No Dice
Posted: Monday, July 16, 2012 Filed under: Whatever | Tags: food Leave a commentPizza Al’s can’t do a pizza with an egg on it. I can’t bring them an egg or anything. It’s against the law. Bah.
Al will still be getting plenty of my money, nonetheless. The same food at the same chain restaurants, everywhere you go, gets old. Like I said earlier, Italy got the food right.
I’ll update this blog if anything relevant comes up, or if the research I did in Italy gets published, but otherwise, I’m done. I might start another blog somewhere down the line, but this one is linked to on the WVU Honors Blog as a Study Abroad Blog, so it really ought to just sit around as an archive. Hopefully, I’ll never end up living under a bridge, unable to pay the $26/year.
To sum up, if you get the opportunity to study abroad, do it. Chances are, at no other point in your life will you be able to spend the better part of a year in a foreign country.
The End
Posted: Wednesday, July 11, 2012 Filed under: WordsWordsWords | Tags: european politics, freedom Leave a commentI’m back in America. Flew back on June 20. Genova to Munich to Philadelphia to Charlotte to Charleston. Window seats all the way, so I got to watch the wing trailing edge flaps doing their thing during takeoff and landing. All that extra work tacking the Aerospace onto my Mechanical was definitely worth it.
I did actually end up getting paid, on June 6. Got the money wired to my American bank two days before I left, when a Euro was worth just north of $1.25. This was the day after the supposedly-pivotal Greek elections, in which the kinda-pro-bailout/austerity parties barely beat the newcomer screw-austerity-we-can-renegotiate-this-thing party. You can bet I watched that closely. Some were predicting Euro/USD parity at the time. Others were shocked at such speculations. Now the Euro has lost 2.95% of its value against the dollar in the last week. Germany, evidently Europe’s last hope for salvation competitiveness on the world stage, is faltering economically. Who’s going to bail everybody out, now?
That said, I’m happy with my money here in America, where it belongs.
I got to see the code I worked on forever actually get put to use in the lab the week before I left. It seemed to do what I wanted, though it still needs some work.
I jumped right back into this whole America thing with home-made hamburgers the night after I got back. Delicious! The next day was Papa John’s Pizza, which was kind of depressing. It was basically tasteless, compared to anything I had in Italy. Luckily, in Morgantown, I live a block away from an honest-to-God Italian-immigrant-runs-the-kitchen pizza place, Pizza Al’s. My faith in pizza may yet be restored.
Speaking of food, I lost more than thirty pounds in Italy. I think I’m going to have to start exercising. I like looking good, but I also like hamburgers. Life just isn’t fair.
But anyway, I’m glad to be back in America.
We, as Americans, are the descendants of people who decided that Europe sucked so bad that it made sense to get on a boat for months and strike out anew in a completely foreign land, where, at the time, if you couldn’t feed yourself, you would probably starve to death. We are the descendants of people who fought, and won, a war of independence against the world’s preeminent superpower, because we didn’t like the way they were running things.
Citizens of few, if any, other nations can say the same.
Kind of on that topic, I never really told the guys I worked with about this blog, or at least not it’s address. I don’t really know why. I did tell some guys at NETL about it, and so, the main Italian I worked for (and still am working for) found out about it. He immediately freaked out upon learning, from the About page, of the namesake of my blog, a piece of the fire control group in the SA vz. 58. He left a very earnest message on my adviser’s voice-mail, asking if I was a revolutionary, or otherwise unhinged. Luckily, I had mentioned my affinity for firearms to said adviser, who also has such an affinity, and so he was able to defuse the situation. I just learned of this from him today.
As Americans, we take for granted freedoms much of the rest of the world can only dream of.
I celebrate one of those freedoms with Italian engineering, interestingly enough. It shall serve as both a little reminder of Italy, and why America is so awesome.
We’re all doomed!
Posted: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 Filed under: WordsWordsWords | Tags: european politics, rally, time Leave a commentI’m having a heck of a time getting pictures off of my phone, so this post will be uninteresting. Furthermore, a big impetus for my knocking out a post right now is largely just so every month I will have been in Italy will have posts. Though something interesting did happen today, so let’s see how this goes.
I will be leaving Italy on June 20, in three weeks. My work is going well, but I will likely still be tying up loose ends after I get back to America. Luckily, what I create is measured in kilobytes, and they ship for free. I’m supposed to be teaching an Italian undergrad how my stuff works, so she can carry on my work after I’ve become enveloped in schoolwork once again at WVU. I’ve spent more time teaching her how MATLAB works, so we’ll see how that goes.
I still haven’t been paid, besides one €500 down payment, for my work. So I’ve been spending my dad’s money since probably late October. The paperwork issues that my employer has faced have evidently been massive. And speaking generally, I’d be kind of okay with this situation. Not many undergrads have multiple cogenerating machines to play with. And, as much as I would rather pay my own way, my dad doesn’t have a problem with helping me out. But I was supposed to get paid. And then there is the Euro Crisis. And what a crisis it is!
I’ve been watching the euro/USD exchange rate the whole time I have been over here. You can check it out in the right sidebar, if you want. That’s the price in dollars for one euro, which makes the guy who decided on their naming convention look retarded. Anyway, a euro has been worth anywhere between $1.40 and $1.30 the whole time I have been over here. Except for right now. In the last week or two, it seems to have dropped a good little bit.
Why do I care, you might ask? Well, I’m supposedly getting paid in euros, in an amount I won’t be able to spend in the span of three weeks, and I wouldn’t have been spending the whole sum over here, regardless. And every time the US dollar gains against the euro, I lose purchasing power in America. So, every week I still don’t get paid, I get to look at my pay essentially draining away. And there is so much stuff I want to buy!
It’s April
Posted: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 Filed under: WordsWordsWords | Tags: airsoft, diaz Leave a commentIt’s been far too long since my last post, and that one was barely a post at all. So here is something. My smaller camera broke a week ago, my D70s is not an every-day-carry camera, and I still haven’t been officially paid yet, so it’s looking like it will be all cellphone pics from here on out. I’m sorry.
Due to a bit of a debacle on my father’s part, I will be back in America earlier than I had planned, in late June. Just an FYI, you can’t change the return trip date of a round trip flight after you have already gone one way.
I had to deal with my bank yesterday in town. I found a branch of the Banco di San Giorgio closer to campus than the one I’ve dealt with before. I went there just to be told that my account is not with them, and I need to go to the other branch to deal with it. Okay. That makes perfect sense, right?
I took care of my business there, and went looking for a hair place. Before I found it, I found a dealer of airsoft guns and equipment. For those who don’t know, basically these are fake guns that shoot plastic pellets that kids and others use in games. They can look pretty real. Anyway, I normally wouldn’t patronize such an establishment, but I wanted a new hat. On my eternal quest to look like an a-hole and protect my head from too much sun or rain, I’ve been wearing a boonie hat now and then. I was kind of bitching at myself about how ridiculous my snow camo one looks and how I should find a solid-colored one if I’m going to wear it as often as I do. Cue airsoft joint.
Yes, that kind of hat.
Before I went to the hats, I screwed around with some of the airsoft guns. I dropped a mag on the floor, and picking it up, noticed a €250.00 price tag, on the mag. I sincerely hope that was for the whole rifle. There were plenty of boonie hats to be had, though as far as I could tell, only one of them fit my apparently-gigantic head. It isn’t a solid color, but it looks a lot less ridiculous than my older one.
I found the hair place and got my hair shampooed and cut for less than half what a cut would cost me at the mall and was done with a half hour left before a movie I wanted to see in the theater.
wow
Posted: Monday, March 5, 2012 Filed under: Whatever | Tags: music, time 1 CommentI just realized today that I have already passed the halfway point in my stay here. It was a bit surprising. I had totally quit thinking about it. Italy is now basically my normal. The thought of leaving is a bit saddening. I guess that is normal, too.
This guy is Italian.
Here’s a playlist of some of his work in Youtube.
First Savonese Snowfall
Posted: Wednesday, February 1, 2012 Filed under: Whatever | Tags: weather 1 Comment
The view out my dorm window today.
Snow is a once-a-year thing here, generally.
Update: And long stretches of cold weather are not planned around. A few days after the picture was taken, I ran across an exposed plastic pipe outside a building near where I work that had burst in two places. It sprayed a mist of water all over the road, which of course froze. This went on for several days. It was a little entertaining, honestly.
It’s Too Italian Here
Posted: Sunday, January 29, 2012 Filed under: WordsWordsWords | Tags: bureaucracy, european politics Leave a commentI promised a big post about my family’s trip through Italy, with lots of beautiful pictures. That will happen. Just not right now.
Here’s a post about why Italy sucks.
My final in Sustainable Energy I was on January 12. It wasn’t really what I expected. I spent the week prior to it acting like I would study for it. Which means I studied for a day and a lot of the night. Where I came into the exam thinking I would basically give an overview of what I learned in relation to fuel cells and distributed generation, I was actually asked a couple of pretty specific questions, each with several parts. During this final, which accounts for the entire class grade, I was asked about subjects that accounted for probably less than ten percent of all the different things we were taught. So, basically, if you don’t know everything equally, it’s easy to get lucky or unlucky, on this test. I got a 23/30.
I can retake it this Tuesday, but I really don’t think I care that much.
If you read the news, you may have heard about a huge cruise ship disaster off the coast of Tuscany. If you don’t know the details already, you probably don’t care, but that gigantic ship, the Costa Concordia, was actually on its way to the port in Savona, right next to the hotel that my family used there.
Ah, the beauttiful Mediterranean.
From a kind of engineer-y perspective, I have to comment on one thing that I read. The average cruise ship has doubled in size in the last decade, and that means a whole lot more passengers and crew. How do you get all these people safely off a ship during an emergency? Why, don’t have an emergency, of course!
Other Stuff
Posted: Sunday, January 8, 2012 Filed under: Whatever 1 Comment
This is far too common here.
I can sit, and I can crouch, but I have a hard time hovering.
Why don’t mechanical pencils come with caps? Almost every time I start to use one, I have to extend the lead, because the excellent marking surface I had just hours before has broken off in my jacket pocket, leaving a sharp awkward edge that I need to write with before I get my proper rounded tip back. And, I occasionally stab myself through the jacket lining. I should start a writing implement company, or search online for what I want, or something.
I listened to the entire Orange Bowl on the internet stream of Morgantown’s WVAQ, from 2:30 am Italy time Thursday morning, through to basically the end of the post-game show around 7:00 am. It was awesome to listen to, as Tony Caridi does an excellent job with the play-by-play, but it is still hard to really get a feel for just how fast the action happens. I found this late Friday:
I’d like to give an internet high five to all the Mountaineer fans who read this. That was an excellent victory.
Also,
Jack in a can.
Oh God. At first I wanted to complain about the generations of tradition thrown to the wayside by putting Jack Daniels in cans. Then I noticed, while looking at my own picture, the “A Perfect Mix of Whiskey and Cola.” I don’t know whether that is better or worse. Considering that everything on the can is in English, I’ll bet this is primarily made for Americans. Why are we so horrible?
Is it me or is it the culture?
Posted: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 Filed under: Whatever | Tags: oddities Leave a commentI work late a lot. This doesn’t really mean I work more than other people. I just work later than other people.
An armed security guy just checked up on me in my little research shack, making sure that I actually work here. For the second time in a couple of weeks.
Obligatory YouTube clip:
These are some funny guys.
Update: EU Plans Revenge Against Britain. This can’t be healthy behavior.
Last Day of Class
Posted: Monday, December 12, 2011 Filed under: WordsWordsWords | Tags: university 4 CommentsWas today, at least for me.
Italian learning is a very strange and alien thing.
My Sustainable Energy I class lasted from mid-September to today. With no homework. Or tests. Or quizzes. Or anything whatsoever that I could be graded on.
My grade in this class is based wholly and entirely on my performance on the final exam. Which is oral. I will be asked two comprehensive questions, which I will need to answer as fully as I can.
There’s a reason why all the English-speaking Italians I deal with refer to classes as exams. I’m pretty sure that’s it.
On the upside, even if I had more than one class this semester, I would have little reason to completely psych myself out. Rather than cramming all those finals into one sleepless week, Italians give you options. I have four different test dates to choose from, from December 21 to February 21. Really, and the next semester doesn’t start until right after that last one. Assuming all classes are like that, you could basically give yourself a full week to study for each final individually, if the scheduling worked out.
In other news, my father, step-mother, and sister will be here in a bit over a week to spend two weeks with my spoiled self and Italy. We’ll be traveling to and through several cities from here to Rome. So lots more pictures. And a hotel with the same name as my own surname. More then.
And because I don’t like the prospect of more posts with nothing but words, here’s what I was listening to here as I published this:
I know all the people who read this are either older members of my own family or people who type awkward things into Google. This is to you, ‘angry “leave a comment” site:.com’-guy. It’s not head-bangy if any members of my family want to rethink that last scroll.
Final Thoughts: Does a class called Sustainable Energy I in a Master’s program called Energy and the Environment sound a little tree-hugger to you? It is. I chose this class because it covered fuel cells, which I’ve been tangentially dealing with for the last three summers of research-like work, and I kind of thought I would continue this pattern over here. All this experience with fuel cell stuff has pushed the feeling that it won’t be really market-worthy for a while, at least not for the power-generation applications people keep pushing it for.
In a pleasant turn of events, I’ve actually been working on cogeneration and distributed generation, which can be downright profitable. And my class covered it too. Yay.
linearhammer 