Not much to say (in reality -after writing this post- I see that there was enough to say), just that I was a little down in the beginning of my last 2 evenings, but as very often happens to me it’s better to go out when I’m in that (unexplainable) status.
On Friday evening I went to Bellinzona’s carnival. I just wanted to see the ambience, thus I didn’t prepare a real costume. Anyway I had a lot of fun: I met several people I didn’t meet since years! I stayed till 4am, if I remember well…
On Saturday evening I was waiting a friend of mine -Steve- from Lausanne coming to meet me and to party in Bellinzona together! Other AIESEC people lanned to do the same thing, thus as result we had a nice dinner in the AIESEC office (thanks Sabrina, Robin and Nader), then we went to Bellinzona together.
Saturday was a long, very crowded and funny night. I left at 5:15am in order to bring Steve directly at Lugano’s train station and Stefano at home. I went to sleep at 6:22am.
On Sunday I woke up at 09:00 and as I often do, I slept 20 more additional minutes… I had a meeting in Melano with Sabrina & friends. But as some friends were late I went with Selene -arrived just a couple of minutes after me- to Sabrina’s home. Sabrina has very hospital parents. It was a pleasure to meet them.
Anyway, the real adventure begun when we started the engine to go to Italy with Selene’s parents’ car, a big mercedes handling 6 passengers (us) without any space problems.
But in Italy the rubber brake (ND POL: "abbiamo bucato la gomma" come si dice in inglese? verifica…), so we had to change it with the reserve one. We were 2 men in the car, Lukas and me. Anyway it was nice to see a team spirit: we all helped (in particular Lukas and me, but the girls assisted us too) to fix the problem in a smooth way.
We finally arrived in Ivrea, where the funny part begun. The oranges battle begun at 2pm o’ clock. Luckily we had some impermeable jackets, but it was not enough to be fully protected against "friendly fire oranges". I’ve never seen such a big waste of fruits and something so crazy. But it’s a tradition since houndreds of years. No matter if it’s a waste: it’s a tradition and now that I’ve participated there I can understand that sometimes sustainability is "taboo" for certain activities.
I liked it very much.
I didn’t think to be a carnival fanatic, nor I think it now, but for sure I like it!
I published the carnival pictures on my personal gallery:
Ivrea’s Carnival offocial site
Tags:
No Tags
February 7, 2005, Category: Personal
Print version
I don’t know why, but if I have to talk about me, or write my own biography, I’d like to tell about what music meant for me in my past years.
I’m also posting this because I’ve just discovered that what is written in "my favorite music" in my blogger’s profile is automatically split into keywords. The following paragraph explains well what I think about, but the automatic generated keywords and links resulted in a mess… thus, as I like to keep some order, here I keep my paragraph and I’ll updatemy profile.
My favorite music was originally (since 1995) trance, but now I listen a bit of everything: chillout, ambience, trip-hop, classical, sountracks, rock, punk-rock, latin etc. in fact I like to collect and to keep my music sorted and ready for specific situations (motivation, relax, background, party and even for romance 
). I usually like to give to each piece of music a special meaning.
To listen and to keep my music sorted I use several players:
- Winamp (lite version) is the fastest player that I use when I want to listen a single song (when I click on a mp3 file)
- Musicmatch Jukebox is the program I use to sort mp3 id3 tags and mp3 filenames and to encode my audio cds into mp3s
- iTunes is the one I’m actually testing to sort my entire music collection
Anyway, in these above few lines I didn’t say a lot about what I wanted to say. Here I come…
When I was a child I was listening mainly to the radio, or tapes that my friends borrowed me (and that I copied, of course). Some examples: Francesco Salvi, Queen, Sting, Sinthetized music (coming from my sister’s collection), Elio E le storie tese (given by a very funny friend of mine) etc.
Then something changed and I took my own path into music. When I first heard dance music, I felt in love for it. Groups such as Corona, Cappella, E-rotic, Scooter etc. were the first music that I really enjoyed with my heart (yes, you can laugh but at that period I was 12-13 years old…). I even started to do bad-mixed compilations, without mixer, on tapes… at that time I wish my parents could have seen my passion and bought me a mixer and some audio equipment, but it was not the case.
Thus I never developed my music passion, besides listening to it and sort it.
Of course I had the chance to give myself to this passion later, but my grown passion for computers was higher and stopped me doing that. Anyway this is another story.
In the dance music I distinguished "commercial dance" such as Corona, Cappella songs and other commercials and another branch: Scooter, Dune etc. which did faster dance.
…faster dance, closer to trance music, which I discovered on the radio thanks to the "Alca Parade". Dj Aqua, Dj Never… these DJs are my initiatiors into trance.
When I got my first computer, (Christmas 1994, a Christmas that I will never forget -the computer changed my life-) I begun to listen computer-made songs, so called modules. This sort of music is something special that can’t be easily cateogorized. Anyway, techno, techno-ambience, happy hardcore are the easier genres that I can remember without doing much research.
My first trance CD is The World of Trance, something that now I can’t listen anymore: it’s too acid. Anyway, in 1995 I was enjoying it.
Robert Miles made me listen more relaxing music, so called dream music. After a couple of years listening 883 -my favorite Italian rock-pop group that i begun to listen in 1993-, some dream, and the same trance CDs that I had, it begun for me the "trance boom".
In 1997, after buying D. Trance Vol. 6 I decided to buy the entire D. Trance collection. I own from Vol. 1 till Vol. 12. Then I stopped because I didn’t like anymore the compilation. I bought a lot of other CDs so now I own about 100 trance CDs. I transferred at least half of them on mp3: I have a project to create a DVD collection containing all my trance songs on mp3.
During high school, anyway, I started to listen also punk-rock music. My first punk group that I enjoyed was Fenix TX. Here there is a funny story to tell: in IRC chat my nickname was "Fenix", so one day a girl asked me if I was listening to that group. As I was curious she sent me some mp3 files and simply I loved it. Thus I begun to listen punk music…
During university I stopped buying trance CDs because I begun to copy trance CDs from my friends or downlaod mp3s from the web and because trance bacame boring after a while. One day I’ll anyway try to retrieve all what I missed. It will be quite hard, but I know some trance fanatics that may help me.
Now, as said in this post’s third paragraph, I like to listen a bit of everything and I’m simply open to discover new kind of music. So if you have a passion for a specific group or a specific kind of music, you may share it with me. I can easily like it.
Tags:
No Tags
February 4, 2005, Category: Personal
Print version
Since a while my room was quite a mess. I’ve just sorted it.
Order makes me happy and makes my mind clearer.
What I enjoy is the lack of objects. I don’t need a lot of objects: they distract me. What I need is the essential and I need that it is sorted well.
I like also order in my computer files. Actually they aren’t very ordered, but at least I can find almost whatever I want without trouble in searching (I use the Total Commander search engine which is one of my favorite features fo this file manager and helps to make my life easier).
In the last weeks I enjoed dancing merengue and salsa with a girl of my course. Thanks to her company I could improve a lot. Today in fact, during "class" I had the impression i learnt nothing at all (I’ve jsut ahd the 3rd lesson), because I’ve already practised 2 times.
I also enjoyed winning a bid on ebay. I’ve purchased a new graphic card - an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro - to play my favorite videogame better: Joint Operations. I’m really looking forward to get it. It costed me 172.5$ + 22.5$ shipping = 195$. With the swiss customs taxes it will be around 223$ (260.- CHF). The same card costs in Switzerland, -at Steg- about 360.- CHF (307$). I’ve read that the cooler is quite silent, while now I have an old Nvidia Geforce 3 Ti 200 which makes a lot of noise. I really hope that my computer will be more silent later
This is the year where I started to be myself again: goal oriented, active, planner and with lot of enthusiasm. 2004 was the opposite, it was almost a failure.
Besides dancing salsa (and merengue and bachata) I also started to do body building. This is the end of my first month of training. Today I got some integrators that my friend Greg ordered for me when he did a massive order for himself and for some other people. I don’t want to take drugs that will pump up my muscles, like some body builders do. Greg is doing "natural body building, he is my friend and my coach and I trust him.
This week, as freelancer, I finished a small website which should make me earn some money. not bad… after doing 2 times the inventory in the shops where my father worked and after this website I’m looking forward to get new part-time opportunities.
This website made me learn some new Internet Explorer problems… and some new work around techniques to fix them. As I’m a perfectionist and I couldn’t find the solution myself I even posted a question in a couple of forums: on webdesign.about.com and on Dev Shed. Nobody answered me, so I decided to subscribe to a non-free webdesigners resource: Experts Exchange. There not only I got the answer I was looking for, I got it in less than 24 hours! That’s an efficient service! If I’ll go on as freelancer I think I’ll keep my subscribtion to the service, as it’s making me learn new techniques and it s saving me a lot of time to solve some really boring annoyances (especially with Crappy Internet Explorer).
I’ve been also active in the mozillazine forums and in the gallery 2 forum. I like to contribute to the open source community, especially by giving suggestions…
Oh, yes, I almost forgot: Yesterday I enjoyed a nice tunisian dinner in the AIESEC office Thank you Nader, you did a great cooking.
Tags:
No Tags
, Category: Personal
Print version