Extremely styled steampunk computer mods

Also check out his website.

Hola mis chico arco iris!

After my first bike ride on a broken bike in the first rain here in Ecuador, I decided to move my ass out of Baños to Cuenca. Cuenca is an old colonial city that has its beauty, but is still nothing compared to European cities. It is new because it is in a Latin American atmosphere, but ¨even¨ Utrecht may have more architectural beauty than this UNESCO world heritage site called Cuenca. Americans love it though because they have nothing like it in the States.

So after one full day I moved on to Vilcabamba, a very laid back, mellow and also relaxed village in the lower Andes (2000 m), where I slept in a lovely hostel with pool and great view from the restaurant. Sunshine, great hikes, relaxing near the pool and lots of bar fun at night kept me there for 5 days.

After Vilcabamba I left my Platoon; me, a British NGO manager and a German doctor. We called ourselves a platoon when fighting all the dogs along a hike and the staff of a hostel called us chicos malos (bad boys) after we barricaded the door of the German with benches, chairs, plants and a ladder. This was of course the idea of the Brit, after a few beers.
I thus travelled alone to Guayaquil. The commercial capital of Ecuador. It is a bit like Manhattan in Latin-America style and with a nice boulevard along the large river. Was fun to wander around for two days.
Then I moved to the coast, to Montañita, where I didn't surf because the waves were a scary 2-3 m high and I didn't yet feel like dying. Montañita was nice though and the full moon party was fun, but without cocaine. I haven't seen any cocaine since I've been in Ecuador. It is around and cheap, but it's underground.

There is a surfer in this picture!

After Montañita I moved on north along the coast to the small fishing village called Puerto Lopez. There I did a whale watching and ¨poor man's Galapagos¨ tour to Isla de la Plata. Galapagos is $1400 for 6 days :( We went on small boat with large engines and found some humpback whales that came up to breath. We followed them for a while and I even saw one amazing jump out of the water at 20 m of the boat. Too fast for a picture (here is one, not from me)... Amazing animals!!! The Island was very dry, but fun because of some cool seabirds like the blue footed boobies and albatrosses. On the way back we snorkeled with 1 m long tortoises and some colorful fish.

My previous two days were very long bus travel trips. Bus drivers here are totally mad. They lake to race each other on mountain roads with many blind turns. If people complain, they go even more crazy :) I love the racing! I saw one nice street fight from the bus. The bus stops driving and parks for a good view of the fight... I love the bus drivers here.

The bus ride from the Andes to the jungle was amazing. I'm now in a town, Tena, surrounded by tropical rain forest. I love all the trees and the green. The weather is good and it is only 26 C. Mosquitos are everywhere at night, but at daytime it is fine. I just arrived here and haven't seen much of the jungle yet. That's what I plan to do in the upcoming days. A jungle camping tour, canopy tower view and rafting in the jungle. It is hard to organize a tour because I'm alone and there aren't many travellers here. I may have just have to go to some basecamp in the jungle and do daytours from there...

'New' Study: More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered

Strangely, in contrast the the older study in the Lancet that reported 654,965 deaths, this new study has received almost no media attention.

September 2007 - More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ‘surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003. Previous estimates, most noticeably the one published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths). These findings come from a poll released today by ORB, the British polling agency that has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,499 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:- QHow many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof. None 78% One 16% Two 5% Three 1% Four or more 0.002% Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597 households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the invasion in 2003. Calculating the affect from the margin of error we believe that the range is a minimum of 733,158 to a maximum of 1,446,063 Full Article...

IMO the method of questioning in this study is very valid though I don't know the reliability of applying the found figures to the whole country. More research is definitely needed. It's unbelievable that numbers of these go virtually unnoticed and most people still go by the Iraq Body Count number (73,922 – 80,560 ATM) which only counts the cases documented in the media. Giving meaning to these high numbers is hard, but it's higher than the death toll from Rwanda though not as genocidal, more sectarian. Much higher than the number of people dying in Darfur.

juggling with only your hands is for noobs

I can do this but I just don't want to.

Holding on to Traditions, the Conservative View

we're all monkeys

puts things in perspective

Internet Memes

meme (Pronounced "meem") A trend, belief, fashion or phrase that is passed from generation to generation through imitation and behavioral replication. Coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene," memes and memetics are the cultural counterpart to the biological study of genes and genetics. Using the evolution analogy, Dawkins observed that human cultures evolve via "contagious" communications in a manner similar to the gene pool of populations over time.

Everyone will recognize a few of these. Here is a list of all of the individual memes in order, with links.