Now married (and with 50% more milk chocolate!)

So, I got married, as you can see here. Pics to follow as soon as we get back from the honeymoon at the end of May. My friend (and witness) Simone posted some "unofficial" ones at on his blog. Yes, the cravat was all over the place after 5 minutes :) It's amazing how many people showed their love for us in the last month. I really don't know how to thank my parents and all our friends that helped them make that day absolutely memorable. Closing my eyes, I can still see all of them talking to me, one by one, and I wish I could have spent more time with each and every one of them. It was amazing and I'm really, really happy that everyone "got" what I wanted to communicate with this. I honestly don't know what to say now. It will take some time to "rationalise" all this. Emotion is a bitch ;.-)

Property Wars IV - A New House

So, I now officially own a house.

To be 100% honest, the house still belongs to my mortgage lenders, and it will probably stay that way for another 25 years. But these are just details.

Now it will take a while to "decorate" it (we have to buy all the furniture and appliances, and stripping wallpaper will probably have to be my main hobby for the next 2 months ), but it's a nice feeling to know that all the work you invariably put in "property maintenance" is to your own benefit, and not your landlord's. The plan is to move out in 3-4 years, when kids will probably enter the equation, and I hope that, for that time, we'll have added quite a bit of "european" value to our little red-brick terrace.

The only downside is that it will take time, and lots of visits to DIY stores, and discussions about colours and shapes and positions, silly things that invariably become bigger than they are when two stubborn geeks have to debate them. Middle-ageness, here I come!

I need BookMooch points!!!

BookMooch seems to work great, I've already sent two books and am waiting to receive another two, one of which had been on my amazon wishlist for ages. I have already spotted quite a few other gems that I want to mooch, so please people, get an account on BookMooch and request my books! Even better, put them on a wishlist and then "mooch" them from me!

• Dave Taylor - Wicked Cool Shell Scripts
• David Chappell - Java Web Services
• Ian Edginton - Scarlet Traces
• Michael Frayn - Spies
• P.G. Wodehouse - The Jeeves Collection: Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves / The Inimitable Jeeves / Carry On, Jeeves
• Simon Brett - The Torso in the Town (A Fethering Mystery)
• Taichi Yamada - Strangers
• Toby Young - How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
• William Fiennes - The Snow Geese

Gold-plated city

Yesterday the sun was shining so much that I simply didn't want to go home; the sharp evening light is one of many little things I love about the UK. So I was rambling and wandering through the streets of Manchester city centre, when all of a sudden, approaching Albert Square, it struck me that some yellowish old building from the XIX century actually looked like it was made of gold and silver. I realized that this was probably how it was meant to look, when the stones were new and clean and the air composition was different... suddenly, all those tales of magical cities, with busy streets full of merchants trading fortunes, and buildings made of gold and silver, looked strikingly similar to what places like Manchester tried very hard to be.

Nowadays, Utopia is made of glass and metal; the mass-market revolution built its fantasy world from Fritz Lang and pulp sci-fi, where wealth is not measured by storing huge quantities of scarce and ultimately frivolous metals, but in affirming the predominance of human intelligence on the physical world.

Wish I wasn't here

Just one of those days when I wish I could just stay home and crank away some fancy little program, but I have to be at work. "Zombieing" my day out, wasting time on the web. Sigh.