James Brody - archipelago in the sky

On Sunday, James Brody, a Santa Fe composer, teacher and friend died in a car accident in Minnesota.  He was an active participant at the Santa Fe Complex where I had a chance to interact with him briefly, as we collaborated on a sonic tribute to Venice on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Venice Project Center.  All I really did was to make available to James the Sounds of Venice recordings that a group of WPI students collected in Venice a few years back, which include over 100 characteristic sounds that are unique to Venice.  James quickly created a medley of the sounds and then proceeded to produce a more sophisticated set, that he named Archipelago Venice.


In case we needed another memento mori, James premature departure from this earth ought to remind us of our impermanence and instigate us to be bold to the point of recklessness in our self-expression...
What are we so afraid of?  What's holding us back?
Memento Audere Semper!

Thank you, James, for being insatiably creative...  We will miss you!

Equinox update

Nick and I completed our epic transcontinental adventure last Saturday (March 13), after logging almost 4,000 miles of driving from our home in Spencer, MA to Santa Fe, across 14 states and the continental divide.  As you can read in our #nfga (Nick and Fabio's Great Adventure) tweets (fed automatically to facebook), Nick and I shared the driving through great American landscapes.  Nick got his first speeding ticket in Indiana and had a very close call with a giant moose/elk in Idaho...  Memorable indeed. We managed to get 3 great days of skiing in there at Jackson Hole (Wyoming), Alta (Utah) -- which was our favorite loveliest ski destination -- and Steamboat Springs (Colorado).  We were bushed by the end of our last run and made a beeline to New Mexico to rest and relax.  We arrive Saturday March 13 at 2am.
About a foot of fresh snow was on the ground by the time the students arrived on Sunday.  What a start of the term!  It has snowed several times in this first week of the WPI spring term (Term D) here in Santa Fe -- over half a meter in all...  Gave me a chance to experience some great high-altitude outings on cross-country skis, snowshoes and a borrowed pair of powder skis. Awesome landscape, but demanding at elevations exceeding 10,000 feet (over 3,000 meters).
Today, to celebrate the vernal equinox, I figured it was appropriate to scale el Monte del Sol on snowshoes to celebrate the halfway point between the shortest and the longest day of the year, when the sun and the moon share the celestial sphere equally.  Sun mountain is one of a pair of conical peaks that offer very accessible yet grandiose views of the northern New Mexico plateau from Albuquerque to Los Alamos, Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo mountains where the Santa Fe Ski Area is nestled.  The twin peak in what some people have called the "wonderbra" of Santa Fe is appropriately called the Moon Mountain.  Perfect for an equinotial hike.  Inspired me to write a couple of #hikeku to honor the moment... at noon.
        This past week the two teams of WPI students were off too a great start, meeting City officials for both the St. Michael's Drive redevelopment project as well as for the Municipal Electric Infrastructure project.  The were even interviewed by the New Mexican newspaper, though the article about their projects is still in the works.  They will be interviewed again later this week.
It's great to be in Santa Fe.  It's healthy and fun.  Nick and I love it...

Rites of passage

Nick and I are on our second continental traverse right now.  We left Spencer on Friday afternoon after a very eventful week.


View 2nd Cross-country road trip - the Northern route in a larger map On the very same day, Wednesday March 3, 2010, Nick successfully completed his GED (General Education Development), which is the equivalent of completing High School and also passed his learner's permit test, so he will be allowed to drive with a licensed driver.  All of this, just in time for our big crosscountry trip from Massachusetts to New Mexico.  It's a real coming of age for Nick!  Wow!  Congratulations my dear son!  I love you.
Now you can look forward to college and life with full confidence.  I am so grateful for this...
In true Venetian/American spirit, we are celebrating Nick's rite of passage with our own version of the Northwest passage, pioneered by our fellow Venetian, Giovanni Caboto, except we're doing overland on our automatic Subaru Forester.  We have driven 800 miles so far, and Nick has been at the wheel at least half the time.  He's a good driver.  And I tried to keep my comments to a minimum... my tongue hurts from biting it and my knuckles are just back to normal color.
It took us a while to pack and leave on Friday, but it was still daylight when Nick drove us out of Castle Lane and to the Pike (Interstate 90 West) which is going to take us clear across to Wyoming.  Easy. And loooooong.
We spent the first night with John Meehan at Taconic Lake, in Grafton NY.  John and I went for a cross country ski trek through the woods to start the day.  Perfect way to inaugurate a cross country trip. Nick and I left at noon (again with Nick at the wheel) and drove 11 hours, clear across upstate New York, bypassing Utica, Syracuse, Buffalo (NY), Erie (PA), Cleveland and Toledo (OH).
We are currently in Wauseon, Ohio.  Ready to leave for day 3.  We're hoping to make it to South Dakota after lunch in Chicago.

Things are looking up.  It's the dawning of a new era.

Nick is now a young man.  And he's going West.

And he's taking dad along with him....

Follow our tweets on the right sidebar of this blog or on twitter.  
Look for the hashtag #nfga (Nick and Fabio's Great Adventure).  
The soundtrack to our trip is provided by Joe Moreau... Thanks Joe!

BUMP!

Our latest project was featured in the Boston Globe a couple of days ago.  It's going to be called BUMP (Boston Urban Mechanics Profiler) and it's a good example of "subliminal" crowdsourcing...  BUMP will collect road condition information for free and without any human intervention (once it's turned on), using the accelerometers and GPS that are becoming more and more ubiquitous inside smartphones.
WPI's City Lab has been developing an automated Pothole Mapping Device since the year 2003.  Based on the concept of City Knowledge -- a municipal information infrastructure approach developed at MIT -- the Pothole Mapper was designed and built to automatically detect bumps and record their locations using GPS.  It was intended to be utilized in municipal vehicles that already roam the streets of a city to provide routine municipal services, like police patrols, garbage collection, street sweeping and plowing and the like.  The device will unobtrusively collect the bump data and several of these devices will, over time, produce a map containing clouds of dots around pothole locations, with the intensity of the bump providing a measure of the pothole's severity. Mayor Menino expressed serious interest for the device and plans were made to install the prototype in his SUV in 2006.  Logistical impediments conspired to canceling the planned installation and the device went back into the lab. Meanwhile, as City Lab explored a patent application for the device , other researchers (from MIT!) leveraged our idea to assess road conditions using additional sensors (see reference #1 in linked paper). Following up on several years of research projects which lead to the development of a prototype Pothole Mapping device, we have proposed to the City of Boston to explore a second-generation  device that will be built upon the Google Phone and the Android platform. Mayor Menino's office of New Urban Machanics has given us the green flag to develop an operational prototype that will establish the feasibility of the project. BUMP will be developed by City Knowledge LLC and the Santa Fe Complex and will initially be an Android app, despite the cool graphic that accompanied the article, which unfortunately shows an iPhone and has led to some of the misguided negative comments about the iPhone that can be found at the bottom of the online article...
Development will take place in Santa Fe in the next couple of months while I am down there with a group of 8 WPI students.  Since Nick and I are repeating our epic continental traverse in both directions, I hope we can use BUMP to profile historic route 66 from Santa Fe to Chicago this May, on our return trip.
Wouldn't that be cool?

Get your bumps on route sixtysix!

Cancellor of the Exchequer

It's kind of late in the year to be making resolutions, but I am getting fed up of getting nickel-and-dimed by my bank, phone companies and sundry other big or small corporations who surreptitiously chip away at my meager bank account (and limited attention span) unrelentingly, so I've decided to go on a canceling campaign.
Starting today, I will cancel something every day and simplify my life a tad.  I will remove myself from mailing lists, go on "no junk-mail" and "do not call" lists, cancel old credit/store cards and accounts, find a decent cell phone company and put my money in a local savings bank. I give myself until the end of May to get it all accomplished, given that I am driving to Santa Fe next week.  But I can do a lot on line, so I will keep at it.  Just one cancellation a day would be enough to gradually reclaim control over my privacy and over my finances.  I recommend you do the same.  It's liberating and actually FUN!

It started a bit subliminally about a week ago, when I finally got tired of erasing the same types of messages from my in box day in and day out, so I began to unsubscribe from a slew of mailing lists and forums that I somehow had been enlisted in, more or less consciously, for years.

I am pleased to announce that I no longer receive emails from Orbitz,

Kayak, Informaworld, Microsoft, Unity-FM (how did I ever get signed-up for this one?), allrugby (another odd one), Ancestry.com, Lending Tree, and my old mortgage company.  I have been on an unsubscribing rampage.  There are many more to come...  As part of my new habit, before deleting a message from my inbox, I check to see if it's something I want to unsubscribe from.
There are "nice" ways to let one unsubscribe - where all it takes is a reply with the word "unsubscribe" on the subject line - and "not-so-nice" ways, when the company actually requires you to sign in just so you can change your user settings and thus stop receiving spam.  I'll get around to canceling those as well, but first I have to request for them to send me a password.  How bogus is that!?

Just before writing this piece, I canceled my Netflix membership.
I enjoyed the service, but I am not in Spencer enough to fully get the benefits, plus I much prefer to read a good book to watching a movie by myself.
It was exhilarating!  After I hit submit, I jumped up and acted as if I had just scored the winning goal in the World Cup Soccer final...  weird but true.

Truth be told, a big impetus towards this anti-profligate new hobby of mine was provided by my discovery of Mint, as I was filing my taxes with Turbotax Online, thanks to which I have been doing my taxes completely on the web for a few years (another thing I recommend you look into).  Mint is not perfect yet, but it has some really great features.  It's another tool I recommend, counting on its becoming ever more powerful.  One of the niceties is that Mint's mobile app alerts you whenever there is a "fee" levied to your account.  Very revealing.  Every time a "nickel and dime" is taken out of my account as a fee, it's like getting stabbed (or more precisely "pricked") a little.  It's painful, but useful.  It generated a "reaction" in me that has led me to become the Lord Cancellor of the Exchequer^*.  Wicked Mint!

It's addictive.  Speaking of which, I am going to also unsubscribe from smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.  The Easy-Way... again.  I don't need to smoke any more.  I have a new habit now... and its side-effects are actually good for me!

Who's next on the chopping block?  
I'll keep you posted...  (look for #canc in my tweets!)

^* Maybe, being a "Lord", I can crash some of the parties that Kyle has been giggin' at in Oxford!

Carnevalentime days...

It's been more than a month since I last blogged.  Valentine's day and Martedì Grasso have come and gone.  Being Valentineless and removed from Carnival festivities, these were just two ordinary days for me, while I am sure they were special to many people out there.  I only noticed that I missed "Fat Tuesday" today when I saw students with ashes in the middle of their foreheads. 
I have been busier than I expected, as I transitioned from the end of the Venice projects to the start of the two Santa Fe projects for this spring.  This is the second and last interim year before the onslaught of 24 students (!) when the first official Santa Fe Project Center term starts in the Spring of 2011...
I have to get better at switching hats.

The Doge toque stuck around too long as I reviewed the final submissions and graded the 7 projects that took place in Venice last fall.

Since my last blog entry, a lot has happened:

• I traveled to Santa Fe for 10 days in January to arrange for the project topics and find accommodations for the 8 students who are going to be there in less than a month (March 13-May 2).  We will be working with the City of Santa Fe on the planning and re-design of Saint Michael's Drive and we will also help the City decide whether it wants to purchase the Municipal Power Infrastructure from the local utility company PNM.  The students will be staying at two very convenient and comfortable homes near the Santa Fe Complex.
• While in Santa Fe I had to administer the last rites to my beloved black Subaru Forester, which was broken beyond reasonable repair after serving our family for almost 300,000 miles of hockey practices and games, school drop-offs and pick-ups, MIT classes, family outings, work commutes, chauffering Nick around well past his "driving permit age" and countless errands and journeys, including the mythical cross-country trek Nick and I took last year to drive it down and leave it in Santa Fe. RIP Black Forester! You have served us well.  The silver lining is that Nick and I will have to repeat the cross-country escapade again this year, as we plan to drive the Northern Route to Santa Fe March 4-13 and back again in May on route 66?
• Steve Guerin and I had a series of intensive brainstorming sessions (the famous "Tesuque rounds") on non-wireless mobile cryogenic gradient landscapes, the fruits of which will only manifest themselves in 10 years or so...  Our paper abstract to the Forest Fires 2010 conference in Kos, Greece was accepted.  The full paper is due in a week. Among other things, we also managed to give a successful presentation to a number of City Officials, where we made the pitch for the creation of the Santa Fe Urban Platform.
• Meanwhile, Chris Murray and I have surreptitiously migrated the Venice 2.0 web site and Gallery to Bluehost.  Our development server will remain in Venice, but our production server is being outsourced. I have begun to toy around with WordPress templates to try to design a personal web site at www.fabiocarrera.com, which will become my central blogging platform.  This blog will be fed only news related to Venice once we have automated the RSS feeds, probably using Yahoo Pipes.  My personal life and my many other projects will all be featured in my new site and their respective blogs will be updated accordingly.
• I got back from Santa Fe just in time to be there when Nick turned 19.  It didn't seem too different from his turning 18.  He is still trying to find a direction through work or school into independent adulthood, as he gets more and more into playing guitar and chillin' with his buddies.  Jackie, Nick and I celebrated his birthday together as a family, a bittersweet reminder of the bygone days.  Jackie, meanwhile, has decided to move back to the U.S. and take up abode in Northampton, one of the most charming and lively little towns in Massachusetts.  There, she will also make strides towards independence, as she gets trained to become a Bikram Yoga instructor and pursues personal growth and self-expression through other endeavors.  I hope we can maintain harmonious family relations and get together as a family on a regular basis as we all adjust to our new lives apart.
• Once I returned, the Venice IQPs were mostly completed and graded, with only one team choosing to extend the project another term to put the finishing touches on it.  Overall, we had a good group of students, though no project stands out as truly outstanding.  Another dry year for the IQP Awards?  We have 28 more students already lined up for next year.  Seven new potential IQP winners... 
• This month, I have been occupied with the preparation for the two SFe teams.  We meet twice a week and we're making good progress toward the project proposals.  You can read the team blogs here and here.
• Just yesterday, my mardi gras celebration consisted in getting off a Letter of Intent for a major NOAA grant ($1.2M), based on CitizenPipe and PicturePost.  The three main institutions involved in the research will be WPI (City Lab), UNH - EOS -CSRC, and the Santa Fe Complex.  We will work with Budburst, CoCoRHas, the Santa Fe Indian School and the Institute of American Indian Arts.  Let's keep our fingers crossed.  Full proposal due April 6th.
• Luckily, through all this, I have returned to my WPI yoga routine and I have begun to cross-country ski on my frozen lake, to make up for the lack of adequate snow coverage for snowshoeing.  Nature is my gym... Exercise and nature are really a tonic that I cannot do without...

I am sure there's more to say that I forgot, but I have to get up early tomorrow to drive to NYC to meet a wealthy Turkish-Italian entrepreneur who is interested in our solar photovoltaic research in Santa Fe...

Let's see if I can keep up with blogging in the next couple of weeks...

Happy Carnevalentime days to all!

Present through Past and Future

True to my Italian origins, I took a nice long break from blogging over the Feste (Christmas Holidays).  Nick and I spent Christmas with the nonni and the nipotini at Pampo's.  Cino turned 75 right before Christmas and survived a serious ladder-related accident which resulted in 8 stitches on his right eyebrow. Nick and I flew back to the U.S. on the 27th, and Jackie and I spent New Year's eve alone discussing our future as a family, which we will indeed be forever, no matter what.
Since Steve was in Cuba last week, I postponed my trip to Santa Fe, which in turn -- thanks to some fresh snowfall over the holidays -- gave me a chance to rest, relax and enjoy some serious snowshoeing, every single day.  I also found a great way to hydrate using Fire Water (a.k.a. Sassy Water).   It's all part of a regimen aimed at strengthening my left knee, so I can enjoy the upcoming ski season.  To me, the start of the new year is a very restorative and contemplative time, especially while surrounded by snow.
It's a new year, a new decade and it's a time to be present and grateful.
At the start of the last decade, I was 38 years old, and at the end of this new one, I will be 58.  During the naughties, a lot happened.  Ten years' worth of life went by, but what do I remember?  Certainly not every minute. Nor every hour.  Nor every day.  Every month? Nah!  Every year? Kind of.  Not really... only in flashes.  This google pie chart is probably an overestimation of what remains in my memory banks out of the last ten years of my life.  Wow.
Is it an indication of how present I was?  Maybe.
It was a busy decade, I was completing my Ph.D., bought two houses (the castle in Spencer and the penthouse in Venice), had to grow Forma Urbis to support my family, as Jackie dealt with Nick's teen years in a new school system, and  a lot more!  Too much on my mind and not a lot of presence -- both physical and mental -- for the people in my life.  Not even for my loved ones.
Inevitable? Perhaps.
It was what it was.
I am grateful for all the achievements and happy moments, and I think I learnt something (I hope) from all my failures. What else can one hope to do?
Now, things are truly changing in my life. Jackie will probably stay in Montreal and Nick is about to leave the nest, however gradually.  I am no longer the director of the WPI Boston Project Center as I start the new one in Santa Fe.  The Venice Project Center's 20-year anniversary is over and I am wondering if I should change the name of this blog (or at least the subtitle) and perhaps even the Venice 2.0 website.  I do plan to work on my personal web site, which is boooring... and I plan to keep on blogging, which I do enjoy very much. I am expecting the presence-o-meter to move drastically to the right in the ensuing decade, and I intend to pay a lot more attention to the people in my life as I focus on the things that truly matter to me the most.

Do I know what these things are?  Not really.

Will I figure it out?  Hopefully.

How will the next decade be?  Different.

Should our purpose be to live a balanced life?  Sure, whatever that means... Or should our purpose be to unify the three marriages and blend them into an integrated whole?  I like that better.  It sounds more real to me.
I wholly subscribe to David Whyte's concept, which would have the three circles in the Venn Diagram overlap almost entirely.  I also think that the three circles need not be the same size.  Having just read Luigi Pirandello's Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, which contains a profound analysis of our ego vs. our image, with echoes of Buddha (佛 = no man) spirituality and Meister Eckhart's medieval teachings, reaffirmed more recently by the eponymous Tolle's "power of now", I think a good "New Decade Resolution" might be to move towards a merged, rebalanced, egoless, present existence, looking more like this...

Anyway, time to start the future 10 years by being present to "my Work", so I can finish grading the final submissions of the last group of Venice students from the past decade!  And, while I do that, let me be selflessly grateful for how "my Relationships" have grown thus far, thanks to "my Work", as well as to "my Self"...
As Nick would say: "It's all good"!

I wish everyone a "most serene" decade...

Festina Lente!  


(top 3 charts produced with Google Charts API -- via a useful blog post)
(last one, composed manually with excel bubble charts)

The (messy) end of a recalcitrant era

Another term has ended and the reports have been (mostly) turned in and boxed away.  We're running out of shelf space...  Next year we won't be in this office any more as our rental contract is ending this summer.
It's the end of an era.
We'll vacate the (dare I say "legendary"?) Veepeesee at Cannaregio 4400... We've really grown into this space in the dozen years since we relocated here from our home in Via Dardanelli, on the Lido.  We are bursting at the seams with at least 150 boxes containing our 20 years of research.
The original VPC office was in the magazzino on the ground floor of my parents' (Cino and Wilma's) house, where I had lived until I left for the U.S. for (what was supposed to be) a single year spent at an American High School.  The year stretched into a full decade spent in the U.S. (getting my degrees from WPI, among other things), before I returned and founded the Venice Project Center in 1988.  After the S.Elena beginnnings, the VPC migrated with Jackie, Nick and me, wherever our family was living at the time.  Only when we moved to Cannargio 4400 -- for the first time -- the VPC was not co-located at my domicile.  We've come a long way... The protracted 20th anniversary is over.  We have turned 21!
The VPC is no longer a minor...
The earth seemed to resist this coming of age... It was as if Venice didn't want the era to end!  An improbable "perfect storm" combination of Acqua Alta and SNOW(!) tried to prevent the students from reaching the airport on Saturday, when the 21st contingent of WPI students was leaving the city, like the grown child who is leaving the parental nest upon reaching the maggioretà.
With a valiant effort -- braving through flooded streets in the midst of a blowing blizzard -- everybody somehow made it miraculously to the airport in time...
...only to be faced with canceled flights and delayed departures to unpredictable destinations, determined with etch-a-sketch "precision" by frazzled airline personnel dealing with thousands of stranded visitors during one of the busiest weekends of the year...
The majority of the students made it home only today, after a four-day ordeal compounded by the snow that simultaneously blanketed the eastern United States, where everyone was headed...  What a way to turn 21!
I personally spent the same four days braving similar weather to and from the U.K., where Adrian and I mediated the re-emergence of energence...
I am back in Venice now, where there is still snow on the ground and it's bitter cold.  And, of course, we have a major predicted acqua alta coming at 4:00am tomorrow, so every table at the VPC is covered with boxes and other materials that were moved out of the "danger zone" in preparation for the likelihood of water entering our office overnight.
It's a sign that it's really time to move on and enter adulthood.  Youth was fun while it lasted.
It's time to get out into the world...

It's the most wonderful time...

...of the year                                     (sing along...)


Merry Christmas!
(may your days henceforth grow ever longer...)

Photo Credit: Nicolò Zuane Carrera

2 days left: 4 down, 3 to go

Today, the Postmortems team completed the fourth of the seven presentations the current WPI students are delivering to complete their projects at the tail end of our Venice Project Center Anniversary. It was a highly entertaining combination of powerpoint, video clips and live demonstrations of their interactive street installation that will highlight some of Venice's most pressing issues.  I particularly liked the little movies displaying animated schematic explanations with handwritten labels on ruled paper...

Origins, Ships and Mobility went the day before at the Spazio Eventi Mondadori (courtesy of Giovanni Pellizzato of the 40xVenezia).
Tomorrow we will have the final three and then the students will have one more day to get everything together and turn it in by Friday before we all go out to the final dinner at Pampo's...  Wow!

Cruising into final week

We are entering the final week of the term here in Venice. This is when miracles begin to happen as time compresses and the days lengthen.
The final presentations are set and the final results are rolling in.
It's going to be a busy week, but I think we're in for some very nice rewards by the time we have our final dinner on Friday.
Meanwhile, enjoy this preview of some of the work the Ships team did using the timelapse camera...



Not bad for a first cut!  Can't wait for the final Kovenysqatsi video!