Thursday, October 31, 2013

Is it a really Happy ... Halloween?

Halloween is the best sign of the times and of its devastating globalization. In my youth these days were devoted to our passed away dears. We used to light up red candles and put them on the windowsill of our room. I used to stay awake till late, while snugged into my bed, watching the reddish shadows dancing on the ceiling of my bedroom after each flame stir. It was at the same time so scaring and exciting. I remember I loved such a unique opportunity to stand face to face with the first conception of death as a human experience and that of the eternal rest that made us children make some basic existentialist questions so early.

What about today?

The depicted piece of art is from my son's homework for his school annual contest.



Four Items


Well, they're actually five. But I like to think of the second picture as if it contained a single item: "glass".

I have scrapped again some time to my already little sleep time to "make" some pictures I've had in mind for a long while. I'm not used to dispose immediately things that I don't need anymore. Sometimes I put them aside waiting for better times or simply a commemorative photo session before trashing.
It is not the case of the items depicted below. Facts are that, for some strange reasons, the few items I had stored apart have disappeared and yesterday evening I had the set ready for doing something after shooting at this year's Halloween pumpkin, i.e. the one designed by my son Flavio for the school contest.

I'll ask the boss of the house about the lost items.








Tuesday, October 29, 2013

And ...

... while I look into the hard-disk for summer flower pictures, it's time to think about preparing the balcony flora for the coming winter.



Friday, October 25, 2013

Flowers

The B&W elaboration of all flowers samples I took last summer when I was in Ischia has just begun. I think sooner or later I'll have to put on stage a photobook that collects them all.





Thursday, October 24, 2013

Airports

You know ... when you have that strange feeling of being observed.


Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Good companions

November 2008. Two wheelchairs waiting for someone to take around in Arlanda airport.


Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Milan Fog

I've unearthed these pictures, that I took with my old mobile phone some years ago, while looking of something else I can't remember anymore. The weather is changing as far as we go on with the Autumn season. In few days we shall have heavy fog and everything will look like different. So our mood will be.
Mine is already foggy and gloom, but there are different reasons behind.






Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Viva Massimo!

After Verdi, it's now time to to celebrate a colleague of mine, a friend who just left my company after 13 years. Beside being an invaluable professional, Max has been a human reference for all of us in several, countless cases. On his farewell party, two days ago, he took us a couple of his home-made loafs of bread.
Well ... could be that I'm too much lean to food and cooking. I feel there's no electronics, no signal-processing, no silicon, no computer programming skills that stands upright and compete with working hard in the kitchen the day before saying goodbye. That bread has been the best salutation and teaching he could leave us. I'm sure he'll continue doing his work well for the simple sake of goodness and that he'll find new bread tasters in his new company. Viva Massimo!


Monday, October 14, 2013

Viva Verdi - II







Viva Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi was born in October 1813. This one, more than usual, is a year of  great celebrations. Everywhere (I suppose) there are initiatives ongoing to let the children know one of our Nation's most prominent figures. In our town, primary school children were taught to sing Nabucco's "Va pensiero" (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves). Needless to write that rehearsal was better than the final exhibition.






Sunday, October 13, 2013

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Hay Fireworks

Asker (NOR), eight years ago. Photo hunting during a lunch break walk on my first trip to Norway. The beginning of what I see now as the happy age of my life.


Thursday, October 10, 2013

Terrae

This time ("once in a while never hurts") I thought I couldn't turn these pictures to B&W. Notwithstanding the extensive color palette, there's already that kind of balance and selectivness a B&W picture provides.



Monday, October 7, 2013

A thinking spot

A thinking spot doesn't necessarily need to be a place where to stop and sit. It can be any place that starts a story, a stream of thoughts that flow, one after the other, through our mind.
Having lived my youth in a hilly country, where olive trees are grown on terraces of dark brown soil grabbed from a stony porous substrate, a dry-wall, wherever I find it, works fine to this purpose.


Saturday, October 5, 2013

Backup required!

I'm starting to lose memory or, put in a different way, not to remember all the things I've done so far. Blogging doesn't help in that sense. You drop pictures and thoughts at a certain rate. These accumulates and, as time passes by, you forget the best and worst under a heap of other daily publications.

A good example is the picture below and the words that come with it. I posted it on the F-blog in September 2008, upon invitation of Ulf Fågelhammar, before he set sails for his brainchild project: 591-Blog. It was taken on my last day in Backnang, in the Swabian District of Germany. I spent the whole Summer 2008 in that little town not far from Stuttgart. I've already written about this experience in another post: "Backnang, Summer 2008".

Well, even though I consider this picture one of my luckiest shots (I didn't move a single grain of sand of the napkin set I discovered during my lunch-break walk), I can't remember if I ever posted it here, on my blog. Leafing back through the posted pictures has become now a long lasting task; search tool doesn't help. So I thought it would be worth starting a back-up procedure and, starting from very my first post, taking note of all the pictures posted, not to repeat myself. It's a personal engagement. I don't think anyone would ever argue to have seen these pixels before but ... you never know.




"My experience here is almost finished. I'm feeling sad.
I know I won't have other chances to be here again,
alone with myself and my thoughts.
I've found this place, in a corner of a schoolyard
and soon felt as it was my "thinking-spot" here.
How strange ... 
Everywhere I go and spend more than a couple of days,
becomes part of my imaginary homeland.
I can't explain.
I must either be a nowhere man or citizen of the world"

Friday, October 4, 2013

Penelope

Fishing is reportedly something for men (what ever the age). Not everyone's necessarily to be happy about it.



Thursday, October 3, 2013

Good catches

Still digging into my disk for some good Summer' shots. Could it be it's already time for a break?




Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Having the right tools

Some pictures are better than others at inspiring deep thoughts or disclosing unexpected mind connections. The strange thing in all this is that you don't know where and when such epiphanies appear. If you're lucky this can occur just a moment before you decide to unveil your work and put it on display. For those, like us blog editors, who aim to put on the shelf both their pictures and inner feelings there can't be anything better.

I was uploading this picture of surgery tools I took last summer while visiting a World-War-I Austrian fortress, in Trentino, now turned into one of the best conserved and most instructive war museums in Italy, when a simple connection with my current job activity came up.

I've been using, let me dare to say mastering for years a design and verification methodology that used to give excellent results in the past time. As it always happens in every field of technical development, this methodology is now obsolete and no longer able to keep pace with the needs of modern electronic design. Having this in mind, years ago, I prepared myself in advance, attending presentations, courses and making short trials but never completed the step and made the grade. I kept on working with my good old methods, leveraging on the fact that mastering with it provided me the same quality levels of a weak grip on a new methodology.
I pushed this condition up to the limits, until I found myself alone in a dead-end, with a design environment that was shouting for something better, easier and safer. All my younger colleagues, although less experienced in "the method", were progressing on a field I was instead fearing to endeavor.

This evening, as I stopped watching again at the tools a surgeon living one century ago had at his disposal to attempt saving the lives of soldiers wounded by heavy artillery, I thought about the low level of self-confidence I had reached some days ago when I realized that my tools weren't good enough to carry on.

In such a situation, shoulders to the wall, I had to look at the new tools with a different sight, as if they were my parachute and, with some chances not to succeed, I started using them step by step although I knew that initially I would have had the same efficiency of a practitioner (incidentally this word, "practitioner", is used somewhere in the world to point out to what we, in Italy, call the family doctor).

After some highs and lows, today I completed my first evolutionary step and felt really happy at the end, when I saw that the system was working as expected. I don't know if this investment was really worth, i.e. if I'll keep on doing this activity in the coming years. I know it's been helpful in any case. Having the right tools is not an easy job. It's tremendously necessary.