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DMLR*Newsletter — Xtra GOLD_60
I. NOVEMBER.
 November is no more autumn and not winter yet. It's a time lag just useful for nostalgia. When nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush of the past—right now I'm thinking back to when I settled in front of my portable computer screen. PowerBook Series G3.
1998 I bought my second Macintosh on a bank lending basis. In the race between Apple and Microsoft, I had opted for the former, being in my opinion more user-friendly as for the software incorporated. The first machine had been a Macintosh Performa I started using SimpleText, ClarisImpact and ClarisOrganizer, simply powerful software™, FAXstf™. As well as the best shareware posted around for free, Eudora, GraphicConverter, and Acrobat. And, finally, the Internet Connection Kit barely downloading some shit, 56K's awesome speed!
Even my personal website, named D.M.L.R. as acronym of 'Direct Marketing Linked Resources' even tough initially without the registered domain dmlr.org that came three years later, was published through the stuff provided with PowerBook Series G3.
I have proudly maintained a personal website (www.dmlr.org) that is representing both the old internet environment and a form of resistance because I can write and publish on-line what I like to express as my own opinions. Meantime I have kept my PowerBook G3 on a small Ikea-DIY desk as vintage piece of computing history—I would take some bundled software DVDs or Imation floppy discs in order to revive old spreadsheets, graphics, texts, GIFs from being chopped into media oblivion.
Diskettes are particularly critical to establish the useful connection to the past of www.dmlr.org since the archive contains much of the published material before 2000, including the vintage edition of DMLR News from 1997/98. Here some issues in Italian text just for the record:
Maybe just to assert that THE CONTENT WAS KING for us early users of the Internet. "You know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours? Your Internet, back then, the Defense Department called it DARPAnet... and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time."
(*) The sentences in Italics on this page are excerpted from "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon (2014, www.vintage-books.co.uk).
II. MODENA.
My father was born exactly hundred years ago (1925), I have to remember it because it's a long time ago and his father was given birth in the XIX century! I have no memory of my grandad he died one day while I was 3-year-old and I lived far from him and right that summer he went away I was recovering from whooping cough on the Alps. My father left in a hurry to reach his birthplace city for the funeral, Modena.
My grandad was employed as a clerk on a Parmesan cheese warehouse, managed by a bank, for the cheese wheels left to mature represented an investment value. He worked really near to his family house that was a modest apartment on a public housing. And my father was born, first of three siblings, in the same old quarter between a large foundry and a car factory. Real Economy. That house to be found always on the same site despite the real-estate development. With the modern towered Maserati HQ noticeable in the background. While the foundry got closed in the 1980s, but it remains as symbol in the city story because of the massacre of local protesting workers by the military force sent there in 1950.
When my father, a blue collar himself, died in 1994 the economy was rapidly changing if not already dematerialized as it occurred within the decade's end. And I was between jobs just from the year he passed away.
"I cannot and must not forget. Remembering is the essence of what I am. The price of my forgetting, great sir, is more than you can imagine, let alone pay." (*)
My father means to me the first toys I usually used not damaged for years; his shouts of rebuke after the long afternoon I had been spending on the street to play football—when kids ruled the streets; the introduction to the sexual life he told me one day without a clue I had of that initiative and why; the constant boost in studying and learning till the university years; the home-made Nocino liquor recipe (from walnut green fruits); the buying wine in bulk from local farmers to be bottled and stored in our cellar; or the habit to dinner with friends even at the Osteria Francescana sooner than the restaurant became the internationally famous 'hostelry' as owned by a multi-star chef—see www.osteriafrancescana.it. So back in the nineties at 35, my father no longer among the living, I could say to feel alone for the very first time in my life!
(*) The sentences in Italics on this page are excerpted from "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon (2014, www.vintage-books.co.uk).
III. OUTPLACEMENT.
[Flashback] Mid in the 1990s. I was fired by a ceramic tiles industry under the pretext of looking for a better job. They call it Outplacement. This was when a Chicago-based firm was called on to help a company implementing a downsizing and so they did introduce the outplacement methods in Italy. I left the company with a severance check for about two months' salary. It took numerous seasons to get over the sense of depression and loss I felt that day.
The real concept behind the outplacement is that no one would work for the same company as many years as our parents were accustomed to do, often all their life. American consultants tried to teach the employees how to change their job as often as possible and take advantage of unpredicted opportunities to move on along one's career.
Publishing firms to place local ads, for example. But soon I started to know new categories of business, being in contact with young professionals standing out from the Internet era. They were basically computer geeks or else somebody with the bandwidth. Founders of companies selling brand new Web services that old entrepreneurs had many problems to understand. I went on for a brief time as one of the middlemen between the two kinds of economies and I was on the dotcom side. I was going around with my black car to visit SMEs just saying that simple concept, "someday you will be able to sell products online...", meanwhile I spoke up for connection, cyberspace, 24/7, firewall, e-mail and so on. New Planet.
Later I realized that maybe Web design was really my main business. Indeed I started associating to the general consultancy on Internet the making of basic websites for companies willing to adopt the new medium, i.e. online catalogues. Old-school HTML pages. I actually set up three different Net catalogues, from robotics to household plastic articles, before I had been associated with a full-service promotion agency.
That tumultuous but developing experience ended up in 2001 after the collapse of the Twin Towers and the "Ground Zero" wreckage left after that terrorist attack. If you go to other sources--the Internet for example--you might get a different picture. Out in the vast anarchism of cyberspace, among the billions of self-resonant fantasies, dark possibilities are beginning to emerge.(*)
That 9/11 right after the towers, I was on the road following my daily visiting schedule and the news came onto the car radio. I tought about hooking a U-turn and heading back home. As for me that TV up-to-the-minute coverage of the disaster recalls a "Ground Zero" of my job because I needed to restart my working life from scratch.
Peace!(*) The sentences in Italics on this page are excerpted from "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon (2014, Vintage Books at www.vintage-books.co.uk).
IV. NORTHWARD.
I entered the United States of America air space from Canada, since the Great Lakes Area inspired me. Indeed I passed three days in Chicago, literally the Wind City for me then, before leaving to Minneapolis where I had booked a room at a family-run B&B located in Fremont Street. I'll tell you for why. Let me explain by getting some clues. Mississippi river and Gold Flour old mill. And of course the Minneapolis sound, as member to the New Power Generation. I was playing the saxophone.
I had seen 'Fargo' (the movie) a pair of weeks before flying to the U.S.A., while 'Fargo' (the TV series) would be produced more than ten years later—'Fargo' seasons I-II-III actually became my favourite filming stories ever until I gave up watching the telly. But recently I have found the series on Amazon Prime to watch it horizontal front of the Lenovo tablet, under scores of blankets for the autumn is going on extremely cold this year: 15° at home without heating.
Despite it happened to snow often those days, I took notes of all my movements by foot in order to visit the most of the places I could in a few days.
Walker Art Center, Caribou Cafe, Mixed Blood Theatre, Mpls Sculpture Garden, Frederick Weisman Art Museum, and Minnehaha Falls by the bus #7—I sheltered me from frequent late snowing at Nicollet Mall with a second-level skyway system connecting the shopping blocks. From that journey I kept tears back for I knew it would have been the last flight excursion for many years. Music track? "Get Wild" if you really need to know. This nostalgia, dude, it dates from the early days of the dotcom boom and it will mean moving forward northward. The future is out here on the permafrost.
"More and more servers together in the same place putting out levels of heat that quickly become problematic unless you spend the budget on A/C... thing to do is to go north, set up server farms where heat dissipation won't be so much of a problem, take your power from renewables like hydro or sunlight, use surplus heat to help sustain whatever communities grow up around the data centers."(*) The sentences in Italics on this page are excerpted from "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon (2014, www.vintage-books.co.uk).
V. Direct Marketing.
The DIRECT MARKETING glossary is available on DMLR in a 3-document edition (PDF) you can browse here or easily download onto your desktop.
It consists of 19 pages as a whole, 311 paragraphs/terms, 236 Kb, 7450 words, 44772 types!
Select and print the three parts of the glossary in English from PDF::Menu.
Sure the Internet has been changing the traditional snail-mail based direct marketing. And yet the Internet marketing is a consequence of the old direct marketing somehow. Many terms you'll find inside the DM glossary are suiting for the e-mail marketing too... but they come from a business development initiative of Canada Post Corporation [hommage à Connexions --centre de resources en marketing direct].
VI. Linked
Resources.
Next week I will be standing at an Emergency.org stall to support and promote their projects. Fundraising will consist of selling out Emergency-branded "Un Panettone Fatto Per Bene" from temporary outlets throughout Italian cities places (Panettone is a rich bread made with eggs, fruit, and butter, typically eaten at Christmas, hereabout handed out at 22€ as a symbol of solidarity in favour of Emergency activities).
From the Programma Italia established by Emergency, we could note the consequences of public spending cuts, commercialization and privatization of medical services, increasing individuals excluded from the healthcare system. Emergency undertaking is aiming to take care of all people in need without prejudice and discrimination. It's not only about securing care treatments, but also dignity to all without any kind of discomfort. A medicine guaranteed as social and political action.
Visit regalisolidali.emergency.it.
VII. MyQuiz.
 What does it mean 'online'?
1) Connected and turned on as a computer when it is connected to an Internet service through a modem or other electronic connecting device. 2) Information, messages or data that are received through a computer that is connected to an Internet service. |
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