I’ve already posted today, but I thought I’d tack on how my day ended. I played a few rounds of bocce ball; the balls were cold, but it was still fun. I also went out on a hike through the Cortonan hillside. I discovered some sort of abandoned semi-industrial site; I’m not quite sure what it was used for. Trekking though the woods, there was an abandoned fort made by an Italian child in recent history. Cortona, a medieval city, is surrounded by a large wall; I walked along it and found a type of cactus that lays low to the ground and sprouts red chili pepper looking buds. They have no top/stem because they grow out from their bottoms. On a tiered hillside lined with olive trees, there was a vista of a fiery orange sunset. A small door in the wall revealed a garrison with slits for an archer to shoot arrows. Dinner was a large Italian/mexican style pizza with sausage, beans, and jalapeños.

I need to organize my thoughts on the future of the website, so I suppose I will do that here.

There are beaucoups of photos that need to be upload, and the best way to manage and upload them has been very troublesome for me. I had four options.
Coppermine (www.jasonhdavis.com/photos)
flickr
Picasa
Photobucket

I think I’ve decided on Picasa, though. It’s a well integrated album solution owned by Google. The uploads will be very, very easy. I should be able to put a large rss feed of the most recent photos on www.jasonhdavis.com/photos and a few on the front page. I won’t have to pay for bandwidth, either. The entirety of the albums will be viewable at http://picasaweb.google.com/Jason.H.Davis (there’s nothing there yet, so don’t try). It will also be integrated with Google image search, so maybe with some optimizing I’ll be able to derive some traffic from that. The only problem is it only gives me 1gb of storage. About 3,000 pictures. Hopefully I can limit myself to 1k a month while I’m here! Beyond that, I’d have to pay for storage; 10gb runs $20 a year.

So, photos are planned and will hopefully be up before the end of this week. It’s long overdue!

As the semester starts to ramp up, expect a reoccurring installment: Glimpses into the Future (name still pending). These will start in the past, maybe around the year 2000. I will work my way up through 2008 and onward. Hopefully I can make predictions out to 2030, although they’ll be quite speculative. The importance of 2030 will become more apparent soon.

The format of the posts will consist of a few major news items, technology innovations, and techno-socio phenomenon. I hope to shed light on technologies’ integration into our everyday lives and its impact on humanity as a race. I also hope to spot trends in technology’s use and predict what the push and pull of technology/user will bring… that is to say, the technology effects the potential of the user’s creativity, but the technology is driven by the user’s desires (the economy).

This post is incredibly long.
-Jason

It’s so wonderful here. Life moves at such a slow place. Italians say”;Americans live to work. Italians work to live.” It’s really amazing how comfortable I’ve become with the other members of the program in just a week. Cortona had their market today, but it was a little sparse because of how windy it was. It’s unseasonably cold, apparently.

I wrote about the Italian welcome of Nutella and school children yesterday, Ben sent me his interpretation of what my welcome was like. It was a lot less intimidating. I didn’t take any pictures, but hopefully someone else did, and I’ll be able to link to some soon.

As for the website, it hasn’t seen any functional additions in almost two weeks. However, yesterday I added some Google Ads to the side of www.jasonhdavis.com/blog. I’m hoping using these ads, along with Amazon Associates (more on this later), will turn the site into a self sustaining one. Really, website hosting only costs about $50 a year.

Beyond that, the website still needs a lot of work, but I’m getting really excited about working on it again. We have tomorrow free, so I’m sure that will be filled with walking, talking, friends, food, and Internet.

Love,
Jason