Tag: vacation

Off to Barcelona

Well, I’m off to Barcelona for a long week­end. It’s been qui­et around here for a while (apart from the auto­mat­ed book­mark posts). Per­haps when I get back I’ll be able to get back into the habit of post­ing more fre­quent­ly. Back in 4.

My photos in Schmap’s Rome, Venice and Florence guides

Lieke in the inner cloister

Plan­ning on mak­ing a trip to Rome, Venice or Flo­rence? Check out the free dig­i­tal trav­el guides from Schmap. The new edi­tions con­tain some pho­tos I took while vaca­tion­ing there this spring. Schmap use Cre­ative Com­mons-licensed pho­tos from Flickr in their guides. They always polite­ly ask for per­mis­sion first even though strict­ly speak­ing they don’t have to. The guides are PC only but they’ve promised me Mac ver­sions will fol­low shortly. 

And yes, Edgar was there first.

Update: the nice peo­ple over at Schmap real­ly love me. They’ve includ­ed this insane­ly great pho­to of the Cab Inn City hotel in their next Copen­hagen guide.

Finito

Just now I final­ly fin­ished tag­ging the last few pho­tos tak­en in Venice. The whole set of Lieke’s and my vaca­tion in Italy is now online. Total num­ber of pho­tos we end­ed up select­ing is a whop­ping 411. You can start at the first new one since the pre­vi­ous update over here.

Plen­ty of pret­ty shots in this update, my favourite is prob­a­bly this one:

Pigeons, lanterns and scultpure

Enjoy!

K‑141 АПЛ Курск

Some­times you learn some­thing strange while tag­ging vaca­tion shots. At least that was the case with this pho­to I took in Venice:

K-141 АПЛ Курск

Look­ing for some prop­er tags I Googled “K‑141” and found a Wikipedia arti­cle on the Russ­ian sub­ma­rine Kursk. I pulled out the prop­er Russ­ian text to use as tags but was puz­zled about the rea­son behind the stencil. 

I decid­ed to let my direct col­leagues in on the mys­tery and mailed it around at the office. Soon after, Peter point­ed out that the same sten­cil art was blogged at zom­bizi zero-six and Woost­er Col­lec­tive.

Quite enter­tain­ing, but it gets even weird­er. He point­ed out this link, which appar­ent­ly proves the sten­cil spree was part of Russia’s pres­ence at the 51st Venice Biennale…

Bart right­ly point­ed out that it’s strange they didn’t get caught doing it. I mean: wouldn’t it be easy for the police to hold the Rus­sians at the Bien­nale respon­si­ble for this bla­tant act of “van­dal­ism”?

Any­way. You learn some­thing new every day, don’t you?

A few more shots of Florence

Despite the heat and humid­i­ty this evening I got around sort­ing through a few more pho­tos tak­en in Flo­rence. Around 50 new ones have been added to the set. You can start at the first new one here.

I’d like to treat you to a nice exam­ple of serendip­i­ty. Here’s a pho­to I took of some stained glass win­dows depict­ing the agnus dei:

Stained glass

Now check out this pho­to by Rich Nur­combe… Weird.

Back with a black label

Just a short post to check in. I arrived back from Vien­na this week­end. The week’s train­ing was a lot of fun, very hot and quite suc­cess­ful. I man­aged to pass all my exam­i­na­tions which means I’m 2nd dan Take­da Ryu aiki­do now, and have received my assis­tants-license. Huzzah!

I did­n’t take that many pho­tos, most of them after a day’s train­ing, but there’s a few up at Flickr now. Here’s my favourite shot:

Dogi hanging to dry