This morning was nice and sunny. I sat in the park for awhile, basking, relaxing. And then started working my way towards some sights. I passed a statue of Cavour; he rates not only an admiring nude woman but a bronze wreath.

I went into a smallish church, the Church of San Francesco da Paola. I was thinking that churches are, in their own way, a medium, expressing — what? The church as objective correlative for the human head. All the gnarly colorful stuff inside, bejeweled and layered. Dig the incense censer hanging from the ceiling.

Next I happened on the Breara Palace, a big stone building right there on a city street, it's an art school downstairs and a museum upstairs. It was great seeing all the students. There's nothing like the warm sound of human voices bouncing off that lovely, worn stone.

This picture was in the gallery or “pinacoteca” upstairs at Breara Palace, it kind of got to me, the genuine sorrow of the kneeling guy, yes, I know it's rather ripely romantic, almost like a fantasy book cover, but something about the raw emotion made me feel great sympathy for the artist. Federico Faruffini, Sordello e Cunizza, about 1850. “Oh, Cunizza, I love you so.”

Speaking of elegant Italian men, here's Gustavo, a friend of Arianna Dagnino, the woman who was my translator for the panel. I like the skulls on the velvet collar a lot. This is no raggedy-ass hippie, by the way, this a serious businessman who organizes trade fairs. After all, Armani is based in Milano as well as Prada.

We did the panel on “Digital Eternity,” with Arianna — what's the word — proctoring, emceeing, chairing, intervening. Whatever you call it, she did a great job. (I mentioned Arianna's email interview with me about the lifebox and digital immortality a few blog entries back, as regular readers may recall.) Right behind her is Carlo Galimberti, who teaches in Milano, and edited a book on Cyberpsychology. Like you can make a burn victim feel better by putting them into a VR that's a world of ice. He made the point that if you could upload people into computers, you'd want to store a bunch of them together, as humans are social.

On my other side sat Francesco Lentini, an intense programmer who's created a virtual girl called Eloisa. She uses something like an Eliza algorithm to talk to you, also she has a mesh face that moves when she talks, forming expressions. I think he actually keeps adding good snappy answers to Eloise's code, provoking Carlo to ask if he's like Flaubert, who said, “Madame Bovary, c'est moi.”

I talked about my lifebox idea, noting that all kinds of different ideas can come together to make this watered-down form of digital immortality a commercial reality soon. There's a lot about it in my forthcoming book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

This picture of me, by the way, was taken at the FuturShow fair right before the panel, by a Brazilian photographer Giancarlo Mecarelli who takes everyone's picture in front of these height-adjustable angel wings. I was wearing my sharpest suit to look good for the Italians, the “godfather” suit I got at Saks for Georgia's wedding.

Student of McLuhan that I am — aren’t we all? — I love to ponder how my use of this new medium, the blog, affects my thought patterns.

Usually I do weird new technological things for reasons I’m not fully aware of at the time. The lack of conscious awareness of its meaning is an essential aspect of any of new medium.

As a practical matter, it could be that by blogging, I’m doing research for Mathematicians in Love. That is, I can see some of my characters becoming bigtime lifeboxers or lifebloggers. I have a feeling Nokia has trademarked “lifeblog” but I like the word a lot, maybe more than my coinage “lifebox.” I guess the lifebox is the hardware, and the lifeblog is the content. The software is “Jenny,” like in Freeware? Naw, I need a better word for that code, which is embedded in the lifebox. Blogware.

I see my character Bela as wearing a ring with a camera in it, and that’s how he gets big. The win with putting the camera in a ring (as opposed to a brooch) is that then the users can see the lifeblogger. Just have a fisheye lens in there, and trust the blogware to run some Eric-Gullichsen-style anamorphic algorithm to flatten out the image or, better yet, to let the user put their virtual eye at the ring and look all over the place. Anamorphocam blogware. Generally it’s wise to wear the blog-ring on the opposite hand from the hand that you use for the more intimate duties. Uneasy rests the hand that wears the blog-ring.

And now strum a classic SF god-chord: Bela’s lifeblog wakes up and starts doing things.

I changed planes in Munich; they had some big Lego sculptures in the airport lobby. This one is of a tourist! My twin. Those black things around his neck are camera straps.

In Milano, about the first thing I did was go to the center of town to check out the Duomo (Cathedral) and its vast square. Here it is, looming in the morning mist, a bit blocky due to restoration-scaffolding. Note the galleria angling off to the left.

I went up on the roof. It was like walking around on a stone wedding cake, A huge stone Mandelbrot set.

Not many of us were up there on this November morn.

And the people down below were tiny. Such a volume of space!

Then I visited Milano's other cathedral, Prada store Numero Uno. Note fashionista peering into the window, she was about fifty.

A sneaked photo inside Prada. Most of the store is down below sidewalk level. Some really nice purses and shoes in those cases.

Later in the same galleria — which is a centuries-old stone stucture, two hundred feet tall — I saw this outfit. Note the oversize sport bag used as purse, not to mention the super-floppy knickers. The heavy-duty multi-buckle exquisitely-tooled luxury combat boots don't show up so well. This woman was about twenty.

And then I made my way to the FuturShow. It's about three hundred booths, each wholly closed off in a square tent some ten meters across, with video projections on the tent walls. Inside each tent are gizmos and booth-bunnies — spokespersons? It's all very high-fashion.

I'm in Milan to give a talk on uploading your mind into digital form, as in my novel Software. It was a long trip, I always forget how nightmarish and draining air travel is.

It’s always a big hassle getting dial-up service to work when I first come to Europe, in fact I have a lot of trouble even making a phone call, what with all those confusing extra prefix digits. Last night I was unable to do either.

This was kind of worrying me, to the point where I dreamed about the phone and network connectivity issues most of the night. Amazing how much of my identity resides in my ability to plug in. We’re social animals. The virtual link becomes of particular urgency when I’m isolated as on a trip in a land where I don’t speak the language.

This morning I wanted to get to the venue to check it out, they’d been phoning me to come in today. It’s this kind of trade fair/cultural event called FuturShow 3004, held in a different Italian city every year. I was supposed to call the organizers to request a taxi, but couldn’t get the phone to work, and then decided to take the metro.

But the Metro is broken, not just the train, the whole line is broken, like for the rest of the day. Italian style. And I’m in California business mode, all rushing and sweating to be at the FuturShow venue at 9:30 sharp to hear Bill Gates pitch the Windows Media package, and meet my hosts. But, then, seeing Italians all around me, and the big buttery yellow buildings, I snap out of it.

“Do like in Italy.”

Nobody cares when I get to the FuturShow. The organizers that I’m imagining to be “expecting” me are Italians, for God’s sake. Whenever I get there will be fine, even if it’s tomorrow.

So I looked around downtown for awhile, got two good sights under my Mars Rover belt — I walked on the roof of the cathedral, a great stone Gothic wedding-cake. And I went into the local Prada store, which may well be the original Prada store, given that Miuccia P. hails from Milano. Then eventually took a beat old tram to FuturShow.

At the show I posted roughly this entry into my blog and emailed home, kind of rushed, as I had to be interviewed for some afternoon TV show. They’re all intrigued by my “lifebox” notion of digital eternity via uploading your software. They even printed a little essay I prepared for Milan’s paper, Corriere Della Sera.

***

Eventually I got the dial-up to work; the kicker was that I had to include the prefix “1,” in front of the phone number. Yes, that’s a comma. The guy at the desk told me, “Put one comma your number,” but I thought he was using comma metaphorically to stand for the idea of a temporal wait, so I’d only put 1 into the number and had been trying to dial by hand with a hand-timed pause to represent that mysterious comma, and then plug the computer in… And it’s not like there’s a comma on a phone keypad. But when you type your number into the dial-up software’s edit box, you can put a literal comma. I feel a hacker’s nerdish delight at this little puzzle’s resolution.