Here comes a long overdue update.
I went to Italy and back. It was only for 6 days. It’s been a bit like a dream. A touch and go after one year and a half. I now fear the day I’ll try to ask days off again (which should be this summer). Possibly, in a bid to hold onto the dream I took an unusual number of pictures. A lot of family stuff, not necessarily interesting to everyone.

Second day at work and there isn’t actually any pressing duty. Most of the coworkers (from other teams) are in vacation too. That reinforces my view of the fact that not giving out vacations is actually a tendency more than a necessity.

In Rome I mostly fixed the wireless home network again.. that for some unknown reason it just stopped working. I set everything back up, so everyone can continue going on the net. Still, as far as bandwidth goes, Italy is much behind Japan. That is an issue as I plan to go ahead with some sort of hires video-chat, or whatever one wants to call it.
AIBO turned out to be very popoular among the family members. For some was actually a stimulating experience. That proves the fact that sometimes one just has to go out and do something, without thinking too much about it (sometimes !). AIBO was potentially an useless purchase, but who knows what kind of chain reaction can spark for me or people around me.

Recently I’ve been thinking about photogenicity ! I usually don’t come out very good in pictures. There doesn’t seem to be any real study about being photogenic. The basic idea is that some faces don’t translate as well from 3D to 2D.
3D here really means stereoscopic vision: two eyes watching the same image from two slightly different positions.
Cameras also have the tendency to distort images more than eyes. My general vague theory is that, for example, a single camera objective pointing to your nose, makes the nose bigger and the jaws smaller. That’s because the lens distort the actual geometry, like a caricature does. Human eyes instead won’t distort as much, also actually pointing to two side points. Assuming that one person is looking at another persons’ face straight ahead: the maximum magnification does not happen on the nose.

Faces also usually have some asymmetries. I’m guessing that two separate eyes can adapt the two perceived images so that they adjust towards the expected symmetries.

There are actually a lot of elements to go by, but I’m not sure I’m up to a deep study of all this… although it’s a potentially very popoular topic.

…and.. I recently gained 2 kilos !!! Time to get back to some sort of diet and to the gym.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Posted by Davide Pasca in Diary