This is worth looking at:
But Prodi doesn’t really care an article by Rob over at his Wind Rose Hotel blog.
I sort of thought most Italian politicians were not up to much, and this comment in today’s Times:
“Italy’s multiple political parties and hangers-on cost its citizens € 4 billion a year, more than those of Britain, Germany, France and Spain put together. “
…..would seem to confirm my suspicions. Left me somewhat gob smacked, it did. Er, thanks for that Rob.
The comment in the Times must have had an effect on Italy’s president Napolitano too, as he made a public plea on TV tonight to the politicos. And he told them, in no uncertain terms, to pull their fingers out and do something productive for a change.
Oh, and the Visco case continues to fizzle away. The fallout from what appears to be a case of political meddling may well bring Prodi’s house of cards crashing down. Not a great loss for Italy. But, alas there isn’t much of an alternative to Mr Mozzarella.
Talk about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Think about the food, the weather, the wine, the women and ‘real’ Italians - I shall keep repeating to myself…….
Registering an internet domain in Italy.
Having heard horror stories about the process of registering a domain name in the Living Museum, I have to say that I managed to register a new .it domain quite easily. I did this though my website hosting company, but this still meant that I had to print out, sign, and send a document to the Italian NIC which is down in Pisa.
Not so long ago, it was necessary to fax the LAR - domain registration document - to the NIC and this process, apart from being a somewhat antiquated, often resulted in problems caused, in the main, by illegible faxes. Now the Italian internet domain registration authority has arrived in the 20th century (Yes, I do mean 20th), in that instead of faxing stuff to them you can actually send them a copy of the required document by email (!) in PDF format. Only, you have to have signed the document before you can send it off. This means you need a scanner, which I do have, but which is not in use at the moment. So, to resolve this slight problem and to avoid going to a local stationers to fax the documents for me, I got out my DSLR and photographed the two page document, edited the photos and placed them in an Open Office document which I then converted to PDF, whilst taking care not to exceed the 500kb limit for the file size of the PDF file.
Must have all worked OK because my nice shiny new domain was active in around 24 hours. Not too bad and, surprisingly, my photographed, edited, converted-to-PDF application did not cause problems.
The domain I registered? englishisin.it - ‘english is in it’ - which is quite snappy I think.
Moodling 2
I have now got Moodle running on my PC locally after installing it using a very useful Joomla standalone server set-up called JSAS. Although I did manage to lock myself out of phpmyadmin for a while as a result of setting up a password! I edited the config file, after I found the thing, and all is hunky dory once more.
Anyway, Moodle, which installed without a hitch, is up and running and I have been playing with the css files and creating a ‘corporate’ colour scheme using my handy stylesheet editor Style Master (very nice piece of kit).
I have also set myself up as an administrator, course creator, teacher and student for testing purposes, so I’m feeling wee bit schizophrenic at the moment. I’ve sourced documentation from the exhaustive resources to be found all over the main Moodle site and have been toying with Moodle settings and have already set up an example listening exercise which has been added to a course.
At the moment I’m feeling similar to when I first installed and fired up Joomla, a little overawed, but, hey, that’s learning for you. No pain, no gain.
Anyway, Moodle looks very promising and its very easy to understand how it has generated a worldwide following. Now, ‘all’ I have to do is come up with a few concrete ideas for useful courses and have a few guinea pigs test them out for me. There is lots to do, but this is stuff I love doing and if I end up with something which helps English language learners progress more quickly, then I will be happy.
Lunch time. That’s all for the moment from this here webmaster, cum webdesigner, cum teacher, cum photographer, cum course planner, cum content designer, cum geek. Over and out for a minute.
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Photos from Flickr
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