I am currently sitting in a dark room at a hostel in Seoul, South Korea. Trying my best to recover from an exhausting day of warfare study. Or should I call it a study of humankind? Earlier this morning I looked into North Korea with binoculars, seeing their flag shaking defiantly in the wind. So close, so far away.
Yesterday I had a drink at a small place discretely hidden inside on of the old hutons (traditional narrow alleys). The owner was a friendly chap and recommended a club in town called the Banana Club. I was quite skeptical due to the corny name, but he wrote down the address in Chinese letters and we took a cab there.
I am currently back in Ulaan Baatar after sleeping some nights in a traditional ger tent at the Mongolian plains. After five days on the Trans-Siberian train, that freezing tent felt like pure luxury but right now I’m glad to be back in civilization (sort of) with an internet connection.
I got off the Trans-Siberian express at 7 am after four nights of irregular sleep, placing my dusty shoes on the pavement of the Ulaan Bataar railway station. When tired and hungry, you are an easy target for the shadowy existences walking around here. Luckily it was sunday morning and the Mongols tend to sleep a lot.
I shared cabin with a Russian couple on a night train from Helsinki to Moscow earlier this week. They told me that a plane had crashed near Perm with 80 dead and some damage done to the Trans-Siberian railway. Since I was about to embark on the Trans-Siberian a few days later and pass the city of Perm, I was curious on how this would effect my journey.
There’s a new guy in town. Apart from being a good song by VNV Nation, Chrome is a new browser developed by Google. As you might expect, it’s fast, memory efficient and slick. The user interface is simplistic and the viewport is very large. By default, Chrome imports the settings from your default browser. It is completely open-source and since it uses WebKit, sites that work in Safari should work fine in Chrome as well.
This site turns 14 years old this week. That’s pretty old for something in the web world. This was a few months before the browser Netscape was released.
I just got back from a trip to Riga, the capital of Latvia. Apart from delicious Laima chocolate and lots of cobblestones, the city is home to a lethal brew with the somewhat mysterious name Black Balsam (or Melnais Balzams in Latvian).
The time had come to visit the overpriced frenzy of Way Out West. It turned out to be just as I thought it would be. It’s quite comfy to visit a festival at the heart of your home town. At any time you can walk home to your own bed instead of crawling across the mud into a ravaged tent. This fact unfortunately also turns the festival into a very calm and somewhat boring place.
Remember those tag clouds that were so popular a few years back? There is a new toy in town which analyzes a feed and present a word map of your recent activity. This is how Mink Machine looks through the eyes of Wordle:
