Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm thankful for:

• My family
• My students
• Everyone who helped out when my bike got stolen
• Only two minor injuries this year
• My friends
• My family
• My crazy coworkers
• The trip to Italy
• My NASA customer
• Python
• The Plone and Zope communities
• Good training partners
• Good teachers

More Italy pictures coming!

I just got a load of pictures off the camera. The last of the ones from the trip to Italy. I'll post them shortly.

Danny the Tourist

Thanks to being ill, I only spent about an hour or so being a tourist in Italy. I did take lots of pictures, so if you want to see some of what I saw, you can go here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pydanny/tags/tourist/

I would have taken more interior shots but the lighting was bad so many shots did not come out well. If only my pictures of the brass door had come out well! Sorry guys!

Monday and Tuesday

Monday Fatigue
I woke up on Monday feeling tired. As the day progressed I felt less well, and most of it seems blurry.

I did hang out with the Plone 4 Artists group and really nailed down my understanding of best practices for Plone testing, both unit and functional. This was good to have, and I managed to hang onto this even if this day seemed a bit surreal.

I gave up a bit earlier than what I wanted, said some goodbyes, and headed back to the hotel. I collapsed into bed and slept.

I woke up hours later feeling terrible nausea. Something I ate was very much disagreeing with me. The rest of the night was misery as my body spent hours voiding itself of something I should not have consumed.

Tuesday ills
I woke early to the sound of stomping workmen. My hotel is being improved. Which is surprising because it is already really nice. Anyway, it was 8 am and I was ready to go to Herculeanium!

Or not.

I was very weak, and just going from my bed to the bathroom was exhausting. Since normally I can cycle 11 miles easy or dash up the stairs of this hotel, I knew today would be really challenging.

Slow and wearily I packed up everything – stuff I had not done last night. Just moving around was challenging and I had to take breaks. I drank water constantly and told myself this would pass.

In fact, since Herculeanium (and Pompeii) together made a half day affair, I determined I would visit them in the afternoon. I napped a bit on those times the workmen weren’t around.

I was ill a couple times that morning, but by 12:30 pm I was ready to go. I grabbed my wallet and borrowed camera and made my way outside. I walked the quarter mile from my hotel next to Piazzo Bovia to the Piazza Municipale, which is bordered by Castel del Nuovo. From there I would take the Alibus to Piazzo Garibaldi and from there I would take a train to my destination.

Waiting for the Alibus I got ill again. It was brief but really unpleasant. The thought of going all the way to my destination was too much. I suppose sometimes fate is not kind. A visit to ancient Roman ruins would have to wait for another Italy trip.

I was disappointed but I was determined to do something tourista in nature. A hundred yards from me was Castel del Nova. I resigned myself to a secondary exploit and made my way inside the old seat of the Kingdom of Napoli.

Castel del Nuovo
I tread my way around this lovely home of a dozen kings. I couldn’t use the flash on my camera on any of the indoor shots quite a few shots simply did not come out. Nevertheless I came in contact with amazing history and art. Some of the standouts include:

• A huge brass door with all sorts of decorative battle signs molded into it. It had been looted from the Castel del Nuovo in some battle with the Genovese. While being taken away on ship it had been struck by several errant cannon balls with one inside. The light was really bad here and I could not get anything but a murky shot of this marvel.
• The chapel area had a number of early medieval wall paintings mounted inside of protective frames. The art was not as refined as the later paintings elsewhere in the castle, but the skill of the artist was undeniable.
• There was a lot of religious iconography in the paintings, and you could really see the work of the artists to capture the light of the heavens in certain figures. This attempt to understand light also came out in the more secular paintings.
• One work by an obviously skilled artist depicted an artist working at an easel. Behind him was a group of obviously notable nobles and soldiers. And they were bending over and looking at his rear end. It was a surprising piece that if not for the skill of the artist, it would have seemed so out of place in this somber castle/museum.
• I gazed into the Hall of Barons, the assembly room of the nobles of the Kingdom of Napoli. Even after 10 tries, I could not get a good shot of this room.
• I managed to get some nice shots of the courtyard and its various denizens. Of course there was a snoozing stray dog enjoying the warm sun, and a pair of very friendly cats.

My endurance was shot. Climbing up the staircases had worn me out. I felt my nausea returning. I made my way back to the hotel stopping just to buy a set of postcards, my one purchased memento so far.

My bed beckoned and when I awoke it was dark again.

It was about 9pm when I headed out looking for tourista shoppes. I walked down Via Toledo, into a couple big stores. Then into smaller stores. Nothing was an ideal souvenir. I eventually went off the Via Toledo down some narrow streets. I found a shop or two that suited my needs. They didn’t have refrigerator magnets or anything, but I did get a couple things for my family.

Murano glass seems to be a bust. When I ask for it I am either directed to Venice or given a complex set of instructions I can’t follow. My Italian is just too weak.

My hope for refrigerator magnets and glassware is the Capodichino Airport. Maybe they have something.

My plan for tomorrow

Herculeneum and Pompeii tomorrow morning, then castles and architecture during the day. Maybe a museum or two. Definately gelato.

Maybe my last post

Tomorrow is my one day of actual time off. I may not have internet connection, but I'll see what I can do. I'm not 100% sure of what I want to do. Pompeii and Herculeneum are very appealing, especially followed by visits to art museums and stuff. The other thought is a day in Capri and Sorrento on the Amalfi coast. Not as much history but much prettier.

Suggestions are welcome!

Sunday funday

Another lovely day in Italia! Well, it would have been lovely but the temperature was rather low. Foolishly I just work a t-shirt and short pants to the City of Science. Which meant I was freezing all day. Oh well…

Bouno Vista!
The night before Florian Freisdorf got a hotel room in Albergo del Golfo. Reed slept in a little bit so Florian rode in the taxi with me to City of Science. On the way there I asked for the scenic coastal route. The Taxi stopped at a photo spot and I got some nice pictures of Isola di Nisida which is about a mile from the City of Science. I also got some pictures of the industry around where we’ve camped out for the geek side of our stay. The picture in this post is one of me and my friend Florian.

Plone Stuff
Me and Carsten finished up the demo product and tutorial for KSS. My understanding of KSS is very strong now, and I’ll be able to KSS any Plone 3.x application from now on. Plone 2.5.x applications like MSRD can be done, but that will be a rather large challenge. We’ll see!

Then I joined the Plone For Artists (p4a) group to work on Calendaring. I wanted to do that because the Web Workshop needs improved calendar functions and the p4a group is on the cutting edge of Plone calendaring tools. The calendaring subgroup eagerly welcomed me and I started working on a couple bugs. On Monday (tomorrow) I’ll be trying to fix the css involved in the weekly view. Bill Keeter, I might be sending you some IMs!

Lunch Blues
So for my mid day meal I walked over to my favorite food place near City of Science. Unfortunately they were closed today! Ack! I went to their neighbor, a similar shop. They simply were not as good. There was no charm and the meat pastry I got was mediocre. Oh well, I think they are open tomorrow…

Also, a huge number of Plonistas ordered out for pizzas. I have a photo of one of the stacks of pizza boxes. Remember, a pizza box is a meal for one person, so what you see in that picture is just one of several stacks. Yes, that many people joined the order. So I had to sit through the smell of tomato and basil after eating something that might have been a day old. Sigh.

Pasti?
I can’t remember the name of this stuff. At the end of the day the French plonistas brought out some sort of gold colored liquor. You poured a dollop into a cup and then watered it. The water turned it cloudy. It was tasty but very strong, being 49% alcohol. With my weak tolerance the little I drank meant I was very… um… energized.

Closing hours
Reed, Chris, and Florian went with me to a local pizzaria. I got the lasagna pizza. Ricotta and mozzarella cheese plus proiscetto and salami. It was not as good as Sorbilla or Port’alba Pizza but it was still better than anything else I’ve had in my life. Well, about as good as Chris Shenton’s grilled pizza. Which is good indeed.

Then I found myself tired and just not feeling well. I went back to my room, read for a while and then went to sleep.

Saturday Bleahs

I was rather ill Saturday morning. I normally don’t drink at all, and hangovers are never good for me. I woke up with a crushing headache compounded by caffeine withdrawal. I showered and ran downstairs and gobbled down some excellent coffee from the hotel breakfast. That stopped the worst of the headache but I still was not at my best.

Plone Fun
Now I got to build on the lessons learned during the other parts of this trip. I haven’t been happy with the KSS documentation for a number of technical reasons, and I wanted some practice. For reference, KSS is the Plone AJAX engine, which allows Plone to do things of the same sort as gmail or flickr. So what I did was create a new tutorial for KSS, complete with a demo package.

I was joined by Carsten Rebbein and we quickly found a good pattern of effort. I did most of the writing and we shared the technical tasks. We used a buildout script to generate the demo package, and leveraged in my new Zope 3 skills to build the package. We each cooked up an KSS/AJAX demo, and integrated it into the tutorial.

Alas, I wasn’t at my best so the first half of the day I was lagging. Compounding that was when I was plugging my Mac OS X into a power socket and smacked my head hard into an obstacle. Ouch!

We didn’t quite finish the tutorial, but we got a lot done.

Keep in mind we started at 10 am or so and ended about 8 pm. 10 good hours of work!

Finding Friends
Near the end of the day Florian Freisdorf showed up back from Munich, Germany. He had been in the Zope 3 class but had to return to his university for several days. He is an academic on the Phd track and very smart. He didn’t have a place to stay yet, and would either stay in the youth hostel or find a hotel downtown.

I bumped into Jens Klein again. I hadn’t realized it, but he was the Austrian mastermind behind ArchGenXML! This is an incredible Python tool that converts UML diagrams into a working Plone application. This guy is really smart and the surprising thing is that the way he does his abstract thinking is amazingly like how I do it. His next big project, Genesis, is very interesting and I’m wondering if maybe I should get involved.

Dinner Again
Chris and Reed were tired and ate close to Albergo del Golfo. I decided I really wanted to eat at Pizzaria Port’alba, the world’s oldest pizza restaurant. Florian, Jens, and Carsten joined me there for food and excellent discussion. I selected the house special, which was dough, sauce, and muscles and clams in the shell. It was brilliant. Not quite as good as Pizza Sorbilla, but very close.

Sightseeing?
As you can see, I’ve had no time for sightseeing. I keep meaning to get up early and wander down to the harbor which is just a few blocks away. Alas, the pace of my journey here is too fast and too long each day for me to find that time. Oh well, I shall have to squeeze that all into my last day here, which is entirely dedicated to sightseeing.

Friday in Italia!

Traffic was nasty going to the City of Science in the morning. The garbage men were on strike, blocking roads with trashcans and banners. The police were around but didn’t seem to be concerned with interfering with the strike. Fortunately the taxi driver broke all sorts of traffic laws to get us there on time.

We went to the same place we always do in the morning, got a yummy breakfast bread and our normal expresso shot thingy, and then made our way into the Plone conference.

Plone Geek stuff
My first session was Philip von Weiterhausen and Martin Aspelli’s presentation called ‘Untested code is broken code’. I agree with them, as does any reasonable developer. What I got out of the session is the concept of telling a story in your tests, because then its more interesting to write and its easier to read.

Then was a session on Plone in Government solutions by a panel of presenters. The focus was on European and South American efforts. It was interesting, and I learned a lot about presenting Plone as a solution to government efforts.

Kaman Ayeva gave a speech on Antipatters, Patterns, and Rules of thumb for successful Plone projects. Unfortunately it was very basic, and nothing new was learned.

Lunch like all the meals was served outside. It was the usual bits of yummy Italian goodness.

The next presentation was worth the whole day. It was the Novell web marketing team talking about Plone at the Enterprise level. I found out why they ditched Team Server and more importantly, why Vignette so utterly failed for them. That even Novell found the costs of Vignette prohibitive and the tool not very useful was really interesting. They found great ways to increase the already secure processes of Plone and to find creative ways to get their international site to handle tens of million of hits.

Last session was Andy McKay on ‘What Plone can learn from Rails’. Very interesting, and I agreed with bits and pieces.

About 20 lightning talks happened. So much good stuff was presented! People are doing some amazing things with GIS and other innovative technologies. I was exhausted so I didn't listen as closely as I should.

Evening fun
Piazza Bellini seems to be the adopted home of Plonistas in Napoli. A delightful band played loud music and the city seemed to be alive with incredible vibrant energy. Fridays are not to be missed in Napoli.

I chatted with Godefried and Jorun, two of the masters of KSS and the Plone – SQLAlchemy mashup. Great guys.

Dinner was another awesome meal. Seafood was the ideal of the place, and it scored. The appetizer was a delightful seafood salad we gobbled up in seconds. I am jealous of Chris because he took the calamari dish, but my fish wasn’t bad either.

Next to us sat a charming British couple. They were funny and witty, and made dinner better.

Alas, I let the flowing wine go by without paying enough attention. Suddenly it was hours past midnight and I had done a bit too much fun. I staggered back to Albergo del Golfo and found my bed waiting.

The morning after a friday...

Friday (last) night was tons of fun. Stayed up way too late and drank too much. Ugh. Not drinking again. But I'm here in the City of Science and about to start work.

Thursday in Italia

Reed and I have gotten int he habit of getting breakfast at this little place a block from City of Science. They don't know any English, our Italian is weak, but they serve great coffee, yummy pastries, and are very friendly.

Geek Speak
The Plone keynote speech was given by Alexander Limi and Paul Runyon, the founders of Plone. The state of Plone is very interesting, and the dynamic is compelling. Plone is about democracy and power, and the state of things is that the economy for it is exploding. Also, the push of Plone towards a better component based architecture is really making it a more dynamic yet better performing system. Very interesting indeed.

The keynote speech went long so everyone was late to my next session on Subtyping by Rocky Burt. I could not manage to catch up, so later in the day I found Rocky and asked if he would give it again on Friday. He agreed so long as I got 10 people to come. Well, the response ont he list was very strong so I managed to get him to do it again. 2pm in the Saffo Room.

I went to a KSS presentation by Balazs Ree. Very interesting, but the work was entirely through the web. Not good. Later I found Godefried Chapelle, lead of the KSS project and offered to do a tutorial on KSS if they would be willing to answer my questions. He was very exciting so it will be one of my tasks during the Plone sprint portion of the conference.

I went to the last few minutes of Philip von Weiterhausen's talk on the direction of Plone in the world of Zope, Paste, Ruby on Rails, Pylons and other frameworks. All the major Plonistas were there. I think he differs in some respects from the current direction of Plone, but I think I agree with him. And I think that his argument is logical and compelling. More on that later.

Alec Mitchell presented on his Plone.app.relations package. This is a much better tool than the Relations product we used for MSRD, but it wasn't mature when we commenced our work. I think we'll adopt it in the long run, since it is lean, mean, and much more logical in implementation.

Then I went to Migrating apps to Plone 3, building off of Generic Setup. Again with the XML! Why use XML as config files? I hate this sort of XML sit up. Grrr...

I hung around for the Lightning Talks, where each person had 7 minutes to describe a project or technology. The best presentation was the German who had cheesy hand drawn pictures who really got his ideas across. The worst was the guy whose material was not in slide format, but in a text editor with an unreadable font.

There was socializing then at some nearby bars before dinner started. Dinner was in the City, and was quite good for the most part. The appetizer was pickled and smoked fish. The prima was a yummy pasta dish cooked in a cream sauce thickened by potato. The seconda was bleah, being shrimp cooked too long. Lastly was an elegant dessert.

Getting home was tons of fun. We packed ourselves into a cab and the driver drove even crazier than the normal Neopolitican cabbie. Next time I want a rocket sled harness!

I'm so busy

The volume of stuff happening means that after a 15 hour work day yesterday, I had no energy to blog. I have just 12 minutes until the first session of the day so I'm not sure if I'll be able to get my thoughts from yesterday down.

This is lots of work and tons of fun.

A note of thanks

A number of people contributed to me going on this trip. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Chris Shenton
Gamble Gilbertson
Jennifer Brinn
Jim Consalvi
Katie Cunningham
Priscilla Beal
Reed O'Brien
Shannon O'Neil
Sharron Sample

Thanks!

Technorati Fun

Technorati Profile

Mercoledi dentra Italia

Buono Pizza!
That is pretty much how the day ended. But let me go through the rest of the day before I explain.

Quick note, I managed to get a picture of myself onto Flickr. More to come!

Plone Conference Sessions (Geek Speak so skip to next session if you want)
Me and Chris went to the integrators track called ‘Making Plone Theme: 10 Most Wanted tips’ by Jarn employee Denis Mishunov. It ended up being just 5 tips but they were killer tips of ultimate important.

Next session was Extending and Customizing Plone by Alex Espelli, who is a virtuoso of Plone content design. While it was good, there was too much content and often you glanced at a slide with 10 lines of detail for 5 seconds and he would go on. This means I’m going to have to buy his new book I supposed. Reed and Chris were also there.

Next was supposed to be Alex Limi’s track on usability, but he was sick. That was a real shame because he is one of the founders of Plone, now works for google, and is a master of presentation both verbally and technically. So I ended up going to Laurence Rowe’s presentation on the ZODB. Alas, it was nothing I hadn’t heard before and anyone could get after 10 minutes of googling the ZODB. He was going to give a demo but did a Q&A first. I was then determined to ask him later for that demo.

Ajax with Plone 3: KSS development patterns was given by Godefried Chappele. This promised to be exciting. It turned out to be a good intro to the KSS system implemented in Plone 3. More will follow with other KSS presentations.

The last session was Portlets in Plone 3 done by Geir Baekholt, and was brilliantly done. Portlets in Plone 3 are powerful, intuitive and very easy to implement. Plus they are very exciting.

Last but not least were Lightning Talks and Birds of a Feather. I’ll explain what that means later, but lets just say that I’ll be joining to Plone4Artists calendar module sprint. I also found a lot of really powerful ideas for use in Plone and Zope in the days to come.

Coffee Break, Lunch, and Tea
We had a morning coffee break with quality coffee and delicious sweets. I had a tiny sfogliatelle (scalloped shaped pastry that is a Neapolitan specialty) that took my breath away. Not bad for conference fare!

Lunch was a buffet of good food. Carpaccio, meatballs, zuchinni, eggplant with cream, buffalo mozzarella, cheese noodles, and smoked cheese was handed out at a central food table. In the US it would be wretched fare but not in Italia! It was good stuff. They served as beverage white wine and lemoncello, but that was pretty nasty stuff so I stuck to water.

A Disappointment
So I found Laurence Row and asked him near the end of the day for the ZODB demo he promised. Nope, he didn’t have one. Really lame. Well, he did manage to waste only 45 minutes of my life…

Plone Foundation News
Went to this meeting about the state of Plone politics. I’ll put my notes in a separate post.

Night Time
We went to Piazza Bellini again to meet up with whoever showed up. We ended up meeting a very smart German fellow named Christian who was a core member of the Zope 3 team. Chris, Reed, Christian, and me went from there to Pizzeria Sorbilla founded in 1938. We stopped there because it was packed full of Italians and in a narrow street, which is always a good sign. I ordered the house specialty Pizza Sorbilla and… well…

It was %@#$ing good pizza.

I’m spoiled for life. No more pizza for me. Nothing else will ever compare!

How can I describe it? The cheese was so good it tasted buttery. The crust was light and charred by the over. The sauce was light and full of explosive favor.

The staff was amused yet unsurprised by our reactions.

Martedi dentro Italia

Ring!
I wake up at 7:30 am when Reed calls me. I slept in because I had a no sleep period where I couldn’t stop thinking about Naples. I shower and dress, and as I’m about to leave Reed calls again and says the taxi has arrived. What? We have until 9am to be at the second training session…

Oh well, grabbed my stuff and ran downstairs. Snatched another of those awesome Albergo del Golfo croissants and ran outside. Put my bag in the trunk of the taxi and jumped into the right side seat. Away we went.

We took a different route to the City of Science. This time we went along the coast the whole way, which took us up windy mountain roads and past incredible vistas. The area became a bit posh, and the cars increased in size. We spotted our first SUVs, and one of them was an American giant. Anyway, to my chagrin my camera was in my bag so I didn’t get any pictures. Me tristo molto (I’m very sad)!

Coffee
We went to the same place as yesterday’s lunch to grab some caffeine. The expresso shot I somehow ordered was really small, really strong, and really good. I’ve got to do that again! I did find this kind of place is called a paninoteca (sandwiches) or a salad a te (sandwiches), and its hard to tell which.

Plone Training
This time we delved deeper into the arcane yet compelling mysteries of Plone. I finally grokked Z3 Adapters for real, and fell in love with Z3 Events. I want to try out lovely.tag too to make all kinds of fun things. My notes are many and hopefully enough. I do know that like the Plone training we took in February, it will take some time to really digest what we learned.

Lunch
We ate at a place next to the same place as yesterday. This place didn’t have the coffee of the other so I think it is a paninoteca. I got two pannini havles, one being filled with incredible tomato bits and tiny chunks of what I suspect is pork. The second was a vegetable pannini but even the bread couldn’t save my disdain for the leafy green inside. We chatted up our instructors and met a German Phd student named Florian who was attending just the training and was heading back the next day to Munich.

More Plone Training
Lots of subtle tricks and good advice followed. Rocky Burt and his crew did good stuff with the training and it was worth the time and expense to come.

Registration
Since we went to pre-conference training we got to go to register the night before the general registration. Which was good because the City of Science staff had a wretchedly slow system built on Windows Vista and an Excel sheet. Reed and I chatted up a pair of English code monkeys and made some new friends. We got some nice swag, including a bag, t-shirt, clipboard, pen, and a humongous bag.

More Pictures
On the taxi back to Albergo del Golfo I did my best to capture the feeling of Naples. Some shots are complete junk but I think I nailed some good vistas. Reed mocked my insistence of taking lots of pictures, but then I infected him and he took shots as well.

Socializing
In the evening me and Reed joined a Plonista meeting at the Piazzo Vicenzzo Bellini. It was only a kilometer away up the Via Toleda, but we got a bit lost. The walk, as any trip through Naples, was interesting and illuminating. And the temperature was perfecto.

So the Plonistas descended like a storm on a ristorante at Piazzo Bellini. The poor staff was terribly overwhelmed. Food took at least an hour to arrive, but everyone was good natured about it. Met up again with Florian and some other Germans and we chatted about Plone, German education, version control (look up Git, a SVN replacement for versioning), and many other fun things. I remember Stefan, Lutz, and a friendly Trieste Italiano named Ansel.

I ordered a pasta dish made with olive oil, parmesan cheese, broccoli, and pignoli (pine nuts). It was really, really, really good. The pasta was cooked perfect ala dente, and the broccoli was tender and delicious, and the pine nuts were fresh. I had no bread and really considered licking the plate clean.

Good times the whole day.

Second Day in Italy

Geese?

I’m in the center of Naples, off the Piazzo Bovia next to the Chamber of Commerce. So imagine my surprise when the sound of geese wakes me up on Monday morning. I showered, shaved, ran downstairs for breakfast.

Breakfast was coffee, yogurt, and the best croissant I’ve ever had. Cheap hotel food too, yet fuller and tastier than anything I’ve ever had from an American bakery. Reed, my coworker, bounced in and wolfed down his food just as our cab showed up.

The ride to Sciatta del Scienza (City of Science) was an interesting demonstration of the Napoli method of driving. We dashed through intersections, went blocks down the wrong side of the road, and had our humorous driver periodically make fun of his own city. He would point out a building mess and call it Sciatta del Garbage.

Just as we arrived at our destination we stumbled into Chris, another coworker. We caught up just a little as we wandered into our event.

Plone!

The event started a little late and the wifi was shaky for a while. We learned some really interesting material. Best was how to write Zope test cases, using a mix of various Python test methods, including my favorite which is doctest. This is powerfully useful stuff!

Lunch was a pizza from a little café and a Coke Light.

The afternoon really solidified my understanding of geeky stuff about Five technology, which is an amalgram of Zope 2 and Zope 3, especially how it relates to the fun of Plone’s archetypes. It was really good stuff.

Night

Evening Chris rode back with us, and then we went out to eat and socialize. We found a wonderful back street and explored it. We drank a couple bottles of wine at a bar, and taught the waiter about the American method of tipping. Dinner was at a cozy outside place with excellent fish dishes and great pasta. We ended up talking shop, politics, and making friends with some very amicable Poles. I tasted and enjoyed Amarone, which is really good wine.

It was late and sleep beckoned.

Things to get

I left my jacket on the hook at home. I spotted a nice jacket for 20 euro. I’ll pick it up tonight. I’m tired of being just a little too chilly.

Italia picture set

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pydanny/sets/72157602311904156/

Italia!

Escaping Heathrow

Heathrow was like a shopping mall with no exits. It was nice to get out. Getting out was a challenge though because British Midland International (BMI) had signs for gate 38 in two places about 75 yards apart, and only one was correct. I did have the fortune of meeting Rocky Burt, who is teaching the class I’m taking on Monday and Tuesday. Rocky did me the favor of answering some questions and taking a good picture of me doing a one-handed cartwheel in Heathrow.

Heathrow is horrible for taking pictures, I really tried!

Heathrow sells Orange Flavor Coke. I kid you not. I bet my kid would love to give that a try. Too bad I couldn’t have kept it if I bought it.

On the plane trip over I sat next to the window and a charming 50 something British couple on holiday. Crossing from the Channel to France was fun. Better was following the northern Italian coast and seeing xxx, yyy, and in the distance mighty zzz. I saw my first castle as we were landing, and the picture I took of it shouldn’t be too bad.

Touchdown in Italy!

The landing was really gentle. BMI might have bad signing and charges 1 GBP for a tiny soda, but they have good pilots. I stepped out onto the tarmac into weather that felt as warm as we’ve had it back home. A quick passport check and I was really in Italy!

I needed change so I got a Coke Light as I left the airport. The attendant was so annoyed that I was interrupting him to buy something I could help but laugh in his face. It was so… Continental.

I knew my co-workers were taking cabs, but the guidebooks seemed to think the Alibus was good. That takes you from the airport into Naples, through the Piazzo Garibaldi and to the Piazzo Municipio (Municipal Plaza). Getting on the bus was a quick lesson in discovering that Italians are not good at line standing.

The ride from the airport was very illuminating. I learned a lot about Naples.

First off, Naples is dirty and things are in disrepair. The roads are torn up, there is grime everywhere, graffiti decorates all surfaces, and yet in the middle of your ride something beautiful will rise up and steal your heart. Vesuvius did that to me, and so did a hill top here and there. Piazzo Garibaldi is like a giant example of the world-weary feel NYC gave me as a kid, and is a notorious haven for pick pockets.

We kept going through streets built centuries ago, past shops closed for Sunday, and stopped in front of a massive castle. A massive castle with a massive amount of construction right next to it digging seemingly into its foundations. This was the Piazzo Municipio, my stop.

I got out and started to find my way to the hotel. After a few stops and starts I found my way to the Albergo del Golfo (Hotel of the Gulf). I checked in and put my stuff down. There was a bit of humor in that I needed a special divot on the room key to get the electricity in my room working.

I was hungry so went looking for food. Everything seemed closed except for a nearby McDonalds (no way I’m eating there) and this really odd convenience store next door to the hotel. It is very surreal and I’ll explain it in another post. After some pretty lame munchies I got I watched some BBC and fell asleep. My plan was breakfast in the morning and then off to the City of Science!

PIZZA!

The phone was ringing through my dreams. My co-worker, Reed, was in the lobby and wondered if I wanted to do anything. I figured I should eat, even though I wasn’t really hungry. So I went downstairs and saw Naples at Night.

Things were coming alive. Restaurants were opening and the city seemed to have an interesting energy. We found a pizza place and split a pizza and mineral water.

The pizza was quality dough, buffalo mozzarella, flavorful tomatoes, olive oil, and basil. The cheese was interesting, being very mild, subtle, and delicious. The water was good. We tossed the idea of wine but nixed it for tomorrow. We chatted and had a good time.

Then I came back, and energized I put my clothes in drawers and on hangers and got ready for bed again.

End Day One.

I'm in England!

Sitting in Heathrow right now. Some notes:

1. Heathrow is a chaotic mess. Getting through to my terminal took about 70 minutes. And there was nothing but airport industrial wasteland around. I took just one picture.
2. The people are nice.
3. I don't understand English money
4. Crawfish + rocket sandwiches are AWESOME!
5. Very sleepy
6. Another 90 minutes till my next flight.
7. Working on mastering zope.formlib in Pret, a yummy sandwich place.

I'm about to get off my rear end and get a few trinkets. Right next to me is a trinket shop. I will also need to find someone to a shot of me doing a cartwheel.

First minutes of the day

I just woke up. Its 8 am. Today I leave for Italy at 6:24 pm. That means I have about 10 hours left in the United States, my birthplace and home for the last four decades.

It doesn't feel like its actually happening. I was told the chances of a funded trip were slight. Then, getting the passport so quick was another slight chance. So I feel like today is a dream I'm about to wake from.

Anyway, I'm pretty much ready. Now I just wait. I am teaching at the gym for two hours so that will eat up a nice chunk of time. And I need to do my electronic check-in for the airfare tickets. I need to take a bike over to Chris Shenton's place. Otherwise I've got nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs.

Enough melancholy! I'm off to Italy today!

Pictures will be at my flickr account here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pydanny/