I have also been to Ikea for the first time. The closer one is located in East Palo Alto which is supposed to NOT be a good neighborhood so it was nice when I jumped off too early from the bus and the Bus driver stopped by to tell me to jump in that it was the wrong stop. I met very cordial people until now. So, the Ikea stop is important in this story because there I bought a desk (as you can see, nothing fancy) and confortable chair to be able to work at home on Oxygen. It was not easy to build the desk without screwdriver and I messed things up just at step 3 :) but in the end it worked!

 

Since I left my lovely 23″ Cinema Display in Italy I’m really thinkinh in getting an 24″ or something iMac. In October I really haven’t any time or energy to work on anything KDE related. Fortunately Nuno and David Miller have been doing a great work filling missing actions icons and improving the ugly ones. There’s still some work to do but I’ll concentrate on designing the applications now. Next coming are for sure Kmail and Kontact. There also some minor changes I’d like to do here and there on the folders, Konqueror icon, Dolphin and to the “new” action badge.

They were doing a very cool AJAX multi protocol IM service and where really needing a designer to help out with the visual re-design of their sites and services. So, after doing a small project contest “against” a couple of other designers they wanted to meet me and in June I was flying for the first time to world famous Silicon Valley, CA. After a long period working from home in Italy as a consultant, a lot of burocreacy and a bit of lucky I got a H-1B visa, which is a non-immigrant visa that allows me to work in the US as a highly qualified worker. My position at meebo will be “visual designer” and I’m really happy to start this experience. I’ll miss my family, my friends, my new apartment, my town, my food, my language and everything I like of Italy … but I think it’s a very unique opportunity and I’m really thankful to meebo founders that trusted on me and are giving me that chance … and I’m really grateful to my girlfriend too, who is coming with me and will stay until Xmas. I know I’ll come back stronger, more mature and with a lot of work experience that I would not have the chance to do get from my home studio.Meebo is also conveniently located in downtown Mountain View, so I’ll be just around the corner for the big KDE release party happening in January at googleplex :) I won’t desappear from the open source scene, the Oxygen Project is very important to me and I’ll take care of it together with my friends of the Oxygen Team.PS: I know, meebo.com still not allowing Konqueror :) I’ve been able to enter the site by changing the browser agent but seems the site ajax doesn’t work very well with khtml 3.x. Probably if/when Konqueror will use webkit it will work just fine. PPS: For the italians reading, I’m also starting a personal blog in Italian called Meno Nove where I plan to post about my experience living in Silicon Valley etc.

UPDATE