Jason H. Davis » Italy

More Venice

Jason — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:47:36 +0000

I realized two things today:

1) Many of the pictures taken on the trip were done with Kassie’s (the person I was traveling with) camera.
2) I’ve already posted pictures of Zurich.

So, in an attempt to stall the mass posting of pictures, because I still (after 4 months) haven’t figured out where I’m going to put 4,000+ pictures, I’m going to post some more pictures of Venice.

A Venice! Where the streets are paved with water.

The Venice locals have decided that giant mechanical bugs are all the rage. They can be seen in shops throughout the town. I can imagine Venician apartments are like metal bug wars.

Venice has a leaning tower as well, but I suppose it is often overlooked because the rest of the city is so awesome.

Pisa, on the other hand, brings nothing else to the table.

This large clock tower displays the signs of the zodiac on its face.

This man is chasing me with hot glass. Look at that glass blower glare!

Hopefully I will have things of more importance to report tomorrow!
Jason

Italy is over, but not done with

Jason — Sat, 10 May 2008 03:36:19 +0000

I learned a lot in the short amount of time I spent in Italy. I’m incredibly happy I made the decision to go. It would seem that the return is bittersweet. It is very nice to be back, but there are things that I’m going to miss. Particularly, being able to go more than 10 miles without seeing a McDonalds was wonderful.

It is over, and it’s starting to set in. However, there’s still more Italy. There is a total mountain of pictures that I still need to upload. Soon I will start spending time uploading, titling, and describing the pictures that I’ve taken. I’ll post the best ones in the Blog as I go.

The summer will also be a good opportunity to redesign this website, which I’ve talked about over and over. The redesign, I think, should not be a gradual migration. I’ll have it up and running before I replace any of the existing pages. I’ll also keep this site online for posterity.

The gist is, I’m going to keep blogging and I hope you keep checking the site.

Perpetually Yours,
Jason

Venice Proper

Jason — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:08:36 +0000

Here are the most choice photos and videos that I’ve taken in both Bologna and Venice.

The only thing from Bologna is the most amazing thing that I’ve seen in my life. Ever.

Ever

Apparently Casanova, every Italian man’s idol, was from Venice. Sadly, the statue is tragically ironic. The man who loved so deeply can no longer be touched by anyone.

This picture was taken sitting at St. Marc’s. You can’t really capture the magnitude of it all in a picture, so I just zoomed in.

Kassie and I were walking around and found this really sweet Medusa carving.

Even Italian children are on leashes.

I leave tomorrow for Padua. Wish me luck.

Ciao Ciao,
Jason

Social Search?

Jason — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:33:03 +0000

I’m up right now working on my Art History paper, but I remember that I said I would write another post. I hope everyone is enjoying the video. Today I learned how to matte artwork, which was a pretty fun experience if not fairly tedious. I also ate an entire pizza, sausage. Dinner was the worst it’s been, so it’s a lucky thing I ate an entire pizza. Things are ramping up for the show. Everyone is up late finishing work.

As for myself, I’ve picked out the blog posts I’m going to print out, and I think I have a good selection. Tomorrow I’m going to buy yarn and proofread Googletopia and Sympathy to get them ready for printing. I’ll also proofread my Art History paper. The blog posts are going to be left unedited.

There’s some cool news floating around, some about how the next hurtles in processing power are being overcome. I found this article interesting, though. I’m pretty sure the majority of the content on the Internet is user generated. Either through YouTube videos, individual or small group blogs, or updates to Facebook. Already I’ve felt the pull that a friend’s blog or stories they’ve found can have on me, and it makes a lot of sense that this is going to continue.

The article itself suggests a feed much like Facebook where new happenings come to you instead of you having to search them out. What’s also interesting, is that Facebook is now allowing data from other websites into your mini-feed (the feature that lets users know what you’ve been up to). So now when you post photos on Flickr of Picasa or bookmark something on Del.icio.us, it will show up in your news feed. It also means that it will be shared with all of your friends.

Kind of exactly what the Popular Mechanics article was talking about.

-Jason

Photos? Yeah. Pictures.

Jason — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:11:48 +0000

So, I’m working on www.jasonhdavis.com/photos currently. So, it’s not working.
There are a bunch of pictures online, however

So enjoy those for now; I’ll keep this updated with progress.

Monday 10:40pm – All I seem to do is run into snags. It would seem Picasa only offers RSS feeds of albums and of pictures inside albums. There isn’t an option for most recently uploaded. I could put all of the Italy pictures into one big album, which wouldn’t be fun. Or I could create new pages for each album on my site, which wouldn’t be fun either.

It’s getting late, so I’m going to work on this more tomorrow. I’ll keep updating this post as things progress.

Tuesday 6:40pm – Working on my pictures got a little delayed. The Podcasting program has a deadline of Friday for a grant it’s trying to get, so I’ve been working on that site. It’s still in alpha, but I think it’s fine if I give out the link. www.tuscanproductions.com.

I’ve decided I’m going to make an album for each city I visit. It shouldn’t be much of a problem. The pictures now display decently. I’m now working on getting two columns of pictures running down the page. After that, I need to figure out how to serve ads on the page as well.

Tuesday 7:00pm – It looks like it’s time for dinner. It also looks like I need to learn more about Smarty php templates.

Thursday 3:45am – Wow! It’s been since Tuesday? I’ve been working on the class website. It’s pretty functional; especially for three days of work. Well, I just spent 4 hours working on the photos page. I hit dead end after dead end trying to get the photos to display correctly. They work now, though!

So, next on the chopping block is getting ads to display correctly. Then adding titles and descriptions to the pictures. Then adding an index page for albums. Then adding more albums! Still more work, but I feel like I accomplished something tonight.

Getting up at 8 tomorrow. Awesome.

Monday 2:10pm – HUZZAH! The hardest part is over! The pictures display and the ads show up where they need to be! I had a very nice weekend; I slept in late on Sunday. Voltera was on Saturday. I’m also working on my first real writing piece. Now that this is just about done, the blog will go back to business as usual very soon… maybe even tonight?

Tuesday 4:10pm – Last night, when I started putting in titles and captions, I realized that the photos didn’t display them correctly. After some work today, however, I got it working and displaying correctly. I’m not 100% happy with how it looks, but I think it’s good enough to call it done. It took a week and hours of work, but I can finally start uploading new pictures.

I have another blog entry that I’ve been working on. The plan is to finish it and post it tonight. A new photo album will be posted tomorrow.

Wednesday 4:50pm – UGH. I’m done with this post. Things still don’t look right, but I’m posting the other post now. Post. Post post.

Perpetually Yours,
-Jason

A hike and a glimps at the future

Jason — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:48:49 +0000

I’ve already posted today, but I thought I’d tack on how my day ended. I played a few rounds of bocce ball; the balls were cold, but it was still fun. I also went out on a hike through the Cortonan hillside. I discovered some sort of abandoned semi-industrial site; I’m not quite sure what it was used for. Trekking though the woods, there was an abandoned fort made by an Italian child in recent history. Cortona, a medieval city, is surrounded by a large wall; I walked along it and found a type of cactus that lays low to the ground and sprouts red chili pepper looking buds. They have no top/stem because they grow out from their bottoms. On a tiered hillside lined with olive trees, there was a vista of a fiery orange sunset. A small door in the wall revealed a garrison with slits for an archer to shoot arrows. Dinner was a large Italian/mexican style pizza with sausage, beans, and jalapeÃ±os.

I need to organize my thoughts on the future of the website, so I suppose I will do that here.

There are beaucoups of photos that need to be upload, and the best way to manage and upload them has been very troublesome for me. I had four options.
Coppermine (www.jasonhdavis.com/photos)
flickr
Picasa
Photobucket

I think I’ve decided on Picasa, though. It’s a well integrated album solution owned by Google. The uploads will be very, very easy. I should be able to put a large rss feed of the most recent photos on www.jasonhdavis.com/photos and a few on the front page. I won’t have to pay for bandwidth, either. The entirety of the albums will be viewable at http://picasaweb.google.com/Jason.H.Davis (there’s nothing there yet, so don’t try). It will also be integrated with Google image search, so maybe with some optimizing I’ll be able to derive some traffic from that. The only problem is it only gives me 1gb of storage. About 3,000 pictures. Hopefully I can limit myself to 1k a month while I’m here! Beyond that, I’d have to pay for storage; 10gb runs $20 a year.

So, photos are planned and will hopefully be up before the end of this week. It’s long overdue!

As the semester starts to ramp up, expect a reoccurring installment: Glimpses into the Future (name still pending). These will start in the past, maybe around the year 2000. I will work my way up through 2008 and onward. Hopefully I can make predictions out to 2030, although they’ll be quite speculative. The importance of 2030 will become more apparent soon.

The format of the posts will consist of a few major news items, technology innovations, and techno-socio phenomenon. I hope to shed light on technologies’ integration into our everyday lives and its impact on humanity as a race. I also hope to spot trends in technology’s use and predict what the push and pull of technology/user will bring… that is to say, the technology effects the potential of the user’s creativity, but the technology is driven by the user’s desires (the economy).

This post is incredibly long.
-Jason

Lazy Sunday, or A message to Kyle

Jason — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:51:37 +0000

I’ve already organized my room today and hung up laundry on the line. I need to scavenge up some lunch (the supermarket is closed, which is sad). I’ve spent far too much money in the short time I’ve been here. I think Cortona will bring a slower pace and a focus on work.

My desk overlooks the Cortona hillside and has no Internet. I think it will be the perfect place to write. I’ll be talking more about that soon. =)

Kyle sent me a message asking about Italy, this is part of what I responded with:

“Italy is amazing. Rome was so big, the people in the program new, the lifestyle so different. Florence brought familiarity with the group, a smaller setting with beautiful architecture and a slower pace. Cortona was like coming home to a place I’d never been before. The group closer to family, the town beautiful and welcoming and the dorm exciting.”

I will hopefully be posting more here tonight.
With Love,
Jason