This is what Zack de la Rocha of R.A.T.M. was singing in `Guerrilla Radio'. I just put the CD in my stereo, raising the volume as much as possible till I don't get kicked outside by my parents. I've been a Rage Against The Machine fan since 1996, when I listened for the first time in my life their S/T album (1992), and I realized that I had lost 4 years without that energy in my ears! Then I got `Evil Empire' (1996), `The battle of Los Angeles' (1999) and a couple of singles (`The ghost of Tom Joad' single+video 1997, `Guerrilla Radio' 1999). Hail to all of them!! I would have given ANYTHING to see them live... and finally I did!!

18 february 2000, The Battle Of Milan, this is what they called their show. The building was crowded with more than 10'000 people, the four guys from L.A. on the stage while the people were screaming and singing with them. I managed to get in the first line in front of the band and I could see Zack singing with the same powerful voice I heard in the CD, and Morello playing the guitar like only he can do!

So they were singing `All hell can't stop us now'. I don't know what, but something actually stopped them. 2000 was the last year for R.A.T.M., when Zack de la Rocha decided to leave the band for some `disagreements' with the rest of the band. They got Chris Cornell from Soundgarden and founded Audioslave. But this is another story... I don't know actually why I started writing all these bullshits... I just wanted to say `do NOT let you RATM CDs get dusty' ;)

Guilty parties:
Zack de la Rocha (vocals)
Tom Morello (guitars)
Brad Wilk (drums)
Tim Commerford (bass)

Links:
R.A.T.M. official web site
R.A.T.M. lyrics

Whilst surfing the web today I ran across this pretty smart product: the Optimus keyboard. It's just a keyboard to plug into a computer... but with additional features. It is made with organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) on every key. This makes possible to actually draw any symbol on the keys, allowing to have different layouts with the same physical peripheral:

Are you a Quake player? You can set up the Quake layout too:

The keyboard is also equipped with additional keys which can be mapped to be shortcuts to produce any sequence (either write a string or execute a command in the system). The cool thing is that the keyboard will be OS-independent and open source, sold along with the SDK to program the interface. It should be launched in summer 2006 and cost ``less than a good mobile phone'' (as said by the producer).

Read this article and try to guess the answer. So true!

It's quite long, but it's worth to be read :)

For four days a year Modena is the center of the italian snow crew, since here takes place a fair called Skipass, with contests, exhibitions, shops and stuff about winter sports.. but not only! Lately this event has focused a lot on *freestyle* sports, such as snowboard, skateboard, inline skating, bmx, and motocross freestyle, with contests and amazing exhibitions on high ramps and artificial snow too!!

This year the meeting was from oct 29th to nov 1st, and I went there every day but the last. As representative of freestyler.it I had a press pass to get in and also to get closer into contest areas.

A few pics.. last two taken from www.skipass.it