Halfway home

July 2nd is the 183rd day of the year...  the midpoint of 2010.  It's an opportune time to catch up with some blogging after some pretty busy time at our halfway house in Spencer.  Since the last blog post, Nick and I have spent a fruitful month of May in Massachusetts, where Nick signed up for his first semester at the Quinsigamond Community College and I tied a few loose ends at home, wrapped up the Bump project and attended the 2010 commencement at WPI.  I even managed to squeeze a quick trip to UNH for an update on the DEW project and a concomitant trip to Maine to help my friend Jonathan put his wooden boat in the water.

 The highlight of that trip was an evening cruise on Jonathan's Lyman Runabout from Georgetown to Boothbay (a 15 min. boat ride vs. a 50 min. drive!) for dinner at Scoop's house there, with John Meehan and Evelyn Ansel, a talented young lady who is following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather by building her first wooden boat while on a semester-long hiatus from Brown University.  It seems likely that she may become the second Venice intern from Brown in the summer of 2011, after her fellow brownian Ben Lichtner of the Santa Fe Complex, who is in Venice this summer as part of the SantaVe exchange, whose alumni now include Tyler White, Kyle Miller, and Ilan Shomorony, who collaborated with Ben on a great piece of interactive art in the summer of 2009.
From the porch of the McAskill's cottage in Boothbay - which I had last visited approximately a quarter century ago - we witnessed the most triumphant moonrise "ever-ever" (as Nick would say)  and then proceeded to circumnavigate Southport island to cap the evening.

Sublime!
Immediately thereafter, I attended the second annual DSO weekend at Hampton Beach and even saw a very powerful Michael Franti & Spearhead concert with Scoop and Brenda on Lansdowne street, in the former home of the mythical Metro club of yesteryear.  Franti's reggae is extraordinarily energetic, and his message, attitude and persona are among the best I have witnessed firsthand.
Right before leaving Massachusetts again, I met up with Adrian on US soil and spent an afternoon visiting with the New Urban Mechanics duo (Chris and Nigel) and then meeting up at Thoughtbot with my old ATΩ pal James McElhiney and his Haitian business partner Rousseau Aurelien of FutureFridays, a very exciting entrepreneurship incubator company they started after successfully launching gazelle.com.  Over a very special homemade Negroni, we discussed how Adrian and I will be able to contribute to their goal of starting four new successful companies every year.  I am very grateful to Jamie's wife, Louisa Bertman for being such a great artist and for including me on her mailing list for her open studio, which allowed me to reconnect to Jamie, another "brother" that I had lost touch with, but whose professional life has much in common with mine.
The next day, Adrian and I attended the wedding of our de-facto Energence legal counsel Jason Cofield with lovely Twilight Seward at Boston University.  Finally, Adrian, Nick and I got on the same plane and traveled to Oxford together for the start of our European working vacation, which will be the subject of the next few summer posts from Venice, where Nick and I will be until the end of July, after my real meno uno birthday...

Tracking Home

Since the last post, Nick and I drove back from Santa Fe by way of Las Vegas and San Francisco and got busy with our "other" lives in Massachusetts as soon as we got back, hence the radio silence on the blog channel for this past month.

It was an epic coast-to-coast adventure.  Especially the California detour.  After paying another visit to the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas (we are now "frequent liers") to see Jackie, who was half-way through her grueling Bikram instructor bootcamp, we headed to San Francisco, hitting Death Valley and Sequoia National parks along the way.  Un-be-lie-va-ble!
As desolate as some of these landscapes are, they are the next best thing to traveling to other planets.  Since they escape description, one must see them to understand what I am talking about.  So go see Death Valley and definitely go see the giant sequoias.  The "biggest" trees on earth.
At a height of 85 m, General Sherman is smaller than the "real" bell tower of Saint Mark (100m), though taller than the fake one at the Venetian.  It is not the tallest tree in the world: Hyperion, a California redwood, a little further north on the coast of California is twice as tall.  A "mere" 2700 years old, General Sherman is half the age of Methuselah, which is also in California.  Except for the widest tree, which is a baobab in South Africa (where, as an aside, the FIFA Soccer World Cup is about to start), California is home to all of the other tree record-holders in the world, and General Sherman is the biggest by volume...  Humongous both in height and girth.  And unexpectedly very soft - kind of spongy - to the touch.  Really weird texture, much like mulch.
Whereas on the way down to Santa Fe in March we recorded timelapse videos of our entire drive, this time around we did less of that, but we compensated by recording "tracks" using the BUMP application, which is now working quite well, as can be seen from the map below, which is a composite of thousands of GPS and accelerometer readings across the entire continent... Impressive! (more on this later)


View Larger Map

We are now about to leave Massachusetts again to head to Europe on June 6th.  We'll be back on this side of the pond on August 2nd.  We are real nomads... Nick and I.  Our travels are testing the limits of Dopplr.  We bounce around like Bedouins, set up tents in far-away places like Tuaregs.  Like Berbers, we are without a real home.  We might as well live in yurts (which for some reason is one of Jackie's unfulfilled fantasies).

As much as he likes the excitement of travel, Nick is starting to complain about it a little.  He misses his SVS friends.  Conversely, many of our friends and colleagues complain that we're not around enough...  It's tough to have to leave, but, then again, if I had never left Venice in the first place, I would have never met any of my American friends.  If I hadn't left Spencer to go south and west, I would have never met my great friends in Santa Fe, like Steve and Josh who now miss me (as I miss them) when I go back east...  You just can't win.

Tonight, a  census volunteer finally caught up with me in Spencer after trying several times.  He is a retired Indian Ph.D. physicist whom I vaguely remembered having showed up (as an abutter) at one of our planning board meetings a while back.  "What am I gonna do?  Stay home and watch TV?" is his reasoning for volunteering to be a census-taker.  My kind of guy.  When he asked me if I was in Spencer on April 1st 2010, I had to think about it.  Then I remembered that April Fool's was when I quit smoking (again) in Santa Fe.  "So, is this your home?", the Indian scientist asked.  "I guess so..." I said hesitatingly.  If I am going to be counted anywhere in the US, I guess Spencer is the most appropriate place for me to call home.  I am here about 5 months of the year, these days.  But I don't like to pick "favorites".  In my mind, all of my haunts are "homes" in equal measure.  After all, as I am equanimously fond of saying:  "I spend half of my time in Spencer, half in Venice and half in Santa Fe".

Robert Frost said that "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in"...  That implies someone else is home to let you in.  Who are "they"?  Now that Jackie is gone, nobody was home in Spencer to let us in, and the castle felt abandoned (as real castles often are). What if you own the house and let yourself in with the keys?  Is that home too?  Or is it where you keep your clothes and lawnmowers?

Being a vagabond has its pluses and minuses, like anything else.
Like Homer, our mobile apps can help us track the odyssey that is our life.  Like Ulysses (which for a while was my acronymically witty middle-nom de plume), I may some day return to my Ithaca: a place I will call home.  Like Marco Polo in Calvino's Invisible Cities, perhaps I just find my hometown everywhere I go.  All of these places are "almost but not quite entirely unlike" Venice as Arthur Dent (or Douglas Adams) would say...  Some subtly so, like the Sequoia of Saint Mark, some more blatantly so, like the Venetian.
In this very Frostian quote, Calvino expresses our struggle with ubiquity in space and time:

"Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in the square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches." 

My answer to this existential conundrum is to be both the man that watches and the man who sits in the square, in an attempt to live out as many possible futures as I can -- simultaneously.

That's me:  ubiquitously omnipresent (yet everabsent) Fabio Polo.

Santa Farewell

It's been a very successful term here in Santa Fe.  The seven weeks flew by and it was snowing here on this May Day 2010, just like it was when the students first arrived in mid-March.  We had a couple of final dinners at the Cowgirl and at Maria's and everyone flew back home on Sunday.  Nick and I will start our drive back shortly.

Last Thursday, the two WPI teams presented their results at the Santa Fe Complex.  The presentations, which made front page news on the Albuquerque Journal North, were well attended by local city officials (including a city councilwoman), as well as representatives of NGOs, friends of the Complex, and even some WPI officials (former trustee Karen Bean) and alumni (Paul Kalenian).  Mayor Coss, who had already attended a set of preliminary presentations, could not be there in person, but sent a very nice letter instead (click on image).
The first project, that explored the feasibility and desirability of developing a Municipal Electric Infrastructure, received more attention in the press, since the issue has been somewhat controversial over the years.  Our team successfully developed an estimate of the replacement cost for all the components of the Santa Fe grid ($100M), and explored ways in which the city can meet its Sustainable Santa Fe goals.  They concluded that the city could afford to own and operate the local grid with little or no increase in the electrical rates for the citizens and businesses.  It is a solution that could even help attract new businesses to the area, in addition to reducing the city's carbon footprint through the use of renewable sources of energy.  It would open the door to innovation...
The second project, on the redevelopment of Saint Michael's Drive, also received good media attention, especially because of our collaboration with young students from the De Vargas Middle School, with whom the WPI team collected and organized a baseline of GIS layers and other data pertinent to the  redevelopment of St. Michael's Drive.  Using skillful, multi-projector presentations that simulated the potential applications of a fully ambient and interactive room, the students persuasively demonstrated how such a platform would facilitate the process of participatory planning and urban design.  The team succeeded at conveying the feasibility and desirability of an interactive urban platform that would allow city officials, planners, professionals and all citizens to visually assess the socio-economic impacts of specific design choices affecting the physical, economic or regulatory systems within the city.  We hope that this project will convince the city to fund the Complex to develop the first "real" prototype of the Santa Fe Ambient Platform, patterned along the lines of the Venice Table and the sand table applications developed by Simtable, perhaps with a bit of EventFlow, borrowed from the Redfish applications in Florida, San Francisco and the UK.
It's been a nice term overall.  Great weather, as always... Great students!  Good progress on our Bump and NASA DEW projects.  A paper accepted at a "Greece Fire" conference.  Better clarity on the "killer platform" for urban information harvesting.  Great new accommodations with awesome views at Las Vistas on Gonzales.  Great high-altitude exercise regimen!  And I even stopped smoking again.  On April's Fool day a month ago.  It was easy.  Pesce d'Aprile!

I like Santa Fe.  I like the fact that I could go snowshoeing and cross-country skiing just yesterday!  It's nice to be able to extend the snow season until now.
But we have to get back to the East Coast now.  Time to go...
Farewell Santa Fe!  Until the next time... (August maybe?)

A Grand Family Adventure

This past weekend, the Carreras took an unforgettable family trip from Santa Fe to Las Vegas and back.  Jackie had come to visit Nick and me in Santa Fe on her way to a 3-month Bikram Yoga instructor training course in Las Vegas.  Since neither Jaq nor Nick had ever seen the Grand Canyon, we drove together from Santa Fe to Flagstaff, and then circumnavigated the whole thing in a 750 mile counterclockwise loop that brought us to Las Vegas and eventually back to Flagstaff by way of Hoover Dam.  For the occasion, I sported my telegenic Jedediah-the-Amish look, as one can see from the photos and videos from this adventure.


View Grand Canyon in a larger map

Wow! what a trip!  I had forgotten just how sublime the whole experience can be.  I saw the Grand Canyon with Nonno, Nonna and Barbara in 1979, after graduating from Chicopee Comprehensive High School. Thirty years seem such a looooooooooong time ago, when measured by the yardstick of my personal timeline...  Yet, the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where the Colorado River is still carving its way through stratum after stratum of geological layers, is at least a couple of billion years old!  Humbling to say the least.  We are so insignificant in the bigger scheme of things...  All the more reason to dare, no?  If we carpe every diem for our entire existence, the whole thing will be less than a blink of an eye in geological time, even when measured with a creationist hourglass in lieu of carbon dating.

The Grand Canyon is so big that I could actually feel my brain wavering between extreme interpretations of its puzzling scale.  At one moment it felt immense, eternal and majestic, and the next minute my brain seemed to also entertain the paradoxical plausibility of its being actually very small and toy-like.  This mile-deep gash into the earth's crust is ten times longer than the Venice lagoon, and about 1000 times older.  It defies comprehension both spatially and temporally.  To paraphrase Ram Dass: "if you think you're so important, go spend a day on the Grand Canyon"... or a weekend in Las Vegas.
The whole drive was "epic" as Nick would say and, appropriately, he cued up some epic Ennio Morricone music at key moments of extreme landscape intensity.  I have never felt so engulfed by geological ambiance in my life.  I could really "feel time" as I drove on across the ever-changing, other-worldly landscapes of the Arizona Strip and on semi-abandoned stretches of the mythical Route 66, in hog-heaven (I think I will come back here on a Harley).  Many times, I felt I was driving along the bottom of an ancient ocean or cutting across a prehistoric riverbed, half-expecting a dinosaur or an alien spaceship to surprise me as I rounded the next corner...  Phenomenal!
Saturday was an extraordinary day.  We should have days like that more often... We woke up in Flagstaff, had breakfast at Macy's on Beaver Street, drove to the South Rim, stopped at many lookouts along the Kaibab trail  and on Desert View Drive, then crossed the Colorado river at Navajo Bridge to enter the Arizona Strip on our way to Vegas.  At the end of long day characterized by awe-inspiring natural beauty, we drove into the fakest city in the world (a veritable Futurama) at midnight on a Saturday and we went to sleep right in the heart of SinCity ... at the Venetian.  Of course.  I think I will ensconce into a separate blog entry my personal considerations about this unique piece of architectural  kitsch that may teach us something about the real city that we know and love.  It was all Nick's idea, and Jackie and I loved it (albeit reluctantly).  Nick skateboarded around the strip until 6am.  Whatever else happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas...
It was the perfect way to end a Grand day for our crazy family.
As Jackie said: "From Canyon Road, to the Grand Canyon to the Grand Canal, in the space of a day".

Grand indeed.

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!