After spending 3 weeks including Holi in Rishikesh I decided to do a tour of Rajasthan, the desert area filled with marble palaces, dried up lakes, impenetrable forts, sand-dunes and camel-rides.

After spending a few days at the dried up lake in Pushkar I moved to Udaipur where I shared a car and a driver with an Irish couple for one day. First he took us to see the Kumbalghar Fort, which lies in the middle of nowhere on a steep hill surrounded by mountains.

After this it took another hour to reach the Ranakpur Jain temple. The interior of which consists of countless of finely detailed pillars and other statues made out of white marble.

The next day I spent wandering around the city of Udaipur, which is not called the “Venice of India” for nothing. It is quite famous for the James Bond movie ‘Octopussy’ which is set on the palace in the middle of its giant artificial lake. Many places have daily screenings of this film.

In Udaipur I also met up with Pieter and Simone who I knew where travelling in India (arriving in Mumbai), but it was a complete surprise to see them walking on the bridge next to the restaurant I was eating! Many cups of chai followed ofcourse.

Then the bus took me to Jodhpur, the “blue city” where I teamed up with Severin, a very cool french dude that’s doing a ’round the world’-trip. After Jodhpur we went to Jaisalmer to experience the desert on a 3-day camel safari!

Unfortunately I got sick on the 2nd day. This did not ruin our trip at all, but when the malaise kept on for another 2 days I decided to take the train to the much bigger city of Bikaner where I got IV-treatment with antibiotics and fluids at the Govt. Hospital.

Previously in Pushkar I met a guy from wales, Nick, that has been working as a musician and audio-engineer in Jaipur for 4 years. So I decided my final stop in Rajasthan would be Jaipur to visit his Morchang Studios.

After relaxing in Delhi for a few days, among others couchsurfing with a wonderfull elder american woman named Barbarra (who is also the local ‘ambassador’ for couchsurfing.org), seeing a local Indian Fusion band and buying a brand new tabla! (that I have stored for safekeeping at barbarra’s place) I went to the word-famous and overrated Taj Mahal in Agra.

I spend 2 daily budgets to get in (well, inc. a visit to the local Fort), together about 1000 rp. Compared to the price that indian people pay: 2 times 20rp!

Anyway, I had a good time there during sunrise, at which time the place is already crawling with hundreds of tourists, indian and foreigners alike.

After spending the morning and lunch here I took the train to Jhonsi and a shared tempo (riskshaw) to Orcha, where I am now typing/posting all of this

Next on my list are the erotic temples of Khujaraho (oelala) and then the stinky city of Varanassi (bbq!).

Till next time!

In orange you see my Baba (monk) friend Krishnanan with his Bengali friends and the girl next door from them.

These guys are almost everywhere. In this case, they where in my view while playing tabla during one of my lessons.

While walking through the Baba camps we went past these guys. They invited us in their tent and we had some delicious chai with them.

A very spectacular event which happens every night all along the Ganga (and other holy rivers) since hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

It is called the Ganga Aarti and in this case there where thousands of people present for the ceremony.

Now, some of you knew already that I was planning to go to Haridwar and experience some of the Kumbh Mela. For those who don’t know about this: it is the biggest religious gathering of people in the world! Feb 10 I took a bus via Dehra Dun to Haripur where I stayed with Rajesh, an Indian Astrologer and couchsurfer. With him there where another 2 Indian surfers staying, Ronita and Ajit. That night, Ajit and I went to have a look at the main site, Har ki Pauri (Step of God), where Lord Vishnu is said to have left a drop of the sacred Amrit elixer. Every twelve years, for the past hundreds (if not thousands) of years, people have been going to this place for a series of processions which last a few months. These are marked by particular bathing days where the masses come to cleanse themselves with the sacred waters of the Ganga river.

The 11th we then went again in the evening to be part of the daily Ganga Aarti, a procession where people lit small leaf-boats with flowers and incense to drift downstream. This was truelly a beautifull sight. Unfurtunately, I didn’t bring my camera, since Ajit had trouble getting in that afternoon because of his. Ofcourse there were lots of people with cameras now and we did bring a small one of which I might be able to get some pictures from.

On the 12th there was the First Royal Bath, which marks the main start for most religious people (although, as you can read on Wikipedia ™, the Kumbh starts on 14 Jan). I must say that the organization was very well done! Even though there where LOADS of people EVERYWHERE, there was never a sense of pressure or too much of a crowd. However, we didn’t go to the Har ki Pauri this time since it gets closed off during the official bath, since then all the Saddhus, babas and other saints have first attendance with their sects and groups. Instead, we went upstream at a local ashram where there was a nice gath (bathing site) and not so many people. And yes, I did went into the Ganga and have a bath! Luckilly this was a nice side-stream of the Ganga with amazingly clear water. I didn’t fully emerge into the water, because I didn’t want to wet my dreads but it was actually very nice and refreshing (read: damn cold!).

The next day a friend of Rajesh that lives in Berlin came with his family to spend the afternoon. Soumitra is a professional tabla player and he showed his skill together with a local harmonium player and singer for a private concert in Rajesh his living room. I also had the chance of trying out these wonderfull instruments. After this the family and I took an auto/taxi to nearby Rishikesh where I am currently staying at an ashram.

I am still debating if I want to stay in Rishikesh much longer and maybe take up some music and/or yoga lessons. During my morning breakfast I had a talk with a Belgian fellow and long time Indian traveller that my plans of going south might not be such a good idea because of the weather. It seems there is going to be some blazing heat coming in the following months so maybe it’s a better idea to stay in the northern region and explore the south on some other journey. Another problem is my visa. Recently, the Indian government has changed some visa laws that mandate that all double/multiple entry visa holders must stay out of the country for at least 2 months when they leave. I was planning on going to Nepal for a few weeks, up to a month. But 2 months out of my 4.5 month trip seems way too much really. I will contact the Dutch Embassy when I get back to Delhi and see what they recommend, because this is very inconvenient.

Until the next stop! (and possibly a better connection with some pictures -_-)

• JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit) - Low Latency Audio Server (read: connect audio apps to each other)
• Ardour - most complete DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) I’ve ever seen anywhere, it’s the center of all my productions.
• Hydrogen - drum-sequencing. Still has some quirks, but I’m getting the hang of it.
• Patchage - nice frontend for JACK to hook everything audio up to each other (mostly for the line-in and hydrogens outputs into ardour).
• Xjadeo - I’m making a score for a video of a friend. This enables me to sync my audio to his video.

Maybe I’ll post some schematics how I exactly use all this later on. I will also be playing with JAMin for mastering, which will be an art in itself.

I’m also still trying to figure out how to work with an RT-kernel and what the main advantages are when doing this. Any tips are greatly appreciated!

This weekend we are working on an interactive installation for the yearly Museum N8 festival at the Dutch Institute for Media Art (NIMK).

There will be an 8bit/acid themed VJ set that can be interfaced with 3 gamepad-controllers including force-feedback! All implemented through javascript using the FreeJ software.

See n8.nl for more info.

Very cool stuff. We are rounding up the scripting now and will setup the installation this afternoon.

You are looking at a new Molecular Scientist. Bsc

The first weekend (2, 3, 4 October) there was TCPC (Troppo Cafe’ Poco Cerbello)

Every year for the past 9 years a bunch of Italians come together somewhere in Sicily for a weekend of drinking coffee and nerding (hence the name: Too Much Coffee Too Less Brain). Since Italy is much too far to go to for one weekend (imho) we had our own hub in Amsterdam to nerd around.

We spend most of the time there organizing their hack-lab, which was a mess and was used by various residents as storage. After we where done there was much more work-space, a few extra desks to work at and of course network.

Another activity for me was the introduction to language translation in gui applications. The major focus of this TCPC was one of Dyne.orgs finest pieces of software: MuSE and most coders where doing a spree on it’s development. Me on the other hand, a complete and utter noob with coding, could hardly help with this. But the dutch translation for MuSE was lacking, so I started to work on that as my contribution to the project, which meant playing around with poedit and pulling my best dutch language skills out of my head. For more info see http://dyne.org/tcpc/

The second weekend (8,9,10) I went with buZz for some more hackery at Jaro’s place. Actually, we where helping out with the second Celluloid Remix FreeJ-workshop on Saturday, which was held at De Balie, right at the Leidseplein, in the center of Amsterdam’s party district. There where some presentations on the Celluloid Remix concept and FreeJ specific and it’s new OSX client.

I personally got started on revamping the beginners tutorial for FreeJ. Hopefully soon ready for it’s 1.0 release!

So all in all these have been relatively productive weeks, nerd-wise. Now all I need is to finish my bachelors …

Signing off from the weekly NerdNight at cafe The Draak, dreamer

Microsoft highly objects to this plugin, because according to them it undermines the integrity of the browser and supposes it features new security risks.

Of course this plugin is not enabled automatically and it needs a special tag in the website featured to be activated. [more]

But, as some may remember, Microsoft has the same dirty (probably even dirtier) tricks up it’s sleeve to “cripple” someone else’s product.

Using Windows Update they install a plugin for Firefox which enables some extra .NET functionality. The big difference is: the plugin of Google needs to be installed manually; while the one from MS is included in this update and can’t even be removed from within the browser! [more]

So please Microsoft, stop being such a hypocrite.
(not like this blogpost will change anything..)

Right now I’m sitting at the 2nd of weekly “nerd nights” we are having in one of the local pubs here in Wageningen. This concept was conceived by loupgaroublond and right now the nights consists mostly of drinking beer and sitting behind our laptops: GREAT FUN!

Today I’ve been mostly trying to get my first package build (Flowcanvas, one of the dependencies for Patchage, which I really want to see in yum). This made me run into a number of road-bumps. Which is OK, since making mistakes only helps the learning process.

Myx0r made princess-cupcakes for us today. They where much too sweet, but we are nerds, so we like sweet stuff.

Hopefully she will surprise us next week with some other sweet bakery-stuff \o/