Commuting Culture Clashes in Italy

May 28, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

On the train from Lecco to Milan the other day, the conductor came down the car, as they usually do, to check tickets. A Spanish-accented woman in the seat in front of me had a generic (distance) ticket, but had not stamped it at the station before getting onto the train, as you are required to do with all tickets. She told the conductor that she had been late and had to rush to get onto the train, and hadn’t had time to stamp it. There are two legal solutions to that problem. One is to seek out the conductor as soon as you get on and ask him to stamp it for you, the other is to write the departure station, date, and time on the ticket yourself. She had done neither. Had the conductor not come around (sometimes they don’t), she could have saved it for another journey, as perhaps she planned to do.

At first I thought the conductor was unnecessarily rude to her. “Pay 5 euros to ‘regularize’ this ticket right here and now,” he said brusquely. Which sounded odd to me; did he mean: “Pay me 5 euros to leave you alone, and we’ll both avoid the hassle of me having to write up a fine” ? But the woman vociferously refused, continuing to complain that she had a ticket, she simply hadn’t had time to stamp it. “You can pay 5 euros, or you can pay 20.46 euros as a fine,” he snapped. “Show me your ID.” (Which he would need to write up the fine.) She refused to do that, either, and was both whiny and abusive about it. “The fine is 70 euros!” he shouted. “You’re refusing to show your ID. Do you want me to call the police?”

We pulled into a station just then, and the conductor used his cellphone to call the local railway police. He may have been faking it, but his “conversation” persuaded the woman to leap off the train. She then stood on the platform complaining loudly to someone who happened to be standing there about how badly she’d been treated.

I was in two minds about this. I disliked the conductor’s manners and attitude, but I had witnessed a very similar scene just a few days before, possibly with the same conductor, and I couldn’t blame him for being tired of the flimsy excuses and bad attitude he was having to deal with. It was clear that each party went away with its own pre-conceived notions firmly embedded: “Lousy, stinking immigrants, they’re all liars and thieves,” on the one hand. “Nasty, overbearing Italians, they pick on us just because we’re immigrants,” on the other. Both sides are right. Both sides are wrong. <sigh>

parenting

Rossella and Hamish: A Love Story

May 25, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

^ above: “Jump? What jump? I don’t see any jump.”

video shot August 14, 2004

music copright Patrick Doyle; buy it here

May 25, 2004

“Okay, I see it. But I ain’t jumping it!”

“Whoa, did I jump that?”

“Well, might as well do this one, too.”

“And this one…”

“…and this one and this one and this one…”

girls who love horses | home for a horse

what I do

Redesigning My Website with Dreamweaver

May 23, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

(Note: This refers to an older version of the site, before I moved it to WordPress.)

I’ve recently upgraded my software skills. I’ve been learning to useDreamWeaverÂ (a vast, complex, and very powerful website creation software) with the help ofÂ lynda.com, recommended to me by a friend. Lynda provides software training in the form of online videos; for $25 a month, you can go through any of their courses, in whole or in part, at your own pace. I would not normally have had the patience to sit through hours of watching someone explain software, but it was just right for my semi-brain-dead state at the time, and I learned enough to completely overhaul my own site.

I had been using a very old version of Microsoft FrontPage. It used to do everything I needed, but the site has grown far beyond anything I had originally imagined, and I couldn’t make design changes without doing them manually on every single page – and there are over 200 pages now. I was also embarrassed to realize that the underlying technology of my site (plain, old-fashioned HTML) was woefully out of date – not a good showcase for my supposed web-building skills.

So I have redone the site completely, using DreamWeaver’s template and library features and CSS (cascading style sheets) to create and manage a complex design. Next time I feel like completely overhauling it, I may go all-CSS, the still-more-modern way do websites.

I bought more server space, so that I don’t have to take things out in order to put new things in. I have so much room now that I have posted all the completed (or nearly) chapters of my fantasy novel, “Ivaldi”; you can download themÂ here.Â I will also, over time, add many more photos to the site.

Although the main purpose of the site is vanity publishing, I also use it as a laboratory for online marketing, as discussedÂ earlier. And it wouldn’t be terrible to actuallyÂ earn somethingÂ on it, in return for all the effort I put in.

Traffic to my siteÂ is decent, considering my marketing budget of zero; it’s been rising steadily, and currently stands at about 250 visitors per day. In that previous article, I discussed how this was achieved. It’s an ongoing process; I drop by some online groups most days, partly to keep traffic flowing to my site, but, on some, more because I’ve made friends there and enjoy the company. And my presence has netted me at least one client – see my newestÂ baby, Tartarugatours.com.

Commonly-accepted wisdom is that it’s impossible to make money from sites that are primarily about the words written on them; even if you’re the New York Times, you can have droves of visitors as long as you’re giving it all away, but the minute you ask for money, most of your audience vanishes. So what’s a starving webmaster to do? No one is paying for my writing (not on the web, anyway), and I don’t have anything to sell except my skills.

Could I get people to buy things linked from my site, so that I get a cut? I’ve been trying that for a while, with the Amazon links that you find all over the site. I’m trying to be honorable about it – I don’t recommend anything that I haven’t actually read or seen myself, and I don’t provide general “buy from Amazon” ads. Perhaps because of these limits, I’ve netted a grand total of $18.67 from Amazon.com thus far, and a big fat zero from Amazon.co.uk (wassamatta – don’t you Brits read anymore? <grin>).

So now I’m experimenting with the classic source of Internet revenue: paid advertising. I’m trying out Google AdSense. The deal is that I add some code from them (Javascript) to whichever of my web pages I desire. There are a variety of ad types and sizes to choose from, and it’s possible, as I have done, to customize the colors to match your page. Once it’s in place, the Google code scans the page, and serves up ads related to the text on the page. When anybody actually clicks on an ad link, whether they buy anything or not, I earn money.

I’ve started this experiment with some of the most-hit pages on my site. Many of you who read this newsletter originally found me because you’re interested in Italy, so you may be surprised to hear that my most popular pages are not the Italy ones, although theÂ Italy sectionÂ is the most popular area of the site (and the biggest).

The most common entry page on my site – that is, the first page that many visitors see, usually because they have been led to it by a search on Google or Yahoo – is aboutÂ Buffy; I think most people are finding it as a result of searches for photos of Amber Benson and other Buffy and Angel cast members. Which is interesting, because, if you go to Google’s image search and type in “Amber Benson” or “James Marsters,” my page is far from the top of the search results. This means that people are digging a long way into their search results to get to my page. Fans are always looking for new material, I guess; at least my photos are original.

So I placed a Google ad spot on that page. The context-sensitive ads showing up here are predictable: action figures, comics, and Buffy DVDs from Amazon (I have also maintained my own Amazon link at the bottom of that page). Another popular page is theÂ miniskirt one. This was a little harder for Google to deal with; at the moment it’s showing an ad for designer mini-kilts (expensive ones, at that).

There are some glitches. Although I’ve specified that the site language is English, ads have turned up in German and Italian – the latter logically enough, on my restaurants page, which contains many Italian words and names. Can’t quite figure out where the German came from.

So we’ll see how it goes. I may never earn much money on this, either, but it’s something new to play with and learn about.

technology

Fantastical Mechanical Music Machines

May 23, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

My husband owns a Yamaha Disklavier, an acoustic piano with a digital interface that allows it to be controlled by, or to record into, a computer, usingMIDI. Today in Lecco, I had a chance to observe some of this instrument’s ancestors, part of a show by the Associazione Italiana Musica Meccanica (the Italian Association for mechanical music).

In a sense, these wonderful creatures are giant music boxes. We’ve all seen the cheap music boxes you can buy in souvenir shops: a wind-up mechanism attached to a small metal cylinder that has with little pins sticking out at intervals. As the cylinder turns, the pins brush across a series of graduated metal prongs, making a brief, tinny melody.
The machines I saw today went far beyond that. The gentleman shown above described his as the jukebox of its day – it’s even coin-operated. This “cylinder piano” and its kin were used in taverns and dance halls in Italy until the 1920s or 30s. In this model, the pins on the cylinder cause the piano hammers to trip just as a finger pressing on a key would; an octave and a half of metal chimes (on the left) add variety to the sound.

The challenge was always how to change the tune. The model shown above could hold ten tunes on a single cylinder – not one after the other as you go around the cylinder, but side by side. To change the tune, you move a lever that ratchets the cylinder sideways.

The solution to getting more songs onto a cylinder is track pitch (the distance between one track of data and the next – a term familiar in modern digital data storage). The closer the rows of pins, and the smaller the levers that read them, the more information (music) fits onto a single storage unit, in this case a large metal cylinder. The technology and know-how to create these cylinders barely exists anymore; one of the last people who could do it was videotaped demonstrating the process just before he died.

This huge, elaborate music machine (brought to Lecco on a 3-meter trailer) uses a punched-card system very similar to the Jacquard loom. The hinged cards fold up into thick little books, each holding a three- to five-minute tune:

Italian education

Compulsory School Age, Bought Diplomas

May 23, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

There have been two big pieces of news in Italian education this week:

The Education Ministry has announced that the age for compulsory schooling will be raised from its current 15 to 18 years. Parents and communities will be tasked with enforcing attendance, on pain of fines. (This law already exists for under-15s, though it doesn’t seem to be enforced with much success.)

The law further requires that everyone leave the system with some sort of diploma or qualification. There is more flexibility in choosing which qualification you come out with, because the new law mandates complete transferability of credits between different kinds of institutions. There will also be a work-study/formal apprenticeship program, in which on-the-job experience can be translated into scholastic credits and, again, transferability between this and classroom programs is supposed to be guaranteed. I don’t see how, in practical terms, this will be accomplished. Even the “experimental” liceo artistico now has a curriculum heavy with academic subjects such as physics; how could a student transfer from an apprenticeship program INTO a liceo without the background courses needed to keep up with the current year’s work?

The other piece of news, in ironic juxtaposition with the first, has been a scandal over hundreds or thousands of high school diplomas that were purchased rather than earned. 23 people have been arrested in several cities for their involvement with accredited private schools which guaranteed a diploma for anyone willing to pay fees up to 8000 euros. The “students” never even needed to show up for a class or test; everything was taken care of, from falsified attendance records to papers and exams written for them and graded by compliant teachers. In one case, an institution was accredited on the basis of a building, complete with “students” and “teachers,” specially hired for the day.

The clients of this system were naturally wealthy; the list apparently includes the children of VIPs, and some soccer players who materially were not able to spend time sitting in a classroom. This gives no comfort about the qualifications of a bank financial adviser of our acquaintance – a former soccer player.

Countries Beginning with I

Commuting Culture Clashes in Italy

Rossella and Hamish: A Love Story

Redesigning My Website with Dreamweaver

Fantastical Mechanical Music Machines

Compulsory School Age, Bought Diplomas

Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia

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Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia