When in Rome, Do as the Vaticans Do: October 17, 2006

Your imagination will have to provide
the organ music and the choir chanting
to the glory of god.

Continuing the recycling of old posts from a 2006 cruise with my parents, but now with 100% more snarky comments!

Yeah, about the pictures? I lied. Didn’t have any time in the morning and forgot my camera in the rush to get to the train. I’ll take them tomorrow. In the meantime, my dad took some pictures, which I will eventually obtain.

This has become a trend. I tend to let people with more megapixels do the photography. Then I get copies of the pictures, edit them, and give them meaning, like here. So if you've promised me pictures, and haven't given them to me yet? I'm coming for you. Oh, and I hate getting pictures off Facebook. They're low quality and fb completely destroys the metadata.

It’s just a 20-minute ride in, if that, to the station right by the Vatican. There’s plenty of trains, they come reasonably often, they’re fast (top speed I saw was 140 kph, around 90 mph), and they’re well-used by commuters. Didn’t get a chance to ride the subway or muni buses, though we did take one of those bus tours, which was not only pretty damn good but also could serve as a convenient day pass (your ticket is valid for 24 hours).

90mph, eh? How about that. Hey, CalTrain? BART? Yeah, that's right you friggin' underperformers, I'm looking at you.

Piazza San Pietro

The bus tour drove by a huge amount of interesting spots, and there was narration, though I couldn’t understand or wasn’t paying much attention most of the time. It was hard to connect the spoken narration with what I was seeing, without someone pointing at what the hell they were talking about.

Oh, god, History! Why? And you were just an innocent bystander... how tragic, to die in a drive-by sightseeing!

"We repel terrorist cavalry charges with
our pikes and garish outfits!"

Before the bus tour, though, we went through the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. 

The line for the Sistine Chapel was like a treadmill. Basically, at the back of the line, some tour group assistant would recruit you to be part of a tour group with the promise that the group was way up ahead in the line.

So then you’d go way up ahead in the line, cutting ahead of hundreds and hundreds of people, and you’d join a group. Except, here’s the thing - all those other people at the back of the line, and the new people who arrive, are also being recruited.

Not big believers in blank spaces.

The end result was that though you had jumped ahead, there were tons of other people jumping ahead of you. After a while, you find yourself back at the back of the line hoping another tour group will recruit you, and round and round you go.

This is, of course, highly but not totally exaggerated.

Anyway, nice city.

Fregene: October 16, 2006

Part two of the exciting walk on the wild side - a stroll through my mind for two weeks that I spent on a boat in the Mediterranean. Actually, it's part three, but part two was so devastatingly boring that I've done you a favor by skipping it. To give you an idea, it was about waiting at the airport to be picked up. See? We're all better off.

It’s the name of the city I’m in. It’s, maybe, a half hour out of Rome? Not even that.

It’s a little town, by the beach. There’s several bed & breakfasts around, and the advertising on the street for local restaurants suggests that tourism is reasonably significant.

I probably don't need to say this, but the food was good. It's Italy, right? If I could only pick one country's cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it'd be a toss-up between Italy and Japan.

Now, though, it’s pretty quiet. The weather’s pretty decent, though - I was able to get away with just wearing a t-shirt during the day.

I’m in Europe. People are speaking Italian on the street. It still hasn’t sunk in yet, though. Unfortunately, my Italian is nonexistent - I can understand it pretty well, but when I try to form sentences in my head they’re some bastard mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, and even Japanese. I don’t even bother trying to speak it.

The next time I was in Italy, I found Italian to be really easy. Getting languages mixed up is still a problem, though: last year I had an Argentine visitor. I spoke with her in Spanish just fine - up until, as part of the conversation, I pointed to a map and said "Shibuya." The next sentence came out in Japanese. I paused, and tried to start again. Still Japanese. I apologized, shut the hell up, and had to take a few deep breaths before I could get back to Spanish. 

Hopefully I get more comfortable with it over the next week, so I can get around in Venice and maybe Torino after the cruise. Greek is a lost cause. French, well, I should be able to get by with some combination of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and I won’t be there for long anyway.

Ended up not going to Torino. I had met a super hot girl who was from there. I barely knew her, but hey, a boy can dream right?

I’m writing this from the front patio of this 2-bedroom house that we’re staying in for 2 nights. It’s hideously nice. The garden is small, but it’s full of all kinds of plants and fruit trees. Grapevines are growing above my head. I’ll take pictures in the morning, I suppose.

I'm going to post this for now, and update it with pictures later. I'm doing some major reorganization of my photos now that I've got better hardware, so finding appropriate pictures will be easier. But I want to get a post up. But I've been spending time tagging rather than selecting pictures. Meh. 

The Critorist Tests Out iWeb: October 3, 2006

The first (and worst) in a series of unpublished blog entries dredged up from 2006.

This is all very nice and pretty. But how the hell do I, you know, stick code in here? I suppose I’d have to open it up in a program actually designed for code, but from what I saw of Dreamweaver, you could switch back and forth between design and code easily enough.

I should probably revisit iWeb sometime after iCloud comes out. If there's an iPad version.

Bananas have a great UI. It's like it was...
designed.

I suppose it’s worth commenting on working on the Mac in general. Obviously, it’s going to take some getting used to. The five (count ‘em, five) different, what the hell do you call ‘em, modifying keys - like Ctrl - are, well, confusing. All a matter of practice, I suppose. And if I can do much more with the keyboard, I can work faster. My main concern is whether the scheme makes sense - do I need to learn a whole new set of command keys for every damned application? That’d be a huge problem.

In retrospect, Windows had 4 - ctrl, alt, shift, windows. I can hardly remember what it was like to be an iVirgin.

Haven’t messed with iTunes yet. Briefly looked at iPhoto, if only to import my photos - now I need to figure out how to use it to organize things well. On my PC, it was pretty well organized into folders, but on a mac, the emphasis is on metadata - tags attached directly to the file. I was using the folders as a way to achieve the same result.

I still feel like my workflow with iPhoto could be much better.

Photo Booth is amusing. Frankly, it’s a toy, but it’s still pretty cool.

All I’ve really used this computer for so far, when you get right down to it, is browsing the web and IM. My excuse is that I’ve only had it a week and consequently not spent much time really digging in.

But I got the Japanese input set up. Works pretty similarly to Windows. でも、マックに全部がユニコード使える。 Doesn’t seem to be a key combo to switch back and forth quickly, tho, which pisses me off.

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair."

I haven't bothered pointing out the glaring inaccuracies. Revisiting my first impressions of Mac OS is pretty embarrassing.

Hopefully five years from now I'll have progressed as much as I have from 2006.