Good morning Bob, originally uploaded by bitful.

Our cactus only gets watered during British Summer Time (once a week). It's been thriving for about 5 years now, not bad for a cheap Ikea plant.

So every year in the last Sunday in March we put the clocks forward and water Bob (that's what we call it, no idea why), then make yawning noises and pretend it's Bob waking up after months of hibernation.

This year we followed the yawning with expressions of surprise and spatial disorientation, because the new (larger) sofa made us move Bob while it was sleeping.

I'm 42, Stuart is 39, and I hope we will be just as silly in thirty years' time.

Got you milk. Are you meeting j and j in town too? Lxx

The text was meant to be for Stuart 'Dr Bitful' 'Mr Boyfriend' of course, not for Stuart I work with (who was very kind and called me straight away to let me know I had made a mistake).

I guess it had to happen sooner or later. I'm just glad the text was family-friendly.

Today's Italian word is errore, which means mistake.

If you don't send any, you are a miser.

If you send e-cards, you are lazy.

If you don't send charity cards, you don't care at all.

If you print addresses from Outlook onto sticky labels (guilty!), you are lazy and impersonal.

If all you write is your name underneath the printed greetings, you could not care less.

If you include a long update on everything that has happened to you over the last twelve months, you have too much time on your hands and deluded that people actually care.

But if you include a personal wish, a few warm words that are tailor-made for your loved ones, you are a (Christmas) star.

Having said that, any of the cards listed above makes me happy. So email away at lucabelletti@gmail.com! I hear Critter Carols could be this year's Elf Yourself.

A couple of weeks ago she said yes – darn ;-) – so I booked her flights before she could change her mind, and Dr B.'s parents insisted we go and see them when she is here (they already met last spring).

She has travelled on her own in the past but was not too sure about it now that she is 83 years old (she had me veeery late), so I found a service that escorts passengers from the aircraft to arrivals and helps out with formalities and luggage. She asked instead if I could go and pick her up.

In Italy.

So I'm flying there today and back with her tomorrow, and in a week I'll fly her back to Italy and spend a few days there. Things a good Italian boy would not do for his mamma, eh?

I am about to leave and am very excited, but I will probably be fed up with her so quickly that my Twitter tweets (or Facebook status updates) later this afternoon are guaranteed to be on the rantful side.

I have been fascinated for a long time by people who take their own picture every day and then paste them all together in a video, like 200 Days in 20ish Seconds and Living My Life Faster. So much so that between 1 January 2007 and 29 March 2008 I took a photo of myself almost every single day.

Did I put them all together in a nice movie? Did I bugger. I tried once with Windows Movie Maker but I found it too fiddly. I tried Photoshop so I could achieve pixel-perfect alignment but the task was monumental. I uploaded them in batches on my lucabelletti account on Flickr (don't bother checking it out, there are no public photos now), but the free account photostream only shows the last 200 pics and I did not want to upgrade to pro.

Last March I discovered Daily Mugshot and found that it does exactly what I need. I gave it a few tries, by using a webcam, or uploading a picture from the hard drive, or sending one from a mobile phone, but it was only when I got an iPhone that I found the method that suits me the best: snap pic with iPhone, email to Daily Mugshot, pic appears in my 'mugshow':

I'll grant you it lacks the perfection of manually assembled examples where pictures are resized and perfectly centered, but it was a very easy choice between having 'nothing out there' and 'something that updates automatically whenever I email a photo to it'.

Cherry on the cake: the guy who developed Daily Mugshot is a star (I had a question on how to do something, and he did it for me straight away). Thanks Keith!

I also take a picture of me in underwear (front and side) every month to record my desperate attempts to combat the inevitable sagging that old father time is cursing my body with. Check back tomorrow for those. Er, scrap that actually, I think I'll spare you that one.

Daily Mugshot

My first ever web page in early 1999 had all my details on it. It was personal but at the same time since it was entirely hand-coded it was meant to me looked at by potential employers or consultancy clients in the IT business. It had a photo of my cat (a must at that time), it talked about my boyfriend, it even had my home address so people would know where I was based.

I sent all my contacts a link to it, and a friend came back to me horrified that I had published my full address. He begged me to remove it, and I did, and I am glad I did, because at that time the last thing I needed was a stalker.

Fast forward to 2002, when I made up a unique blog name (bitful) and started connecting to a blogging community (the way we use to do it, by linking to each other's blogs, since FriendFeed and Facebook were at the time but a twinkle in Tim Berners Lee's eye). I kept everything separate even when it took a lot of effort, and only disclosed my blog's URL to very close friends. Similarly, I would never post pictures of myself or of my friends on my bitful account on Flickr, and maintained two separate Yahoo! accounts, one for mail, the other for social stuff.

A lot has happened since then. I am probably more comfortable with myself. I also am very lucky to be doing a job I love in an institution I respect, with colleagues I trust. And little by little, the boundaries I had carefully drawn to separate my two online identities became blurred. I have always been much more active online as bitful than as lucabelletti, and I was eager to connect to people as bitful to create connections between them and my online identity.

I have come to a point where I am perfecly happy to feature my name openly on my blog. I feel it is for me a very natural progression, as I cannot see the point of hiding it any longer, and the public and private identities are now one and the same. They serve different purposes perhaps, but they complement each other, as two facets of who I am. I know many people who are still terrified of such openness, and I respect their position, but I know this is right for me now.

And after all, if you search for my first and last name in inverted commas on Google you already get links to my FriendFeed, delicious, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, and (empty) personal homepage/sandbox for work projects (as well as stuff from other people I share my name with).

So yes then, my name is Luca Belletti, I run a blog called bitful, and you are very welcome to my life.

Then do you think I would miss the opportunity to record a daily summary of my activities and get pretty charts to boot?

Of course not.

So now you can find out how I am doing and feeling, how little I sleep, if I stick to my rule 'no alcohol on school nights' and if I am still caffeine-free by checking out my Morale-O-Meter:

Until today, my favourite 'me' time was left untouched. Bright and early at 5.30AM, day after day, I answer the call of the bladder, look at the time and rejoice in the fact that I've got one and a half hours to do exactly what I want to do. That is when I reply to emails, check Facebook, read feeds and news, catch up with recorded TV and with stuff on iPlayer, listen to new music and plan the day ahead.

The other morning I went for the usual early morning slash… and I went back to bed. Until 7. And then I had to do what everybody else does, which is get ready very quickly and rush through the door.

On one hand, I did not like it. Leisure is always preferable to pressure.

On the other hand, I managed to do the essential tasks I had to in about fifteen minutes, instead of diluting them into ninety minutes of perfecly useless (but one hundred per cent pleasing) surfing.

If only I did not feel fantastic without caffeine, I'd have a triple expresso just because it's more fun.

I knew my caffeine intake was way above sanity (about 10 cups a coffee and a couple of 500ml bottles of coke zero during the day, and two or three mugs of tea in the evening) and wanted to do something about it.

Knowing myself pretty well by now, I had a very good feeling that cutting down was going to involve a lot more energy than stopping altogether. After all, I failed every single attempt to cut down smoking, but when I went cold turkey five years ago, it worked and I have not smoked since.

So I started my Saturday with a mug of peppermint tea. Incidentally, I like peppermint tea, so it's not a big effort. I had a couple more cups during the morning, then at around lunchtime the headache started.

I must add at this point that I was also trying to cleanse and detox by trying out the Master Cleanse during the weekend, so I thought the headache was due to insufficient calories, or a reaction to maple syrup (Dr B. said it gives him headache).

However, by evening the Master Cleanse was out of the window, I ate and I drank and a darn good idea it was. But the headache was still there, I went to bed with it and I woke up with it too. It followed me all day on Sunday, laughed at the painkillers I threw at it, and again on Sunday night I fell asleep with the back of my head throbbing and sending discomfort down my spine.

Yesterday and today I have been feeling better, the headache is coming and going, I cannot put my finger on what makes it worse – but I have noticed that working out makes it disappear.

I am very surprised by my body's reaction to caffeine withdrawal, it feels oddly familiar and I recoil in horror because it is very similar to the first few days of each and every one of my (near-monthly) attempts to stop smoking. Is caffeine really that addictive? Or – shudder – am I allergic to peppermint tea instead?

Those who know me at this point will not be surprised, as they often joke that when sense of direction was being handed out, I was unable to find the queue. And that's exactly why I looked up the venue on at a map before leaving, which clearly showed I could take Middle Temple Lane from Victoria Embankment or from Fleet Street.

I tried both ends and could not find the street. I checked the map again, and even my mobile's GPS failed to take me there. So I googled for instructions, but there seemed to be nothing in the first page of results. None of my friends was going to be there, and I could not call the singer because the concert had started.

I now read that I needed to

'Watch out for a wooden gateway with a sign to Middle Temple Lane. You might think you are going into someone's private yard but it's the north entry to this cobbled street of solicitors' offices in London's "legal village".' (City A.M. June 2007 review of La Grande Marque)

Of course. How could I not have known?