Some Interesting Art from Italy

I had a great time in Italy with my family. I will post more pictures later but thought I would start with some interesting art I saw. After you look at these, check out a higher quality slide show here. You can’t help but see a lot of art in Italy. It is everywhere. I am not much of an art lover so these are not pictures of classics but rather some items I thought were interesting and unusual.

I saw basically three types of art: religious, sex and violence, and quirky. I typically don’t like religious art. This one was an exception. It was in a tourist shop window. The Jesus eyes open and close as you walk past it. I almost bought this one because it made me laugh out loud.

This one was found in a Brothel in Pompeii. 2000 year old porn!! The small building was, by far, the most popular in Pompeii the day we were there.

This is a staircase in the Vatican Museum. It is a double helix with one path leading up and one for down.

This mosaic is about 2000 years old. It was in the enteranceway to a house in Pompeii. Underneath the dog, are two words “Cave Canem”. Thanks to Nikki, who took Latin in 6th grade, we know it means “beware of dog”.

A dome inside St. Peter’s Cathedral at the Vatican. It is all marble mosaic.

The ancient Romans were very big people

Just one of the violent subjects

and another. They used to cut you open and pull out your intestines while you watched. You might have to watch it happen to your friends first. Yeesh.

This is from the Arch of Septimus Severus. The arch is in Rome and was built in 205 AD to celebrate Emperor Septimus Severus’s victory over the Parthians. This panel shows a Roman soldier leading a prisoner to slavery.

An odd character

and another

One of many free running public fountains in Rome. The water is cool and drinkable. Ancient Rome used to be fed by a system of aqueducts. The water in public areas was free running and drinkable in 300 BC. It is amazing to think the Romans were so far advanced. It took about 1000 years for Europeans to get running water after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Another strange fellow…

Come see more in my online gallery at flickr.

AIM Buzz

I am happy to show off a nice little feature I have been playing with. It shows you all the shared items in your buddy network including AIM Share, Away Messages, AIM Profile updates, and all buddy updates for the last five days. It is all in one view and shows the most recent at the top. Items posted since you last looked are labeled “New” so you can easily see them. This is kind of like Kevin’s Buddy Stalker but is a simpler display.

I do believe we, the AIM team, should add this consolidated view of buddy updates somewhere in our products. I have found I discover a lot of good stuff happening in my network that I was missing by looking only at the AIM 6.0 buddy update indicator . I was also very surprised that there are almost 100 items for me to view. I visit this every few hours.

I built this as any good developer would…by copying lots of parts from other (better) developers. Every year or so I get the itch to do a little development project. I use these to learn some language or technology I hadn’t used and to build something I think I would use. My last project was, I think, last year when I wrote an AIM Plugin that lets you set your away message from your cell phone. This time, it was my first try at Javascript. I mixed in a bit of CSS and HTML to make for some goodness. I used the AIM Web API to fetch my buddy list and then pulled in the public RSS buddy feed for each person on my buddy list. It works but is slow because I have over 400 buddies. The good folks on the AIM Host team released an API that gives me all the buddy feed data for everyone on my buddy list in one call, getBuddylistFeed (see developer.aim.com). This call has been released but we are changing it and won’t have the changes installed for another few weeks. I don’t think the documentation for this call has been posted yet.

I also wrapped this up as an Apple Dashboard widget. I don’t plan to release that. While it was fairly easy to get the basics working, I could tell I would have to climb a mountain to get the widget working well and looking good. So I’ll put that off for now. I may wrap this up as an AIM plug-in if I have enough time.

I hope you give it a try. I have found it very useful and a bit addicting as well.

P.S. If you get an error or no results after 10 seconds, just reload. It isn’t perfect.

More about Israel

To continue the trip report, or at least the fun part of it, here are some fun facts about Israel and cultural differences. I am not a journalist and did not fact check the things people told me. So go look it up if you don’t believe what you read.

• Tel Aviv is a fun city. It is full of young people and lively areas.
• The food is good. Since it is on the Mediterranean, there is a lot of seafood. They seem to enjoy appetizers of humous, eggplang, and vegetables prepared in a variety of ways. I saw very little fried foods or other I would call unhealthy. I did see several McDonalds.
• There are very few obese people.
• A lot of people openly carry guns. I heard it is law for school groups to have an armed escort. The escorts are often parents and carry an assault rifle such as an M16 or something smaller.
• Men are drafted for three years into the Military and Women spend 2 years in the service sometime after High School.
• The biggest worry for many who live there is Iran.  The President of Iran has said he wants to annihilate Israel.  He is building nuclear weapons.
• There is a sizable Muslim population in Israel.

That’s all off the top of my head.  Did I miss anything interesting?

Our Trip to Israel

I’m back from Israel. We all had a great time and were blown away by the hospitality of the ICQ folks. Not only did we have fun but we had very productive meetings with the team in Tel Aviv. There are pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alankeister/sets/72157594275505370/detail/

This trip was my second to Israel, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. It helped to have been there before but there were still a lot of new experiences. I have to say the most notable was airport security. The second leg our our journey from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv was on El Al Airline. Security was unbelievable!!! I had a one on one interview with an agent, then got a boarding pass. At the gate, I was interviewed again. Then through a metal detector. Then patted down in a private area. They do that to everyone. But for some reason, they had one of our party unzip his pants!! I’m not kidding. It sounded like the Jerky Boys Dentist routine to me but he was conscious so they didn’t take advantage of him .

They were very suspicious of my laptop. They wiped it down with a paper towel and did some kind of bomb residue test on the towel. Then they brought this strange looking vacuum thing and vacuumed the crumbs out of the keyboard. Really! The vacuum with crumbs was placed into a big machine that gave me the green light. Whew!

So we went off to the non-citizen area where I went through another metal detector and my bags went through the scanner thing like security in the US. Then they opened every single thing I brought including socks, looked in medicine bottles, my book, toothbrush, everything. They used some kind of wand and wiped it on everything, inside and out. Then they put this wand into a strange looking machine that was meant to determined my fate. The machine seemed to like me but it beeped loudly at another one of my coworkers. The security people became agitated and had a quick conference. They were talking very loudly at each other. They came over to us and said “It’s ok.  This is not a big deal.” But it clearly was a big deal. A guard appeared at the door and took him into another room where they did something to him for another 15 mins. In the end, he was allowed to get on the plane but they made him check his electric razor — he carried everything else on. He was the last on the plane and delayed the flight.

When the first coworker went through, they security people had a lengthy discussion about his shoes. At first, his shoes were deemed suspicious and were not welcome on the airplane. They were running shoes.  After a while, they agreed to let the shoes on the plane but not while he was wearing them. They had to be checked with the baggage. When they realized he would be traveling in his socks, they brought his checked bag where he had packed a second pair of shoes. He was very relieved.

After I was on the plane, I felt very safe.  I have never seen so much done to ensure my security.  But during the process, I began to wonder if I would spend some time in a prison.  I don’t know what my shoes may have stepped in or what my bag rubbed against.  Either of these could have doomed me.

Our Linerider Videos

The whole family played with Linerider Sunday. Here are the results:

Nikki’s video (She’s 11 years old)
Stacy’s Video (She’s 9 years old)

My Video (I’m kind of old)

I just couldn’t get the final jump right so my poor sledder died prematurely.

Line Rider – very addicting

Have you seen this little flash game Line Rider? If not, head on over to YouTube and check out a video to see what it is all about. You start this game with a sledder and a pen. You have no control over the sledder — only gravity does. You draw a hill for a sledder to go down. Some people are really adicted to this thing and have produced some amazing rides with jumps, flips, and more. The poor little guy always dies in the end. Give it a try. It’s easy to get started but more challenging to keep him alive than you may think.