Our last day in Rome, so we had to get an early start. The breakfast server beamed as I finally got our room number pronunciation comprehensible. There wasn’t any really fresh bread (it was Sunday), but we were still adjusting to eating restaurant meals every day anyway. We dropped our bags at the bag-dropping room […]
Author Archive for dfsmith
Saturday, and you’d think Rome would be a bit calmer. Nope. Anyway, we decided to jump on the bus again (and grab a 2-day pass) and head over to the open market. Sara went ga-ga over the fruits, vegetables, flowers and spices. After that (and a small footwear-related expenditure) we wondered the back streets for […]
The Hotel Brasile had a good continental breakfast. Sara wasn’t all that keen on the bread, but I lapped up cheese and ham and milk. The staff maid had squeaky shoes, and was happy to help me pronounce cento-quindici (our room number: Chen-TOW qwin-dee-CHEE). Being in a strange city, we decided to head back to […]
We’re back from Italy! As a memory aid, I’ll see if I can remember what happened. Day 1 and a bit: we got to the SFO ticketing desk ten minutes after they’d stopped issuing tickets. Luckily someone came and got our baggage anyway. We made the flight. Barely. In Amsterdam, my luggage decided that it […]
At long last, I’ve got round to porting Marcus Meissner’s DATlib from a Sun/Unix-y to a Win32/Generic platform. I also wrote a quick Dat2Wav.exe program to batch my music from DAT (digital audio tape) to WAV files. It’s available (for free) at my main site, but please report any problems (or successes) here.
Sara and I finished up our concert set with the Santa Clara Chorale where we sang a bunch of ancient and modern Christmas-themed songs. We did two concerts in the Mission at Santa Clara University as well as a few shorter concerts. The final one was at St. Joseph’s Cathedral downtown. Also, Sara has finished […]
It seems that the solar experiments we did in the summer were just in time according to a CNN report today. Apparently the U.S. Mint has noticed that the penny is now a bullion coin and consequently have written some new regulations to disallow “recycling” of pennies and nickels. (When we did the experiment, I […]
I was taking this apart when I realized I hadn’t recorded a picture of it for posterity. See if you can guess what it is.
Just in case you were wondering; yes it’s a huge event here. We went to a party (at a friend’s parents’ house) dressed like this. The really scary thing was that nearly everyone recognized who we were supposed to be.
I installed a new ceiling fan over the weekend, so I spent a lot of time at the top of a very tall ladder. It took a few hours to make and finish (paint) a little box to make the beam wider and hide the cable. It took a few hours to run the power […]