Stumbled upon a couple of cool short videos the other day (now that my laptop is back from repair). Check ’em out. Oh, and you’ll probably want to go to the Vimeo site to watch the second in HD.
Oh, and for those of you with your own blogs, check out the online tools at Tools 4 Noobs in order to generate valid XHTML code for YouTube/Vimeo video embedding.
On Sunday afternoon Chiara and I went to a lunch organized by Chiara Vecchia and her husband Paolo for a group of parents, children, and now grandchildren of those who grew up in our neighbourhood in Rome (which is also the neighbourhood in which Chiara was raised). Below is a photograph of those attendees who are “differently young.”
I’ve made a couple of minor changes that I figured I’d mention here.
I’ve added a new group of links (Photo Galleries) on the right, and I’ve changed the order of some of the other groups of links appearing there.
If you want to see a group of photographs that were originally linked from a blog post, now you don’t have to hunt for the original post to find that link, you can just click on the link in the Photo Galleries category.
Chiara was in Oxford for a teaching workshop Easter weekend, but when she got back we went to Elba Island (in Tuscany, off the west coast of Italy) to meet her parents, who have a condominium on the island. We only spent one full day on the island, but we still managed to see quite a bit. I’ve created a Flash gallery of photographs here, and I’ll probably add an HTML version (and a few more photographs) when I get a chance.
Below is a photograph of Chiara taken in Marina di Campo (the city on Elba closest to Chiara’s parents’ condominium), and it’s one of my favourites.
It’s the morning of day 4 in Barcelona, and I’m just about to head out again. I’ll be posting a few photographs soon (I still need to sort through the hundreds I’ve taken and do some post-processing), but I thought I’d post this one in the meantime.
This was taken on our first night, looking towards the west end of the city, taken from a bridge over a busy street near the cost.
Below is one of the obligatory photographs of Gaudí’s Casa Battló, and as I’m sure you can imagine there are lots to follow!
Just wanted to add a quick post prompted by Friday’s snow in Rome—the first snowfall in Rome since 2005, and possibly the heaviest snowfall since 2005.
This photograph was taken from our entranceway, looking out onto the street. Of course, a couple of hours later all the snow had melted, but it was nice while it lasted.
Chiara and I have been busy as usual. Christmas was spent in Chicago, and we saw Avatar in 3-D on an IMAX screen, went to the Art Institute, and spent time with family.
Chiara almost didn’t make it, though, as her flight from Rome to Washington (where she had a connection to Chicago) had to make an emergency landing in Geneva, and she was stuck there overnight. She finally made it to Washington a day late, and was lucky enough to get on the first flight to Chicago. (She was on standby, and the first flight on which she could book at seat was Christmas morning!)
That’s all of our recent excitement.
Shown is a photograph of a sculpture by Giacometti (taken at the Art Institute), one of my favourite sculptors. His ‘Walking Man I’ recently set a record for the highest price paid at auction for a work of art, so it looks like I’ll have to keep saving before I can get my own.
Other than that, you might want to check out a site called The Oatmeal. Some of the comics are pretty funny (and I learned a few things about cats too).
OK, so I’m starting to move things over from my iWeb site.
My most recent post was about attending a demonstration. So, here it is again…
OK, so I’ve not been very diligent about keeping my blog up to date, but I have been busy as usual. (I won’t add the boring details.)
So, on to more exciting stuff.
On October 3, Chiara and I went to a freedom of speech protest, in defence of La Repubblica and associated media, see more info the protest here). Before coming to Rome, all I really knew about Berlusconi was that he was prone to stupid—and widely publicized—remarks, but after learning more about him (Chiara was happy to fill me in), it’s really incredible that someone like that could be allowed to govern. Below is an interesting video on Berlusconi that gives some impression of the crazy state of the current Italian government (unfortunately, parts of it are not subtitled in English, but it’s still pretty interesting).
Anyway, that’s the most interesting thing we’ve been up to lately. I’ve also been playing around with some HTML, CSS, and some new graphics software recently, and I’ve got an alternate that I’ll probably be working on over the next while here.
Today Chiara is off to vote in the democratic party primary, so maybe change is in the air…
