The Twitter Diaries: January 2009, Pt 1: Italy, Ireland, UK, France

back from New Year’s celebration with friends in Piemonte, back to work (in Dublin and Grenoble) next week. Not ready for vac to be over!

“Apologizing” for Fascism

@robinbloor thanks for the tip- Stanza looks like an app I’ll use!

hmph. Dublin hotel booking form requires me to be a Mr., Mrs., or Miss. None of the three is correct.

@deirdresm since I retained my own surname on marriage, Mrs. is simply dead wrong; there is no Mr. Straughan in our family

@deirdresm I need a crash course in Irish – how to pronounce Saoirse? thx for the Far Side re-enactments – brilliant!

must… face… the wardrobe. If nothing fits, the sales start in Milan tomorrow. Not that I can buy much in Italy. Wrong body shape.

Ross on her re-entry to small-town Italy: “I didn’t know so many Italians are racist.”

…and her friend’s 23YO ex boyfriend just died of a drug overdose. No, Italy is not quite the paradise Americans fondly imagine

@mmcallen I have [had Amazon ads on my site] for years, to VERY small returns. Classic, I think.

couldn’t be happier that Terry Pratchett got a knighthood, unless they also found a cure for his Alzheimer’s

@deirdresm don’t know anything; in spite of my name (which has nothing to do with my ancestry), this will be my 1st visit to Ireland

had a day in which Italy did its best to remind me of all the things I do NOT love about it

@deirdresm thanks, but doubt I’ll have time this trip. Just there Monday afternoon to Wednesday morning – this time

what I miss about Italy

@Roam2Rome Mexico will be a lot cheaper. Italian dentistry is so expensive people leave the country for treatment

the Vatican reaffirms its medical ignorance

@tara_kelly yup, according to the Vatican’s chief of medicine, the birth control pill causes male sterility.

Ross’ way of making up with me after a fight: “You can take this makeup of mine to use on your trip if you want. Just don’t lose it.”

@trine you have to go through horrible teenage tantrums before you get that kind of treatment… sometimes

in Dublin, about to film Michael Pryc on IPS package manager GUI. Any particular requests for what he should cover?

the menu of Sun’s employee canteen in Dublin includes a “potatoes” course. And steak & Guinness casserole for lunch. Yum!

@deirdresm it was good, though they gave me way too many potatoes (if such a thing is possible)

I wish cut & paste from OpenOffice to Roller worked the same on the Mac as it does on Windows

good day of filming in Sun’s Dublin office yesterday, followed by a nice dinner, then total collapse. No time to see sights, unfortunately

I hate multilingual websites that assume that my country is also my preferred language

in a hotel in Grenoble with a very shaky wifi connection. Argh.

Italian train graffiti

Words of Wisdom from Irish Taxi Drivers

at Sun’s Grenoble engineering center, can’t yet see the towering Alps that everyone assures me surround us. Better weather this weekend?

filming over for the day. Got some great stuff on Amber Road aka Sun Storage 7000, OpenSolaris desktop, Java RTS, and more

I love the location of this Ibis hotel in downtown Grenoble, but the wifi sucks royally

time to hit the icy streets of Grenoble in search of breakfast. Wish I could find some fruit, but the hotel buffet is sad.

wrapped the second day of filming in Grenoble with an interview with a campus ambassador, in both English and French

hubby not going skiing, so we plan a day of sightseeing and shopping in Grenoble. Ate amazing foie gras last night, with Burgundy

best purchase this trip: album from The High Kings (at Dublin airport) http://www.thehighkings.com/

humor: The Italian Adam

have packed a much smaller bag for tomorrow’s UK trip. Hate lugging stuff.

@davest 1-1 in a coffee house – I like!

@italylogue [who provided a playlist of Italian songs, with links to my translations for some] get I should get cracking on translating the rest, eh? ; )

@plasticbagUK thanks for the LOL! It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of ads you get instead, though.

just used Final Cut Express semi-seriously for the first time, not quite as hard as I’d feared. Now to figure out the compression

@lbridenne76 thanks, was using Roxio VideoWave before!

at Sun’s Guillemont Park office, which reminds me of a very nice shopping mall. Lots of bright open spaces.

@tara_kelly nope, in the UK this week, back to Italy for the weekend, back to Colorado on the 21st

a foggy day in London town

filming at Sun’s Customer Briefing Center just over London Bridge

…and next door to this [the London Monument, below]

last day in England, for which I am thankful. This damp cold gets into my very bones. Unfortunately, Italy may not be much better

@lbridenne76 In my book, that’s a no-brainer: customer service/experience IS marketing, and the most important part of it

pensiamo di andare ad Abano Terme (o altre terme) questo weekend (20mo anniversario). Qualche suggerimento?

is the horrible hold music almost over? and can we all learn how to use “momentarily” correctly?

@Hellyski hope to make it Saturday [to a social/new media podcamp in Boulder] if not dead with jet lag

woke up at 3:30 am to get to my 6:30 am flight in Luton. Which turned out to be too early.

started a new blog to aggregate and tag Sun video (at least the portion of it that I have anything to do with): http://blogs.sun.com/video/

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