I always liked trial, for those of you unfamiliar wth this bike sport, a pic on the left shows what is about: basically with those tiny and essential bikes you jump, climb, cross  rocks  or whatever other natural (or artificial)obstacle. It’s all about concentration, focussing on the path to follow, it might appear very calm, not like watching motocross or 500 cc  but when in a few seconds you’ll see those guys jumping and doing it’s spectacular.
So today i took the chance to go and see a competition from the italian

championship that was quite close home (just a couple of hour away) by the mountain of Val Formazza, just a little above a scenic place that’s the cascate del Toce, a nice and impressive waterfall. that’s where the pic is from, it was fun and location perfect, maybe the zones were not too tough but i enjoyed the show, and well the sun was high at 1700m so right now my neck and arms up to the shoulders where i rolled up the sleeves of my t-shirt are plain red as a lobster.

uhm a few days off-blogging, say that maybe it was lack of inspiration, or maybe it’s a natural reaction after for nearly all week at work i’ve been doing webby stuff, i mean, i enjoyed and it was a long time since i was just focusing on one thing at a time : usually it’s typical multitasking with shifting priorities, unclear plans, compressed resources and nevertheless delivering good results : call it italian style. Instead this time, it was just working on this nice web site that should see the light soon, and the good thing was being able to recycle something i already developed for this very same web (some database trick with asp), i think there’s nothing like learning a thing just because of your own personal interest and passion and if you can get this, or part, to to your daily work, well, it’s a chance to find it more interesting and hence pleasant.

instant classic

there are some songs that do have that feeling, how can i say… it’s something that appeal you just as soon as you hear’em and then it stays, even some years after that song doesn’t grow old, of course it’s all about personal tastes, but in these days on the radio i’m hearing Drops of Jupiter by Train and this is exactly what i mean, for other examples of songs that fit into that category i’d pick Runaway Train by Soul Asylum or 74/75 by Connells. Those songs have in common also the fact that the groups beside them almost vanished or at least i remember them for just those songs, but i’d pick at least a couple of more modern instant classics : The River by Bruce Springsteen and Losing my Religion by R.E.M , yeah here we may be on another level but the thing for me it’s the same, it’s that fabric in the songs that make me feel them as not out of fashion.

The digital mirror of memories

computers store data, no wonder, but data sometimes is something more that numbers or “cold” facts, i was thinking about this weblogging process : the way all trace of posting is kept into one neat page, the fact that you could browse and go back into the past of thoughts, considerations, feelings,same for e-mail: i’m a sorta archivist :: i keep all e-mails i sent and received in the last 6 years so they’re now several thousands of letters, short rants, useless communication and very important decisions. they’re all together, searchable, this could be done maybe by a software, there’d be a time where some piece of code could say “ah this message reveal your inner happiness or your disbelief” but also by a person. on the other side you’d have your mood tracked by some weblogging services such as livejournal.com or imood.com, what’d be all this about ?

well i’d say that looking at our digital trace maybe we’d learn a little more about ourselves, and, who knows, get some glimpse to know where this could lead us…

i’d add some more metaphors to explain this and i was thinking about vectors as a representation of the direction and the intensity we put in one thing but this is too much for my today’s posting…



click 2 zoom
Ain’t my bike impressive ?


Or at least i think so, even if custom bikes are not so trendy here as they’re back in mid 90’s but i just don’t care too much about trends. So for ferragosto had one of the usual trip to the mountains where my bike surprised me with a not so pleasant effect : after some more of an hour ride we got stuck after this bus that due to the very narrow road was going damn slow and there was no point where it was possible to pass it. Put in this way: getting down and walking i’d have been faster. So i guess i over used the clutch and after some while the clutch completely "disappeared" : you’d grab the lever and nothing completely nothing happened, now this may be some of a problem considering the 270 Kg of a Suzuki Intruder 1400 and changing gears without clutch on a road full of curves, not to mention a dark sky approaching with promises of rain…  There’s to say that with my previous bikes i was more expert on mechanic and there was something i could think of doing but with this one i honestly admit i never got into detail of the engine, and the hydraulic clutch is something even more obscure. Well at least the only thing i did was just to let it rest a while and slowly getting colder it started again to work as usual : amazing how you never think about detail of a thing until it doesn’t work…

Ferragosto

so they call today, i.e. august 15th in italy, public holiday, where by tradition cities should be desert like the metaphysical squares of Giorgio de Chirico and silent should be the main soundtrack, no cars, just faint sounds in the distance (playing maybe “Summertime“). And indeed that’s the scene, althought with the passing of the year it’s becoming less ever dominant, and more people stay in towns or work in August where in the past it was almost a must : in august the only chance to spot people in italy were on beaches or on vacation.

family talk part II

with an apparently seamless link from previous post i met today a friend of mine i almost lost touch with, we’ve been school buddies since high school and then to college , well he’s with his young baby and his wife and recently moved to a new job closer to home, without having to commute every day, maybe not so exciting as in a big city , but according to what he said, quality of life got much better. Instead i still commute (and waste?) for something slightly more than 3 hours a day, i like my job and i’m single.
Now, there’d be many choices in life, some of them explicit, for others you can’t really evaluate the effects, and now i just done watching The Family Man and that’s exactly what i mean. The story should make think, about the big decision if we’d be given the chance to compare our existing life, what’s really important that we do have there ? and how in many cases we lead to choices that made ourselves, as i was saying yesterday living ,a life more individually focussed, is it worth ? is there a second chance ?

beyond stats

i was checking a recent report from the italian national statistic agency about families and other social trends in my country. Firstly i find hard to generalize and to abstract conclusion after some stats, but that’s my fault, anyway some consideration can be drawn and to be very short it has to do with a life more individually focused, less family oriented and maybe more lonely. So we know (starting from this sample of 58.000 people) that singles count up to 23% of population , taking into account the progressive extension of life 61,7% of the singles are over 60 yo. But families take time to build considering that youngsters leave the family home quite late (reason being cost of living, lenght of university studies etc.). the portrait is of a nation that’s growing old and with families surely different and less present that in the generation of our parents. The aspects of being single are many, in some way even people with a good job move, relocate and maybe dedicate much time to work than to family, at this point question that i’m posing myself is about the quality of the social network we’re in.

I see something like if our age is on the spell of a “loosely coupled” social network, surely we’ve technology that allow us to be in touch with almost everybody on the world and exchange ideas and connect into communities with people sharing our own interests, they’re real, they can give us something useful but they’re not here, with you in the same moment. I’m realizing that putting down this topic is even harder than what i was expecting, too much for this post and maybe i’ll get deeper in another occasion, just wanted to stop and think about what’s the society we live in, and to a closer look how we , you , real persons relate to it and what’d be done to make our experience richer and shareable with others.

yumm

Figs gathering season starts, i’m quite lucky to have in the garden a big and old (really i’d say it’s more than 60 yo) fig tree and it seems

that we’re there : first ripe fruits appear and the beginning has the advantage that you’re quite safe from too ripe fig bombs that in the meantime you’re leaning may drop and make you experience totally bio shampoo but not really pleasant. Good are those fruits that doesn’t even need a ladder just stretch out your arm, but interesting those ones that hide beside leaves and need you to climb steps in the ladder and while you’re there the best thing overall eat directly from the tree with the wind breeze launching down the peel with accurate aim, tasting their sweetnees, and find yourself with sticky fingers…

(i’d take a tangent and find this… uhm say erotic, it’d be even more if you’d know italian language and perceive the assonance between the fruit and… another fruit, ok i stop here, there’ll be another time to sing you Sexual Healing)