Epinephrine or adrenaline, sometimes spelled "epinephrin" or "adrenalin" respectively, is a hormone. It is a catecholamine, a sympathomimetic monoamine derived from the amino acids phenylalanine and tyrosine. The Latin roots ad-+renes and the Greek roots epi-+nephros both literally mean "on/to the kidney" (referring to the adrenal gland, which sits atop the kidneys and secretes epinephrine).

Epinephrine is a "fight or flight" hormone which is released from the adrenal glands when danger threatens or in an emergency. When secreted into the bloodstream, it rapidly prepares the body for action in emergency situations. The hormone boosts the supply of oxygen and glucose to the brain and muscles, while suppressing other non-emergency bodily processes (digestion in particular).

Epinephrine plays a central role in the physiological response to threatening, exciting, or environmental stressor conditions such as high noise levels or bright light. It is secreted by the adrenal medulla. When released into the bloodstream, epinephrine binds to multiple receptors and has numerous effects throughout the body. It increases heart rate and stroke volume, dilates the pupils, and constricts arterioles in the skin and gut while dilating arterioles in leg muscles. It elevates the blood sugar level by increasing catalysis of glycogen to glucose in the liver, and at the same time begins the breakdown of lipids in fat cells. Like some other stress hormones, epinephrine has a suppressive effect on the immune system.

It's interesting to note that life is often very cyclic.

Maybe because people in fact are limited in what they like and they end up repeating cycles of their lifes, maybe trying to live/realize them better than in the previous attempt.

One obviously tends to repeat and improve the good experiences while trying to escape and forget the bad ones.

Today I've watched a set of new photos.

Deja-Vu.

And it probably was an improved experience too. I'm happy about it :)

'Cause you know that it happened before.
And you know that this moment in time is surreal.
And you know when you feel deja-vu.

Feel like I've been here before.
Feel like I've been here before.
Feel like I've been here before.
Feel like I've been here before.

So...

I'm in the Line6Linux project. In particular I'm taking care of the Line6 Communication library that handles enumeration of Line6 devices and provides a nice application-friendly callback based interface to the underlying MIDI protocol. You can take a look at the SVN repository.

• RotoJet entered it's scheduled period of customer review.
• Working a bit over EasyLayout: we have new customers.
• Almost finished the scanner integration at MPS.
• Consulting in Bassilichi's (and more specifically Frantz's) Cassandra project.
• Finished the statistic module for GEOS in EBS.
• Got the first working Humor demos after the rewrite: need to merge more Vincenzo's code.
• Started working over PragNet: a control software for wireless networks. A huge one.

The Linux Day is quite questioned this year. There will be a concurrent manifestation in Florence: The Creativity Festival. I'll probably be there with the University of Siena AI group, maybe presenting HuMoR (a toolkit for Human MOtion Recognition).

Found a bug in the standard linux pppd daemon when interacting with the rp-pppoe client. There is an issue with the closelog() call that ends up closing the children stdin stream... Whatever... mailed the report and the fix to the upstream mantainer and to the linux-ppp@vger.kernel.org ML.

Still studying. Numeric Calculus this time. Today I've been playing with the Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel iterative linear system solvers.

Hellvis upped the new kvirc.net layout. The graphic work has been made by Etherea while Hellvis took care of the whole php framework. IMO the result is quite cool. Thnx Hellvis, Thnx Ethy :))

Tesla Effect: that's the name of the band. We'll be playing on 24th August in S.Martino (Monteriggioni). On 1st of September we'll be there with Ace Of Space too. Maybe there is a third band cooking... :D

Ah.. I've promised to post some photos of the Ace Of Space show in Casole. I failed to keep up with the promise since Adriano didn't give me the photos yet... Bad, bad Adrian! :D However, while waiting for the very nice ones, I'm posting just the few photos made with my camera instead.

Siena is quite silent in these days. It will blow up in few days with the secondo Palio of the year.

There are ideas about another long distance trip in November-December.

Very recently I've turned the stuff in picture A into the stuff in the picture B. The car is very cool and behaves quite well.... finally :)