Ivan Zorzin (Giles)

I've always had a passion for graphics and math but I never been able to draw. When a day they teached me about Cartesian graphs my life changed and became something of the kind 'How does this f(x) look like ?' ...

When computers started to be around and I had the possibility to use one (my first one was a ZX 80) the very first y = sin (x) graph came out .. was blocky .. 64x48 pixles or so .. but it's all how it started.

I've always been fond of computer graphics since then, spending a lot of time plotting 'all it was possible to plot' and reading 'all it was possible to read', I've always had a strong interest in rendering and 3D graphic especially 'unusual shapes' and mathematical functions.

From 2D to 3D ... wireframe ... points ... then even ray tracing on a ZX Spectrum and Z-Buffer techinques for rendering complex surfaces on a Sinclair QL. Sometimes I was interested in 'math precision of the shapes' often just wishing 'something beautyful to see never seen before' ... fractals, cellular automatas ... I think I tried a bit of all it was possible to generate by algorithms.

A passion

What was missing at that time maybe was communication, of course we were a bunch of friends with ideas spending weekends playing with computers or trying to poll from a computer shop to another asking 'Can I please try this on your computer ? '.

There were people with passions like me but with no place to put them so slowly in time we more or less turned all into doing 'something else' then .. you know .. for most it turned into a hobby and when they started to be too busy with life the time for hobbies ended too.

But I simply never stopped doing it, I can say it really been 'the thing I always wanted to do in my life'.

Thanks to my coding skills and such after years of my 'alternative job' I managed to get hired by a company that needed me 'because I was very good in 68000 assembler coding and HW' (for this, I have to thanks the great Uncle Clive and his QL) with the promise of 'we can't grant you more than 3 months of work'. At that time it was ok for me, I SO wanted finally a job where I had to work on computers. :)

The three months became almost nine years and the company grew from a bunch or more or less 'mad people' like me into one of the world leading companies about security systems and one of the pioneers in digital video recording, my biggest achievement there is I am one of the 'fathers' of their best product an 'adventure' I will never forget.

From darkness to light

Life and things can change a lot .. especially when a place turns form a place where you were sharing a small room with 4 people swapping coffee cups and passing each other sandwiches and crisps while coding making occasional funny comments about what 'Mr. Adonis' was doing in the apartment having the window in front of us to a multi national corporate with offices around the world ISO 9000 certified.

In short .. lots of things changed, most of them too fast, work never been the same nor the passion .. life started to go very strange as well, I was returning back home more stressed than anything else, unable to sit in front of a computer doing something nice ..

Almost three years spent in a really strange state of mind with really weird experiences .. finally I decided to do 'a last try' and I created 'my last website' where I put all I had in my heart in those moments: graphic, passion and life.

One night a friend does a mistake and ends up in a place he tought was something else ... the same night I do a mistake and I make a typo in a Google search or can't remember at all what I was looking for, I still don't know really what made me type a 2 lines email like 'Hello, you could like to see my website ..' followed by my URL I think ...

Two weeks later when all was completely forgotten an email of the kind 'Hi, apologizes for the delay .. ' appeared in my mailbox .. Giles meets Yak ... the rest is history ...