Impressions of Rome

Despite being a 3x Inter-Rail veteran, I hadn't been to Rome before. It's an impressive city, especially as concerns:

• history: roman, medieval, renaissance, modern, all on show and one on top of the other (often literally) - Paris and Athens eat your heart out.
• buildings: truly massive structures, built over the centuries. Even today there would be logistical difficulties in transporting many of the columns and beams.
• pedestrians: despite the chaotic traffic, crossing the road is not that difficult. Just get out into the traffic and drivers will slow down enough not to hit you. Don't expect any nice lines of waiting cars at pedestrian crossings though.
• scooters: tens of thousands, parked in their allotted spaces and just about everywhere else.
• dirt: street washing teams clean the roads, but not the buildings which are generally very dirty. Pollution has apparently improved but cleaning facades is apparently not a priority.
• good food: considered fast-food elsewhere, pizzas are taken seriously. Pasta is the best part, with many shapes and varieties, sauces with a huge range of subtle tastes. "Bruschetta", toast with a variety of toppings as a starter, are considered a speciality in their own right.
  
• Awful beer, of the expensive, weak, German variety, but good wine at reasonable prices.
• Churches: not usually my cup of tea, the number and variety of churches is exhausting, all with some detail worth seeing. I was in sensory overload after three days.
• Tourists: if anybody can give me the visitor statistics, I'll go back when there are fewer tourists.
• Low-Tech: non-standard electric outlets even in 4-star hotels and wireless internet only if you pay for it.
  

Foot in Mouth

Quote from a Radio Renascença football commentator last night during the Sporting - Bayern Munich match, referring to a Bayern forward:

"This guy's good. He can shoot with whichever foot comes to hand"

Classic!

White Rabbit Syndrome

No time for anything at the moment! No blogging, no studying, no life! Aaaaargh......

Three days in Rome last week, on business I hasten to add. Some of the pics are already up on flickr.

Now for economic theory of the week: every day off work requires the equivalent amount of overtime to be worked in the weeks before and after that day. The theory applies to holiday, business trips but, strangely, not to sick leave.

So I'm stuffed. Just another quick post and then I'll be off to study, sleep a little, get up early to face the traffic in the rain on the way to my 9.30 meeting. YUK!

Rapid Reaction

After the bank raid and hostage situation in Setúbal on Wednesday, TVI's Thursday news stated that the would-be robber produced a gun in the bank at 2.30 p.m. The police were alerted immediately. Half an hour later the PSP arrived, followed soon after by the "rapid reaction team".

Half an hour! How big is Setúbal? It can't take more than 20 minutes to cycle from one side to the other. And if he had shot someone, how long would an ambulance have taken? As I have previously said, it's better not to need the UK level of policing, but this is ridiculous.

CD of the Week (2)

One of the first CD's I bought, back in 1983 when CD's were young, was this classic recording of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue", played and conducted from the piano by Leonard Bernstein, perhaps the greatest American musician of the 20th century.

That well known piece is followed by the Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story", Bernstein's landmark musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in 1950's New York. While possibly rather pretentious, creating Symphonic Dances from a musical movie soundtrack, the dances are more developed, musically, and much more satisfying to listen to than the original, with its purposely untrained singers.

And who better to conduct them than the composer himself, with his favourite Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra.

Management Objectives

It's good, once in a while, to be reminded of the fundamental principles of our day-to-day jobs, which we often have no time to reflect upon because we are too busy resolving immediate problems.

The principle that came up this week was "Management's fundamental objective is to maximise the value of the company". Rather obvious! Very easy to apply to the cases we are studying, involving investment decisions on discrete projects, but how to apply it to a company as a whole?

Imagine that, as the series of projects and initiatives that comprise the company's activity move forward, management identifies obsolete assets and under-performing staff. For the assets, just sell them off. But the staff? That brings into play management's business philosophy: is a company a social phenomenon or merely an economic one? And if the company falls into a recession cycle for its product.

Investment analysis is the easy part of management. Knowing when and how to disinvest, while maximising the company's value, is much harder.

1,000 visitors

Visitor 1,000 was Bev Trayner, on-line collaboration guru, mountain biker and fellow Setúbal-based Brit. An honourable mention for her...

Navy Blues

So the long arm of the law has finally caught up with corruption in the Portuguese Navy. Everybody knows it happens, but it has never been convenient to look too closely. After all, who would volunteer to investigate people who have unlimited access to arms and explosives.

The question is whether this is just scratching the surface, or if the can of worms is now open. One of the captains had just bought a Mercedes (wow!), which is too ostentatious for his salary level. But there are many more, mostly quartermasters staff, who don't necessarily have Mercedes, but have a nice house, cars for all family members, frequent holidays. Postings to those positions are highly sought-after and involve severance payments to the previous incumbent.

Of course, the charges may be unfounded. In five to ten years we will find out. In the meantime, I wonder how many people on the south side of the river have been sleeping badly this week.

Blogger beta

Beta is definitely the word here. A whole evening, just to update my template:

1. Standard templates are still 800*640 pixels though very few of my visitors use that resolution. So I had to stretch the template again, just like I did with the old one.
2. Nothing can be placed above the post body, so it is impossible to take Google's own advice on their AdSense advertising site and place the ads top and centre.
3. The footer only allows a left-justified column of modules, not a centered line of icons like I wanted.

Serves me right for not sticking to my golden rule: NO BETAS.

Copyright, or copy wrong?

Well break out a new criminal record for me. I realised today that to put the music clip on the CD of the Week post below, I broke copyright law.

As my computer is usually off, I uploaded an MP3 track that I had ripped from the CD (for my own personal use) to Fileden. That's not a music sharing site, as such, but if you let the music play through, you end up with the whole MP3 file in the browser cache on your hard drive.

If they come and arrest me, I'll let you know.