Italy 2005 II

This trip to Italy was for work and boy did i travel alot in Italy. I took loads of pictures and will post 1 pic for each place i went. As usual i will avoid talking about work.

Bologna Piazza Maggiore
Piazza Maggiore in Bologna

Italy, like many european cities have Piazzas which is a public square with room for pedestrians. A cool place to see people, have coffee alfresco style and maybe even gelatos or wine. Had dinner during twilight right on the Piazza and even had a bit of wine, very nice, very romantic, but too bad my wife was not on this trip.

Duomo Milano
Duomo in Milan

In the heart of Milan is the most outstanding example of Gothic-Lombard architecture which dates back to 1300AD. I paid 4 euros and went up to the roof to have a closer look at the 3500 statues dotted all over the building. The inside view is amazing too.

Duomo Milano Inside
Inside view

Lake Orta
Lake Orta

Having to go up north to Lake Orta to visit one of my suppliers, they housed us in Hotel San Rocco. It was very nice!

Lake Orta via Olina

In one of the small street i came across a street “via Olina” lol… It happens to be very similar to the name of my friend Olyna which happens to be unique.

Modena Train Station
Modena Train Station

Modena is where the Galleria Ferrari is, and from what i’m told, Modena is the city where Ferraris are made. But i’ve not seen any during my brief time in Modena.

Adriatic Sea
Adriatic Sea

We traveled 400km south by car and in 4 hours we arrived at Giulianova beside the Adriatic Sea and checked into Hotel Cristallo. Very nice. ;)

The next day, after our business stuff, we traveled to Teramo to catch a bus to Rome. Fantastic ride, the best bus ride ever in my life. From the east coast of Italy to Rome which is almost the west coast of Italy, passing thru the mountain ridges that span the whole length of Italy. Valleys, small villages, the landscape… and all this travelling was when the sun was setting. Amazing…

Rome Colosseum
Rome Colosseum

Arrived at Rome at night and walked around the ancient city abit in the dark. Although you still see the mordern cars around, but you could easily feel how it must have felt like to be in the city of the most advanced civilisation.

The Italian trip was somewhat a new experience as i was more or less on my own and did not have my dad with me, so had to make all the arrangements myself. I had almost 2 espressos a day and i feel real Italian. Anyway… its nice to feel a country full of culture and heritage, in short… i’ll be back in Italy again with Pearl.

Italy 2005 I

I’m now in Italy for a trade exhibition known as Cersaie which is held yearly in Bologna. I’ve got so much to wrtie, but don’t have much free time on the net and worst of all the keyboard here is so different. Anyway, will write another post with pictures when i get back.

If you want to see pictures of Bologna go to google to do an image search or Flickr is good too.

Fave Website of the moment

A List Apart

^ A List Apart

Being a web designer for quite some time, many people ask me what is my fav website and just for the record, currently its A List Apart. I followed it since the late 90s as it was one of the most consistent online publications that did alot of good for the budding web designer. So with its current look, unless you are really into site / information architecture, you might not be able to fully appreciate the site.

Stuff like friendly urls, CSS for print (do a print preview and you will know what i mean), simplicity, usability, little usage of graphics, no usage of tables, right menu bar (we are mostly right handed, so the cursor tends to be on the right), clutter free yet full of useful information.

Worpress Migration

I’ve finally moved to WordPress since i wanted to in early april this year. I’ve been on Movable Type since mid october 2001 and i have to say it served me well, but due to the high amount of spam and always having to rebuild, i really needed a change. Now after importing 728 posts, i’ve got lots of house cleaning to do, not to mention editting the templates and adding back all my LINKS! Please give me 1-2 days to get all the links back up.

This brand new WordPress template i’m trying to create shows the latest 2 posts horizontally and all other monthly and category archives are shown 100 pst titles per page. Yes the font is very small & i like it that way!

So i think i’ve come a long way for blogging, from a simple text file in late 2000 to newspro to greymatter to Movable Type and now to WordPress. The whole blogging scene have change alot this past 5 years and we see now average people with no programming skills having blogs. The classic saying “Content is King” is still very true, its the stuff people post on their sites that make their site happening, not the programming… Like how James Seng mentioned, its going to be interesting to see the development of the internet in the next 10 years.