W

inter has not yet gone by…
The official astronomical spring was already some days ago.

Like a wonderful haiku by Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉) says:

年暮れぬ
笠きて草鞋
はきながら

Toshi kurenu
Kasa kite waraji
Hakinagara

Another year is gone
And I still wear
Straw hat and straw sandals

If your browser is unable to display the Japanese text correctly, here is a picture of it:

The world revolves and we don’t notice it.

We put one foot in front of the other
and we don’t realize that we have walked a whole life.

There is a promise in the air: spring is coming.

…And once again, we will wait for the summer
and will not realize that the spring is gone.

I wish we could stay in spring a whole life long.

I

magine a clock, set deep into a mountain.
…Imagine a clock that doesn’t need winding for the next 10,000 years.

…Imagine a clock that will sound a chime melody and this melody will never be repeated once again in the whole 10,000 years.

…Imagine a clock that will be standing there, ticking the universe’s time away thousands of years after you, me and everyone we know are dead and gone.

…Imagine a clock on which our children’s children’s children will be able to tell the time from, or wind up to produce that same day at noon a new chime melody that has never been played before and that will ever be played again in the thousands years to come.

Continue reading The 10,000 year clock →

O

h, blimey… now it’s freezing alright.

…Nice & cozy on the couch.

…Media Center on.

…What’s tonight’s movie, my dear?

N

o, I’m not talking about Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, though I’m still talking about poetry… in a way.

My paradise lost is not entirely figurative… I’m talking about a splendid uninhabited islet which I have had the privilege to visit for some years in a row.

This mythical place is located at 40° 44′ 37″ N and  13° 59′ 36″ E and looks like a banana floating on the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

I’m quite sure that a lot of people will look at the picture and will know exactly where it is and what’s its name.

Continue reading Paradise Lost →

I

‘ve not listened to new music for years.
My great passion is my collection of 3000 (give or take) records from the 60-70-80 era.

Rock, Canterbury, Reiterative, Minimal music, Symphonic Rock, Progressive, Pshychedelic, West Coats, the first Punk and New Wave, never forget Jazz and Classic… that’s what I love.

Continue reading Brushing off the rust →

W

ow! A pyrotechnical show is going on all over the Low Lands.

The long promised storm is coming this way. It’s fascinating but also rather terrifying.
The Dutch are not used to see this.
We’re not in Tornado Alley… we’re not in the Caribbean… this is not India and there is no  Monsoon season in Europe.

Nevertheless, the horizon is set ablaze by dozens of lightnings, while the thunder is rolling almost continuously from horizon to horizon.

Getting scary, actually.

I once have seen lightning strike just 30 meters from where I was standing and I can still remember I almost wet myself and jumped at least 20 cm into the air with a racing heart and the immediate comprehension that we cannot hide form nature and when it decides to strike, we are just at its mercy, no matter how technologically and culturally advanced the human race may be.

But this time I’m not in the open, I have a nice book besides me (the first volume of Ken Follet’s Century Trilogy), a good cuppa and my wife.

So come on, storm… just do your job and move over.

W

hat a corny start, actually…
But hey, this was the title of the default example of a blog post… Besides, all geeks have apparently a tender spot for this salute.

“Hello World!” is the first example in every programming book… how to create a little piece of script that will make a dialog pop-up saying: “Hello World!”.

How clever one must feel after compiling the script and seeing on the screen these two little words and the exclamation mark… how many blood sweat and tears did it not cost to convince the script the ‘!’ was not an operand but just a character to be shown in the dialog window.

Well, if this is the most used first-step declaration in the Digital World (Hello again…), who am I to put myself above the hundreds of thousands, or millions of people before me and try to start a new blog with something different than “Hello World!” ?

So to everybody out there:

The Renaissance-Man