Every end is a greater beginning

Once upon a time, a fish was swimming in the big sea.
She was alone, wandering around, and questioning about the size of the sea.
She was a very curious and intelligent fish, and was taking note of everything.
She had many friends among the many creatures of the sea, and was very appreciated for her humour and smartness.
She liked to venture in places where other fishes were not likely to go. Not for food, but simply for the sake of it.

But.

But she was not satisfied. She needed more.
So she ventured to explore.
Alone.


At the extreme end of a long wooden pier stood a fisherman.
He was sitting with his fishing rod in the hands, smoking his pipe, looking at the water and thinking. He liked to stay there, meditating, getting lost in remote fantasies and dreams.
He never caught any fish, but diligently prepared and did all things to be done.
Suddenly the float went underwater, and he gave a gentle pull.
He quickly understood he had a big prey, and was determined not to lose it. After some time, he managed to pull the big fish out of the water, and removed the hook from her lips.
He looked into the tired fish eyes for some moments, put her into his net, then put the net in the water, launched again his fishing line, and stood still, smiling. Something changed inside him.

He started thinking about the big fish, while looking at her swimming inside the net. He imagined her life, free, in the immense ocean. He tried actually to feel like the fish. And fantasized about this, constructing stories in his mind while the afternoon became evening. He took a nap too, and also the fish felt asleep. Maybe they met in their dreams.
Then the man touched the water with his hand. The fish was strangely calm and was waving her tail. Was she happy?

The evening set up with wonderful colors, while the sun was slowly sinking away in the sea. The sky was bright, and the first stars were starting to light as diamonds in the blue. The sea was calm and with slow waves.
With clear eyes and heart, the man then started speaking to the fish. "Oh dear Silver-Blue fish, you are so beutiful and pure. I want not to bring you home. You dont deserve my pan". "Why?", replied the fish. "If that is my destiny, let it be. I dont want to be alone. For my whole life i wandered in the sea. I think its a really rare chance that the two of us met, since I found nowhere someone like you".

"Neither i did", said the man, crying, "and you were my only capture in so many years. I desired to catch you for a long time. I know that i will badly miss you, but you have to be free." The fish was crying too. "I would like to stay with you. Now I am not alone anymore".
"We are rare and very similar but each of us has to have his own life. Our encounter was not by chance. Come on, dont refuse your freedom, wonder fish. You were free, and free have to be. Smile and be happy. You will for sure not be alone anymore. Maybe we will meet again." And saying that opened the net with trembling hands.

The fish was reluctant to swim away, and said: "Oh, dear fisherman. I am really happy to have met you. Not only you set me free, but you taught me something i will never forget."
"Dearest among all, unique, Silver-Blue Fish, you were the teacher. I am now a better man. I learned a lot of things from you. I too will never forget you." replied the fisherman.
Then the fish swam into the big sea, again free, wawing her tail. She was sad, but felt that she had to go.

The fisherman remained for some time on his seat at the end of the pier. His tears confused with the fine rain and lost into the sea. Then his pipe extinguished. He sighted. Finally darkness came. After a while, he stood up, packed his things, and went home.

On the way back, he was smiling.


Marco

Walking on Earth's Spine

Walking on Earth's Spine

We walked on Earth's Spine
and felt the bumps on every step,
discovered gold in the leopard's eye,
heard the bone cracking sound,
and saw the resting lions feeding their cubs after the kill.

Can you feel the blow
that's running on these plains
from the beginning of time?
Can you sense the underground flow
of Life poured into Life?

Stay still and be silent. Try to perceive the little laughter
of Good and Bad dancing together.
Everyone's changing but struggling to last,
and both: hunter and victim
give back their proteins in the end.

Bring home a grain of sand,
bring home a single leaf.
Make them hatch inside your heart.
Be the Music. Be the Dance,
and give back your words to the wind.

Marco Guardigli,


Ulusaba (Sir Richard Branson resort)
South Africa, march 3, 2003

Casio FX-702P

This is a pocket calculator I had when I was in the high school.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/Casio_FX-702P_Programmable_Calculator.png

I remember saving a lot of money and coins to buy it. I kept my money in an old malt can 'orzoro'.

Then I went to my dad and asked him to buy the calculator for me.

It was 1982 I guess. I was 16.

I enjoyed a lot programming it, and also has some correspondent around, and we were exchanging code. I remember testing a lot of sort algorithms to identify the best performer. Bubble sort, inserion sort, shell-metzner sort, quicksort.

I remember trying hard to understand quicksort.

I developed a game on it, along with my friend Marco Crosa. It was a kind of shooting game, but difficult to do something very dynamic on a single line of text display.

Then I was hacking it, and bought the printer too to print my programs. The printer was not able to print lower case letters, but I hacked the calculator and was able to find strange codes that corresponded, when printed, to the lowercase letters.

In the same period my friend Daniele Stella was hacking with the Hewlett Packard HP 41.




.

The computer I started with

Here I am going really back in my memories.
This is the computer I started with. It is an HP-97 programming calculator.
It was 1976. I was 10.

(see http://www.hpmuseum.org/ )

And I was fascinated by this incredible machine.

It was programmable, and it had an amazing 224 bytes of program memory to play with.
Memory was not permanent, and it was lost every time you powered off the calculator.

But it had a magnetic stripe mass memory. We were using small two-sided magnetic cards, each side was able to record 112 bytes. So passing the two sides of the card in the reader was allowing a complete save or load of the program memory.

What a time!