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Africa

Note: this is the third post in a series about my trip to India and Africa. The others are available at Amsterdam and India. The full set of pictures is also available on Flickr.

We flew from Mumbai to Tanzania on Kenya Airways. We had a long 11 hour layover in Nairobi, but we were warned not to leave the airport or else we would likely be mugged or robbed. We stayed inside.

The first event was a big one: climb Mount Kilimanjaro. We had a great group of people to climb with - 3 Americans and two Germans.

The climb started off in the rainforest jungle. It rained nearly every day, so we had to learn how to deal with the downpour. Ziplock bags to the rescue!

The entire climb took 7 days: 5 up and 2 down. We climbed slowly in order to acclimatize to the 19,000 foot altitude. Some campsites had magnificent views. Some did not.

A team of 26 porters, guides and chefs carried all the gear for us, including delicious meals, dining gear, and a "toilet tent."

On the final day, a freak snowstorm covered the peak of the mountain in snow and clouds, freezing everyone to the bone. My glasses froze over.

Despite the cold we successfully made it to the top! Unfortunately we couldn't see anything at all. Supposedly it's one of the most magnificent views of the African plains that can be seen.

After seven days on the mountain living in tents without showers, we were excited to get back to the hotel.

After the climb, we went on a safari in the Serengeti National Park. The scenery was unbelievably amazing - we saw hundreds of thousands of animals.

Lions sat by the side of the road and weren't even bothered by all the tourists snapping pictures of them.

Due to excessive rainfall, we got a free upgrade from tents to these "luxury lodges".

The Ngorongoro Crater is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Stunning.

One day we saw a pride of lions eating a giraffe. The next day the giraffe carcass was almost completely gone. Here a hyena and a jackal are scavenging it.

We were lucky enough to spot a cheetah and 3 of her cubs eating a gazelle.

Apparently leopards are even rarer, but we saw one of those too.

There were so many giraffes that we had to shoo them out of the road.

Warthogs are actually fairly ugly. The Lion King was a lie.

Herds of wildebeest were all over the place.

Rhinos are very endangered - there were only 21 of them left in this area.

Elephants

When we forded this river I was sure we would get stuck.

Yawning hippo.

Monkeys were everywhere.

There are a lot more pictures, but I don't have room to include them all here. Head over to the Flickr set for more!

India

Note: this is the second post in a series about my trip to India and Africa. The others are available at Amsterdam and Africa. The full set of pictures is also available on Flickr.

After Amsterdam, we flew off to India.

The first stop was New Delhi, the capital.  The city is very much under construction and extremely polluted, much like Beijing. I had heard that cows idly wander the streets with no fear or harassment in India, but I was surprised at the extent to which this is true. Cows were everywhere.

This is the India Gate - an arch built by the British commemorating WWI.

Qutb Minar - built by the Mughals.

Big dosa. The Indian food was very good all around. It was sometimes difficult to tell which food was safe to eat (cooked and/or boiled) if you were not familiar with what each dish was made of.

The Taj Mahal is in Agra, a city about 400 km outside of Delhi. It was rainy and polluted on the day we went.

The Red Fort of Agra is another attraction in the city.

In the opposite direction is Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, famous kingdom of the Maharajahs.

The Water Palace is a famous attraction.

Elephant rides were available for a fee.

Snake charmers huddled around touristy areas.

Next up was Jamshedpur, a smaller mining town on the eastern side of the country. We attended the wedding of a friend. It was a traditional-style Sikh wedding.

The groom rides a horse to the ceremony.

Everyone wanted a picture with the funny white people.

Kolkata (Calcutta) is another major city nearby, on the shores of the holy Ganges river. People famously come from far away to "wash" in what must be the filthiest river in the world.

Many flowers are available for purchase to use as offerings to the gods.

Mother Teresa's house for the sick and dying is next door to the Temple of Kali, Goddess of Destruction. It was sort of a weird juxtaposition.

Mumbai was the last stop on the trip. This hotel is the site of the 2008 terrorist attacks.  It seems to have recovered fairly well, though security was very high.

Mumbai has a very nice waterfront and is the most clean and modern ("Western"?) of any Indian city we visited. Unfortunately we were laid low by an E-Coli infection while in Mumbai and didn't get to see much of the city.

Fortunately we recovered just in time for the next leg of the trip - Africa!

Amsterdam

In December after leaving my job at Microsoft, I went on a trip to India and Africa for a month. I'm only now getting around to writing up a post about it since I've been super-busy recovering from the trip, moving to San Francisco, and starting my new job at Facebook (more about that later).

The full set of photos is up on Flickr for perusal now. This is the first post in a series about the trip - the others are available at India and Africa.

On the way to India we stopped in Amsterdam for a day. It was the middle of winter, so many things were closed, including the famous Rijksmuseum, above. Had it been open, I would have apparently been able to see lots of Rembrandts, Vermeers, Van Goghs, etc..

Here are some of the famous "fries with mayonnaise."

The city's canal system is very extensive - it's nicknamed the "Venice of the north".  The only boats I saw anywhere were tourist boats, so the canals don't seem to get much real use any more.

We went on a tour of the red light district called "Randy Roy's Redlight Tour". It's run by an American woman from Michigan(?). It was very informative - recommended.

This is the main train station, which provides easy access to/from the airport.

A big attraction is the Heineken brewery and museum "experience". Unfortunately we only had one day so I didn't have time to go inside.

Next up: India!

Managing photos with iPhoto + Flickr

This weekend I worked on setting up an organizational system for my digital photographs. Up until this point I've just been dumping pictures into folders, roughly organized by trips and dates. There were several problems with this system: there was no easy way to find pictures of specific people, it was difficult to browse through just the good photos, and they weren't automatically shared with anyone unless I manually uploaded them somewhere myself. It required too much work to upload and share photos that I often never got around to it.

I needed to find a system which would keep the photos organized and automatically share them on an internet site like Flickr for me. I looked at a lot of different photo apps and Flickr clients, and ultimately decided to use iPhoto. Its Flickr compatibility has some limitations, but it goes far beyond any other system in terms of ease of use. Here's how my setup works:

After a trip or a day of taking photos, plug in the camera to the computer. iPhoto pops up and offers to download all the pictures and automatically sort them into "Events".  Events are just collections of all the photographs taken over a certain time period. It defaults to splitting by days, but you can also split the events between certain photographs:

This works fairly well for a first level of organization. The events contain every single photo taken, even if you took 10 photos of a certain object in order to get the perfect shot - that's OK. We'll sort out the good photos from the rest when we get to the Album layer later. You can leave all the originals in the events and not have to worry about losing them.

While still working with the events, it's only a few clicks in iPhoto to automatically tag all the photos with the location of the event (if your camera does not have a GPS built-in). A Google Maps window pops up and allows you to search to assign the location ("Tiananmen Square"), or drop a pin on the exact coordinates. All the photos in the event are then automatically tagged with the GPS coordinates and the name of the location.

The next step is where iPhoto really shines. The "Faces" feature scans all your photos and automatically finds people's faces in the photos.  If it doesn't know who a certain person is, it prompts you to assign a name to the face. Once you assign a certain person's face in a couple of pictures, it automatically recognizes that person in the other photos. Then you just need to click "Confirm" or "Reject" on all of the other suggested faces to commit them. This will automatically tag all the photos with the names of the people in them. Overall I find that this feature works surprisingly well - you'll never want to go back to manually tagging people in photos again. Here are a few pictures of me that it automatically detected:

Next I like to pull out just the good photos, for browsing and sharing on Flickr. iPhoto has "Albums" for this, and you just need to select the good photos from an event and drag them in.  One album can contain photos from multiple events, or not: how you want to organize things at this level is up to you. Unfortunately there's no hierarchy between Albums.  I would have liked to create a super album called "China Trip" which contains sub albums for "Bejing", "Shanghai", etc., but it's not possible to do this. That's probably just as well because most internet photo-sharing sites don't allow nested albums either (Facebook & Flickr being the two big ones).

Once everything is organized into albums, it's only a few clicks to sync all the albums to your Facebook or Flickr account. iPhoto takes care of automatically uploading all of the pictures and syncing the metadata like the location and people tags.  There's very little flexibility at this point - iPhoto will sync everything in the albums without giving you many options to control the details of what gets uploaded (for example, if you had kids you might not want to sync the names or photos of the kids). However, if you keep these limitations in mind while making the albums, it works out fine.

And that's it - once you have everything set up, then there's very little "maintenance" work that you have to do with the photos. Just plug the camera in, name the event, accept the detected faces (assuming it's already been trained), and pick out the best photos for an album that automatically gets syncd up to Flickr or Facebook.  You don't need to manually tag or upload anything (unless you want photo-specific tags like "street vendor" or something like that, which are significantly easier to tag right in iPhoto than on the web).

I've done all this with my recent photos and syncd them to my Flickr account, if you want to check out the results: http://www.flickr.com/photos/efaller/

Furthermore, if you use WordPress for your blog, it's easy to install a Flickr plugin which creates a new "Insert Flickr Photo" button, which makes it super-easy to insert your photos into a blog post. You just click the one you want, and it automatically chooses a thumbnail of appropriate size, inserts it, and links it to the full-res version on Flickr. No need to mess with manually resizing the photo and using the WordPress upload screen any more. Here's an example:

The plugin linked above also includes a handy sidebar widget that automatically displays a random selection of your photos, linked to Flickr:

All this without needing to manually upload anything! I expect that I'll be able to keep up with this system since it's so easy. There's no more excuse not to get all my good photos uploaded with the appropriate tags.