Vito @vitorm@mastodon.technology

It wasn't "heroic", it didn't feel right. It felt like I was yelling at an old stranger in the street. I'm very shy, I don't do that. People around were agreeing with him. They agreed that immigrants are criminals, they harrass our women, they live off our taxes, they could work but are too lazy, etc.
I tried to reply, but I was soon overwhelmed. My words were too weak. I was soon defeated, I left.
My hands were shaking for long after it was over, the shame I felt for my Country is still there.

So, I ended up having an altercation with a racist old man in the street. He was loudly harrassing and insulting an African immigrant who was selling lighters. I don't know what got into me, I'm not confrontational, I stepped in and told him that he needed to stop that change his tone. He started yelling at me, I ended up yelling too. It wasn't pretty. I left disgusted, defeated, sad.
I can't take this holiday anymore, I want to go back home in Australia. I have one more week, I can't wait.

Italy 2019: on a main TV channel two grown ass men in yellow face wearing fake teeth are the idea of entertainment for families #PlsStahp

Halfway through my holiday back in my hometown. It's still snowing. I'm eating a lot and quite well. I'm still fairly miserable. It's not hard to remember why I decided to leave and go as far away as possible.
I feel like I'll need a holiday after this "holiday".

I left Australia in full summer, I came to my hometown to find snow and real winter #MateraSnow2019

On my way to my hometown, after stopping for a quick lunch in Rome. There are too many things going through my head to put them in order.
Mainly I'm scared to see what my hometown has become, overrun by mass tourism. It used to be a place forgotten by everyone, dirty, backwards, shameful. Today is the new tourism sensation, there were giant ads all over Rome airport. It was so weird to see the sleepy uneventful small town I grew up in blown up in everyone's face.

Of course two days before a trip my Kobo dies. I had to buy a full price one to replace it, instead of spending months hunting for a bargain.
Actually, that might not be too bad of a thing, after all.

I love that my company's Christmas party is in a fancy yacht club and I'm wearing a Steven Universe t-shirt and teared up old pants

I have a new rule of thumb in dating: if a woman has never had to learn how to text using T9 she's too young for me to date.

In my office we have a shared drive for the scanners to save scanned documents in, each user has their own folder. We don't really police it, but we try to encourage users to clean it up from time to time.
When I take a look at what's inside, I regularly find stuff like this, and I don't understand who would think this is a good idea:

Why use Christmas lights when you can use your raspberry pi setup instead?

Today the company owner held an end of the year presentation in front of the whole company, where he unironically congratulated a bunch of new hires for having made it through our hiring process, as he thinks they hire only the best of the best.
Scientists said that the collective eye roll that followed could be observed from space.

I pretty much made up my mind that next year I'll move out of Sydney and look to go back into a "pure" dev role. I'm worried that having worked a whole year in a mainly support and salesforce admin role will hurt my chances, but I'll have to convince recruiters I can be a dev.
Considering in my last dev role I burned out in less than 6 months I'm a bit scared at this idea, I'm really scared to fall in another hellish company.

"Can I ask you about the plotter?"
"I don't know anything about the plotter, but you can ask"
"It's not working"
"Okay, how is it not working? Is there an error?"
"Uuh, yeah, it says it's out of paper"
"...Maybe it's out of paper, then"

I swear, I wish I was making these things up.

Are there interesting Goodreads alternatives for managing a book library?

This is a new low: a guy at work asked me if I was named after the Godfather. I must've shot him a look, because he immediately looked sorry and embarrassed. My answers was "Of course not", and I barely managed to refrain from adding "What kind of question is that?"

I'm so so sick of people at work being so clueless.

I don't want to be the guy at work who labels his stuff, so I asked my coworker to label my USB cable for me. Surprisingly, they did it.

Last night I had a nightmare: I was back at my old company, a shitty place that pretended to be a startup by trying to emulate shitty startup culture. On the first day back, in my dream, they gave me a tacky t-shirt that I had to wear at all times while working there.
I woke up in sweat and I didn't dare go back to sleep.

Fun fact: the house I grew up in can be seen in the cover image of that article.

Interesting NYT article about my hometown and region. It's too heavy on the "this is such a simple life" side, but it otherwise feels like a good picture:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/travel/matera-basilicata-italy-southern-world-heritage-city.html