Kathmandu photos

After being here for almost 8 weeks I finally managed to spend an afternoon exploring the greater area around Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. Until today my exposure of Kathmandu had been mostly limited to Thamel which happens to be the part of town were many restaurants, bars and most of Kathmandu’s night-life can be found. Anyway, today I had a great time wandering through the city with Daniel and Vikki, hanging out on Durbar Square, climbing up the Bhimsen Tower, enjoying delicious lunch at a tiny Korean restaurant and dinner at OR2K and – I’ve never been more surprised – actually finding a quiet street in Kathmandu. To cut a long story short: I had a great day!

Not surprisingly I took a ridiculous amount of photos and I now spent the past 3 hours going through them, picking the best ones and subsequently tagging and uploading them to the Kathmandu album on Flickr.

New York City in Photos

I recently stumbled across a great ongoing series of photographic impressions of New York City by Austrian radio station FM4’s Christian Lehner. It’s quite possibly the most interesting photo series I’ve seen in quite awhile and really makes me want to go back to visit New York again.

Who’s That Guy

Here’s a list of all the collections published so far:

• #1: Coney Island (my favorite!)
• #2: Singing In The Rain
• #3: Friends
• #4: Hippie Traces
• #5: Crash, Boom, Bang
• #6: Ein Strand names NYC

(Do note that while the introductory text is in German the photos all have accompanying English titles, plus the images really do speak for themselves.)

You can find a list of other articles by Christian Lehner here.

Photos of the Teej festival in Patan

I spent the afternoon hanging out on Patan’s Durbar Square where I enjoyed observing the Teej festivities going on there. I took quite a lot of photos and have uploaded a small best of selection to Flickr – you can find them in the Teej Festival album.

I also took a short video of the festivities which you can find here.

Technology Review’s TR35 2009

Every year since 1999 the MIT’s Technology Review selects 35 Young Innovators Under 35 whose work the magazines editors consider to be exciting and potentially world changing. Needless to say that the list always makes for a great and very inspiring read. This year is no exception and after reading through all the entries here’s a list of the 10 research efforts I find to be the most interesting:

Jeffrey Bigham (28) – efforts to enable blind people to use the Internet
Adam Dunkels (31) – Honey, I Shrunk the Internet Protocol
Nathan Eagle (32) – innovative use of mobile phones
José Gómez-Márquez (32) [Humanitarian of the Year] – inventing low-cost and appropriate tools to improve health especially in developing nations
Jeffrey Heer (30) – Protovis visualization toolkit
Anat Levin (31) – interesting use of digital cameras
Pranav Mistry (28) – Sixth Sense wearable computing project (if you haven’t seen it yet then you should really watch the TED talk on the project)
Aydogan Ozcan (30) – interesting efforts to replace microscrope lenses with a combination of inexpensive chips and software
Vik Singh (24!) – allowing third parties to make us of Yahoo’s search technology
Jaime Teevan (32) – improving search results by drawing on other available information

Video on the “Social Media Revolution”

Disclaimer: I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of buzzwords such as social media. Additionally here’s not many words that are as over utilized when it comes to technology as revolution. However I do have to admit that this video is very nicely done and also quite thought provoking. Enjoy!

Bhaktapur photos now on Flickr

On Sunday I went to Bhaktapur, the third city here in the Kathmandu Valley (besides Kathmandu and Patan). While the trip back and forth was amazingly bumpy and slow it was well worth it as the city is absolutely stunning! So while I’m quite happy with some of the photos I took they simply don’t come close to doing the squares and streets there justice.

Anyway, you can find a selection of photos in the Bhaktapur album and for the lazy ones I’m including two panorama shots that I’m particularly fond of:

180° Panorama of Bhaktapur's Durbar Square

Panorama of Bhaktapur's Taumadhi Tole square

Wahlwerbespot der Piratenpartei

Die Piratenpartei Sachen-Anhalt hat für die anstehende Bundestagswahl 2009 diesen wirklich ausgezeichneten Wahlwerbespot produziert:

Photos from Hash Run 1607

I just uploaded some photos from this weekend’s awesome but seriously exhausting (well, at least when you’re not feeling too great to begin with) Hash Run 1607. You can find the photos here.

Next weekend I hope to bring my video camera along which could make for a nice YouTube video:-)

XKCD: Supported Features

The mockery of Linux development in today's XKCD is pure genius:-D

Short film: “The Bill”

Someone mentioned this short film on Twitter the other day and today I finally had a chance to watch it. Definitely very nicely done and some good food for thought…

More photos on Flickr

I’ve just added a bunch of photos taken this weekend to the Nepal 2009 collection on Flickr.

The first set are some impressions from Run 1606 of the Himalayan Hash House Harriers (“a drinking club with a running problem” – see the corresponding Wikipedia entry for more information on the Hash House Harriers).

I’ve also added some more photos of Patan which I took during a nice 3 hour walk through the city earlier today. You can find them in the Patan set I started 2 weeks ago.