Random thoughts from the Pacific Rim
Take a look at this picture taken by the Spirit Rover on Mars.
That’s where we are… All your life from birth to the grave will happen on a little tiny bright spot in the Marsian sky.
It’s a good thing to adjust our perspective from time to time…
“A World Of Sounds” is the title of a sidebar article that appears in this month’s Travel + Leisure magazine’s online feature about the Top 25 Travel Websites.
The sidebar article features ten audio recordings from places around the world, including my Competing Chinese Operas, that has before been listed on the Quiet American.
I’m pretty thrilled about this and I will definitely do more recordings in the future. It’s in fact such a nice medium to go along with travel stories, that we have just added it as a feature to Mapskip.com. You can check out the same recording on that site, too.
After about four months of work – usually late at night or on weekends – both me and Kazumi are proud to present MapSkip to the world.
We came up with the idea for this site when we were looking at other Google Maps mashups and one thing we noticed was how much the users of these sites wanted to tell their own stories about these places. So we decided to create a mashup that would make it easy for users to tell their stories. Sounds easy enough, but it took us a little while to find the right tone and functionality for the site.
Now it is done. If you can never get your first name as user name in other sites since there’s already a million users, here’s your chance. Be one of the first to claim your name and your very own places on MapSkip.
Several blogs have been linking to this remarkable image over the last few days and I see no reason to hold back. 
If you click through to the large panorama at Wikipedia, you’ll see one of the earliest existing photos of Edo, which was rename a few years later to Tokyo. This panorama is from 1865, taken by Felice Beato, one of the earliest pioneers of travel photography and probably one of the first to make use of photographic panoramas to show the world to the ones back home.
It’s pretty amazing to think that this photo is now more than 140 years old.
Over at the BlogBrothers, Bob Brady just posted a very touching remembrance of his father’s time in the Second World War.
I have similar memories of my grandfather, who had been a soldier with the German army during the same war and who could never talk about his experience in Yugoslavia, even thirty years later.
It is worth noting five years into the current insanity that is being played out in Iraq, that no amount of care, love and peace will ever bring back the young minds that have been sent into war. What comes back are women and men with wildly out-of-the-ordinary experiences that they can not share with anybody who hasn’t been there.
Kazumi has been posting desktop calendar backgrounds with some really amazing macro shots she took over the last year.
This month’s is another beauty – click the photo to see her background gallery and download the latest one.
