| They were both cops. |
[Oct. 28th, 2007|11:23 pm] |
This is Mike's story.
He stays over at the Agora, a hotel near Lago. One night last week he was in his room when he heard a commotion outside. He looked outside and there was a man on a scooter and another man yelling at him. The man yelling at him began to viciously start slapping the guy on the scooter.* They got into a little scuffle but then the guy who was doing the slapping pulled a gun out from his pants and started holding it on the scooter guy. A crowd of people living in the area started piling out of their homes at around this time.
Now, at this point Mike assumed that it was the guy being most abusive that was the problem here, but the people coming out were yelling at the guy with the scooter. They started kicking at him and spitting on him. The guy with the gun started rifling through the scooter's compartments looking at papers.
At one point one of the other guys in the crowd grabbed scooter guy by the ear and scooter guy was actually holding on to his hands to keep him from ripping his ear off because he was jerking it around, but when that didn't work he started slamming scooter guy's head into the ground and then he also pulled a gun.
At this point the original guy with the gun pulled back the second gunner and the scooter guy crawled away to lean against a wall while all the people were still yelling at him. The two with guns started checking the scooter out and were inspecting his license plate a lot.
At this point the polizia showed up. It turns out those two guys with guns were police officers that lived in the apartments around there. The guy with the scooter had been caught trying to illegally park in their lot. He'd marked up his license plate to make it look like it had a different tag.
Italy is a safe place to live.
* No one fights with fists in Italy. It will land you in jail. Fights are handled by slapping. Really hard slapping. |
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| pardon me |
[Jun. 19th, 2007|12:11 am] |
Life is spinning less. In two days I move six times zones away, but then I'll have two years without any major transitional phases.
It's almost a relief to see so many abandoned journals here. It was a guilt trip of mine that I hadn't been on in so long. The link has always been there on my bookmarks bar, being avoided for reasons I can't specify.
I'm not used to knowing people for more than a few years. ClemsonTalk presents no challenge since it's so easy to dive in and climb out without feeling beholden to anyone. Here my circle is so much smaller that it feels far more significant.
School at Fort Gordon in Georgia was the most uninspiring experience in my life. Great Lakes in Illinois was only a little less so. I account for my life by the pictures I take, the songs I compose, the stories I write, the programs I code, and whatever else it is that I'm capable of producing. There was no life for me in Fort Gordon.
I've done what I could with the pictures I took. I've hosted them all here on Picasa because they provide a convenient application for me to upload.
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I'm still working out my media setup. Picasa is alright because there's a handy program that will send whole folders to it at a time. I'd prefer to use DeviantArt or Archive.org but right now it's too much of a hassle to upload to those. I'm working on getting a drop folder working that will automatically upload to archive.org or Flickr. I considered smugmug, a bright little company, but... well, I'm still considering them.
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To the other users of iView Media Pro... did you see what happened? Go to their site and look. HD Photo is an amazing format, much better than most other raw image formats. With iView and HD Photo under the same company they can combine the two and make a very competent competitor for Aperture. |
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| tracking.... |
[May. 27th, 2007|03:42 pm] |
I'm going to be home for about 20 days and then I leave for Naval Support Activity Naples, where I will be working at the Lago Patria AFSOUTH site. The fact of the matter is, I spent 6 months in the most boring place in the world (Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia).
One guy in my class is going to the Sigonella site at the very east end of the base here. My other classmate, a second class, is going up to some NOAA satellite receiver site in Washington state. Everyone else in the two classes behind me (besides another second class coming to Naples with me) are going to sunny little receiver site in Bahrain.
My commitment is two years in Italy. I think I'm going to try going to Bahrain next. It counts as sea duty with sea pay plus it gets hazard pay and it's tax free.
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I bought a Garmin ForeRunner 205. It's pretty cool. I haven't been running with it, but my father and I went on a walk around our property while I was wearing it and it produced a nice little map of our excursion with nice records... screenshot
I'm probably going to upgrade GoogleEarth to the version that lets me import GPS data so I can start looking at these things on there. There are a number of sites that allow that sort of thing (motionbased.com, trainingpeaks.com) but I'd like a little less automation so I don't get locked into anything. The first thing I want to do is combine GPS data with journal entries and photographs and have that all displayed together in an Apollo program using GoogleMaps.
I may eventually work up to a Quartz-based application. I haven't looked at integrating webkit into any applications before. Maybe I'll wrap all this up into an ODF based file and start some cross-platforming. Maybe an exporter for LiveJournal or something.
The most important thing here is that I want to keep reasonably detailed records of where I've been and what I've done for the duration of my Naval career. This all stems from my idea back during my sophomore year to integrate a digital camera with a GPS device. Now I'm building upon that.
Compare the track below to this satellite view... maps.google.com |
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