While a new law was accomplished that allows police to break into every house, install a trojan horse on there computer-systems and video-cams in there rooms to secret monitor them, others are on there way to ban internet-games they don't like or to just shut down wikipedia cause they can;

Politician Forces German Wikipedia Off the Net

A rather unknown guy was able to do so with the permission of a court+law and without allowing wikipedia to provide a statement / alternate view before. That is the real scandal since it demonstrates the new direction of our neoliberal development and it shows that the last protection we had, the law, is finally gone and/or fails to do it's work.

No news for those who where able to enjoy the new terror-laws at the G8 Summit 2007 or who did fall into the terror-trap like some families. But that it's now valid for even such cases does set new levels. Huston, we have a huge problem.

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If you like to laugh then the Apple presents the iRack clip may something for you - always again impressing how close political reality and good jokes can be

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For those few of you interested (is there anyone?): I've started a new blog. If this one is any measure, it will be a pretty dead one, but I think it's the thought that counts =)

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A few weeks ago, I decided to write a small utility to
help me with my work and also to relearn Qt. This small
utility enable me to control the boot process, update
the firmware of various devices I have at home and at work.

The current version only work with a serial link, and it's
it's also hard coded for the specific devices I have.
I'm currently thinking about refactoring the current code base
so I can remove the proprietary stuff and make the thning more flexible
with different plugins, I will probably had jtag support and
maybe a nice kde4 gui ...

On another notes, it's fun to have his name on a product
that is on the shelves

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Yesterday I finally reached the last level of Marvel Ultimate Alliance—the game is tremendously good, although I have to say that the final boss is quite easy to beat, just like a friend of mine foretold me (hi Dennis, you were right).

Right now, I could be going back and forth between levels so I can actually finish it 100% by finding all the missing bonus points and missions, so I can actually get all the costumes and so forth. I actually usually do that. But this time I’m not sure I will, I’ll probably leave it at that until I can play with some friend.

What made me reflect is what another friend of mine told me yesterday; he has been playing Monster Hunter for quite a while, and now he reached the end, basically. All the main missions done, just a handful of the longest ones to face, not worth his time.

And the same is happening to me with Pokémon Diamond, now that I got almost all the Pokémon available on my edition, bred all the ones I had to bred, evolved almost all the ones I have. I could be continuing (and I probably will, like in a car or something) by training all my main Pokémons to the 100th level, but even that is not much of an achievement. Doesn’t help that I lack people to play with.

I also have Devil May Cry 4 half-finished (half-way through the second time ‘round to finish it). But even that is now down to the task of getting more points to get more abilities and max the stats out.

Sure all the extra features, bonus, abilities, points, extension and so on are quite good and can extend the life of a game beyond its basic, but… I wonder how many people can reasonably say nowadays that they had finished a game, 100%.

Oh well, now I just have to decide what else to play ;)

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I’m not going to write much right now as I still haven’t eaten anything in about a week, and it’s actually pretty cold in my office, not as cold as it was in the surgical unit, but still cold, and I’d rather not take flu right now.

I had surgery, last week; it was more complex than I expected but easy enough for the surgeons, it was done with urgency, but it wasn’t life threatening, yet. I’ll probably write a lot about the last three weeks in the next days but for now I have to recover, eat something, watch TV, play, make sure my cut heals fast and steady.

I’m now back home, I still have staples on my tummy, but it’ll be fine in a week or two, although it won’t heal fully in less than six months.

Oh, and I have been diagnosed type 2 diabetes, but in a light form which should be reversible, and is not related at all with my pancreatitis but rather with my having been overweight before.

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So I’m in the hospital, with too much time in my hands of course, since the exams take time to be prepared. I spent the weekend out of the hospital with my family, which really made me feel better, and with that I was able to get some new books to read, in particular The Dragon Reborn, and a Japanese grammar textbook. I was also able to get the Italian edition of Cowboy Bebop, an anime series I really love (and have seen many times in TV in Italian—this time I also have the Japanese track).

But one thing I’m doing for most part of my days is filling crosswords puzzles. It’s a nice way to spend time, and it keeps my mind awake, without numbing it down. Reading is nice but I find this more intriguing, during the day.

Unfortunately, a programmer with too much time in his hands is always a problem, because obviously something very nasty might come out of his mind, like, in this case, the idea of digging into crosswords puzzles solution by machine.

Just for information, this post is going to have excerpts in Italian, since I haven’t yet tried to complete a crossword puzzle in English (I doubt I’d be able to), and thus I’d be focusing on solution of Italian crossword puzzles. I’m sorry if this reduces the scope of the post, but I’m just very bored and this post reflects that.

Also, since I haven’t been digging into this at all yet, I’m using an expensive connection, after the initial 50MB/day of flat rate, I’m probably going to say lots of things technically wrong, so the value of this post has to be taken with a full package of salt.

As much as crosswords vary, especially between different authors, and different points in time (they reflect a lot the social life of Italians, for instance “La provincia di Cogne”, literally “the province of Cogne” – i.e.: Aosta – was probably impossible to find, and know, before the murder happening in that city that monopolised the attention of the media for many years), there are a few constant pieces of it that could easily be automated in resolution.

This usually applies to the definitions used for short two-letter words, like the following ones, taken from an actual crossword schema:

• Le ha doppie l’ufficiale (“Ufficiale” has pairs of these): FI, as those are the two letters that are found twice in the word “Ufficiale”;
• In centro e nel sobborgo (In “centro” and in “sobborgo”—In center and suburbs): RO as those are the two ordered letters found in both words;
• Iniziali della Allende (Initials of Allende): IA for Isabelle Allende;
• Le consonanti in azione (The consonants in “azione”—The consonants in action): ZN as the two consonants in the word “azione”;
• In mezzo al buio (In the middle of “buio”—In the middle of dark): UI as the two letters in the middle of the word “buio”;
• Ex-sigla di Forlì (Former code of Forlì): FO, as the previous province code for Forlì (nowadays FC for Forlì-Cesena);
• even more similar definitions;

There is of course a huge problem here in dividing the definitions in tokens so that the computer could understand what the subject of the definition is, but it’s not tremendously impossible. Once you know which word to look at for a purely letter-wise definition (like 1, 2, 3 and 4), it’s trivial for the computer to calculate it, even without knowing it from before; just like a human, though, a software solver would need memory for the third and sixth options.

In the case of initials for a public character, again just like a human, the software could fill in the surname initial to begin with, even without knowing the other one, but then it could be helped through a list of names. With a sophisticate enough software, it could eventually learn the definition once the other cell is filled with a sure enough value. For what concern province codes, which are quite often used, it would be very easy, as most of those definitions are just “Venezia” for “VE” (Venice name and Venice province code), and the list of provinces is usually one and not variable.

Of course it’s impossible to complete a crosswords puzzle with just the mechanical solution to these, the complex definitions are the tricky ones that would require some complex solution like neural networks, like the one a friend of mine is working on for his short university degree in computer engineering. Most of the definitions are just matter of looking up words from memory associated by keywords in the definition. Sometimes, the same database of public characters could be used for finding out the names for the definitions, like:

• La Gale della TV (The Gale from TV): Megan Gale, is a TV character.

But other times, you’re just given a few synonyms to find the definition, thus associative memory is the only thing you can use to find the solution.

I’ll think about this a little more, I have time here in the hospital, and maybe I’ll actually try to come to something about this in the distant future, while I’m convalescing from the surgery maybe.

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So today they broke me the news, not like it wasn’t in the air already. I need surgery, to remove my gallbladder, and to remove the pseudocyst that is still there. If I don’t remove it soon enough, it might turn into chronic pancreatitis, and I’d rather that not to happen.

I admit I felt, for a while, slightly crushed by the bad news, but I got to feel better, to the point I was able to eat just fine. I suppose it helped that I was laughing at the fact I felt in the middle of a Scrubs episode, with all the new doctors around and the chief of the unit asking questions.

At any rate, I’ll be in the hospital for a little while more, then when I’ll be back home it’ll probably be for just a few days, before being called in for surgery. I’ll try to do my best to do something good in the mean time but I might be scarcely available for a while.

I just hope not to be a guinea pig for a long time still….

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I wanted to write about names and their spelling since a post by Michael S. Kaplan but for a reason or another I postponed it till now. I decided to return on this topic since, for the whole day at the hospital up to now, my name was regularly misspelled, and considering I am not even hitting problems with “foreign” names here, it makes me quite upset sincerely, as it’s all due to the way software has been written.

As you most likely know if you read my blog, wherever this happens, is that my name is Diego Pettenò (well, this is not going to be technically right in a few months but that’s another point altogether). You can see there is something “funny” on the final “o” of my surname. If you’re American, you might not know that’s called an “accent”, and it gives the proper way to pronounce the name. I guess one of the reasons English is considered easier than French, Italian and Spanish is that it lacks accents.

What is the problem? As the computers used nowadays seems all to derive from some English based design, they base themselves still on the ASCII table, the ASCII table makes it very difficult to handle special characters, which include “ò”. On some systems, like the credit card system for what I can tell, this is handled by replacing the accent with a quotation mark, making my name Diego Petteno’; not exactly my name but it comes closer than “Diego Petteno” that many other systems use; this is especially boring because “Petteno” (with no accent) is a different surname in this area, so I make it a point to distinguish between the two.

It is even worse when you go away from the Venice area, where both surnames are quite common, and enter Verona area, where at least Pettenò is not; I’ve been called Petteno all day, and I’m not liking it. And this is staying in the same country, actually the same region. I don’t even want to know how people whose main alphabet is not the latin one feel about this, with forms to be compiled with an approximation of their actual name.

I’m always signing up with my full proper name when I can, but a few times I’ve been asked to remove “non-letters” from my surname, and the scary thing is that this seems to happen more often with Italian sites rather than American ones, lately. It is not possible, for instance, to issue a wire transfer to “Diego Pettenò”, you have to round it down to “Diego Petteno”, even when using SEPA (Single Euro Payment Area, which means a global “namespace” for wire transfer in the Euro Area; note that European languages are quite full of special characters, I can’t think of another one but English than doesn’t have them, and much more “complex” than “ò”).

And don’t even try to get me started about katakana passwords :P

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I’m leaving for the hospital in a few minutes, I was called in yesterday around 14:00 and I had to get ready quite quickly as the bed was free either today or to a non-foreseen date.

I hope everything will be fine, that connection will be present, and that I’ll have a decent roommate…

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Summer is gone. No more pictures or travelling, lack of time for much opensource... that's life.

I will also be moving soon, and that will make my spare time even shorter. Lets hope there will still be some spare time during the weekends!

In the mean time, I'm seeing that many photographer applications and code are being added hideously to svn. I really wish those projects got more attention and advertising (and thus help), since, given the skills required for coding them, they require quite a few resources. I hope to be able to help those myself with some code, now and then.

That said, I'm pondering what to do with the photo tutorial series. planetkde is eating too much bandwidth off my server, by showing the whole blog body on each hit. That makes for 12GiB transfer per day (around 6-7k hits, I think) and it's unnacceptable for me, so I will have to stop them for some (short) time and try finding a proper workaround.

[o ] click!

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While I’m writing this, Yamato is up and running a world rebuild to updat to the new CFLAGS. It also spares me from having to run a further rebuild to get stuff updated. I’ll write more tomorrow about Yamato, the problems getting it to run, my idiocy on a little detail, and the changes in software I made for this incarnation of my workstation.

As I now have access to my main data repository again, I’ve also started a boring and long task that I should have done a long time ago. I started looking through all the bookmarks I had in Konqueror (and there are lots), and tag them on delicious (has it been renamed Yahoo! Bookmarks yet or is it soon to come? The fact that Firefox extension revers so often to “ybookmarks” makes me wonder).

My reason to use delicious is that I have a huge amount of bookmarks saved, and I have to organise them somehow; tags are better suited than folders for this, as it makes it possible for me to remember that Dave’s Trailer Page is, yes, a page related to Movies, but it also involves my multimedia work as it contains important samples.

Thanks to the extension, also, I can easily access all the bookmarks, from Yamato (Linux) or Intrepid (Mac OS X/Windows), which makes it quite important when one of the boxes is inaccessible, or if I have to find something and I’m not at home, but rather at a friend of mine’s (as long as I decided to share the bookmark).

So if you’re monitoring my delicious page or my friendfeed, you’ll most likely see a new wave of pages being tagged down, it’s not something I think I’ll be doing for a long time, hopefully.

On the other hand if you have been following me a few weeks ago you might have seen I tagged down a huge amount of medical-related pages on Wikipedia; I was transferring to delicious the list of pages I bookmarked last year while I was at the hospital, integrating it with the new stuff they gave me this year.

I suppose that if you’re monitoring me, you might now know more about me than you’d ever have wanted to.

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When this entry will be posted, I’ll most likely be hospitalised again, this time at least it will be a different hospital in a different city, in a different healthcare unit, with different doctors.

When I was hospitalised last year, I was at the main public hospital in Mestre at the time, the Umberto I (named after one of the Italian kings from our nation’s previous life – a bit of a controversial king too). During the time I was hospitalised, the work on Umberto I maintainance was quite reduced, and you could easily ell that by looking around. The reason for this was that a new hospital was to open in a matter of months, near Zelarino.

Indeed, the inauguration of the new hospital, that incidentally is just a couple of minutes by car from my house, happened just a couple of weeks before I was released, in September 2007.

During my whole hospitalisation, when something seemed substandard, or simply broken, the standard answer was “But you’d have to see with the new hospital!”. The ICU was still using CRTs? New hospital. The amount of computers and CRT monitors and laser printers turned on 24/7 amount to a good waste of energy? New hospital. The bells in the rooms don’t work correctly? New hospital. The six-beds room doesn’t have enough space to eat? New hospital. Air-conditioning doesn’t work – it’s either too high or too low? New hospital. And so on.

The features of the new hospital also started to be heard about: shops for the people coming to visit, an internal garden for patients to relax in even during Winter, rooms with maximum two beds, and in-room services, LCD TV in each room, and an entirely new Gastroenterology unit so that it won’t have to be shared with General Surgery.

But at the same time, gossips about the absolute failures of the new hospital arrived: very little space to move beds around in the rooms, CAT scan rooms designed without taking in consideration the movement of the little bed on the machine, the parking lot having to be paid for, not only by patients and visitors, but also from personnel, which also had, for what I was told at the time, to pay for the lockers in the locker room; and stuff like that. The opening, originarily expected for January 2008, was moved down the line.

In March, I think, of this year, I had to go to the ER for my migraine, and I asked about the new hospital, since it hadn’t opened yet. I was told that with the rain, happened a few days before, the ER in the new hospital was flooded; which of course is not a good thing, and had to be tended to before opening. The doctors didn’t espect it to be open before June.

Indeed, this summer the new hospital opened, and more problems started to show up. People having to go to the various ambulatories in the new hospital lost themselves in the randomly-numbered maze of corridors, and as soon as the sun started to shine on the hospital, another huge fail started to show itself: the glass panels used to cover the “sail” of the new construction (that is designed to impress), were mounted inside out; instead of keeping the heat to enter with the light, they created a huge greenhouse.

When I was hospitalised at the end of July, I went to the new hospital, as the old one has closed down entirely, the ER being the last part of it. The structure of the new hospital is indeed impressive, and the equipment is all new. I’m not sure why they didn’t just use the newly-bought equipment in the old hospital too but that’s beside the point. The ER is totally new, it looks like the one from Scrubs or House. Luckily the doctor in the ER (new one, too) was also good. I was impressed to find a doctor speaking fluently both English and French; it’s news as the last time I visited the old ER, they tried to speak English so badly that I was almost tempted to stand up and translate for them, if I wasn’t in pain.

But the outstanding impression didn’t last long. While the new “observation” unit is really cool, both in equipment and personnel, the Gastroenterology unit was still merged with General Surgery (with all the problems coming from that), because there are a lot of staff members on vacation, and the corridors are too long for the reduced number of nurses to keep up with the three stations that the two units have. This also means that the nurses are always running, they take a huge lot of time to answer to calls, and they cannot just give patients enough attention, like the few words they could spare before so that you didn’t feel totally isolated (I didn’t suffer from this problem, I had my cellphone, and Internet connection, but I can understand the feeling). Also, something probably happened between the nurses, because some that were a bit cold and detached last year were now warm and caring, and one that last year was very positive and funny was now bitchy.

But it’s not just a staff problem. The new hospital has less beds than the old one, so patients are released as soon as they are able to stand around by themselves. Which is nice if you don’t want to stay, but it creates a bit of a problem, if they come home and then they have to come back to the hospital. It also means that there are always needs for new beds for people that come from the ER.

And the rooms haven’t really improved that much. Yes there are no more six beds bedrooms, which were quite a mess to stay in when all six the beds were filled, and a curtain was added so that the two patients can have a little more privacy, but there are still structural problems. First in all, the TVs are still missing, although there are the screws and the aerial connections for them, on the wall and ceiling, as well as having headphones connections on the nurse bell remote. But it gets worse. The windows were replaced with a huge glass panel; a fixed glass panel; you cannot just open the window to get a bad smell out; which is far from uncommon in a Gastroenterology Unit, especially when you’re put in the same room as an old man who just had surgery and cannot walk to the bathroom. Also, instead of good old manual blinds, they wanted to make something better, and put on automatic electric blinds, which supposedly should have closed automatically if there was too much sun; I’ll get back on these later. The air conditioning, that was a problem on the old hospital, was even worse here, as it was mostly off; if you add the increased heat because of the glass panels being mounted wrong, you can guess it wasn’t that good. And again, there are “night lights” to move around in the rooms, which are LED-based; but not white or “almost white” LEDs as you might fine in the nearest Chinese Dollar-store; not even the “calming” blue LEDs that I used to use myself; green LEDs, bright green LEDs. And the staff hasn’t learn to use them yet, so sometimes they are not turned on during the night and some other times they are left on during the day—yes of course it is NOT set on a timer.

Speaking about the electrical devices, on the old hospital, every Saturday morning, there was a blackout. Either some weekly test or something that was turned on blew a fuse, but it was there for as long as I was in the hospital, which was a long enough time; even when I returned to the ER on a Saturday morning, months later, the blackout was there.

On the new hospital this changed. Instead of limiting themselves to Saturday morning, the blackout happened every other night I was there; and not just once, but a few times. One night with my sister, we counted five short blackouts in about an hour, between 9pm and 10pm. It wouldn’t have been that bad if: a) when power goes out, the emergency lights turn on; these are fluorescent lights, in front of a tinfoil mirror system to increase the brightness, and they are basically on the eyes of the patient on the door-side of the room. Guess which side of the room I was? And not just that, but also the automated blinds reset themselves, and resetting themselves, they end up doing a huge amount of noise (as they open and close) and decide to stay open afterward, even if they started up being closed. So the blinds were almost never closed during the night; if it wasn’t for the curtain, I would have been woken up by the light from outside.

And this is still not all. The only table in the room, where patients could possibly do something that requires a stable surface, like eat, is along the “window”; but as the beds are put in parallel with the glass for obvious reasons, it falls entirely on the side of the room where just one patient is. The bathroom, on the other hand, is on the side of the door, which means that, during day and night, you’ll have to see the other patient going in and out of the bathroom.

The bathroom itself isn’t bad, it’s quite spacious, and there are good services. Unfortunately having one inside the room also means that you cannot choose between the less dirty stall, especially when you have an old dirty man as roommate.

Outside of the rooms, there has been other problems. The hospital is huge, and this means you have to walk quite a bit to reach the right place. The last morning I spent there I had to take an ultrasound. They asked me if I wanted to go with the wheelchair or if I could walk, and I gladly decided to walk, I didn’t do that in a week, I wanted to, but then I didn’t expect I had to walk through almost half the hospital size in length to find the right ambulatory; we arrived fifteen minutes later than expected. And it’s the same building (there are multiple buildings in the hospital).

What about the shops they opened? Well there’s a restaurant, that has its usefulness considering the time visitors might spend in the hospital to tend to a sick relative; there’s a cellular phones shop, which wouldn’t be bad at all if it wasn’t that it sells only Vodafone, and Vodafone does not cover all the rooms of the hospital (I can understand that if you have to leave a relative at the hospital becahse he’s sick and he didn’t have a cellphone, you’d gladly buy one even overpriced, without leaving the hospital, or if you have a rechargeable contract, and you need to recharge); and then there’s a para-pharmacy. If you’re not used to the term, it’s a pharmacy-lookalike that can only sell non-precription medications; in this case this was an herboristic shop too; when the doctors don’t want to accept the existance of that at all. Now I can understand an herboristic shop in the hospital, myself; but why a para-pharmacy and not a full pharmacy? I expect more than half the people leaving the hospital with prescriptions for some meds, and it would be quite nice to be able to get them before going out.

I enquired about WiFi access, but it was not an option; someone said that it would be a problem with the machines around in the hospital. Someone even suggested I shouldn’t be using my cellphone at all, in the hospital (which makes the presence of a cellular phone store quite stupid then). Just to be clear, more than half of the staff – nurses and doctors – go around the hospital with their cellphone turned on, included the ICU and the “red area” of the ER; and for what concerns WiFi, the old DECT-based cordless phones used in the old hospital by the doctors to be reachable were now replaced with shiny new wireless VoIP phones (I didn’t get to see the producer); the coverage is provided by multiple Cisco access points all over the place.

All in all, there has been quite a few flaws with the new hospital too. And it became even worse because I was assigned a roommate under emergency rather than with a little consideration. A dirty (literally) old man, who spent the nights cursing (aloud), disallowing me to sleep enough, who had relatives visiting who yelled so high, unable to use an handle (every time he got to the bathroom during the night he slammed the door, multiple times, – being new, the door wouldn’t close easily just being slammed – rather than using the handle), and totally inconsiderate of the fact of being in an hospital with a roommate (the last full day I spent there was hell: his wife brought him a radio, with no headphones, he turned it on during visiting time, so I took off with my friend to the tables outside the unit – tremendously hot but at least I wasn’t on the bed – but then he started it back at mid afternoon till 9pm! And just one nurse came in to ask him to lower it at least a bit, at 6pm—for a moment she thought it was me, but then I shown her I had my earphones on. During the night he decided he had to change his clothes at 3am! And wanted to turn on the light for that! He also had to call the nurses twice to know how to turn it on; considering they explained it the night before, and it’s far from difficult anyway; at least the first nurse plainly said that it was not something to do at that hour, the second was quite worse).

Hospitals are never fun, but they can even be worse when there are such issues…

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When I was in Junior High (or rather the Italian age equivalent), I used to have a small address book with the phone numbers of the few people I knew. At the time, cellphones weren’t so widespread, even in Italy, and we were too young to use them for the standards of the time.

In the first years of High School, cellphones started to spread around, I ended up having one, and I had a Filofax-like organiser that I used to write the numbers and the addresses on.

At the third year, I actually prepared a simple table with addresses and numbers of all the class members for us and the teachers.

I guess I always had the feeling I needed to organise my contacts’ information so I could access it easily.

I used to keep an almost complete contact list on KDE’s Kontact, before it lost its data a couple of time and I had to recover it from a backup. Since then, my “master” address book has been OSX’s. The nice thing about OSX’s Address Book is that it’s very easy to sync with my phone, so that the phone book there is just a copy of the one in OSX. And since OpenSync supports Evolution and my phone, I can copy the stuff back on Enterprise.

The problem here is that iSync uses a vCard 3.0 format that seems to allow customised labels on phone numbers and addresses, while the phone only keeps the standard ones. iSync also does not allow to set the “preferred” number or email address, so every time I call or send a message to someone in my phonebook, the phone asks me for which number to use. But it’s a minor issue.

Last week I started cleaning up my phone book, and filled the blanks. Like the birthdays. Even though neither Symbian nor OSX merge the data from the address book to their calendars, it’s still useful to have it written down there (I then manually file the birthdays on Google Calendar).

The relatives names are also useful: even if I don’t have a contact for them, it’s much easier to look up a name there if you forgot how the sister (or brother) of your friend is called; or if your friend have a sister (or brother) at all!

But what is the point of all this? Well, I’m afraid I haven’t seen a portable device that has an address book good enough for me. I already written about some annoyances with Nokia but for what I can see, it’s still the best choice between iPhone and Windows Mobile, at least for what concern the Address Book (synching the Windows Mobile with OSX requires paying for software, synching iPhone with Linux is unlikely at all, to begin with; and yes I do want the two systems to share the same Address Book).

I decided to lease a phone through 3 (my provider) for when I’m in the hospital, and I then decided to go with Nokia again; the nice thing is that I can change the phone if I don’t like it, without changing the lease or spending more money on it. I decided to go with an E71, the updated model of the one I am currently using (the E61). I’ll write once I have tried it whether it works with vCard 3 yet, and whether it supports a few basic features, that I think should really be considered mandatory on advanced mobile address books:

• custom labels for phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and postal addresses: people might just have home, office and mobile numbers, but offices might have multiple phone numbers, especially public offices; (note of colour: E61’s address book supports multiple phone numbers but NOT multiple addresses);
• support for second names: the Nokia E61 is a very strange system on that note, when I added my second name to my contact on OSX (more about that I’ll write in the future), the E61 still seen me as “Diego Pettenò”, on the other hand, using Nokia PC Suite to copy over the address book to my mother’s 6288, it appeared in there with my full two names;
• support for nicknames: very important; I have many people who share their first name, and a few who share their last name (I have seven people named Alberto, four named Marco, five named Andrea—that’s a male name in Italy), it’d much easier to identify them by writing their nickname rather than their name, but neither Symbian nor the iPhone address book accepts lookup by nickname, even though they have it saved in;
• handle multiple possible inbound contacts calling: my sister and my brother in law, obviously, have the same home phone number; when a call come from that number, obviously the phone cannot be a psychic and it cannot tell me which one of the two is calling, but it would be nice if it shown at least two or three possible candidates rather than showing me the raw phone number at that point; for what it’s worth, I don’t want to remove the phone number from one of the two because when I’m looking for specifically one of the two, I open the contact page on the address book, and call first home, then the personal cellphone; if one of them didn’t have the home number I’d have to switch between two contacts;
• show the contacts’ birthdays when they happen on the calendar: please, it’s the most basic of the features, Outlook 98 had it!

On a different note, I still haven’t found a way to easily synchronise my phonebook with the Siemens S450IP cordless: I know I can upload and download the phonebook as a single vCard file with multiple contacts, but each contact only can have one number, which makes it difficult to handle an address book that is organised with multiple numbers per contact (home, work, mobile).

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Since I left the hospital this year I’ve been told to limit my coffee intake too. This actually didn’t make me feel to good especially since I accepted my caffeinism a few months ago.

The problem is that doctors tend not to explain themselves on why someone should or should not eat something, which doesn’t fly too well with me. But I accepted that I have to keep low on that.

But in the past two days I noticed that I really feel the withdrawal, migraines restarted and I felt like crap. So tonight I started on a mission to find why they barred me from drinking coffee, and whether this was related to caffeine itself or to something else.

As far as I can see, the problem lies in colestherol, which of course is bad for the gallbladder, which is what caused my pancreatitis in the first place. I think I’ll stop drinking coffee altogether until they take it out.

Tomorrow I’ll see if I can get a hold of my doctor, and ask him if there is any caffeine pill I can take. I really feel the need for caffeine, alike to how House feel the need for Vicodin. The problem is mostly to make sure I don’t take something that might antagonise the rest of the pills I’m taking.

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