My friend Luke and his Portugese girlfriend will shortly be moving to start a new life and company in Brazil on a nice sunny beach somewhere. Because Luke is English though, he will need some help fitting in to the foreign culture. To that end Joana, his girlfriend, purchased the book “Live and Work in Brazil”

I had a look, but after a while realised it didn’t contain all the info that I think it really could. So while he was preoccupied I made some revisions of my own to assist my friend in his travels across the pond.

Please note that I’ve many Brazilian friend and nothing against their lovely country. This was mostly an opportunity to give Luke some grief about moving to a place with more sun and beaches and leave us in London!

This year, despite my copy on the poster, everything went quite smoothly. Fireworks were pointed in the right direction, the party host remain on his feet at 4am – all in all a good result. Thanks to all of you who attended and made it the fun event it was!

On a side note, it’s been 9 years since I was in America for a 4th of July, so it was a pleasure to see Mike Kobal‘s video of the NYC fireworks display. Stunning!

The vantage point of the camera is taken from my roof terrace, with me down on the street lighting this off. Rockets impacted buildings on all sides. At about 1 minute into the video, the box tipped over and started shooting rockets right at me. I ran like heck with them flying over my shoulder. Lucky for me, a friend had parked his shiny new motorcycle in between us, and you can see half the rockets impacting it and then blowing up! The bike escaped mostly undamaged with a minor dent in the fuel tank. I was unharmed after fleeing for my life around the corner of my building!

My name is Tony Volpe, I’m a 29 year old American who has been living in London for the last 7 or so years. For the last six of those years I’ve worked at unit9 first as a designer/developer, then technical leader for projects, and I now fill the roale of Head of Development. My professional interests are usability, team development, design, flash sites, and inter-group communication of technical challenges.

Outside of work I enjoy running – I’ve completed the 2005 Edinburgh Marathon in 3:55, reading – mostly fiction and science fiction, console and computer games – such as the Final Fantasy series and World of Warcraft.

Through this publication I’d like to highlight issues that come to mind through my day to day work including views on usability through my experience, and solutions to problems that we face quite often in the Web Industry. I may also cover more casual issues that concern my interests outside of my professional life. I intend to keep my professional and personal posts separate through the use of “categories” in the Word Press system, so you the reader will be able to navigate posts more efficiently.

Please feel free to leave feedback on the site positive or negative, though I reserve the right to remove unconstructive comments from the site, as there is nothing to be gained by them.