it all and start pretending to work like everybody around you. The pressure to just play the game and lose any human connection with the work you do is very strong though. Even days when I did almost nothing were stressful (if not more so) because of the realization that I was losing my self as my life was slowly wasting away. For this reason, I don't recommend working there unless you need the money or a place to rot away in while doing something pleasant outside work.

Another very bad thing about the JRC is the group politics. Like in every bureaucratic environment, there is politics, but usually it is at the personal level. Someone is trying to advance in ranks, to shit on someone else's head, to position themselves closer to a more relevant person or project. However, the politics in JRC are about groups that are doing everything by themselves. Trying to use the results of another group in your work is not only frowned upon, but provokes fits of anger from people thinking you are trying to steal their thunder and butt in on their whitepaper or whatever. As a software developer I was spared of many of these things, but I have heard quite a lot from the more "scientific" levels of the JRC. Even with software, there is not and probably never will be a situation where you create a library with a useful purpose and share it with all the JRC somewhere. This type of policy makes collaboration all but impossible. In place of a community of researchers, happily sharing and creating knowledge, you get little groups of people unaware of what others are doing, often working on the same thing in a different way and closely guarding their rights to put their names on things they publish.

Politics is worse even at the personal level in JRC. Working on a project basically on your own and then having your boss tell you that everybody in the team needs to be in the whitepaper name list is bad enough, but I have seen that the only real criterion of worth in a team is to "play nice" with your boss and the influential members of your team. People who were finishing work early and "were caught" watching YouTube videos were considered bad workers, while people who did nothing but mindlessly watch the screen all day were seen as conscientious. The "grapevine" was strong in JRC. How would you feel to meet people for the first time and see that they already have formed an impression of you because people, many times your own boss, was gossiping with others? This was a common thing in JRC and Mensa was like the main gossip club. I am certain that some people went to the Mensa in order to remain socially relevant and to be "in the loop" rather than for the dismal food.

The last but not least negative thing is the futility of work in the face of bureaucracy. In Romania there is the saying "I am working for the state. I pretend to work, and they pretend to pay me". Imagine that times 28 and this is what it is like to work in a truly international project for the European Commission. I have worked for two different projects while in JRC and the first was something nobody wanted to see work (especially the supposed clients, because of "national interests" - read this as "people wanting to keep their useless jobs") and the second is doomed to failure because there is no way the data produced by it wouldn't hit a political wall when "an EC software is gathering data about my country". Actually, I hope the second project works, although I cannot see it ever ending or reaching any meaningful result.

Conclusion

What else is there? I talked about an apparently idyllic working place, corrupted by human pettiness and social imbecility. I talked about great resources, squandered on meaningless work and the good people reduced to angry ranting drunks by it. I talked about a country that values silly things and looks only inward, instead of opening to the vastness of the world around it. The only thing I can think of saying is opportunities. Don't squander them.

Occasionally you will see something new that could expand your horizons. A foreign language class, a cooking class, a festival somewhere, learning to ride, going to the gym, the possibility of love, whatever. And, working as an external in Ispra, always asking yourself if you will spend more than another six months here, if the boss won't fire you, the project won't suddenly remain without a budget or if the wife will have a fit and demand you come back, you will convince yourself that you don't need it, that it can wait, that you can't spare the time or that you are not sure you want to spend the money. That's bull! Take the opportunity, learn whatever new you can, not because you have all the time in the world, but because you actually don't! Exactly because you might be gone at any time, you need to seize the moment.

For me, that's the only regret. I made great friends, I had fun as much as I wanted, I could have done more at work, I am sure, but I made a decent effort, I enjoyed the solitude as much as I enjoyed the company. But I return with little but money and the knowledge I've detailed in this post. As for JRC Ispra... it felt like prostitution. I was making money for being fucked in the ass, and had I stayed any longer, I would have been convinced that somehow I deserve it.

I've always heard this when I was young, as a Latin proverb - and therefore old and wise: in vino veritas. I've always interpreted it as "alcohol loosens the tongue", but today I had a revelation. Yeah, alcohol does remove some inhibitions, but usually the things we say to other people while inebriated are really dumb things that only a drunken man would say. They are not truth, they are wishful thinking, fears, pains. Instead, I propose that the real truth of the wine is you cannot so easily lie to yourself!

Indeed, I've noticed this in several situations, highly emotional ones or normal ones - it doesn't matter, when I have drunk alcohol and I am thinking to myself I always reach the conclusion that lying to myself, no matter how comforting, is not worth it, and I often expose and dispel things like hypocrisy, pettiness, delusion and so on. My best psychotherapy was always alone, drunk or comfortably inebriated, having the opportunity and courage to confront myself.

Now, that might seem boisterous or even something a drunken man would write. And that is true. However, it doesn't invalidate the argument. I have recently counseled a good friend who just lost his mother (he didn't lose her, he knows where she is, but she just died) to drink - alone - and speak to himself. I only wanted to help using my own experience, but that prompted me to think a little about it and that materialized into this blog entry. Drink a little with your friends, relax, chill, do whatever social thing you want to do, perform whatever ritual your tribe is comfortable with, but that only removes the stress. It does little else. At worst, it makes a fool out of you. True drunkenness is lonely and revealing and bitter. It is not pleasant, it is, at best - when done right, or when lucky - therapeutic.

That's my two cents about the subject, but I feel I need to explain a passage above: "comfortably inebriated". Sometimes, especially if confronted with strong emotions (or even boredom or gluttony, why not?), we drink too much. We don't consider the "alcoholemy", the amount of alcohol in the blood, the rates of absorption and so on. If there is a "sweet spot" a place where the quantity of alcohol in our blood is good for us, the only way to maintain it is to compute the ingested quantity compared to the quantity of blood one has and maybe some empirical factors like tiredness, personal resistance to intoxication, body mass, what you ate and so on. More simply: find the number of minutes that you can afford to drink a beer and then continue to drink beers every such interval so that you not get completely wasted. Of course, the equations are slightly more complicated, but you get the gist of it. I submit that you probably don't need to get completely drunk to reach that sweet spot, instead just research and find the perfect combination for you. More than a few times I got wasted after I had stopped drinking, as the alcohol in my guts was getting absorbed.

I may be wrong. There is always the dark specter of acquired resistance to any intoxicant, so that while the experiment may be perfectly scientific and true, one would need increasing quantities of the drug to get to the same result. However, empirical evidence of people who started drinking a little bit, then more and more, shows that there is a point where they stop and get the same result with similar quantities of alcohol. There is the sad case of alcoholics, but I believe that to be a small percentage of people experimenting with alcohol.

Anyway, the thing to remember: a few (more) beers could be as good as a year of therapy, if you are willing to drop the veil and be honest... to yourself. Anyone else wouldn't understand anyway.

I have been watching this weekly space show made by a husband and wife couple working for SpaceX. Initially called Spacevidcast, now it is called TMRO (pronounced Tomorrow). It is a great show, great quality, nice humor and, more than anything, a comprehensive video report on weekly events in space exploration, commercial or otherwise. If you are even remotely interested in space, you should subscribe. And they have been doing it all from their own resources and crowdfunding for seven years! You gotta love that.

But the selfish reason I am blogging about them is that I got mentioned in the TMRO show! Click here to see how they are trying and even succeeding to pronounce my Internet nom de guerre. The effort is appreciated.

So I have to leave Italy and go to Belgium for some business. I would make the trip with my colleagues so, imagining they know better how to fly from Italy, since they live here, I ask them to search for the flight. They do that and they send me this link to a site called VolaGratis ("fly for free" would be the translation). This is actually an Italian web site for BravoFly, an Italian flight search aggregator. I find my flight, it says 89EUR a two way flight, which was OK. The site is in Italian, though, so I choose English, it takes me to the BravoFly site, I select the same flight: 105EUR. I'll be damned! So I use the Italian site. I also check the special needs box and write down "Long Legs", expecting them to book me one of those extra legroom places. Now it gets interesting.

The payment section held a big message telling me how great it is that I use Mastercard, so they can give me a big discount. I don't use Mastercard, though, so I select VISA. Suddenly the price jumps from 89 to 125EUR. Well, that probably explained why there was a difference between the Italian and international site. So I proceed. In about half an hour I receive a call from a weirdly formatted Italian number: +39 followed by only 6 digits. I answer in English. There is a long pause, then (in English) I hear the question "Do you speak French?", I reply that I don't, the voice asks a quivering "Do you speak Italian?" (also in English) I also reply no, but I ask her to wait and I pass my phone to an Italian colleague. The operator has closed the connection by then, probably couldn't wait for more than 2 seconds without asking an inane question. A minute later I receive an SMS - in Italian, of course - that I couldn't be contacted and that I should call them back. All nice and all, only their phone numbers are all paid numbers, I have to pay 6EUR per call, give them my credit card details, etc. Or I can call the Italian paid number (six digits) and pay 1.8EUR per minute. Funny enough, I could not call the Italian number from the land line, since it was a paid one, nor from my friend's phone, also because it was locked for paid lines, nor could I call the international number from any Italian phone, as there was an automated voice telling me to call the other number. I wrote them a scalding email, awaiting a reply. I got a phone call at 8 PM which clicked two times and closed after two seconds, but no other reply.

So I was forced to call them using my Romanian number, in roaming in Italy, calling the paid "international" Italian number. And that is because their site could only show my bookings, but would not allow me to cancel one, so in fact they were holding my credit card details hostage. In order to cancel any booking with BravoFly I had to - yeah, you guessed it - call them. Meanwhile I was stuck not knowing if they will book the flight or not. After speaking with an operator speaking English with a thick Italian accent, one who barely mumbled anything she said and then acted annoyed that I ask her to speak louder, I realize that the whole thing was caused by my ticking the special request box and asking for the legroom. I needed to pay extra for that, of course. I said OK, waited for five minutes, nothing happened. I hung up the phone. Got called back in 5 minutes that my booking could not be confirmed. They might just as well have said "Thank you for the money and time you spent trying to make us do what we advertised we do, but we can't, so fuck you!". And I wouldn't have minded as much, since that could have been a nice email message and I wouldn't have had to get this angry.

The ending of the story is me getting to the EasyJet site directly, getting the ticket (with the extra legroom) for about 40EUR less than the one from VolaGratis, all in one nice and clear web interface. Perhaps Vola Gratis in the name of the site is all about them getting to fly for free with the money they extort from you. Don't ever use the BravoFly site or any of their differently named clones. From the way I was treated, I can only assume it is basically a scam, their purpose being only to steal from you.

I remember when I was a kid in highschool and wanted so much to experience that amazing feeling books and movies described, the magical bond between man and woman, the thing that makes everything worthwhile and even death irrelevant. So I had the feeling. It was amazing, it was magical, it was everything I expected it to be and more. And yet it all turned out to be an illusion, a manufactured fantasy of my own making that just tumbled down like a castle made of cards. And I always thought that was sort of weird and uncommon, but now I am thinking that maybe all romance is like that.

Could it be that love is something we are programmed to need to feel and we are just doing all is necessary in order to have the feeling into a familiar and comforting setting? All other sensations and feelings and needs are accounted for: you are happy because something good happened, you are hungry because you haven't eaten, you are disgusted because someone did something, you want to belong because we are a social species, but love is something that doesn't make a lot of sense, it's just there. It also feels too personal to assign it under "a species thing", even if its ultimate purpose is just that. So, in order to justify it, you need an origin story, just like any good comic book hero.

Thus the myth is born, perpetuated, kept alive as long as you have the feeling. And when you break a relationship up, again there are these justifications, stuff that just appears out of thin air and one or both of the people involved are always shocked, because they weren't there five minutes ago, when people were in love. "You killed my parents!" "You threw me in acid!" and so on. I don't want to stretch the superhero thing too much, though. Alternatively, think back and try to imagine all of your relationships as movies in the Kick Ass franchise. :)

So this is how I am seeing this: you meet this other person, you develop feelings of affection (or maybe just carnal lust, I don't care) and your brain starts churning up this script in the background. Once the script is ready, the focus group enjoyed it, the producers secured the financing, you already have the cast and bang! you have a blockbuster movie you call love. Until then it was just... less, "simple" affection or enjoyment, but with the origin story it becomes the superfeeling, capable of incredible feats, worthy of songs and tales.

As an argument for this vision I bring the terrible reluctance of people to dispel the magical script of their love affair. When the mystery of their feelings is laid bare they feel they have lost something. When outsiders are trying to look at it logically or to deconstruct the story they meet with fanatical resistance. After all, if you are an artist, making your own movie and starring in it, you really hate critics.

And when you are in a long relationship, one that spans more than the fabled three years, you continue to have the feelings, now intertwined with practical issues like who gets the car, who walks the dog, but they don't look so great because the love movie, as cool as it was, is old. You remember those times, maybe share them with your friends, just like remembering a good movie (made even better in your head by the bad parts you chose to conveniently forget) and your friends' reactions are just like for a movie, either sharing their own or criticizing yours or agreeing it was cool, maybe even getting the old "they don't make them like they used to" speech.

Of course, in order to definitively prove such a thesis, one must delve into the idea of what is real and what is not. That's a can of worms I am not opening. And believing every love story is a fantasy that covers up more mundane things and in which everyone involved participates willingly doesn't diminish its power. You can enjoy a movie even when you know it's not real, especially because you know it's not real. I also have to say something about the nature of control in a love situation. It's not clear to me, yet, but the gist of it is that this is why people do enjoy playing romantic games of seduction and betrayal, but ultimately dismiss the practice as not serious. It's the same kind of behaviour one sees in parents that scoff at their children's games, but watch TV all day. The thing is in a story you don't have control. It becomes more and more powerful the more the characters can say it all happened to them, rather than being something they planned. Somehow having control in a romantic relationship is frowned upon and having a good story on why losing control was a good thing is a form of art.

I'll end with a fragment of a movie I really liked, one that you probably don't associate with romance: The Name of the Rose. There was this scene where a girl, dirty and inarticulate, scavenging in the castle's garbage, meets our young protagonist interpreted by Christian Slater and just humps him like there is no tomorrow, groaning and moaning like a wild animal for the whole five minutes; then she leaves. Later on, when people are trying to burn her as a witch, the boy saves her. At the time I found that very romantic, even if they didn't even share a word. Maybe it's the fact that he gets to save her in the end, but most likely it's Slater's performance of looking at the girl with a longing and very confused gaze, the "what the hell is happening to me?" look that betrays the background script writing in the back of his skull.

As you know, I have been living in Italy for a whole two weeks now - I am a veteran, practically - and since friends keep asking me how things are, I am writing this entry. I will not dwell on the regular stuff; this is a hill region, close to the mountains so you can see them on the horizon, but not really mountainous. I am stationed right between the villages of Ispra and Cadrezzate and working 10 walking minutes from where I live. I don't really have anything else to say about the region, it's not that interesting. What I did find interesting are the differences in culture between this place in Italy and Romania. For starters, it seems the northern part of Italy is - proudly - different in culture from the rest of Italy as well.

Pizza, for example, is something that I find hard to understand. In this region close to Milan they make pizza like a sort of prosciutto, very thin. But it's a weird and cumbersome thin, since the outer crust is hard and brittle, while the interior is soft. That means that one cannot cut it easily unless the knife is very sharp, one cannot roll it up like a shawarma or doner kebab, since the margins break and the content of the pizza is not really bound to the dough, so it falls down, and one cannot hold a slice in hand because the core is soft. The way I found works best for me is to cut it into thick ribbons, then kind of compressing them with the fork so that you get several layers of rectangular pizza that you can put into the mouth and chew. I've also tried folding the pizza, so that it becomes a sort of quarter pizza of regular thickness, but that soft core makes it rather difficult to manage and often the ingredients tend to try to escape from the sides when you bite on the thing. Another difference in pizza culture is that they don't use tomato sauce on the pizza, they barely use any in the pizza anyway, instead pouring oil, spiced or not, over it. In my mind a pizza is made out of dough, tomato paste and cheese. They use little tomato paste and, since they feel the need to put oil on it, they probably use little cheese as well.

Coffee. Italians love their coffee, which they call espresso. It's a (pinky) finger thick layer of coffee, which they savor for the taste of it, then get back to work. My colleagues have this ritualized fixed hour coffee breaks, about two or three a day. They also have something called a lungo coffee, which means tall in Italian. This coffee is about two pinky fingers thick, but not quite. To get a full (small plastic) cup of coffee from the machine here, one has to ask for a cappuccino, which is a normal coffee with a lot of milk foam. Apparently they don't have anything like Starbucks in Italy; market research showed that they would not be successful. A mug of coffee is as abhorrent to Italians as a pint of palinka would be for a Romanian. Actually, some Romanians would not mind... Also, while this espresso thingie is small, it only concentrates the taste, as far as I can see, since I feel almost no caffeine effect.

Alcohol. Italians need to have beer with pizza. Drinking anything else, like wine or - God forbid - Coca Cola, is uncouth. However a half a liter of beer is in any bar at least 4 euros. Usually it is tasty, so it's probably a little higher end than a Romanian beer, but consider that in my country a beer is as expensive as mineral water. In comparison a glass of grappa (a grape brandy that seems to be the most alcoholic beverage they have) is about 3 euros. I don't know yet, but it might be that wine is as cheap here, if not more so, than beer. And speaking of wine, they don't have a clear marking on their wine bottles specifying the sweetness of the contents. Worse, I've bought a "secco" bottle of wine which was sweet as honey (this is bad for wine). At first I refrained from buying Chianti, because the name sounded sweet. But no, that's the good wine, apparently, while most wines in Lombardy as crap - lucky me. There are other wines here, as well, but you must know them. It is good that my colleagues are well versed in the alcoholic arts. Apparently in Italy you are allowed to have some blood alcohol content while driving, the equivalent of a having drunk a beer or so. But they don't check for it anyway, so it is customary to drive to a bar, eat and drink there, then drive back. Drinking at work doesn't seem to be a problem either.

Coperto. Sometimes translated as service on the bill, the coperto is the price of staying at a table, having a paper towel and using their utensils. At first I thought they were trying to rip me off, as in Romania we don't have a tax per place - strangely so, I would expect establishment owners to want to encourage people staying in, rather than making them pay for it. Italians don't really tip, though, as the coperto and the price of the food includes the tip. As a comparison, in Romania we habitually tip around 10-15%; not doing so sending a message that we are either cheap or that we disliked the service.

Services are very expensive. If the prices in a supermarket seem similar to ours, anything one does for you seems overpriced to me. I know it's a perception issue that I have and I must adjust it, but still when I got an offer to wash and iron my shirts with 4.5 euros each, I thought they were kidding. Luckily I found a Romanian speaking woman who will do all the work and not give me these insane prices, so maybe the price of service only seems high because I don't know where to find it, yet.

What else? There are no stray dogs or cats that I could see in the area. That's something I miss, actually. In Bucharest there are a lot of dogs and cats. Unfortunately scare tactics in the media and politics will probably lead to them being killed in the name of "progress" and "Europeisation". I did see squirrels and wild rabbits around here, though. Everybody moves around in a car or a bicycle. Not having either makes me the odd fruit in the tree. When I told them I don't even have a driver's licence my colleagues were flabbergasted. Italians don't shake hands when they see each other every day, so when I came to work the first few days and went to everybody to shake, they got freaked a little. I still haven't gone to Milan yet, but I went there to visit and work when I was employed in an Italian company, so I know the city is nice, but the culture is similar. No dogs there, either.

That's about it for now. More to come soon.

I have already spoken of the incredible lack of Internet connectivity in the area or Ispra/Cadrezzate. Of course, they are only villages. In Romania you would be lucky to have a telephone. However, this situation has brought to my attention two interesting and strange things.

First, lacking the distraction of the web and of other people, I found myself rediscovering introspection. It felt like meeting an old friend, as my brain was beginning to spout ideas for movies or short stories, computer programs or blog posts. It felt nice and perhaps I ought to try this more often. Apparently, I will have the opportunity every weekend, but already the universe is working toward bringing me a cellular card, so I don't know if I will have the disposition. If you want to try it, go somewhere where you have no Internet, don't call anyone and don't take any other creatures with you, be them dogs, cats or humans, and stay at least two days. I am already after a month of not working, so if you find yourself focusing on work issues, you are not doing it right.

Second, I actually found a magical spot, almost no metaphor here. So strong was my need for connectivity that I actually found a place where a wi-fi connection was available and I could guess its password. It must have seemed weird to see a guy with a cell phone in his hand, triangulating wi-fi spots. The magical part of it is that the spot is on the sidewalk and restricted geographically to an area of 2 or 3 squared meters. Apparently the wifi comes from a clubhouse, but I could not find it in the area and whenever I make a step to exit the area, the signal strength goes down and disappears. If you are old enough to have played Quest for Glory, you know there was a magical area in the forest where you could sleep and find yourself refreshed, without fear of attack and even having a fruit tree that you could eat from. It's kind of like that. Now, I have no idea what Italians think when seeing a big guy standing in the sun on the sidewalk in front of a metal sign for Cadrezzate and either furiously tapping on his smartphone or reading some web pages, but at least I get to read my e-mail and RSS feeds.

The metal sign is probably the reason this works at all, it must function as an antenna. I wonder if my landlord will be OK with me trying to install big metal plates on his balcony... My search for Internet took me almost 2 kilometers away where, after unsuccessfully trying to find a bar or a restaurant with wi-fi and not being able to guess a single password from private networks, I found one that was an actual ADSL line! Couldn't guess the password for that, either, but for someone to have ADSL in this starved out region and not share it felt like a crime to me. Perhaps I will be able to get a contract for myself here, then share it in the building and become the hero! [Enter Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero soundtrack]
Anyway, tomorrow will be my first day of work here, so probably my hunger will be alleviated a little, otherwise I am half a mind to root my Android phone and then install wi-fi cracker programs.

This would be my first post from Ispra, Italy. There is no broadband Internet. Anywhere! I guess I will have some at work, but soiled by IT guys with God complexes who will filter every port that is remotely significant. When asking about it everybody recommends cellular cards that have "a flat rate" of 12 euros, which would be pretty cheap if it weren't limited to 2 GB transfer and wouldn't have ridiculous speeds. So probably I have a lot to say, but I will write blog posts when available. This one, for example, I am writing as a text file on my lonely laptop, hoping to get a chance to post it soon.

Well, after ranting about the lack of Internet access, which was probably the least of your curiosities, I can continue. I got here using the plane from Bucharest to Malpensa, which is one of the airports close to Milan. I've bought the ticket online, checked in online, they gave me a PDF to download, I printed it at a local printer service and so I had my ticket. Being a tall guy, I requested extra leg room and being a lazy guy, I requested priority boarding. In order to get from Malpensa to Ispra I would have had to take a train to Gallarate, then switch to one that would take me to Sesto Calende, then switch again for Ispra. This would have taken me 2 hours and a half, carrying the mother of all baggage. You see, my wife prepared everything that I would ever need in a single bag (except the Internet!!!). Well, screw that. I also ordered online a taxi cab to wait for me at the airport and take me to Ispra, which did cost as much as a third of the plane ticket. Estimated arrival time: 40 minutes.

So I woke up at 6:30, got clothed, took the dog out, read some of the news, got in the car with the wife, she drove me to the airport, I brought my printed ticket to the lady in charge, she took my baggage and that was that. I was ready for boarding at 9:30, when the plane was leaving at 11:20. You see, in Romania the public services have been so poor for the last decades that people still expect something as simple as a plane boarding to take hours. I spent some time with the wife, connected to the airport Wi-Fi, downloaded two podcasts and then went to the boarding gate. There I found a lot of people standing in a huge line. I went to the girl in charge and asked her what should I do, considering I had a priority boarding ticket. She said "well, take a seat and we'll call you". And so it happened. The entire line moved back to allow me and a few other people, mostly foreigners, to pass through. Then people with children, then the regular folks. I guess this is one of the few advantages of having a child. The disadvantage being that it could cry the entire flight to Malpensa, which one of them did! Luckily I had my new smartphone with me, which allowed me to listen to two podcasts and watch most of a Japanese anime film with my headphones on.

I have to digress a little here, as I have mentioned my new smartphone. The reason I've abandoned my trusted Nokia E60 is that the head of the new project implied we could be writing code that would work for cell phones, as well. Another reason was that I wanted something I could watch films on and also read books. Previously I would have used my other trusted device, my PalmVX, a PDA built in 1998 that still works perfectly. Unfortunately, the way to connect the PDA to a computer is either via Infrared or via a 9-pin serial port, which have long disappeared from computers and laptops. And since I could not bring my trusted Athlon 2500+ desktop PC with me, I had to buy a smartphone that is faster than the desktop PC, has more features than the PalmVX and also functions as a phone. Pretty awesome, in a way, but also pretty shitty if you think devices that are decades old could easily carry the load of most of the usage of this incredible device. They couldn't do fart sounds, though.

Anyway, I passed via customs instantly, had to wait for the luggage to arrive (which is always a lengthy process, probably because it doesn't interfere with the plane schedule and we've already paid). Then I went outside. A lot of people there, some were carrying signs with pen written names. There was a cute little chick there, with a printed A4 paper with my name on it. It was like in the movies when they do that. I felt pretty good. Apparently, the designated driver had some delays with his previous customer and so they've sent this girl with a big van thing, even if I had only paid for a small car. I am not one to complain, though, am I? Don't answer that! The girl was very polite, knew English well and we conversed until I got to my destination.

The residence, which is a sort of long term hotel, was right across the street to my new job. I checked in, conversing with the owner's wife, who is also Romanian, and at 15:30 I was "home". By all accounts I will be living here for at least two months and probably for many years.

Next I phoned my new employer, who graciously invited me to a beer (he is Belgian, you see) and we got to talking. Well, things look pretty good, but also are really not well defined. I will not talk about details here, but let's just say that there is a deadline in two months and not many ideas on what exactly we are building. This is a Research Center, though, my new boss assured me, that's what we do: research.

My hotel is right across the street from my job, which is awesome, but one kilometer away from the nearest supermarket. Ispra is a small village, 5000 people or so living in it, and as far as I saw, there are a lot of small villages here, but very few services. You need a car to go to anywhere that matters, including daily shopping. Well, in a way that's the way in Bucharest, as well, but there are a lot more shops on the way instead of lizards running for their lives and squirrels running up trees. Supposedly there is a lake close to here that is warm enough to swim in, there are trees and green things (also known as plants) everywhere and it is rather chilly, which I love. One of the reasons I came here was to escape the horrible wet heat of my apartment, where my wife could not suffer air conditioning. Here I don't have air conditioning, but people assure me I don't need it, I will only need heaters for the winter. Well, let's hope so.

So after I've met with my new employer and most of the team (we will be five people in all working on this) I went shopping. I was very confident that 1 Km would be close enough to get to on foot. And I was right up to the point where I had to return with my hands filled with bags of stuff. But it was OK, I got myself some vegetables and eating utensils, even if later on I discovered I already had some. I went to sleep listening to music on my smartphone. The next day I made myself a salad, went for more groceries, and wrote this post.

In conclusion, I still have to get my "codice fiscale" without which I cannot buy things of importance (like cellular dongles to give me Internet), but other than that I am a brand new inhabitant of Ispra, of the Varese province in Italy. Although that is debatable, as well, since my job is certainly in Ispra, but my hotel seems to be in Cadrezzate. Next to do is explore the area, find some way to wash and iron my clothes, buy decent glasses, cups and water boilers, not these silly Italian espresso things, maybe get to lake Monate and swim a little and, of course, get myself some Internet.

I wrote a bunch of posts regarding my past employment, but said nothing about the new one. In fact, I was a bit superstitious, didn't want to jinx what was going to happen. Now it shall all be revealed! Well, long story short I will be relocating to Italy (re-boot, get it?)and working at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra. That's it, cheers!

Just kidding. How does one get to, first, have the opportunity in the first place and, second, actually decide to go? For the first point I would have to say pure blind luck. I happen to have a LinkedIn profile that shows a lot of experience in the field of Microsoft .NET and so they called me, since they needed someone like that, and I turned out not to be a complete wacko (only a partial one) at the interview. The second point is actually the most complicated. Most Romanian developers of my experience are rooted, so to speak. Married, many with children and obligations, relatives and social circles, they often find it too hard or completely impossible to relocate to another country. Luckily for me, I have no children, I don't have any social circles to talk about, I will probably talk to and visit my relatives just as much from Italy as from Bucharest and I have one of the most understanding wives one could want. She stays behind, at least temporarily, to mind the fort, continue her own career and take care of the dog, while I go on to the adventure of my lifetime.

I may be exaggerating, but I will check out several experiences that I have never had before:

• living alone - I know it sounds strange, but in 36 years I have never lived alone. I was either living with my parents, with my business partner or with a girlfriend or wife
• living in another country - I have worked in Italy before, a few disparate weeks, but never lived in another country for long enough to understand the local culture and experience the way locals see the world
• living in a small town - Ispra is a 5000 people enclave, so it's not even a small town, more of a village
• working for the European Commission or some other governmental organization like that - I am afraid of the bureaucracy, frankly, I hope there is some sort of separation between devs and that sort of thing
• working with actual new technologies - I thought there are some people that inflate their resumes in order to get jobs they don't really deserve, but I never imagined that most companies would misrepresent themselves to appear more attractive as a workplace. I've heard a lot about what great new project I will be working on, only to be relegated to some legacy crap that no manager wants to rewrite even when it's bankrupting their company. Oh, I really hope the JRC people didn't bullshit me about an ASP.Net MVC 4.5 web site with Web API's, AngularJS and Google Maps.
• staying separated from my wife, but not being mad at each other - not that I have ever stayed separated from her while being angry, but still. Our relationship started as a long distance one, since we were living in different cities, and only after a year we moved in together. I am curious as to how this reversal will affect us. I believe it will strengthen our bond, but there are alternative scenarios.
• working and living in a truly multicultural environment - the place will have Italian, French, German, Swiss, Romanian and who know what many other types of people. I will have the opportunity to relearn all the European languages, express myself in them, learn about other cultures from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

All in all, this is the gist of it. You can see that I am excited enough (setting the stage for future disappointment). My plane leaves Bucharest next Friday, on the 30th of August, while actual work begins on the 2nd of September. Hopefully this will generate a deluge of technical blog posts that will compensate the lack experienced in the last two years.

Today was my last day at the large corporation I was employed at. I quit for several reasons, but mainly because the project I was working on wasn't challenging at all. So one has to wonder: how did I get to be bored at work when only two years ago I was so happy to be hired by one of the best employers in Bucharest to work on an exciting new project? And the answer is : misrepresentation. I've titled the post thus because I sincerely think very few people, if any, wanted to harm me or lie to me or take advantage of me and yet the thing I was hired for changed and shifted until I became annoying for proposing ways of improving the project and asking for work. Let me take you from the beginning and you will see what I mean.

At the end of March 2011 I was working at a medium sized company, a place where there were some interesting projects, but the work ethic and methodology was really lacking. I had been working there for about two years and I was starting to get annoyed for not getting any recognition in the face of obvious personal improvement. And in my vulnerable state I was head-hunted by a human resources person from this major American corporation who wanted me to work on a project for them. I said I will give it a try, personally believing that I will either not like the place, not like the money or, even more probable, they will not think me worthy of the job. See where I am getting with this? I was already sold on the concept of a new job there and I didn't want to get disappointed, so I was playing down my chances. It seems that, after one telephonic interview, a series of six consecutive face to face interviews and another one with the head of the company, I was good enough for them. All I had to do was negotiate the wage. I was rather disappointed with the way the then current place of employment was handling salary increases (I've gotten only one raise, 2.25% in size, in two years) so I had a sum in mind that I would consider the minimum I would get in the new place of employment. You see, I am not a very good negotiator, I hate haggling, so I just drew a line in the sand and said that no one will push me over it. I was so serious when I went to talk to them... they proposed a sum that was more than 10% higher than what I was willing to fight for. Surprised, I accepted. Now all I had to do is wait for a call to tell me how we would proceed. It was near my birthday and I thought "Wow! What a nice present!".

At this point I'd had contact with the HR girl, who was very nice, been interviewed by a lot of people, both technical and not, also very nice, and even passed by the head honcho of the company who played a little game with me when we met, by pretending to be a very arrogant and annoying person while the top HR specialist was watching me with a stern expression. I am kind of proud of myself to have seen through their ruse, but I think they did try too hard. No one can be such an idiot to consider refactoring useless because you write good code from the beginning, right? Anyway, the guy who was supposed to be manager gave me a call the first week, told me there was some restructuring going on in the company, that we were still on and that I had to wait. He was nice too. He called me every week for about three months to tell me we were still on, while I was sweating bullets because I had already announced in my company that I was going to leave so that they can prepare for my absence, and they were starting to look at me suspiciously: I wasn't going anywhere. At the time my soon to be manager said he was going in holiday and that another guy was going to call me. No one did for more than two weeks. So I called them!

Now, you see, the HR girl was genuinely believing that she would offer me a better job and my prospective manager was also convinced he wanted me in his team and that we would work great together, they all wanted was best for them and me! So imagine my shock when I called and the new guy told me "Oh, you still wanted to get hired? I had understood that you refused the job". No, you moron, I did not. I politely asked for more information only to find out that they had no more positions as full employees, a limitation that had come from the US corporate headquarters, and that they could only offer me a consultancy job. Devastated, I asked what that meant. It meant I didn't get company stock as a bonus, but I was only paid the sum we had already negotiated. I didn't know about employee benefits when I got the job and I didn't really care for them, so I said yes. It was going to be a temporary measure until more hiring positions were opened.

The company had gone through a "reorg" (I was to meet with a lot of new acronyms and made up words in the new job, much to my chagrin - this particular one meant "reorganizing") and I was not to work under the guy who talked to me week to week, but under the new guy, the one that didn't know if I wanted the job or not. But he seemed genuinely nice and motivated, very enthusiastic about the new project, an administration web UI made in ASP.Net MVC. He asked me if I knew anything about the project. I said no. Why would I care about a project if I don't know if I would be hired or not. He seemed disappointed, but proceeded to explain what the project did and how great it was going to be, as it was meant to replace the old thing, made in ASP.Net in Visual Basic... by monkeys.

You see, he had the best of intentions as well, he was technical, willing to create something exciting and challenging and convinced that I would fit in their team and help with this new project made with new technology. When I finally got my hands on code and started actually working, the project was dead in the water. They had decided instead (and by they I mean some schmuck in US, not the people actually working on it) to just refactor the old admin and continue on. Different from what you may think, I was actually excited. In my head I had this tool that I would be working on to transform all VB.Net 2.0 code into C#.Net 4.0, become the hero of all, and create a formal framework of refactoring code from one language to the other. (If you don't know the terms here, just imagine I wanted to replace wood with stone so that the big bad wolf would not blow the house in). Alas, it was not to be. "Too risky" they call it when they feel afraid. I was yet to understand that in a large corporation responsibility dilutes until it becomes nothing. The only tangible thing becomes blame, which replaces responsibility and exterminates creativity and stifles initiative.

You see, like all the actors in this play, I too had good intentions. The first code I wrote was to fix some bugs that I had noticed in a bit of code related to online shopping. The customers had also noticed this bug and had found complex methods to get around it. While my fix solved the initial problem, it also broke any such method and, as I was a rookie in the formal way of doing things in the new company, the fix wasn't even bug free. From that time I was labelled "dangerous", from the initial problems with understanding the project and also my vocal way of expressing what I thought of leaving a project unstructured and buggy. Well, in hindsight, I have to agree that I wouldn't have felt a lot of love for someone calling me an idiot. Even if I were... especially if I were. Anyway, from this little incident you might have already guessed that a complete overhaul of the code (wood to stone) was out of the question. The powers that be had decided that starship Enterprise was to stay home, no bold missions for it.

I could go on with details, but you are probably already bored. Enough to say that I had my first real experience with Scrum there, a way in which all people had a role, each development cycle had phases that were followed in order and documented along the way, a system which, in time, would collect enough statistical data about the team so that it could predict development speed. All it needed for that was a team that would remain constant. Due to repeated reorg-ing my team had never the same structure for more than two or three months. The general (not per project, overall) company policy would shift radically, often completely in the opposite direction, every six months at most. Plans were set in motion, then discarded before reaching anywhere; performance metrics were created to measure project progress, only to be changed at the next strategic hiccup. It was clear that this was going nowhere like that and, instead of changing their way of constantly shivering in fear, they decided to close the project.

Only you see, the project earned money. Not a lot, but enough to count. There are tens of thousands of people paying for the service and hosting sites on it. You can't shut down a project like this. So they invented yet another expression "sustainability mode", to express the way they intended to zombify the project that they had advertised to clients and developers alike like the next cool thing that would solve all problems. I felt cheated and I could only imagine how clients that paid money instead of receiving them felt. There is an expression "the way to Hell is paved with good intentions". All the people - there were 70 developers and testers on the project and God knows how many managers and support staff - had the best intentions. We achieved a highway to Hell. Oh, and by the way, I never really got hired as a full employee. I remained "temporary" a consultant for the full length of my work there.

So what is the outcome of all of this? Two years of my life are gone. I have learned some things, but in the meantime lost a lot of my initial enthusiasm towards development. I stopped reading technical blogs and only spent my days thinking of the tasks ahead, like a good little robot. I've earned a lot more money, many of which I saved in the bank. I gained ten kilos (that's about 20 pounds, for you metrically challenged folk). I almost made my wife divorce me once, but we got over it. I've made some good friends. I learned to play chess a little better. I am not yet sure if the good balances the bad. Now I have found a new job opportunity, one that is even better paid. I only hope it will not be equally as depressing.

Was I wrong to be so optimistic about getting hired, as I am now, I guess, because it led to disappointment? Better to have loved and lost, I say. Were the people that misrepresented themselves and the project I was to work on wrong? I don't think so, I think they were equally optimistic and got equally disappointed. Was it wrong to have better expectations from the world? Prepare for the worst, but expect the best, I say. So yet again, I can't really blame anyone in the Romanian office and it is difficult to point the finger at the guys in the US as well. And yet, this is the result...

A while ago (geez, it's been 6 years!) I wrote an algorithm that was supposed to quickly and accurately find the distance between two strings. After a few iterations it got really simple to implement, understand and use, unlike more academic algorithms like Levenshtein, for example. I placed all the code in this blog and allowed everyone to use it in any way they saw fit. Let me make this clear that it is not the greatest invention since fire, but it is mine and I feel proud when people use it. And today I accidentally stumbled upon something called Mailcheck, by Derrick Ko and Wei Lu. Not only did they use my algorithm, but they also graciously linked to my blog. And, according to the description from their GitHub page, this javascript library is being used by the likes of Kicksend, Dropbox, Kickstarter, Minecraft and the Khan Academy. Talking about Sift going wild! Woohoo!

So I started to Google for other uses of Sift3. Here is a list:

• Mailcheck, the software that I was talking about above.
• Sift3 for AutoKey - Autokey does "Fast scriptable desktop automation with hotkeys". Toralf also published the result on GitHub Gist: AutoHotkey: StrDiff() and his implementation is now used in 7Plus, a software to improve usability in Windows
• Longest common substring problem - wikibooks varient vs sift3 varient - which seems to make Wikibooks the winner. Drat! :) loser! On second look I noticed that the values did not show time, but operations per second, so more is better. Also, looking at the implementation I noticed that it uses a maxOffset not of 5, but of the minimum length of the compared strings, which makes it more accurate, but much slower (and still wins!)
• A Java implementation on BitBucket
• A PDF document suggesting the algorithm is being used in an Italian software called CRM Deduplica

All in all I am very satisfied of how Sift3 is being used in the wild and, I have to say, grateful to the people that trusted my work enough to include it in theirs. It took 6 years, but look how much it has grown!

Update: To celebrate the usage of my algorithm, I've added an improved Javascript version in the original post, a form of the algorithm that I call "3B", since there are only minor improvements.
Now I have a weird idea of an algorithm that would compute the similarity between lists of strings (which is the usual usage of string distance). Could it be done, in a simple and straightforward manner like Sift3? What do you think?

A while ago I decided to comment on every cinema movie that I watch using the IMDb platform. I wanted to have a history of films I watched and also remember what they were about. (It might not happen to you, but there were at least three movies that I realized I had seen already only when the ending came). Also it would be interesting to revisit films I liked or hated and see what changed in my perspective during time. Certainly it happens this way with books, as you've seen in case of the book Dune, by Frank Herbert.

So today I went to see the list of my comments. They became rarer and rarer because I have many more responsibilities and also I am watching a lot of TV series, which I usually don't comment on. It is a list of 1075 movies, the first one being in the 27 of December 2004 and the last today, the 1st of June 2013. That's a difference of almost ten years, more exactly 3239 days. It amounts to a little less than a movie every three days. I realise that this is an enormous waste of time. Think about it, leaving all TV series aside (which at the moment take a lot of my time as well) I spend half an hour of every day on average just watching films. That's 2% of my total time, in which I include both sleep and work. And I don't even watch TV. If I did, I would have to factor in hours of commercials and channel switching, nature and science documentaries and news shows.

I believe this to be an addiction. I have difficulty even admitting this here, which lends credit to the idea. Moreover, I know it is an addiction, a total waste of time, but I have known it for a long time and I have never managed to stop. I never even got myself to attempt it. Extend this to the entire human race and it is a staggering waste of human time and life. If a disease would kill 2% of all human kind it will be called a pandemic, it would be called horrible, it would kill 140 million people. Add TV and you get a billion people dead. You can then add the time spent discussing movies and TV with friends and acquaintances and it just grows. How come something that serves little purpose becomes the biggest time killer of all time?

That being said, if you are interested in the latest movies I've seen, the list is in the left there, in the About me section. We can discuss them together! Oh, wait...

I have attended the Adobe KickStart Innovation Workshop, which is the latest Adobe attempt to increase innovation in the corporation. You see, having a pyramidal structure where the top instructs the bottom, stifles initiative and sucks the life out of people was not working for them anymore. In all likelihood the move was sparked by Adobe not being in the list of top 100 most innovative companies and they took that to heart.

That being said (in a mean spirited, ranty and spiteful way, of course) I really liked Mark Randall, the guy that introduced the concept. You see, he is a rather brilliant entrepreneur, almost hugely successful several times and certainly above most business people I know of, who uses the ideas of Lean startups to create companies that "change the world". He is also kind of funny, in that personally distant way that Americans often display, but still funny and smart. He is as far away from the classical corporate vision as he could be, as he advocated structures that self organize under the scrutiny, but lack of involvement of the management. In a sort of "If you build it, he will come" sort of way, he thinks that if you create a system that allows for everybody to win, then people will automatically use it, improve on it and make it work, without the need for suffocating oversight. And that is what the KickStart project entails.

There is a lot to say about this, including my ongoing efforts in it (the two day presentation was just the preparation for the actual work, which I must do for myself), but I will keep this to a minimum. It could be enough to say that I really liked the idea, even if I completely disliked the presentation video, with all the diversely ethnic people excited about the opportunity to rise from the dirt by the all enabling Adobe. In truth, I opened my big mouth again asked Mark why the video sucked so much and he said that it was made in a day with only the people that could come on short notice. So I guess the excited people were actually the excited ones.

Anyway, let me summarize the concept of KickStart. You go to this two day preparatory presentation with Mark Randal where he gives everybody a red box containing the blueprint for a business. He lists the six steps that one must take in order to get the blue box, which I guess is the symbol of success. One of the most important ideas that can be taken from this process is that you do not need to do any actual development of the idea in order to validate its success. You get the idea, you share it with people, ask for feedback of the people that would use and/or buy your product, improve the idea, prototype something fast, without anything in the background, and iterate through this until you have some sort of metric of success: is your idea good? Would people use it? Would they pay for it? After you have changed the idea to conform to the realities of business and the clients needs and after you have gained support behind the idea, only then you get to make the actual development. In other words: gather data as fast as you can on the interest people have in your idea before you actually get to work. It's based on science: gather data, make a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, iterate.

Now, what does KickStart mean in the context of the corporation? It means they give you 1000$ (on a card that is valid only for the duration of the workshop - one and a half months) that you can use to further your business (like buying a domain and hosting, advertising, research, etc) and they want you to do the work that validates the idea. The sixth step is convincing the Adobe executives that your idea is good and not only that, but in sync with Adobe's strategy and values. What strategy and values, you ask? I could not answer that, neither could Mark Randall. The example business plan that won the blue box in another workshop was some kind of online challenge based on photos that where connected by their GPS location. And even if this really aligns with the Photoshop+mobile+creativity Adobe thematic, he still got to change the idea until it became something more marketable. You also have to fight out of the blue concepts like "Adobe doesn't do hardware" or "Adobe doesn't do games". Who comes up with these? Executives. They don't have an anti-porn charter, but they assume it's common sense not to pitch your newest Creative Sexuality idea.

And here is the kicker (pun intended): if your idea does not pass, you have gained invaluable knowledge as an innovator and a possible entrepreneur. If your idea does pass, you gain more support to expand on it, under the corporation protective umbrella (insert Resident Evil jibe here). In fact, if you are hugely successful, the business belongs to Adobe, not to you. It only makes sense, since they supported you from the beginning. And if it works, who else to run it and earn the big bucks but you? so I don't see it as a big problem, but you have to be aware of it.

Last but not least is the question: Who the hell is Mark Randall? He is the guy that in the 90's could have revolutionized the video and photo industries with little gadgets that they did with heart and a lot of work. He and his best friend Paul worked their ass off for five years (and here I mean off! They lived in their offices, even if they had rented apartments to live in) until they reached from a garage shop the size of a company that was going to go public for 650 million $. I won't spoil the story that Mark himself tells during the initial presentation, but enough to say that the feeling and vibe of those days he is trying to kindle into others, to make them live the same wonder - if they chose to.

Meet my new puppy dog, Tyrion! The name is, of course, taken from A Song of Ice and Fire, where it is the name of a dwarf who is kind, intelligent and, when needed, ruthless. Of course, if it were a female puppy, she would have been named Arya.

The dog is a West Highland White Terrier, a breed that is known for a lot of sturdiness for their size, curiosity and intellect and also a strong personality which pushes them to claim leadership of the house, even over their owners. Even if the owners are assertive and consistent, only one of them is likely to be considered "leader of the pack", with the other a peer at max. He is supposed to be very stubborn.

That being said, Tyrion is a small lovable little puppy of only three months who so far liked every person that came into the house and was likewise liked in return. He seems to love us even if we do evil things to him like vaccinations or shouting at him when he poops all over the place. On the other hand, a Lannister always pays his debts, so you never know. In all fairness the vet warned us that he might need a few weeks to adjust to the house and learn to relieve himself in a single spot, but he is well on the way there. In only a week he learned to excrete on the Pampers like sheet we placed on the floor. More or less. Also, until we vaccinate him, he is not allowed outside, and that means he will stay indoors for at least another month.

And before you think I am in that "Ya gotta see the baby!" mood, let me tell you I am not. I am quite attached to the affectionate little fur ball, and he to me, but that's the extent of it. This is an informative post, just so you know why instead of blogging cool stuff, I put out puppy pictures.

As an experiment in blogging from the iPad, I am also trying to say something about my thoughts lately. One of them is about the need to be active, to do something, no matter what.

There is obviously nothing wrong with the first part, more with the latter: we are content when we do all kind of stupid things. We might regret them later, but while we are engaged in them we are enjoying it. A brilliant example is my grandmother; when she retired from her job she had a crisis, she did not know what to do, so she came to our house and catalogued every book we had. And we had hundreds. In a recent film Maggie Smith's character said that her apartment is so small that she can make it spotless in 30 minutes; then what is she supposed to do? Why did she need to do anything?

I also remember the times when, no matter what idiot designed the feature and what moron asked for it, I was happy to feel useful coding it. I imagine that people with jobs that I consider inferior, like housecleaning for example, would also feel better doing that instead of nothing at all. We sometimes curse the people that use us for their own benefit: the faceless corporation, the greedy boss, the slave driver manager. But isn't that a bit two faced if we actually enjoy it and feel that it gives purpose to our lives anyway?

What is this obsession with doing something? I can imagine that during our evolution, individuals who needed to do something to keep occupied were more successful than the ones sitting around doing nothing. That we are obsessive by design is a bit unsettling.

I guess the true test of this hypothesis would be to get into a situation where I am neither constrained to do something nor having a particular craving at that moment. Alas, this is hard to achieve. Even during holidays, there is first a time of respite from the stress of work related thoughts, then a bit of relaxing, then some things that we had planned before and then... it's over: we need to get back to work.

There have been rare occasions when I would become bored with sleeping, watching movies, reading books and news, playing games or learning whatever held my fancy at the moment. It is a time of creativity, of sifting through previous ideas and dreams and deciding some are not worth the effort or the resources to complete (or are damn impossible) and, yes, of doing. And yet the doing is never as good as imagined before starting it and never as satisfying as expected after having been done it. Yet the sheer pressure of sitting still and doing nothing forces on.

Of course, being a rather ordinary human being, I can hardly consider myself free of constraints. The rare occasions mentioned are just that: extremely rare. Having a lot of money might enable this kinds of situations, but even then I suspect the real hurdle would be to actually get to be alone. Alone with one's thoughts, alone from incessant distractions, free to let the mind roam. Would I then do something great, as I often daydream? Would I find the situation satisfying enough to not do anything? Or would I bore myself and be forced to seek the very distractions I have been fleeing? And before feeling left out and ignored, dear wife, I have to mention that this is an exploration of myself, outside any context, and that includes you, not forgotten, just off topic.

The answer to the question above is that I don't know, really. I just feel that the true test of one's life is to have the opportunity to imagine its next steps free of constraints and the resources to follow that path. Until then, we are just absorbing stuff, like biological capacitors. And sometimes we die before we get to discharge. I refuse to even consider people that learn nothing from their experiences.

There was a TED talk about the evolution of computer intelligence. We are at the edge of a revolution when computers get as smart as us and then exceed that intelligence. It is inevitable. People will be replaced by machines in increasingly more fields of expertise until there is nothing left to do. Can you imagine how that would be? I can't at the moment. Like pets to exceedingly smarter computers, we would either explore new avenues of thought or just sit and eat and sleep and fornicate. The pessimist that I am, I predict the latter. We will drown in the thing that defines us next after intellect: socialization. You already see hints of this now (I am talking of you, Facebook!), but this will only get worse.

I am torn right at this very moment between exploring this scenario (and of course, finding a solution) and the very subject of this post: doing or not doing something because we need to. Of course, this post must win for now. I can save the world later (I am putting it in my todo list).

My life is really quite uneventful, but I wonder if it should ever be different. The Chinese do have that curse "Be that your life is an interesting one". Is that truly that awful? Why is it that whenever I feel content with my life I also feel the need to change it? And when I do not, I feel the need to be content. Must I journey to find myself, as in so many bullshit movies and books? And if so, what will I find? Will I even want it after finding it? Is my life like a boring movie that must pick up the pace and, if so, who is watching it besides myself and who gets to direct it?