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Here's part 6 with pictures of La Paz and of a day hike through beautiful nearby landscapes and canyons.

Here is part 5 of my Peru and Bolivia photo report with 77 pictures and 5 movies of South West Bolivia, the most spectacular region I've ever visited. My three-day jeep tour through this region included the world's largest salar flats, a mars-like desert, surrealistic rock formations, an open-air swim at 4400m, sulphuric geysers at almost 5000m, a huge lagoon with blood-coloured water, and lots of flamingos.

I must say I wholeheartedly support this campaign for New York to be given back to the Netherlands. I especially like their plan to turn Wall Street into a canal, as it was always intended to be.

Saw this in a comment on Engadget:

By the way -- if you like Joy Division and the Wii, I made this: http://joydivisionwii.ytmnd.com/

Here are two more parts of my Peru and Bolivia photo report.

Part 3 (33 pics) is about the Peruvian side of the 3820m high Lake Titicaca where I visited the floating islands of the Uros people and the funerary towers of the Colla tribe. Both were very picturesque locations so lots of good photos here. Part 4 (21 pics) is about my first two days in Bolivia, mostly spent traveling straight to the south of the country. Along the way I visited the ancient city Tiwanaku and got lost in the endless slums of El Alto above La Paz.

The next part will be about the absolute highlight of this journey: my three-day tour of the natural wonders of South-West Bolivia.

Here are the first two parts of my Peru and Bolivia photo report. They cover the first 6 days of my trip.

Part 1 (36 pics) is about Lima and Cuzco, including the Inca fortress Sacsayhuaman above Cuzco. Part 2 (74 pics) is about Macchu Picchu and the Inca fortresses in Ollantaytambo and Pisac. Macchu Picchu and Pisac were two highlights of this trip so this is a very good part :)

In between work and other things I've mostly been working on my pictures recently.

• I'm processing the 4470 photos I took in Peru and Bolivia, deciding which to eliminate (about 2/3) and sorting those I keep. I'm at day 9 of 35 with that.
• I've improved my new picture gallery script some more. An animation is now shown on the thumbnail while the picture loads which is important for slower connections; I've tweaked the algorithms for smoother movement (less wobbling); and I can use different gallery styles now (e.g. the second part of the sample album is different).
• Finally, I've just started on my travel report, and the new script is making it much easier work than before. Expect to see the first episodes about Lima and the Cuzco area (including Macchu Picchu) soon.

I stumbled upon more memorabilia of the greatest machine ever created - the Commodore 64 (cfr. this item about C64 music).

I've made a new picture gallery script for future travel reports, check it out! Everything happens in one browser window, so make your browser big enough, click a thumbnail and then see what happens - it's quite spectacular I think :) You can have various pictures floating around at once, play around with it and let me know what you think.

Besides the new look this script makes it much easier for me to create galleries. With the old system I had to type in the sizes of all pictures and thumbnails, now I just have to add the file names and the script does everything else. It's 100% Javascript and will work on any site in both Firefox and IE (but not Opera).

This example is just a quick remake of part of my Syria report, but when I'm done tweaking the script I'll start making the report of my Peru and Bolivia trip with it.

Libya is buying 1 million internet-connected laptops to distribute among its children, the first big success of the fantastic One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project started by an MIT engineer. In the Slashdot discussion about that, I discovered this amazing story about an Indian scientist who as an experiment put an internet-connected computer in a kiosk in a slum.

I've created my first Ajax feature! Add a comment anywhere on this site and pay attention to the screen while you hit the submit button and you'll immediately notice what Ajax does.

Space.com has an article on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, the larger version of the X-prize winning SpaceShipOne that will start sub-orbital passenger flights in 2009. There are some pictures of the interior and most interestingly an animation movie that shows the space ship being launched and gives a good idea of what the experience will be like for passengers.

The initial price for a ticket will be $200.000. In the years and decades after that prices can only drop as other companies enter the market, and flights will get longer as technology improves, hopefully reaching actual orbit. In any case, I'll be going one day!

I'm brushing up on my Ruby on Rails skills to prepare for future new sites, and for practice I'm tweaking some little things on this site. I've also made a long-planned drawing: a world map showing not only the countries I've visited but also the specific locations, just like on the maps in my travel reports. This is just part of my list-making compulsion :)

The ever brilliant Daily Show sticking it to American politicians who crusade against violent video games...

Since I like making lists, I made one of the World Heritage sites I've visited. Currently I've been to 68 of the 830 sites designated by UNESCO.