31 Jul 2008

iron maiden's gonna get you, no matter how far

On August 4th i'm gonna see Iron Maiden live for the first time in my life. The reason i am so excited about the concert is that i realised i will never be as passionate about any other band as i used to be about iron maiden. i had been their passionate fan during all highschool, and quite some time afterwards. albums, bootlegs, live concerts, videos, b sides, artwork, tshirts, you name it, i had it. i knew all lyrics from all their songs (and still know an impressive amount of it). i convinced all my friends to give them a chance. i listened to fear of the dark and dance of death each morning, around 7 a.m. when i crossed cismigiu park on my way to highschool. i have a tremendous amount of memories connected to iron maiden one way or another. and my greatest dream back then obviously was to see them perform live.


until they come, here's a video with two of my favourite guys ever, maiden's vocal bruce dickinson and top gear's jeremy clarkson.


29 Jul 2008

random links of interest

i have spoken before about how much i enjoy presenting, and one of my goals is to become and actual good presenter (whatever that means). one of the consequences is that i can't have enough of related readings and talks, because i am trying to use more and more platforms and instruments that are completely unrelated to powerpoint. which is why the visual thinkers community gathered by VizThink, and the numerous links i plunged it from the main site have been my brain candy during the last two days. the only thing i now have in mind is how to gather a sort of local community of visual thinkers, because i think it would be nice to meet and share thoughts every now and then.



until i do that, however, i must admit i was pleasantly surprised by powerpointheaven, which basically shows that powerpoint as a medium is not actually as wicked as the people who simply choose to overcrowd it with neverending bullets, charts and templates. just as i was enticed by the simple philosophy (and not only) behind visual thinking company XPLANE: "when you communicate clearly, people understand. when they understand, they make decisions which lead to actions and create results". and i also found interesting the Daniel Rose's idea to create The Global Collaboration Cue Card Project, that gathers visual interpretations of the concept "collaboration" coming from various people around the world.

seriously, now

some time ago, i read A. Plesu's "Tescani Diary". the reading was enjoyable and thought-provoking, and there were several ideas i particularly embraced. one of them said that "the act of thinking should start by taking a platitude seriously. starting from a platitude is equivalent to starting without a personal idea. the people who have ideas too fast, who have ideas even from the beginning, almost always end up not trully thinking. the key to optimal speculative start-up: not having ideas, but rather obtaining them."

i love the idea of taking a platitude seriously. i work in an environment that cannot work with presumably "general ideas": we fear not being particular enough, so we'd rather invent or fabricate something (a benefit, most of the time), than taking "general ideas" seriously and communicating them differently to people, embracing a new perspective and shading a whole new light on them. and that's a pity: in my opinion, most "general ideas" are general because everybody takes them for granted and nobody actually takes the trouble to go deeper into finding out what these ideas actually mean, what they actually translate into. although showing a brand new meaning of a "general idea" is very impactful and intriguing, because it makes people think: "hey, i never looked at it this way".
pic from here.

personal wrap-up

i have spent the last few months growing up and developing in many different ways. the blogging gap that i had was thus due to two major causes: on one hand, the fact that i attended a lot of workshops, and worked on a lot of interesting "extra-curricular" projects; on the other hand, the fact that i spent a lot of time thinking about what i do, what i want to do, what i see myself doing with my life. The truth is that i love doing so many different things, i love investigating so many different areas and i find so many places and subjects fascinatingly interesting, that i kinda got stuck in a carousel of emerging decisions. No wonder, since I had to deal with a lot of interesting circumstances, varying from amazing opportunities to pragmatic and rather painful surrenders. Happily, i am surrounded by some amazing people, whose support, ideas and feedback were essential for my mental sanity.


now most things have cleared up in my mind, and i have some trully great plans at least for the near-future. one of my conclusions was that i miss blogging. so here i am, resurrecting this old personal space that will keep on gathering my silly musings.