I used the Beautiful Soup python HTML parser to pick apart an employer's javadoc for a product, and wrote out C++ header files, as a first brush at (others) rewriting the java product in C++.
Drove to China from Portugal with a old car. Tried to find the concentration camps in Xinjiang. Got detained twice, was so much fun! Chinese police a really really funny (if you have the right passport).
I would not think of it as dangerous. Apart from the danger of car accidents etc etc. Some interesting places on the way, Turkmenistan is particularly strange, like the slightly moderated not known little brother of North Korea.
It took 11 month an 40k km all in all. But it was 80% detours. Had to leave my car at the boarder to China. No chance to take it there. The most magnificent place on the way was Iran for sure. Lovely people with a hate for their own government and not afraid at all to voice their contempt for religious fanatics, the city dwellers at least.
Nice. I've been wanting to do the same thing for a long time. I have a friend who did it on motorbike and from what they said visas and vehicle papers were a major hassle. Would you recommend taking a car with the power of hindsight? Were you able to sell it for a decent price?
As an American, it would have to be performing Scottish music (as a teenager!) in an _extremely_ remote pub in Scotland late into the wee hours of the night while drinking ale (as a teenager—wut?!) and chatting it up with the locals…alongside my mother who was a Scottish-American student of Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic). Not the typical thing one does at that age. Still one of my favorite memories!
That sounds really cool. Just out of curiosity, how welcomed are (were) you in Scottish society (in Scotland)? Are you treated as a complete outsider? Partial outsider?
Had my some of my (nsfw) artworks featured in a russian ero/doujin torrent dump of a specific fandom. Made me truly appreciate fans from all around the globe with love. :)
Synthetic Aperture Virtual Focus photography. I was inspired by Mark Levoy of Stanford who had an array of 128 video cameras that he could combine/align the images from to generate a virtual focal plane. His demo showed focus on subjects at various distances in front of some shrubbery, then the subject otherwise obscured by the shrubbery.
I did a lot of things with my 1 camera, and many photos from slightly different view points, aligning them manually using Hugin (the open source panorama tool) and a small python script.
I got written up in a magazine in Germany once. I also made contact with a few others doing similar things.
Certainly not the most weird thing ever done ('weird' was my normal during my early mil years), but about the best experience had as a young person.
Flew a Piper Colt (PA22-108) from New River MCAS, NC to Meadowlark airport in Huntington Beach, Ca. Took 12 days because I was flying by dead reckoning and was taking zig-zag paths around weather systems and had to land in a field at a ranch outside of Lubbock, Tx to fix an oil leak.
Definitely not the best, but probably the most stupid ... Once as teenagers we rode our bikes with a friend to a forest park in our town and decided to have a bottle of wine in there. We drank one, it wasn't enough, so we got another one. Turned out the "wine" had 20% abv and we got quite wasted. I blacked out and regained consciousness in the middle of the forest with my bike, next to a long fence that was 2-3m high with a barbed wire on top. I didn't know were to go and got angry, so I hanged the bike on the fence, climbed it, scratched my whole arms on the wire, jumped down, picked the bike and started riding further. Turned out it was a military base, so I rode around and finally found the gate guarded by a soldier. I told him to open it, but he kept asking how I got in. I kept mumbling that I just threw the bike in and he finally let me go. Later on, still completely drunk, I rode a couple of kms through the city to McDonald's to get a burger. But I lost all my money. So I mumbled my way again and they finally gave me one for free. Then I went home.
Next day it turned out my friend woke up in a graveyard on the other side of town. We never found out how he got there :)
Got the bus from Scotland to Amsterdam with nothing but a box of ham sandwiches to support a friend. I've been married to that friend for 25 years now.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] threadIt took 11 month an 40k km all in all. But it was 80% detours. Had to leave my car at the boarder to China. No chance to take it there. The most magnificent place on the way was Iran for sure. Lovely people with a hate for their own government and not afraid at all to voice their contempt for religious fanatics, the city dwellers at least.
I bought a military surplus flamethrower, called the CIA on a dare, and performed standup comedy.
I did a lot of things with my 1 camera, and many photos from slightly different view points, aligning them manually using Hugin (the open source panorama tool) and a small python script.
I got written up in a magazine in Germany once. I also made contact with a few others doing similar things.
Flew a Piper Colt (PA22-108) from New River MCAS, NC to Meadowlark airport in Huntington Beach, Ca. Took 12 days because I was flying by dead reckoning and was taking zig-zag paths around weather systems and had to land in a field at a ranch outside of Lubbock, Tx to fix an oil leak.
Next day it turned out my friend woke up in a graveyard on the other side of town. We never found out how he got there :)
Don't drink and ride.