It should be remembered, though, that both Welby and Eluana did not wish to “end their own life”: both loved life very much. Their statements were a refusal of “therapeutic tenacity”.

All obstacles brought to impede the interruption of hydration and feeding of Eluana, interruption continuously requested by her father for 17 years, are direct consequence of the pressure from the Catholic church on both the politics and the tribunals. I say that there is no doubt about it. If the Pope said “I prei that Eluana iss left frei to reetrn to die hause of der pater”, no one would have opposed the interruption of the treatments.

What is even more grotesque is that the same Catholic church teaches in Catechism:

2278 – The interruption of medical procedures that are costly, dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected results may be legit. In this case we renounce the “therapeutic tenacity”. There is no wish to cause death: there is acceptance that we can’t stop death. This decision has to be made by the patient, if he is capable and competent, or else by those who have the legal right to make such decision, always in the respect of the reasonable will and interest of the patient.

In other words: in catechism they write the plug can be pulled off, and that the decision can be made by relatives.

So why such a can can? Because Eluana’s father did not chose to do things “under cover” but he chose a public way instead, and such a public way could’ve put on the table again the debate about a law on euthanasia.

Therefore, the Catholic church tortured Eluana and her family for 17 years, with no biblical or magisterial support, with the sole objective of leaving what the Church considers a “sin” – euthanasia – a crime.

The confusion with euthanasia has been backed by the bishops and, in a particularly fanatic manner, by the daily newspaper of the CEI, Avvenire.

The Card. Javier Lozano Barragan should read the article “The right to die: a document unheard” written by the Jesuit father Mario Beltrami from the Aloisianum of Gallarate, and published in Dolentium Hominum, n.68, 2008, pages 57-62. This is a publication of the Pontificium Consilium for medical practice (Pastorale della salute), which is the Vatican office under Barragan’s responsibility. The article further clarifies the correct interpretation of the renounce of therapeutic tenacity as stated in the art. 2278 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church with conclusions that, if applied to the Englaro case, guide us to completely different solutions than those brought up during the current campaign.

Italian bishops should read the document “Christliche Patientenverfugung” (Sanitary dispositions of the Christian patient). It’s a text signed in 1999 (and revisited in 2003) by both the Catholic church of Germany and all the evangelic churches, addressed to German Christians, that contains a statement about the end of life (a sort of biological testament). It seems that it has been signed so far by more than three million people. It holds, among other things, some really clear statements regarding the respect of the will of the patient, the difference between active euthanasia and passive euthanasia and therapeutic tenacity. Statements that are radically different from those we have heard from the promoters of the campaign that went on in our country. (source: press release N.S.C., 4/02/09)

I’m happy and proud I’ve left the Catholic church at the time of the Welby case, and today I renew my indignation and “shake the dust off my shoes”.

And I might add: should I end up in similar conditions (vegetative life, dementia, incapacity) I pray of anyone who is my friend to find a quick way, even if it’s painful, just make it quick enough, to let me go to the other side. A knife stub, a lethal injection, a liter of whiskey in my drip-feed… whatever, but no legal ways. Do it undercover and in secret. Better if it’s Irish whiskey at least 16 years old. Of course, have a sip of it in my honor, first.

And then break the bottle on my head, just to be sure. And then have a great party, to the sorry faces of all those assholes who would have liked to torture me.

And how’s that, when it was the Pope’s time to go, for him no therapeutic tenacity. Hard to guess why…

The week starts, and brings on a whole series of things happening around you. Phone calls, emails, messages via chat or sms, people visiting, anything else that’s coming to you from the outside.

There are only two ways to react, and to handle these external stimuli.

1. Event Driven (the events drive you)

You fit into this category if you adapt with flexibility to everything happening around you, trying with all your efforts to follow that particular direction you yourself deem, at any given moment, more useful, more right, more proper.

Let’s make an example: at the start of a working day you place a series of objectives, you make a small list of activities that you want to do and bring to completion. You put your effort into it, but then you are exposed to a series of external stimuli (all those phone calls, messages, etc). I’m not speaking about personal messages, all of them concern your activity.

You answer, and give each of your interlocutors all the time they ask.

Each time, during these conversations, you place an objective to complete: you want an answer from Dick, an admission from Harry, a payment from Matthew, to enforce a principle with Mark, to motivate Luke, to convince John, to get finally rid of Tomas and so on.

In other words, YOU DEAL IN REAL TIME WITH each given stimulus, in order of appearance. If there are too much of those external stimuli, at the end of the week it’s very likely you did not succeed in completing your list of tasks. You are certain you worked very well: you’ve done a lot of things and you did stay focused at all times on your activities. Easily spending much more time than those traditional 8 working hours.

Your task list keeps growing constantly, and almost always you find yourself doing important things at the very last moment before the deadline is reached. You know very well what fatigue and/or adrenaline is.

You frequently reach the deadline without fully completing your tasks.

It has happened more than once that you couldn’t manage to reach those important goals you’ve set for yourself, because at deadline you just weren’t ready.

Event Driver (you drive the events)

At the beginning of the week the first thing you do is planning.

You read again all the strategical goals you’ve set, which means you’ve written them down. Writing down objectives is the first step in order to reach them: to be sure our brain doesn’t turn the tables on you along the road.

Then you read again the tactics (tactics too have to be written down, for the same reason) and you check your current position towards the goal. Given the time you have at your disposal to get to it, you plan your week accordingly. So you set (write down) the minimum results you are supposed to reach within a week, and accordingly asset in your agenda the necessary activities to reach those goals. You mustn’t fill in all the time available in a day, in order to leave space to accidents (by giving them space they become expected!) and to those routine activities such as answering phone calls or emails, saving for such activities only the appropriate required time – meaning the time you feel is sufficient, but that is also balanced towards the goals you need to reach.

When all this is done, you are in the middle of the proverb “A good start is half the battle”: the week starts, and you receive the same 20 phone calls a day, but you handle them by your tactics. Therefore, to avoid losing concentration, you establish a schedule of your “answering hours”, and to those calling you outside such a schedule you tell without exception to call you back in your answering hours, or you take a note (if you can’t take notes you must not answer incoming calls, or you’ll risk losing all the precious info you’ve been given!).

During your answering hours, since your time is limited, you’ll handle the calls by focusing on those more important, giving such calls more time than others, less important ones. You’ll need to cut straight to the bone and let go of all provocations and all the minor goals. In fact, if you give each of your interlocutors all the time he/she asks, you’ll run out of time before you can answer all the calls. Only in the rarest of cases the phone calls are incoming in order of importance, thus allowing you to reach the most important goals: in all other cases it won’t be so.

You plan, at a different hour of day, an appropriate time to call back those looking for you. This callbacks are to be handled in order of importance, and leaving those less important, where you need to cut it off, for last.

“To cut it off” necessarily means using scissors. End the call, convince the other person, repeat, tell again, on the contrary means not to cut. To cut it off means you say and listen only the necessary minimum, and then you break with a sentence like “I’m sorry, I have a meeting now, I must go, bye, click”. Only this is cutting off, everything else it’s not.

Doing so lets you decide how much time you assign to phone activity and to all those other activities: only by doing so you are in control of your time.

If you are “event driven” all the rest of the world dominates you, and you are slave to many lords.

Only if you are an event driver you own yourself, because you choose who deserves all of your time, who deserves more minutes, who less minutes, and those who deserve only a few seconds of your precious time.

All of this is impossible to do when RECEIVING a call in an UNKNOWN moment and time and when you want to handle it immediately: no human being can ALWAYS BE READY to their best. Only a computer might do so. The only way I know is to concentrate my calls in one (or two) moments during the day, previously planned, when you can recall to memory your objectives, order the important calls first, preset the times, have your eye on the clock. This necessarily means to SEPARATE the moment of RECEIVING the stimulus (phone call, email, fax, sms, a visit, any external event) from the moment you HANDLE that particular stimulus or activity.

The clock is most important. The clock is like a scales: it prevents you from wasting too much of that precious ingredient that is time. The best of all cooks do not approximate, they always use their scales: it’s the only way to cook your recipes always right, and the only way to improve them. Only by measuring your ingredients (time, in our case) you can learn from your experience and decide “next time I’ll try more sugar” and change only that one ingredient in your recipe, to be able to decide if this single change is definitive or you need to change something else too. If you don’t measure, you’ll have no control on the result because you can’t REPRODUCE it.

Not following a list and flying manually is not a symbol of creativity or skill. It symbolizes CAOS, and MENTAL DISARRAY.

As an Event Driver, not only you are able to plan the duration (how much to give), but also the time (when to give), and the best instruments to use (how to give). For example, you can ask other members of the staff to do the part of the work that is their specialization. Or do first what can be done immediately, and afterwards only what you need to do based on the results of previous completed activities.

You also need to determine the moments when you OPERATE: during these moments you need to have your required tools. Particularly, your agenda=calendar and your notepad – gmail for that on the fly stuff, google docs for the more complex – so you don’t lose them ever, have them always available, and what’s more important making them SEARCHABLE, which means you can find what you need any time, anywhere.

Not finding a note when you need it, is exactly the same as never taking that note!

The moments when you are not OPERATIONAL  (because you’re at a course, or a meeting, etc) are to be placed in your agenda as well, which allows you not to overcrowd your day, leaving always the time for managing ordinary activity.  And the appropriate time to recover all the calls from your incoming or missed calls list, before you start your next activity.

This is true for all human activities: there is a small set of ways how to do them, in all other ways they fail. Let’s take agriculture, for example: only by plowing in the right season and, afterwards, by letting the soil rest, milling, sowing, irrigating and treatment, the fruit grows and the field produces more than the seed you’ve sowed. By doing those activities in any other order, the return is drastically less than seeded, if not null. And while the effort may be the same, if not higher (to plow in an inappropriate season is much harder, i.e. when the land is frozen or wet).

There are only a few ways to have results, all other combinations bring useless CAOS.

—

There are no alternatives: either you drive the events, or you are driven by them.

And you can be an Event Driver only if you make a distinct choice and apply this method.

And if you wish to work with me, useless to say, you need to be an Event Driver, whatever it is that you do.

Imagine a pot filled with cold water. A frog is quietly swimming in it. The fire is lit under that pot. Water starts warming up. Soon it becomes lukewarm. The frog finds this rather pleasant and keeps swimming. The temperature keeps rising. Water is now warm. It’s a little more than what the frog enjoys ; it becomes a bit tired, but it doesn’t panic. Water is now really warm. The frog finds that unpleasant, but it has also become weak, by now, so the frog stands the heat as it can and does nothing. The temperature will thus keep rising up to the moment the frog will simply end up being cooked and die, without ever extracting itself from the pot.

Plunged in a pot half-way through boiling temperature, the frog would immediately give a powerful and salutary push with its legs and find itself out of it.

This experience (which I do not recommend) is rich in teaching. . It shows that when a negative change occurs in a slow enough manner, it goes unnoticed by our consciousness and, most of the time, will not trigger any reaction, opposition or revolt.

This is exactly what is happening in the society we live in.

Year after year, we observe a constant degradation of values which occurs – however – slow enough for nobody (or almost) to be offended by it. Nevertheless, as the frog suddenly plunged in very warm water, if we’d take any average person from the 80s and, for instance, ask her to watch nowadays television or to read today’s newspapers, we would see her react with utmost stupefaction and incredulity. She would hardly believe that anyone might one day write articles that mediocre in content and that irrespectful in style, as those we find normal to read today, or that some day might be seen on TV the kind of debilitating shows we are now offered on a daily basis. The increase in vulgarity and crudeness, the vanishing of points of reference and morality, the relativisation of ethics have all happened in such a manner – slow motion – that very few have noticed or denounced it.

In the same way, if we could suddenly find ourselves in the year 2022 and observe what the world will have become since then, if it keeps rolling down the slope on which it happens to be now, we would probably be even more disconcerted, so much does this phenomena accelerate (an acceleration made possible by the speed at which we are bombarded with new information, forgetting all the rest). Let us note, along these lines, that almost all futurist movies agree to present us a future that is certainly “hyper-technically developed” but surely lugubrious.

Each time a change is too weak or too slow, we need either an acute awareness or a good memory to become conscious of it. It seems that both these faculties have become rare nowadays.

Without awareness (consciousness), we become less than human.

Without memory, we could go each day from daylight to night (and back) without even noticing it, because changes in light intensity are too slow to be detected by the human eye. It is our memory that makes us aware a posteriori of the alternation of day and night.

Over-fed by too much useless information, memory lessens.

Deadened by to much sensory stimulations, consciousness falls asleep.

Thus, our civilisation sinks into a spiritual obscurity signed by social and environmental degradation, Faustian drifting of genetics and biotechnologies, and mass “moronisation” – among other symptoms.

The principle of the frog in the pot of boiling water is a trap one is never too cautious about, if one’s ideal is quality and improvement, if we refuse mediocrity, status quo and carelessness.

Interestingly, the same principle also works in a positive way, and even there it can play tricks on us. The daily efforts we make do also trigger changes – positive ones, here – but often too weak to be immediately noticed ; the improvements are indeed there, but for lack of noticing them, some people get wrongly discouraged.

So : how can we avoid the trap of the principle of the frog in the pot of water, individually or collectively ?

First we need to keep increasing our consciousness, our awareness, and then we need to keep an intact memory of our ideal and of the goals we’ve set for ourselves.

Training and increasing the human consciousness are two common points of all spiritual practices : consciousness of self, awareness of the body, paying attention to our word, consciousness of thoughts, awareness of emotions, awareness of others, etc. Beyond all dogmas, all doctrines and all ideologies, increasing and enlarging one’s consciousness should therefore be considered – much more than thesole development of our intellectual faculties – as a founding behaviour of our status of human beings,and as an indispensable motor of our evolution.

—

This is a short story by Olivier Clerc, writer and philosopher. I’ve asked myself what could it really mean to “give a powerful and salutary push with its legs” before it’s too late.

And I’ve found the following answer: turn off the television and keep it turned off. This way we stop the never-ending media bombing, and our brains are again able to distinguish things.

It’s a known fact: 90% of the consumer’s needs are created through the television. Without a TV you don’t feel the urge to buy a lot of things.

I did that, and I’m free, and I see around me a lot of slaves – chasing nonsense, spending without keeping count, and they’re not happy.

I decide and choose, each day, what to do and what to buy. And I buy very few consumer goods, choosing instead the long term investments, that make me earn money, or save money.

Is my answer the right answer? Until someone finds a better interpretation of a “push of legs”, it certainly is.

I find extraordinary the quiet serenity of my compatriots, past and present, living under that same volcano that has already given many signs of eruption, or living in precarious or non earthquake-proof homes, or homes built on the banks of rivers – river banks made to contain eventual floods and where building houses is strictly forbidden.

The nice thing with all Italian catastrophes is that they’re always announced well in advance, and everybody knew everything. In those known examples I’ve listed, the bureaucratic machine has even had the time to approve due laws, laws that were always been readily ignored.

Since I was a child, I’ve always seen the doors of the stables being closed just after the last of the horses run out.

The “break of the system” that we are experiencing – much worse than just a “normal” economical crisis – has been clearly announced and foretold long time before. But everybody kept living their lives.

I think it’s ridiculous to accuse the managing class (who holds, in any case, a great responsibility) when we aren’t capable of managing our own lives and our own finances.

The American crisis, and in a few years the European crisis, is direct consequence of the incapacity (thus of the unawareness) of common people to manage their own money, and of an economic system that’s built upon this ignorance.

The vast majority of people is convinced that they know how they spend their money, but they’ve never done an annual balance of their income and outcome, by filing them accordingly. They never do this because they don’t know how to, despite all necessary tools to do so are still being thought in schools during compulsory education.

Thus not knowing how to calculate their real current financial assets (that would be, i.e. net after future obligation expenses), they are happily certain that their current assets equal the current money stock on their bank account, so they spend – without knowing – more than they have, without ever being able to save some money for those accidents that life always carries.

They take a loan to go on “holidays” that are much more stressing than the jobs they do, or to buy a cell phone worth a month of their salary (!!!), or a plasma TV set  to daze themselves better; they spend 5 euro per day on scratch-card lottery (there goes another month’s salary in a year), just as much to feed a dose of tar to their lungs (one more month of salary), twice as much for phone calls (two months worth of salary) in order to talk nonsense with the usual two or three people that are just a few miles away, they throw away 50 euro to “have fun” on week-ends (two more months). And so on. Then they have the courage to say that salaries are low, and to be stunned that this crisis is here. And to mumble against the managing class.

But as soon as some politician tries to make an intelligent or necessary reform, they are out on the streets to protest.

*Naturalistic note – I’ve read taht the ostrichs do not really hide their heads in the sand, the (short-sighted?!?) look of a watcher from a great distance is the cause of such a common belief. Cfr. Wikipedia

If there wasn’t one already, someone would have to create it! This group made me completely reevaluate the Facebook phenomenon. So there really is something useful in social networks: they help mutual consolation!!

Italians!! Join in masses!!!

I quote from the presentation page:

This is an organization founded for all those who believe that Italian girls are playing hard to get in a disproportionate way when compared to girls from almost all the rest of the world!

1) If you think that only in Italy even ugly girls play hard to get
2) If, when abroad, you’ve been dating fantastic and maybe even rich girls who, when in Italy, wouldn’t even want to talk to you
3) If you’d like to emigrate, even if it’s just for this reason only
4) If you think that Swedish girls are adorable
5) If you think the same of English, Irish, American, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Greek, Croat, Slovak, Swiss, and all those other nations’ girls

THEN HELP OURSELVES TO FACE THIS BATTLE FOR A BETTER ITALY

SPREAD, let’s try together to reach an army of at least 10000, make all Italian boys know that insurrection is close.

****TERMS****

“PLAY HARD TO GET” is not just a simple refusal of a proposal with sexual background.

For us, “PLAYING HARD TO GET” is the person who refuses even the simplest approach made with the sole intent of socialization.

That’s why this group is not just for men, but also for all those women who can’t stand anymore people who, with their unjustified sense of superiority, hold a hostile attitude to others.”

“We make a clear and precise disambiguation between the person who plays hard to get and the one defending herself: shyness and pride under some circumstances may present the same symptoms. In the first case one thinks she’s not worthy enough to address the other, in the latter is thinking others are not worthy enough to be allowed to address us. The final effect is detachment, but with different causes. We therefore hope this won’t be an association against Italian girls being too shy”. (…Manuel Mazzara)

In my opinion, the majority of men should just stop their “blind scan”: try to catch, often in a sloppy and vulgar way, 20 or 30 girls in one evening communicates your intellectual poverty, and reduces the beautiful play of making relations to the simple satisfaction of an instinct.

If these men were more selective (and that would happen if they were better cultured and intellectually deeper) and, instead of trying an evident sexual approach, if they really tried to establish first a human contact, to know something of that person in front of them, without unfailingly proceed with a more or less open sexual approach, they’d have first of all much more success; on the other hand, ladies would find themselves exposed to much less useless courtship attempts and therefore they would be less on their defenses.
A moderately good looking Italian girl, in a crowded place, can’t talk with a girlfriend more than 1 minute straight without being interrupted by some more or less worthless “Latin lover”. Try to put yourselves in their place!

On the other hand, the ladies might do something to make the situation better: replace the sourness that unfortunately they almost all have in common, with some of that good old kindness that today feels so out of fashion.
Personally, what I hate the most is receiving real BLOWS IN MY FACE when I’m just only asking “what’s the time” or “you know the name of the dj” or “are you alone here?”.

There’s another idea of a solution brought to me by a guy from Rome whom I met in Shanghai: “the government should inject a good dose of Russian pussy, not 1000 or 2000, but one million of Ukrainians on the Italian market. Pam! So then you’d see the bitches bow their heads down when nobody gives a fuck for them, and then they would behave normally…”

It’s so true when they say that governments never solve the real problems of citizens…

Too many people —too often—instinctively don’t express themselves with frankness. They don’t communicate straightforwardly or put forth ideas looking to stimulate real debate. They just don’t open up. Instead they withhold comments or criticism. They keep their mouths shut in order to make people feel better or to avoid conflict, and they sugarcoat bad news in order to maintain appearances.

That’s all lack of candor, and it’s absolutely damaging. (…) To get candor, you yourself demonstrate it in an exuberant and even exaggerated way. (…) My bosses cautioned me about my candor. I was labeled abrasive and consistently warned that my candor would soon get in the way of my career. Now my GE career is over, and I’m telling you that it was candor that helped make it work. (Jack Welch, Winning! HarperCollins Publishers, 2004)

Why is there so much falseness in our relationships? I’m more and more convinced that, in the end, it’s this general hypocrisy that makes so hard and complex human relationships, and it’s so easy to fall into a negative spiral made out of the smallest misunderstandings.

But why is hypocrisy such a universally accepted rule? For example: it’s considered impolite and inconvenient to express negative reactions to a gift we have received. This is cultural data that is so accepted we deem it only natural: but… does it make any sense, in the end?

In particular, this allergy to frankness has become more spread and evident among women: they generally love the compliments received with the same intensity they hate the criticism.

Have you ever tried to say to a girl you are dating that you don’t like that much the dress she’s wearing? Or that her hair doesn’t particularly excite you? Or that she’s wearing too much makeup for your taste? Or that she spends too much time thinking about nonsense? Or that she could try to be less anxious? Or that you just think she said something solemnly stupid and that she shouldn’t be talking about something she doesn’t really know nothing about? That’s exactly what I usually do and say and – in my case, I haven’t had a story that lasted longer than 2-3 months…

What is really paradoxical is that from the surveys we find out that the majority of women states they wish sincere men! A typical feminine mental confusion? A subconscious wish of complementarity? Or just a simple, shameless falseness even when they answer anonymous surveys?

But it’s only through the critics that we can change, grow and become better; while with the compliments, let aside an immediate joy, gives us no support in the medium-long term.

I’ve chosen my side long time ago: 100% loyalty and frankness. I’ve had my share of success on all fields, except when it comes to the sentiments. But you know that hope is the last to die…

But in this book Baricco delivers more. First of all, as the author himself states in the introduction, he’s writing from the top of a tower, standing in the wind. That is, he published this essay, split in episodes, on La Repubblica, “live”, favoring speed of thought over completeness. I don’t know how much did he venture into this test – it’s not ours to know the amount of materials he might have had previously prepared – but this is not the point. The point is the topic, which is also the subtitle of the book: “essay of mutation”.

Here are some excerpts of the Beginning, to understand what is his about. His writing skill, for those who already read him, is well known.

Skilled professors, from behind their desks, measure in the silence of their students what ruins were left behind by a roaming horde, whose passing through, actually, no one could see. All around (…) lost commentators set their sight and speak, with dismay, of a land ravaged by predators with no culture or history.

The barbarians, here they are.

This might well be, I’m aware of it, a normal generational conflict, the old resisting the invasion of the younger, the power instated that defends its position by accusing the emerging forces of barbarism, and all those things that always happen and that we’ve already seen happen a thousand times before. (…) Usually, we fight to control some strategical points on the map. But here it seems that the aggressors are doing something more profound: they’re changing the map. (…) This is how it all must have happened in those blessed years when, for example, the Enlightenment was born, or in the days when the whole world, all of a sudden, discovered it was romantic. (…)

Maybe this is such a moment. And those we call barbarians are the new species, who has gills behind its ears and has decided to live underwater. (…)

Whatever. I’d like to have a closer look at those gills. And to study the animal withdrawing from the earth and becoming a fish. I’d like to spy on mutation, not to explain its origin (that is out of my reach) but to be able to at least draw it.

And he does so, draws it. First through some contexts he regards being simpler, “ravaged villages” with well defined boundaries. A few episodes on the wine: the uprising of the “Hollywood” wines. Then speaking of soccer, a world completely strange and unknown to me, yet he managed to awake an interest in me, he made me understand, and even dream of it and deliver some of its emotions. Then about books. And here as well, he manages to stay away from the ever present pits of banalities this mine-field is so full of. Yes, he quotes Moggi and Dan Brown, but he doesn’t say the usual things.

I like particularly it, because it speaks of the soul. Because it seeks the soul, and asks – intelligently – if the soul is getting lost or not in this “new coming”.

After the wine, the soccer and the books, he places a bet: the rise of Google (and not just of the Web) is a great step of humanity towards knowledge, as great as that of Gutenberg. And I think he’s right. Now I’ll read the rest, but I can already say: Bravo Baricco.

I found the way to do manually in a simple and secure way.

This is a simple step-by-step procedure and shall be used on a jailbroken iPhone; if you have a virgin one I think there is a tool to extract sms.db out of iTunes backup, when you have this file you can go on from Step 2.

Step 1 - transfer the file sms.db in your PC:

This step is quite easy but you have to install on your PC the program WinSCP or any other Secure FTP (SFTP) program. Some SSH clients have this addon application. You have to connect to your iphone via Wi-Fi, so your PC and the iPhone have to be on the same area, connected on the same network.

To discover the ip address you can go in general settings / network / wifi proprerties, or you can run Terminal on you iPhone (if you have installed this application) and run ifconfig, the address is the one near “inet” word.

You have to find the file Llibrary/SMS.app/sms.db or /var/mobile/Library/SMS.app/sms.db and copy it somewhere in your PC.

Step 2 – convert from sms.db to out.txt (ascii comma-delimited text file)

To do this conversion you have to download in the above directory the SQLite3 client from here.

Then open DOS Prompt, go in the directory where you placed sqlite3.exe and sms.db and type exatly this text (don’t forget the semicolon after message). Mind that this is case-sensitive!

sqlite3.exe sms.db
.output out.txt
SELECT * FROM message;
.quit

That’s all: in your out.txt file you have your sms, in a readable format.

Step 3 – Import your sms in an Excel / spreadsheet, useful to convert date/time field in an human readable format

Run Excel, open the file out.txt. Excel will ask you if it’s a delimited file or a fixed length. Chose delimited and insert a “pipe” symbol ( | ) in the “custom” separator at the end of the list.

Click ok and your file should be correctly imported.

Add a new column after column C.

In D1 cell (should be empty as you added freshly) cut&paste this text:

=C1/86400+25569+(0,04166*(2-G1))

don’t forget “=” at the beginning of the string. Format this cell as custom, typing: dd/mm/yyyy h.mm.ss (for italian users: gg/mm/aaaa h.mm.ss

You should read the converted date&time. Now click on this D1 cell, type CTRL+C then select the D1 column and type CTRL+V to spread this conversion for all your SMSes.

In column F, 2 means Received, 3 means Sent, 0 means Unread.

Column G: contains the clock correction in hours, this is used in D formula so don’t remove this column.

If you discover the meaning of the other columns, let me know, thanks!

I read the following comment in an another blog:

This daddy’s boy speeding around in Rome driving a Mercedes, who hits and kills 2 people and then runs away, disgusts me. And I feel also disgusted by his father trying to justify him. This is not acceptable.

Now there’s a video on the Internet where this pirate of the roads introduces himself to French cybernauts with him driving his car during a headless journey from Rome to Budapest. Ironically titled “Friedrich – drive safely!”, this clip shows the young man visibly altered while driving with no hands on the wheel, dancing, laughing.

In the interview the journalist asks “have you seen the video on the Internet, in which Friedrich drives without putting his hands on the wheel”

1) everybody drives with their hands away from the wheel in some moments, is it because they are responding to a cellphone call, or to drink a sip of water, or because they are making a gesture during a conversation o if they cheer.

2) in this video, when he raises his hands away from the wheel, the background we can see through the rear window of his car is still. Therefore we cannot be sure he is actually driving with no hands on the wheel.

3) the statement that “his father justifies him” doesn’t seem correct to me. He tries to make a supposition to explain his son’s cowardness. And to lose your head is quite a normal thing, I believe, after you kill two people. Someone else could have just as well jump in the Tiber. He crushed against a news stand.

His father says what he can say, to a journalist who seeks a monster (monstrum, from “mostrare” – to show, to expose – at public display). The interview is clearly cut, as all interviews are, you can hear that from the recording. Maybe the father spoke some intelligent and profound words, maybe he cried, but if it is so, that part was cut out. The only part that still survives is the one containing the words that make the piece more spectacular. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a “piece” of news, but a “whole”. The theorem must be always followed, in this case the theorem is “if the son is an imbecil, so is the father”.

I myself, if I was the father of a son cought in such a situation, would I know what to say to a journalist suddenly calling me? Would I try to find some reasons, at least to try to wash away my responsabilities as father?

I believe we need much more respect. What we know of these sad stories is only the little the TV tells us, and always this is not enough to make any judgment ourselves. But probably, that’s exactly what the television sellers wish to inspire: rushed judgment, sentences. I wonder why. Maybe to divert our attention from incompetent politics, which is something we all could and should be seriously angry about.
But to judge he who has mistaken, feeling “normal” and “just” because we still haven’t killed anyone, even if we sometimes did drive under the influence of alchohol, or like crazy, feeds some of our instincts.

I spoke using a “we”, even if I don’t have a TV anymore, not since I’m living by myself.

And I feel I wish to say something to you, the reader of this page: if the TV makes you want to judge someone in such a rush, consider stop watching it yourself. Sell it, while there’s still someone who wants to buy it, and buy a pack of books instead.