I love the idea of the HumanCar, a street-legal vehicle powered by the passengers and a hybrid-electric drive. It’s wonderful!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=369463415941480101
[via Autopia]
Monthly Archives: January 2007
Biking on the Via Appia (part 2)
This is a two-part article. Here’s Part 1.
While in Rome, my brother kept dangling this promise of taking our bicycles out to Via Appia and making a day trip out of it. I wanted to see it because the Via Appia was the most important Roman road of its time. Roman bases, villas and famous tombs adorned its sides in its heyday, and their ruins can be seen even today. The road itself was a marvel of Roman engineering. It was so well-made that portions of it are still preserved, thousands of years later.
Well, I kept feeling like the horse that can’t reach the carrot, since my brother still buried his nose in books every day. But, I kept nagging him, and in my last week there, we managed to make a half-day trip out of it. It was a wonderful time!
We took our bikes and rode through the city till we reached the highway shown below (don’t ask me for the name, I forgot it), rode alongside it for a bit, then took a side street down a little hill that took us to the start of the Via Appia. From then on, it was an easy (and beautiful) ride out into the countryside.
Along the way, we stopped so I could take photos (of course), and also snuck into some pretty unsafe ruins, as you’ll see below. I’m still amazed the floors didn’t crumble under us as we climbed onto the second floor of a villa. I can only attribute it to good, old, solid Roman construction.
You can also read more about the Via Appia over at Wikipedia. Stay tuned for my post on Florence.
Photos from Rome
In March of 1999 I visited Rome. It was my first trip to Italy and I had a wonderful time. I stayed with my brother, who at the time was on a 3-year fellowship there to do research. He studies myths and religions and does comparisons between deities in various cultures. He also collects folklore: dying traditions and customs. Takes lots of photographs and films them as well. The latter part of his work is exciting. The former puts me to bed. Mille scusi, fratello!
Anyway, I had the most wonderful time. Bogdan (my step-brother — he’s pictured above) had his nose buried in dusty books at various libraries in Rome, while I literally walked through the entire Rome on foot, taking photos with my trusty little Canon Elph and consulting the map here and there. The Canon has since become unusable, because APS film is no longer available, but it did help me preserve the wonderful things I saw. Over the years, the photos gathered some dust themselves in my closet, till I finally decided to scan and share them online. Since I don’t have a scanner that will work with APS film, I scanned the photos themselves. I realize that’s a real step down in quality, and given the age of the prints, it really shows, but the digitized photos still serve to convey the beauty and history of the place. Plus, the aged paper gave a nice Sepia effect to the photos that I’d be hard pressed to reproduce in Photoshop.
While I really enjoyed Rome, my experiences with Romans were mixed at best. And I had breathing problems there as well, due to the pollution. But none of that could eclipse the sense of wonder and discovery I had every day as I planned out where I’d go, then get there and take photos. Maybe I’m biased, but I find today’s architecture pathetic. It’s disposable, ugly, flimsy and imitative. Few and far between are the buildings that make a statement. Well, in Rome, as in most European cities, you’ll have no shortage of good architecture. I think that’s what makes them so beautiful.
Here are several of the photos I took during my trip.
DC FAN Meetup last night
Ligia and I attended the DC FAN (FeedBurner Ad Network) meetup last night. It took place in downtown DC, at Capitol City Brewery. It started around 6:00 pm and lasted well after 8:30 pm. It was lots of fun and we really enjoyed it. Got to meet the cool folks from FeedBurner, without which my site wouldn’t be where it is today.
I use all of their services, and love them. I burn my feeds through them, I offer email subscriptions to my various content, I repackage my feed content and display it on various web pages like this one or this one for example. I use their ads, of course, which is how I monetize my site and feed content, along with Google’s AdSense. I use and love their feed stats, and I’m really excited they recently introduced site stats as well. I also use something they call feed flares, which are the little snippets you see at the end of every one of my posts. They let you do things like subscribe to my feed, email me, add a post to del.icio.us or submit it to Digg, etc. It’s really, really cool stuff.
I covered FeedBurner on my blog in the past as well. If you’re interested, you can read more here, here, and here. And of course, let’s not forget the time when Rick Klau, VP of Biz Dev at FeedBurner, stepped in and stopped me from making a feed gaffe early last year. Rick was at last night’s meetup, so I was really glad to meet him.
So, who attended? The folks at FeedBurner were well represented. There was Rick of course, and Eric Olson and Jake Parillo.
Eric coordinated the event and invited me, so a big thank you goes out to him. Various folks showed up throughout the evening. Sphere CEO Tony Conrad and VP of Biz Dev Jeff Yolen were there.
A few people from AOL’s content division showed up. George from Fat Pitch Financials was there as well. As we left, more people showed up.
I really liked being able to interact directly with the FeedBurner folks. I got to hear about some cool upcoming features like blog networks, got the scoop on how Site Stats hit the ground running, had a chance to give some direct feedback about the Ad Network, and of course, the highlight was that Rick Klau loves photography. We had fun chatting about that!
There was an interesting mural on the wall above our table.
There was plenty of food, and of course there were pretzels as well. 🙂
Raoul Pop 