The Kitchen is Done!

Finally the kitchen is done:







Cabinets: Ikea abstrak gray and white
Appliances: Ikea
Backsplash: Porcelanosa Cubica blanco
Floor: Sintesi Glamour Grey

Wall color tests

Some test for the walls' color:


And some more, with the help of the in-house interior designers...

New door, old door

Some progress in moving the door:

No floor!

Demolition continues: now the floor is gone:


Still, it does not stop me from cooking a last "Pasta alla carbonara!".

Kitchen Remodeling: A little bit of history

In removing the cabinets we found the original order:

And this is what is left of the kitchen now:

Kitchen Remodeling: the beginning

We decided to go for kitchen remodeling. Our house has an original 1959 kitchen: it works but it is neither functional nor very beautiful, so it has to go. In the picture is what we started with:

Hallo eBay!

Hallo eBay!
First day at the new company. Really excited to make an impact on eBay search.

Goodbye Yahoo!

Last week was my last at Yahoo!. It has been almost 3 years, and by far the most successful, productive and exciting years of my working career. I will miss the great people at Yahoo!, and I will always be proud of my contributions to the search engine: I released several ranking functions and about 12 lines of C code that I wrote are executed every single time someone runs a query on Yahoo Search.
Goodbye Yahoo!

Slow iMac

I have a late 2006 intel mac core duo, and I was a bit upset about how slow it was. After some investigation I finally narrow it down to the internal HD performance. Looking at the system monitor I found out that I was getting on average 1-2 Mb/sec transfer rate, tops. Which was really strange, since I was getting better performance even from the external hard drive connected via firewire. Running all sorts of diagnostic did not turn up anything suspicious, except the slowness. Suspecting a bad hard drive I decided to replace the internal hard drive. After following instructions on the internet (not for anybody: opening up the imac is quite a challenge) I replaced the internal drive with a 1TB hitachi, and after reinstalling everything I now get 10-20Mb/sec transfer rate. Happyness!
So, if you find your iMac particularly sluggish and you notice that the hard drive is slow, it might be due to a failing hard disk.