Travel
Sunday, December 29, 2024
Now that we are at the end of the year, and I have this arbitrary deadline looming, I thought I’d better finish off my series on travelling to Taiwan. Taiwan was extremely stimulating, and I have been promising to write my conclusions after doing a series of posts. At the same time I held off for fear of putting my foot in my mouth (this post might actually accomplish that 😅), so, rather than conclusive statements or “insights”, maybe I will conclude with some questions, lines of inquiry that you or I or whoever is next travelling to Taiwan to take with them.
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Friday, December 27, 2024
I didn’t notice it in Frankfurt, but maybe that was because it was such a sunny day and after the 10 hour flight from Vancouver I was a bit jetlagged. Happy people enjoying the warm rays, walk the river under the watchful eyes of the statue of Karl de Grosse (aka Charlemagne), King of the Franks in the 9th century. Whether it was the weather, jetlag, or the cute little historical towncenter of Römerberg, I didn’t notice it.
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Thursday, November 21, 2024
Here are some photos and a bit of an overview of our recent, cross-border #DWeb event
whtwnd.com/chadkoh.c…
Sunday, September 29, 2024 →
Had a nice time walking around Mannheim taking selfies in front of old/impressive things
Mannheim Gallery on Flickr
Friday, September 27, 2024
This post is part of a series. See the introduction here →
Despite being the beginning of May Taipei was very warm. The sun was out as we walked the wide sidewalks around Taipei Station downtown, cars and scooters zooming by. Even when it was cloudy, crossing the Keelung River through the tech area of town (I spotted the Foxconn tower), the lush green mountains of the north were a tropical reminder.
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Monday, June 3, 2024
This post is part of a series. See the introduction here →
(see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here)
The gold rush at the turn of the 1900s caused a boom in the small mountain town of Jiufen, with its sweeping views of the sea towards both the northwest and northeast. The narrow road switches back upon itself numerous times as you climb up the rugged mountainside.
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Thursday, May 30, 2024
This post is part of a series. See the introduction here →
(see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here)
Kaohsiung is a port city in southern Taiwan, developed by the Japanese as an important industrial hub. We hired a tour guide who carted us around to different locations including the port area, the old British consulate, the art walk, and to one of the most intensely nerdy coffee shops I have ever seen (run by what I am pretty sure are devotees of the Falun Gong new religious movement , check out the art to see what I mean).
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Thursday, May 30, 2024
Taiwan has been on the bucketlist for a while. In the year 2000 I was an exchange student in Kyoto learning Taiwanese from a fellow exchange student who was so excited for elections that he flew back to Taiwan to vote. That was only the second presidential election since the military dictatorship (which ruled from 1949) had transitioned to democratic elections in the nineties. In 2000 things were very exciting since it was the first time an opposition party won the presidency.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2024 →
Pano of Jiufen for you
youtu.be/qNs1X7AdP…
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
The HN Tokyo Meetup. As one Kansai person told me: “I can tell it’s a meetup for people who are into frameworks.”
Last week I went up to Tokyo on my annual pilgrimage to meet with old friends and make new connections. I timed my trip to coincide with the monthly Hacker News Tokyo Meetup. These social events regularly see a hundred or so hackers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts of all kinds come out to drink and be merry.
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Friday, December 29, 2023
As described in my previous post, Istanbul is a city of layers. Nothing demonstrates this more than one of the gems of the city: the Hagia Sophia.
Built on the site of an earlier Christian church erected in 336 AD by Constantius II (son of the Emperor Constantine) the current building was made in the 532 AD by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. For a thousand years it was the largest building in the world.
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Monday, November 27, 2023
Istanbul, Constantinople, Nova Roma — the city at the crossroads of the world — is a city of layers. First settled 6000 years ago each new community was built on top of the previous. And being located at such a strategic point as the world’s only trans-continental city, there have been a lot of different people groups and empires with designs on the city.
I was in town for just over ten days, mostly for work, but my old pal Chris Gunson flew up from Dubai and we toured around together for a few days.
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