Flour Power

If you only have 10 minutes today to procrastinate on the Internet, use them to watch this video.

While I’ve seen other projections on the side of buildings, this is clearly the best I’ve come across. It’s full of astounding visual effects while telling the story of what Prague’s Astronomical Clock saw during its 600 years of existence. Awesome!

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

(via CrunchGear)

If, like me, you’ve never been to Paris, this might be a good introduction. Paris 26 Gigapixel is an amazing panoramic picture of the city, created by Martin Loyer, Arnaud Frich and Kolor.

Paris 26 Gigapixels is a stitching of 2346 single photos showing a very high-resolution panoramic view of the French capital (354159×75570 px). Dive into the image and visit Paris like never before!

You can move around by clicking anywhere on the image and moving your mouse, and you can zoom with your mouse wheel (alternatively, you can use the arrows and +/- keys on the keyboard). It’s easy to get overwhelmed by this huge panorama, so there’s a quick of 20 of Paris’ most impressive monuments.

There are also some easter eggs hidden in the picture. Can you find them?

And if you look carefully, you might even find odd things that weren’t placed there by the authors. Like this gun…

Happy window hunting!

(photo by Mark van de Wouw)

Quark Expeditions is offering to send one lucky blogger to the Antarctic Peninsula for two week’s worth of freezing cold and penguins. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? That’s why I’m participating!

Here’s how it works… The one with the most votes by September 30 will be flown to Argentina in early 2010 to embark in one of Quark’s expeditions to Antarctica. The winner will become the expedition’s official blogger, and will have the responsibility of reporting the whole thing – the preparation, the expedition itself, and the return home. I think I’m qualified for the “job”, and that’s why I’m asking for your support.

Long story short, I need your vote:

Please vote here!

Yes, you have to register to vote, but it’s not that bad, it only takes a couple of minutes. You might have to check your spam folder for the confirmation email.

I’m gonna need thousands of votes to win this thing, so feel free to ask your family, friends and pets to vote for me. Also, sharing my link or a link to this post will be very much appreciated (just use the icons in the end of this post).

Thanks in advance for your help!

I “promised” a detailed report of the small trip I did to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day, right? So I invoke the “a picture is worth a thousand words” rule, and here are roughly 17 thousand words about my trip. Is that detailed enough?

The 16th of March, having dinner and then going out:

On St. Patrick’s Day morning afternoon, a taste of the parade and all the festive mood around the city:

And also a few shots of buildings and suchlike:

And for the more distracted, in the last few days I have been posting a few funny pictures shot during Paddy’s Day.

Saint Patrick was a Christian missionary in the fifth century that became one of the patron saints of Ireland. He was captured by Irish raiders at age 16 and taken from his native Wales as a slave to Ireland, where he lived for six years before escaping and returning to his family. He later returned to Ireland as a missionary in the north and west of the island.

More importantly, Saint Patrick is the one responsible for single-handedly expelling all the snakes from Ireland (I haven’t seen a single one, so I’ll give him that, for now…). He did some other stuff as well.

And even more importantly, it’s because of Saint Patrick that Paddy’s Day exists. The day is the national holiday of Ireland. On this day (generally the 17th of March) there are celebrations worldwide themed around all things Irish and, by association, the colour green. For example, the Chicago River is dyed green every year, and in 2009 even the White House fountain went green.

To put it bluntly, it’s an excuse (not that the Irish need another one…) to drink as if the Apocalypse was coming. And do it with the Ireland flag and shamrocks painted all over the body.

So I took this opportunity to head over to Dublin for the first time since I arrived in Ireland, with the intent of experiencing it in the middle of a big crowd. Unfortunately I had to work both on Monday and on Wednesday, so it had to be a one-day trip, which is kind of scary at first due to the fact that it takes 3h30m by bus each way. Anyway, said trip started on Monday evening, right after work, and I was back to Galway on Wednesday at about 1am. I’m still a bit sore from all the contortionism I had to do in order to get some sleep on the bus.

In short, Monday night was spent on the pub, on Tuesday we slept late, then went outside to see the Irish madness and finished with a tea party. There are a lot of pictures and also some videos that will have to be sliced into several posts, and there are quite a few fun ones that’ll be featured as an Image Of The Day. I promise to post them soon, when I have the time to browse through all of them and choose the best ones.

All in all, it was great fun. Mainly for the get-together with the Portuguese guys that welcomed me (also participants, or previous participants, of the same internship program I’m in) and their friends, who already promised to visit Galway soon.

The detailed reports are coming soon. Stay tuned!