Day 6: A Wine Tour
The wine tour turned out better than I expected. Small intimate group, fun guide, and the best part was that I was able to handle my wine well.
In the picture - barrels of Merlot from a cellar of an independent local winery.
Also pictured - the winery’s friendly cat was saying hi to us 📷
Finally, a relaxed day in Florence. I went on a walk and captured more of the essence of the place.
There are many small shops and bars, like this one. Whenever possible I avoided the crowds. 📷
I think today’s adventure in Rome, which involved lots of rain, several public bathrooms in unusable situation, and plenty of noise I see back home, we got to the peak of the vacation.
Tomorrow I hope to pace (as in “pache” in Italian) out.
Day 4: Rome
Rome is… Like New York. Similar grunge with millennia old structures scattered about.
We skipped the big ones. We’re not big for crowds.
With extra time to kill, we went to a video game museum instead. Playing old arcade games for free…? Worth it. 📷
This morning we woke up early to take the train to Rome. NK suggested we catch a snack before we start the day - a smart decision.
We got two Foccacias and two espresso (due espresso). When you drink espresso straight up, beating it with a little spoon before you sip makes it sweeter. 📷
The streets in Florence are narrow. The sidewalks often fit only one person. Even then, if you don’t clutch your camera bag close, a passing car will hit it and spray its contents all over the pavement.
We stopped often to examine stickers. I think we could use more of those in the streets in NYC. 📷
The best places in a trip like this are serendipitous. We stumbled upon a local bookstore, with delicious cappuccino and brownies.
I felt a natural pull toward the redical-anarchist books on the shelves.
The store owner said she doesn’t know if Cyberpunk by Raf Valvola Scelsi has an English translation. Doesn’t seem like it. I got a book about mushrooms instead. 📷
From a pass under the highway heading to a restaurant tonight in Florence. The whole tunnel is covered with graffiti like this. 📷
Day 3 - Walking Firenze
I wanted to use the phone for quick updates, but I couldn’t join the local network until a couple of hours ago. Some settings on the Google-Fi network needed to be turned on, others turned off, and magic, we’re back in the 21st century. In the meantime, I learned that my privacy-oriented Android phone is still very useful offline, with OSMand Maps, and the ability to take and sync pictures wherever Wi-Fi was available.
We just got back from La Fate Bistrot. A small restaurant seemingly run by my mother in a different life. She served us and cooked our food. Every meal on the menu was vegan, all homemade style served on nice plates. We had a glass of wine to end the long day and exchanged tired smiles. “Conto, per favore” has been added to my Italian vocabulary now.
There’s much to write and much to show, but it’s close to midnight and it’s been a long day full of walking. I’ll leave you with one picture I took yesterday with the phone; tomorrow I hope to take my camera and take some photos.
Buona notte, amici 📷
Copenhagen
It’s like IKEA in this airport. There’s No music walking down to the connecting flight, but there is a chill soundtrack in the bathroom - like an indie video game. A long trail of shops led us to the gate to our connecting to Italy; It feels more like a mall than an airport here. And it’s so quiet! there are so many cramped together in one coffee shop but it feels more library.
I’m enjoying a good cup of hot chocolate and a plain croissant with it. 📷
Day 0
The morning in NYC started with this.
Time to wake up and make some coffee. I walked toward the espresso machine zombie-like and emptied the remainder of the beans into the hopper. NK showed up soon after, a shadow of pink fluff in their onesie. They sat on the sofa with their TODOs for the vacation. I noticed the notebook they used is a college-ruled A4 size, unlike the pocket-size notebooks they usually write their thoughts in.
I hope this vacation will be Paché. Inner peace and self-reflection. I know how new-age this sounds (is this called “new-age” still? I think with the years, “new-age” is now “old-age”), but I find that in other vacations I often appreciate this the most. This is why I packed a new small notebook with me, to capture some of it on paper. The computer can be too distracting. Only now I spent half an hour researching and updating my wiki; typing paché above (with accent over the e) showed me my instructions on the wiki needed updating.
Brand, Shmang
Even though I have several videos on Diode Zone, a PeerTube instance, I’m been thinking of going solo with YouTube.
The catalyst has been limited storage space, though now I am double checking, and it looks like Diode Zone always offered unlimited space… I could have sworn it was topped at 10GB at some point. However, even with unlimited storage, this instance is run by one person who hasn’t been too active online, which is always a worrying sign.
YouTube is the king of online videos, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy to work with. It’s lawyer-speak meant for brands, not people; each video I upload is scrutinized for fear of getting sued and greed for making ads. Last night, when I tried to add a link to my wiki (which I’m recording in the video itself), it informed me I had to be verified, either by uploading a video of my face or scanning a government-issued ID.
Annoyed (Google already has enough of my government-issued ID one way or another), I checked to see if I could move content from my alternative account to my primary one (not really) and found out I can have a dedicated “brand” (of course) account on the platform with my primary Google account, which is verified. So now I need to move my videos from my TAONAW dedicated account to my primary Google account to open a brand there as an alternative account for the primary account…
I’m not against making some money from my content, but Google just makes it feel so crooked. It is a well-oiled money machine, which means Google won’t shut it down any time soon (though the risk of rebranding it in new colors and logos remains, as they tend to get bored quickly over there, it seems). So do I just put up with it for now? Do I engage with it, jump through its hoops, and learn to be a “brand,” asking people to subscribe in each video?
I don’t know. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle.
The S3 video from last week is up:
Getting ready to pack for a long trip. The flight is Wednesday. I woke up worried I won’t have enough underwear, so I’m planning to buy extra. Then I’m worried my adapter will burn out my laptop when there, and I can’t remember where I placed it. And allergies… You can tell I don’t travel often.
My wiki can be addicting. I forget how fun it is to organize information, make it more presentable, and just have fun with it.
When I started working on it today, my goal was to straight some rough edges to get it ready for another S3 Video. Instead, here I am, still tweaking and changing things, writing logs, submitting changes, and having a good time.
Hopefully, I’ll get to recording pretty soon.
I keep reading that Mastodon is “complicated” from mainstream media, like Verge and Techcrunch.
What’s so complicated? Find a server, register, use. Are people so braindead they don’t know how to look in a directory of servers? If you know how to read an Excel sheet, you can read that list. What’s so hard?
I can’t get over the fact that the Mac mini (M1) restarts so fast it’s actually easier to reboot than to close all the different apps to start from a clean slate.
Human errors and an Emacs tip
My Linux desktop stopped syncing my Emacs files yesterday. I noticed this in the morning, realized what the issue was, and didn’t get a chance to fix it until the evening. Two human errors caused the issue:
- I changed the Syncthing folders to be under ~/Sync/ instead of the home folder in my emacs settings
- I deleted the .emacs.d folder from my home folder
I fixed the path for the settings file but introduced a typo. I typed emacs_setting.org instead of emacs_settings.org. I only noticed the typo in the evening.
As usual with my singular/plural typos, they are invisible to me. I can read the l line 5 times and not see that S is missing. It’s the same with my writing, where I’d publish a post without noticing these typos until I run it through a grammar check. I need a strategy to counter that.
I’m not sure why I removed emacs.d from the Linux desktop. It was a hectic morning with Nat trying to find a clinic that would see him, among several other things. For some reason, restoring the folder from the trash didn’t work. It seems it got stuck restoring some files that weren’t there; I guess it was a file corruption issue.
The .emacs.d folder mostly contains the Emacs packages I use, so the solution was to re-download those. Here I learned an important tip: to repeat a command in Emacs (which is M-x or Alt+M), press M-n or M-p after M-x. This is similar to pressing the up or down arrow in the terminal window.
On Linux, it’s easy to run another instance of Emacs. I used one instance to download packages as I kept opening new instances to read error messages that told me which package was missing. Launch, see the error, go to the other instance, M-x install-package, launch a new instance, and repeat. Within 2 minutes, Emacs was functional again.
What’s left now is to see about the bookmarks file. I still keep it in the home folder under .emacs.d since my connections to my servers change depending on which computer I’m on. This is another thing I need to fix.
Non Monogamous
Just like I wrote about my name not too long ago, it occurred to me I should write about being non-monogamous.
At this point, it’s not about showing the world who I am and what I am. As NK would jokingly say, I’m a “grumpy old man” who doesn’t care what people think about that anyway.
But I don’t want to keep people guessing or scratching their heads either, especially when I use the term “my partner” or switch between “he” and"them" when I talk about them - my partners. Of which I have two.
And that’s the other thing. I don’t talk much about my partners; as a matter of fact, I’ve been avoiding it. A habit of keeping my non-monogamous status a secret from days past.
For example, I wanted to write about a bit of a medical situation with Nat (my other partner, and he’s fine, by the way) this morning, but I didn’t. Part of it is his privacy, sure, but the part about me, how I tie into this and what I did, that’s my story too. When you hang around your significant others for over 10 years, you have a lot of stories to share that involve them too.
For now, I’ll tell you there’s NK (they/them) and Nat (he/him). They are both awesome and different in their own ways, and I love them both to bits.
We don’t have a perfect life together; we have a realistic one. We go through hardships, we pay bills, we do the daily grind, and we have a love/hate relationship with NYC.
After a good nap, I was able to work more on an animated gif for a knowledge base article I’m working on (can’t integrate movie clips, so it’s a workaround).
Then it was time for a quick walk. The clouds left earlier and the sun came out, so I enjoyed our neighborhood park.
