Rookie runner

I’m used to 14 hours, multi-task multi-purpose working hours; my average working day starts at 6 and a half with the first mails and web check and usually ends after mid-night; but I’m a full-formed lazy boy for everything concerned with sport activities. Yes, it’s true that I love skiing, I play tennis, I swim and try to perform in other sports too… but these are not daily activities, nothing I can say I dare to to every day. The opposite is true!

But as my business/dinner lunches grows in number and in quality as my weight has re-started growing; I needed something that, without forcing me in a diet I would never have been able to maintain in the long distance, granted me a loose in fats and – hopefully but as a side effect – could also get myself fitter.

I started by evaluating the Nintendo Wii together with the Wii fit; but as the summer approaches it’s getting harder to perform fitness activities at home; I don’t have enough spare time to dedicate at least 7 hours of my week to go to the gym (and when I tried I never been able to reach the objectives I had due to my early abandon of it).

Speed graph on Nike+ siteBut then I’ve seen a commercial of the Nike+ Men VS Women challenge; basically Nike+ is a sensor, integrated in your left shoe to track speed and distance, wirelessy (via Bluetooth, I suppose) connected to your iPod (Nano or Touch, I own the second one) to organize, measure and maintain your running activity.

That was exactly what I was looking for:

  • It’s something geeky and innovative; something that reallly excites me;
  • It has a companion web site with cool functions and intuitive UIs;
  • It gives me the chance to share my results with friends and followers in a load of ways (email, Facebook, web, etc.);
  • It let you create your own challenges (personal or VS someone), running tracks (using Google maps), and objectives (calories lost, distance, speed, etc.).

I think these qualities are keeping me on track: I’m really enjoing running and I having the first results after just five days of activities: I started on Monday with a 20mins, 2.5 Km run and ended my Running Week on Saturday with a 25mins 4,7Km performance, nearly doubling my first effort!

Here belowOn the right column you’ll find a widget that connects to the Nike+ server and let me share with you my results; hopefully you’re going to see a 10Km run in the next 30 days!

Frontiers V warming up

Update: the press release is out (Italian only, sorry)

So finally (and as per our tradition: just in time) the conference site is up with the program (work still in progress) and the social networks stuff (Linkedin and Facebook).

Frontiers of Interaction V web site now live

This year edition will be held in Rome on June 8th at the Acquario Romano (I’ve linked the Google Map) starting at 9am.

Citing names among our speakers line up would be difficult to the amount of talent and innovation we’ve been able to pack in a single-day single-room conference (and uh: have I said the conference is completely free?).

I’ll be in Rome starting Sunday 7th; drop me a line if you’re in the surroundings and would like to meet for a beer.

YellowLine. Reloaded

Yep. More or less as in Matrix 2.0. New server, new Word Press, new template. And a brand new load of messy problems: giving the fact that I have not been able to convert my old WP 2.0 database into the new one, I really managed to completely f**k the previous version of the blow which now appears in a shining 500 error.

I really had the intention to repost the whole 2002 (circa) 2008 archive (which is now accessible only via MySQL admin consolle) before firing up the public version of the blog but we’re living tough times, my friends, and I’m pretty sure that the risk was to have everybody waiting forever.

Every week I’ll cherry-pick precious content from the past and post it here, in its original form and publishing date, waiting for a cool idea (or a cool friend) that we’ll magically import the whole database in a few seconds.

Everything is still very beta and I still need to have some plugins installed (such as the connections to my Flickr and Last.fm accounts) and the template completely tuned; but the RSS feed now correctly points here, and we cn only get better.