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it’s been a very busy week, working at full speed, client visits, meetings, dozens and dozens of e-mails to read. At least i enjoyed one long lunch break in the center of Milan with the chance of wandering around and visiting some music shops where i did buy the latest from Bob Dylan : Love and Theft (that i’m really enjoying) and some bookstores too like Hoepli. It’s amazing their array of books and i like to look around for inspiration in between so many different books, there’s especially the section about art and design that offer many hints and althought i’m not directly into that i do believe that inspiration is something that may come across different environments.

back to school time now, what does this mean for a worker and commuter like me ? well that on the train i use to take at 7 AM or 8 AM in the morning it’s becoming harder to find seats available, it’s the same story , year after year, and it’s not exactly good to start a work day after 40 minutes standing in a crowded train (and that’s just a part of a typical 1.40 hrs daily commuting (one way only, not the round trip)

During the last few days so many times we stopped thinking about the recent tragedy in the USA, talking with friends, colleagues, reading on newspapers or watching tv. Also the various shows, competitions and public event are affected , some have been cancelled some delayed. In many countries last friday people stopped for 3 minutes to remember. Should we stop everything ? I guess it’s hard to say in this time, something like ok, life goes on etc. it sounds like a little superficial but it must go on. One aim of terrorism would be really to paralyze everything and replace with fear and terror. So it’s right in my opinion that soccer match are on today and as well as F1 grand prix in Monza, Italy. Surely with some sign that remember all of us what happened as in the Ferrari car, all without sponsors marks and with the black on as in the picture on the left i took  on the pit lane walkabout in Monza on Friday.
So with more modest aim is this site where i did paint the home page black as well as the top bar on all the pages (i wanted to make all pages black but i discovered that a partial usage of stylesheet on my site made it quite hard). So we remember, of course, but we go on, even in between uncertanties.

that’s was the title on an article on Il Corriere della Sera, a major italian newspaper, and i share that view, we’re not there, maybe some of ours had friends or relatives there in the World Trade Center towers (we discovered we’ve 300 colleagues of us working there) but nevertheless we shared one of the worst day in history. I just felt damn sad and with that feeling from my stomach up to my throat of a disease and sorrow that’s surely faint compared to what people there may have experienced. Trying to imagine what people there in the offices felt imagined when a plane is crashing in, or even worse the people on the planes themselves, knowing they’re going to die and calling home. the people who were waiting for their relatives or wives or husbands or friends coming back and knowing they will not. it’s a thought that is so heavy and as i said even for us, here, safe (?) is a distubing thought something that make things different from before. I only hope this is not a beginning of something even worse that we don’t even want to imagine.

I’ve been there, i mean in the World Trade Center tower, and it was not much time ago, on december 2000 , it was so huge and impressive you’d not even take a photo of it from the base and when on top the view was magnificent. of course it’s a symbol of NYC and the US but even wider, but that’s not the point: a symbol is made of steel and glass and could be rebuilt, not the same thing for the lives of people who were there.

what is happening in NYC and Washington is so damn fucking absurd and unbelievable to say the least, my words are useless but as i’m browsing through news and watching TV i’m deeply impressed and shocked. period.

you know, there are some times when you just have the blues, and without a specific reason, say you’re too tired or worried or anything, i’m indeed more and more convinced of my theory : to be happy you need a good reason, something to drive that mood, for the contrary it ain’t necessary, i mean you’d be unhappy without any well identified reason, of course you might say it’s the same story as glass half empty of half full, sure. I already have this reinforced some time ago when i met this girl with wild mood swings, so that in just a matter of minutes she’d switch from smiling to the opposite, looking like if they’d killed her cat and you start wondering what you’d have done and indeed it was nothing (i believe though). So what to do… well one thing could be to run away, move, travel and put miles and miles in between so that this blues ghost can’t find you…, i did once, putting like some several thousand miles in between and one ocean too. Tomorrow it’ll be some less : just a night of cruising on a boat (new thing to me) to get to Sardinia, one of the beautiful islands in Italy.

so it seems summer is going to an end at least that was yesterday, raining and quite cold, not too much but enough to appreciate the warmth coming from my notebook on my legs while sitting on my terrace, looking and listening at rain falling while smoking and watching smoke rings raising up to the sky. I’m not a smoker, trust me,i’d smoke a cigarette a month or even more few and far between, for me it’s just something more …aestethic really, watching at the architecture of smoke in the air, somewhat spiritual i might add. Like a ceremony. For a period infact i enjoyed smoking a pipe, more for the ritual of taking tobacco with finger, gently pushing in , lighting and smoking and helding the warm wood in my hand.
Anyway today sun was back, but kinder, more gentle and not so hot, so it’s all about changing, autumn could teach us something, to change, with kindness.

e-commerce for the masses

after having subscribed to the cdnow affiliate program i did the same for amazon in the US and in the UK. So what’s about it ? , well say that when you click on those links and afterwards buy something in their site i’d get a commission on sales…you might see no value added for you in this case (and indeed it is unless you’d like to do me a favor 😉 but when a link comes after you wrote something on what you’d buy, say a review or just a “i enjoyed it” and you’re already familiar with buying on-line the thing may work. When i did using cdnow on my cd list page the idea was for you to be able to listen at a sample of the record too mostly. So that’s it for my peek into e-commerce

ain’t it nice when you come back home and find something you’re expecting ? so yesterday there were two packs : one with my almost new notebook, the Toshiba 35DVD coming back from being serviced (the DVD was acting like a ghost, maybe was the shock after playing Twister, the movie) and the second, a tiny one with 5 cds of live recordings from this guy in Sweden. Amazingly enough in 2 days without courier you can ship from Sweden to Italy and so now i’m listening to an old recording of Bruce Springsteen (the 1978 concert in Paissac, NJ a.k.a “piece de resistance”) and it feels like i’m going back to the first time i heard the boss.. something like 16 years ago