It’s What We Do (Gilmour, Wright) – 6:17
Gilmour: guitars, bass – Mason: drums – Wright: keyboards, synthesisers, strings
From the first few seconds of the track, in line with the overall progression of the album, the listener seems to be taken on a journey backwards through familiar suggestions and echoes that trace, as if along an imaginary river, the entire Pink Floyd story. The Hammond organ paves the way for the synths, while the first acoustic guitar breaks suggest references to Welcome To The Machine; then the song develops on the strings of a classic Floydian blues in a climax very similar to Shine On You Crazy Diamond, on which Wright’s keyboard and Gilmour’s solos phrasing relentlessly. At minute 5:15 you can recognise the splendid guitar sequence used as a promotional minispot on the band’s official website.
Translated from: “Pink Floyd. Il fiume infinito – Le storie dietro le canzoni” – Giunti Editore
There is a song from Pink Floyd’s last album, The Endless River, called It’s What We Do: If you want to experience the essence of Pink Floyd’s sound, you need to listen to this track. It captures their essence perfectly.
I start with this track because if you want to understand my essence, my dream, we need to talk about Information Technology.
It all began when I was eleven, while browsing through a cartoon magazine where the old Commodore VIC-20 was featured. A spark ignited in my mind, and I became fascinated by this odd machine.
I convinced my father, who worked for the former Rockwell-Rimoldi in northern Italy, to show me the IT department of the company, where an old IBM/360 was in use. That afternoon, as I left the engine room, I literally cried. I had seen the light: I would become an IT engineer. Period.
My high school was a vocational school where I studied to become a hardware engineer because none of the high schools in our area offered courses focused on software development (it was the mid-80s…). A vocational school allowed me to apply the theory I learned immediately; the school focused on digital electronics and microprocessors, so the connection to the IT world was clear. After five years of study, I graduated with top marks, presenting an interface between my Apple IIgs and a Meteosat receiver, a re-engineering of a full video converter featured in the Nuova Elettronica magazine. But why build a full video converter if we already had a color PC with plenty of slots?
In the final months of school, I also became interested in industrial automation, which led to my first job. I was hired by the former NUMServomac in Milan (now simply NUM) as a testing engineer, and later as an automation engineer, responsible for designing and building automated testing equipment, then based on the glorious Hewlett-Packard 9000/300.
After a brief stint at MEMC, where we produced silicon wafers for the electronics industry (I worked on epitaxial reactors and in the wastewater treatment department), I left the job when globalization took off. I then moved into the world of packaging machines, first with Marchesini Group, then Romaco (pure pharma), and later Siemens Dematic (automated warehouses).
This marked the beginning of the most exciting period of my life: traveling around the world, working as a contractor. During those ten years, I decided to move from Italy to Switzerland. Life was easier without the bureaucratic hurdles of Italy, where I needed to hire a tax consultant, a lawyer, and so on. In Switzerland, it was just you and the public administration—simple, easy, and cheap!
Then my wife came.
Then my two children came!
I needed stability—no more trips around the world.
So I returned to being an employee, working for the (now defunct) Waterline as automation engineer, Groupe Schneider as project manager, and UBS as unix engineer. Almost 95% of people in Switzerland have worked directly or indirectly for UBS at some point in their lives.
In parallel with these activities, I developed my personal cloud storage solution, AnoniCloud. What’s special about a personal cloud storage? AnoniCloud doesn’t track you, doesn’t profile you, and doesn’t send your data anywhere. All data are encrypted before leaving your device, and what we store is just a bunch of meaningless data to us. Only you, the customer, have the password and can decrypt the content. The password is not recoverable by us: if we could recover or rotate the password, it would mean we, as a provider, have access to your data. So, no password recovery at all.
AnoniCloud is an ecosystem, not just an app, that helps you generate and manage data on your mobile device.
Finally, unlike our competitors, we are independent. Before choosing a service provider, dig into its history: who works there, who funds them, who supports them, their affiliations, and what these people believe.
You’ll be surprised!
More projects in the future? For sure! I’m always at work—stay tuned.