Look for postings about the italy trip at:

http://www.hipcats.net/italy

In rome now. Actually wrote a post earlier from the philly airport, but have not posted it and it is buried on my laptop in my bag. So we will jump right in here. (You might be noticing the lack of contractions in my writing -- I am using a computer in a Roman laundromat and I have not yet found the apostrophe on the Italian keyboard!) Also do not think I can post pictures from this machine. I have them on my camera, but no easy way to get them off. So that will come later.

I think I am going to start a seperate blog just for the Italy stuff -- stay tuned for details.

Naturally the kids were out celebrating last night... From the Daily Orange

Thousands of Syracuse University students flocked from dorms, the Carrier Dome and bars to celebrate on Marshall Street. And celebrate they did. More than 100 police greeted the fans, barricaded crowds, put out fires and, generally, tried to subdue the mass.

[...]

“Within five minutes, we saw a guy naked in a tree, a homeless guy, a guy in a chicken suit and a bonfire,” said Lindsay Skorupa, a sophomore English and textual studies major.

Several times, officers escorted fire officials to those blazes. At one point, officials put out a fire, in front of Jay’s Communications, that stretched about 8 feet into the air.

“The cops did a great job, they didn’t break up the fires as fast as they did last time and just let everyone have a good time,” said freshman architecture major Mark Wizeman.

Oy. I am dead tired, and am so behind on my to do list that it's not even funny. But first things first:

Syracuse 81, Kansas 78

National champions, baby!

Not long after the game I got a call from one very happy friend in Boston -- and then about two minutes later another called my cell phone. Boston in stereo! They had both just gotten home from watching the game with 200 SU partisans at a local bar. When it started snowing, they figured that it was a good omen for good ol' snowy SU!

Aaron, who is already in Monaco, sent a distressed e-mailed this morning begging me to bring a tape of the game, since he couldn't find it on TV over there! I don't think this will work since I think a VHS NTSC tape may not play back in Europe, but I went ahead and recorded most of the game on my DV camcorder with the idea that I could then suck it into my laptop. So far this hasn't really worked, but maybe I'll take another stab. Or just stick the tape in my bag in hopes of running into someone else with a camcorder!

Back to my to-do list: still have to xerox my textbooks, finish the pro bono website, talk to the 12-year-old next door about feeding the cat, call my credit card company, get my hair cut, haggle with my dentist about insurance, go to several meetings at work, finish up packing, pick up hemmed pants, leave instructions for the temporary folks we hired to work on a project I'm running, etc, etc. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day. Then Wednesday morning it's off to the airport for two days of travel hell. Despite all this, I'm still totally jazzed about the whole trip!

I'm a bit of a preservation buff, and I love looking at those "then and now" books where they take old photographs of buildings and streetscapes and place them side by side with the same view today.

Here's an an even cooler idea:

What do you do when you get laid off and suddenly find yourself with lots of free time on your hands? First, grab screen shots from a DVD of various San Francisco locations used in one of the greatest films of all time. Then visit those locations and take digital pictures. Go home, download the images and meticulously crop them to match the original screen shots. Arrange them in sequence, add a little text and ba-da-bing, you're done. Then you look for another job

You can check out the results right here.

Link via Scrubbles.

Went out this afternoon and blew an insane amount of money on some new clothes and a pair of prescription sunglasses. Then (while watching the basketball game) I spent the evening trying to figure out how I was going to lug all this stuff around the continent. My rolling backpack thingy is crammed full, and weighs in at over 42 pounds.That's with the laptop, which I really want to take so that I can do classwork, post my photos online as we go, etc. But after picking that danged bag up a few times, I may just reconsider. (Times like these I wish I'd splurged on a teeny-tiny notebook, instead of my standard middle-of-the-road Toshiba.)

I'm actually going to unpack a bit of it to carry on the plane with me (probably the laptop, camera, one change of clothes, etc.), but I'm trying to make sure it will all fit back in when I get there.

I also still have a page-long typed list of things I need to do before I leave -- everything from xeroxing pages out of my textbooks to cleaning the litterbox to writing a paper. And since the first two days of the trip are all travel, I'll have plenty of time to stew about what I forgot to do!