Babak Fakhamzadeh https://babakfakhamzadeh.com Thu, 07 Mar 2024 11:18:31 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 150972265 Breeza.com.br https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/work/breeza-com-br/ Thu, 07 Mar 2024 11:13:55 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?post_type=work&p=25396 Breeza.com.brA website for a Brazilian online magazine that aims to be the reference for all things related to cannabis.]]> Breeza.com.br

A website for a Brazilian online magazine that aims to be the reference for all things related to cannabis.

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In Mexico, good food everywhere https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/in-mexico-good-food-everywhere/ Sat, 02 Mar 2024 18:54:12 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?p=25389 Natalia needed to be in Mexico for a meeting, right during carnival. That’s almost blasphemous for Brazilians, so to make the best of it, I booked myself on the ‘ultra low cost carrier’ Arajet, the flag carrier of the Dominican Republic, and got myself to Mexico, too. ‘Ultra low cost’ apparently includes to mean that …]]>

Natalia needed to be in Mexico for a meeting, right during carnival. That’s almost blasphemous for Brazilians, so to make the best of it, I booked myself on the ‘ultra low cost carrier’ Arajet, the flag carrier of the Dominican Republic, and got myself to Mexico, too.

‘Ultra low cost’ apparently includes to mean that no food or drink, whatsoever, is served, which, on my 14 hour journey, was unpleasant.
Then, at my stopover, the airport in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, I encountered a new stage of capitalism; virtually nothing, in the shops and restaurants, was priced. You take, or order, what you want, and then pay the mystery price for it at the till. Sure, ‘you can ask what it costs’, but when was the last time you had to do that when shopping in a supermarket, or ordering a meal?

Meanwhile, the regular sized screwdriver, which I need for this little project I’m working on, made it through two luggage screenings. Though not on the way back; the Mexicans didn’t see it fit for air travel.

In terms of food and drink for the journey back, we had come to the pleasant discovery that excellent, tasty, huge, and cheap, sandwiches are a staple of Mexican City street food. So, I made sure I was provisioned properly for my return journey.

Upon arrival in Mexico, we first only had a short night in Mexico City (in a love motel, featuring rooms with bubble bath and, ehm, ‘love’ chairs), as we had to leave early, ahead of traffic, to make it to a friend in Tepoztlán, not too far from Mexico City, for the local carnival, and before that city would go on lockdown for their festivities. We made it, but only barely, as getting to the friend’s house meant driving through the town’s main drag, if only for 50 meters, which was already packed with stalls and people by the time we got there. At a snail’s pace, we made it through.

We were under the impression that Mexico doesn’t really celebrate carnival, and that the festivities in Tepoztlán were an exception, where locals dress up in grotesque versions of colonial administrators and dance the day away. Here, the micheladas, beer with a shot of lime juice, with the rim of the beer glass covered in salt, were post-modern, with the salt replaced by a, rather disturbing, sweet fruity paste.

The street party in Tepoztlán was comparable to a Brazilian bloco, a street party where a parade is lead by a group of musicians, followed by dressed up, or not, locals, chased by individuals trying to make a few bucks with beer sales.
It was fun.

Then, after Tepoztlán, after we drove with Popo, Popocatépetl, in full view, we got ourselves to Puebla, the location of Natalia’s meeting, where we found chinelos, the name for the Mexican carnival dress, a common sight there, too. And we even stumbled into a late-night dance-off of carnival troupes, with particularly one, deploying participants dressed up like devils, or demons, reminding me of European pagan rituals.

Next, a return to Teotihuacan, where nothing much seems to have changed since my last visit, a mere 16 years ago. Still, the venue leaves you awed.
The Pyramid of the Sun, the largest pyramid on the site, was named as such by the Aztecs, not the original builders of ‘the place where men become gods’. And, now, more recent research, amongst others finding a fresh spring underneath this pyramid, suggests that perhaps this pyramid was dedicated to a water god, not that pesky old sun.
And why is the site’s main avenue off from true north by so many degrees? This paper makes an interesting and convincing case, that the orientation was based on magnetic readings, identifying ‘true’ north at the time of its likely design and initial construction, around 400BC.

We finished up with a short whirlwind tour of Mexico City. Very pleasant, though traffic can be horrendous, while the metro system is still excellent, if perhaps a tad busy.

On our walks, twice did we encounter large public gatherings, specifically for, it seemed, attandees to purchase and smoke weed. These places appear to be authorised specifically for exchanging weed for a donation, and then consuming the new acquisition, on the spot.
We didn’t get tempted, but we did by the many street food offerings all over the city.

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New year in Minas https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/new-year-in-minas/ Fri, 29 Dec 2023 11:47:56 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?p=25373 We spent the end of the year in Minas Gerais, the massive Brazilian state next door to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Because of our cat almost dying back in September, and him having FeLV, we’re still weary to leave him alone for too long. So, we didn’t want to go too far, nor …]]>

We spent the end of the year in Minas Gerais, the massive Brazilian state next door to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Because of our cat almost dying back in September, and him having FeLV, we’re still weary to leave him alone for too long. So, we didn’t want to go too far, nor for too long. Though, thankfully, colleagues of ours loved the idea of spending their end of the year at our house, bringing a pool, and enjoying their escape from the hustle and bustle of São Paulo.

The central destination of our week away was Santuário do Caraça, a former monastery and boarding school that now operates as a fancy guest house, set in a large reserve, where the primary attraction is the nightly feeding of the maned wolf, or lobo guará.

The wolf is actually a dog, the largest canine in the Americas, and a very elegant, if skinny, animal. 

Back in the 1980s, the monks at the sanctuary found that some animal was raiding the church’s trashcans at night. A nightly wake revealed the culprit: a maned wolf was snacking on the church’s leftovers. Then, to enjoy the spectacle, the monks decided it a good idea to specifically leave out food for the small family of canines, after the evening’s dinner, and this soon started to attract visitors.

At first, it was allowed to feed the animals by hand, and some photos of the priests doing that are on show at the monastery, but it’s now a criminal offence to physically interact with wild animals, in Brazil, so, now, dozens of spectators stay at the sanctuary every day, for the privilege of hanging out with the snacking canines.

You can’t blame the animal, the full-board at the monastery provides superb food. 

The park which the monastery is the centrepiece of, is pleasant and relaxed. A convenience, as we suffered an accidental, if severe, psychedelic experience, where the park allowed us to recover in exquisite calm.

Another quirk of the sanctuary is that the church has a saint on display. Or rather, a puppet in the shape of a human, where some remains of the represented saint were moved to the church in the 18th century.  

Supposedly, these are the remains of a Roman soldier who was killed for professing his Christian faith, and was giving the name Pio, after the name of the pope (Pio VI) which governed at the time of his body’s discovery.

There’s little of the man out there, except a short Wikipedia article in Portuguese, making me a bit skeptical of the veracity of the whole episode.

We stayed in two more locations during our short trip. 

First, the often-overlooked town of São João del Rei. Like many of the towns in Minas Gerais, the city has a colonial past, complete with some lovely architecture, but is often passed over in favour of the nearby Tiradentes, or the slightly further away Ouro Preto. But, its relatively limited tourist appeal also means that, virtually without tourists, and plenty of students, the place is a pleasant destination for a few days.

Then, we headed to the town of Alagoa, not-yet-famous for its excellent cheese. We left with close to 10 kilos by the time we headed home.

In Alagoa, we arrived on the day the town celebrates its anniversary. The celebration centres on a 5km float on one of the valley’s rivers, where hundreds of participants meander down the stream on their own huge inner tubes.

The town takes its anniversary seriously; a large stage had been set up for live music. I’d say ‘in the center’, but the town is so small that even the ‘center’ is hardly a ‘center’. Live music was scheduled for three days in a row, including New Year’s Eve. But, because of the limited funds of this small a town, they only had managed to get one band to play, for three days straight. We detected enthusiasm for the band had already started to wane on the day we arrived, the second of three days of live music.

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Is it a coincidence that ‘Thailand’ contains the term ‘AI’? https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/is-it-a-coincidence-that-thailand-contains-the-term-ai/ Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:51:36 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?p=25339 If you’re any kind of change maker, or pretend to be one, proof that you’ve ‘made it’ is when others pay you, to listen to you speak.  I don’t pretend to be a change maker, even if I am quite opinionated. But, just having an opinion is clearly not enough. Or, perhaps, with a more …]]>

If you’re any kind of change maker, or pretend to be one, proof that you’ve ‘made it’ is when others pay you, to listen to you speak. 

I don’t pretend to be a change maker, even if I am quite opinionated. But, just having an opinion is clearly not enough. Or, perhaps, with a more favourable reading, I just do crappy marketing for myself, in a world where everyone who pretends to know anything has a TikTok or YouTube channel.

But, for a change, I *am* now being paid to speak, while also being flown half way around the world to do so.

With Agência Pública, I’ve been working on a challenge of introducing AI, artificial intelligence, into the newsroom. We came up with two ideas. The simpler one of having a synthesised voice read news articles to improve accessibility, and a more complex one of using AI to analyse the impact of Pública’s investigative journalism on society.

From a large field of teams expressing their interest to participate, 12 were selected to take up the challenge and compete, and, eventually, five were selected to fly to Splice Beta, a journalism conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to present their work, and perhaps take home the grand prize of 25000 USD.

Splice Beta is a 2.5 day event, with a focus on innovative journalism in East and Southeast Asia, organised by a team of two, based in Singapore. The mashup with this global AI challenge is perhaps slightly unconventional, but with the majority of participants in the AI challenge coming from the Global South, it does make the connection a bit stronger, even if that meant that the two teams from Latin America, ourselves and a team from Colombia, had to travel for about 40 hours to arrive in Chiang Mai.

The conference itself was great, as were the people and vibe, even if there was not enough of a focus on technology, and its related challenges. But, I’m biased and Google sponsored the event. As did YouTube.

With the journey between São Paulo and Chiang Mai being long, and the timezone difference being quite brutal, I opted to extend my trip to two weeks, including a short stop, on the way back, in The Netherlands, where I just missed attending my high school reunion on the occasion of the school celebrating its 75th anniversary.
The journey from São Paulo to Chiang Mai included the longest flight I’ve ever taken, from São Paulo to Doha, in Qatar, at 14.5 hours.

We, sadly, didn’t end up taking home the big prize. But, the real prize was the friends we made along the way. Right?

When I briefly returned to Chiang Mai, now 10 years ago, one thing I had noticed was that the local tourist industry had started pivoting to focus on Chinese visitors. Now, I noticed virtually nothing of this pivot. Some official signs were still also in Chinese, but practically none of the tourist-focussed businesses were advertising themselves as Chinese-oriented. Apparently, the underlying reason for the surge in Chinese visits, a few films that were shot in Chiang Mai, had dried up as a source of inspiration.

I took the opportunity of visiting Chiang Mai to also join a local hash, which happened to be an anniversary run, and a tough one; a 18.5km hike, mostly flat, but with the first section a tough off-road hike up a sizeable hill, or small mountain. With temperatures over 30 degrees, this was a challenge, if satisfying.

Spending my time in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, I also discovered I had completely forgotten several run-of-the-mill features of the country and culture. Everywhere smells of incense. Ice coffee in small cans. Toasties at 7/11. Fish balls.
The quality of life is still high in Thailand, even with their recent stack of political challenges. Weed is now freely available, after all drugs being heavily criminalised for decades.
But, one major difference between Thailand and Brazil, which I now realised on this visit, is that, as a western visitor or expat in Thailand, you will never be able to completely integrate, whereas in Brazil, with some knowledge of Portuguese, it’s fairly easy to embed yourself in the country.

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Historic cafés of Europe https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/project/historic-cafes-of-europe/ Mon, 16 Oct 2023 23:36:06 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?post_type=project&p=25321 Historic cafes of EuropeI’ve been looking for suitable material for Placecloud; short, location-based podcasts that reveal the stories of the places around us. I stumbled upon the Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe programme. These are some 40 thematic ‘routes’ throughout Europe. Most of them are not really routes, but thematically linked locations, with subjects like European …]]> Historic cafes of Europe

I’ve been looking for suitable material for Placecloud; short, location-based podcasts that reveal the stories of the places around us.

I stumbled upon the Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe programme. These are some 40 thematic ‘routes’ throughout Europe. Most of them are not really routes, but thematically linked locations, with subjects like European Mozart Ways, Prehistoric Rock Art Trails, or Le Corbusier Destinations: Architectural Promenades. And not all only cover Europe. The one on Le Corbusier, for example, also includes locations in Argentina and Japan.

Each route is managed by its own organisation, somewhere in Europe, has its own website (well, most of them), developed by some other organisation, and collects and collates information on the locations on its route (or routes) in its own way.
This not only means that the Council of Europe (why are they facilitating this, anyway?) has spent a truckload of money on putting together all these routes, and the information that is provided on them, the quality, accessibility, and usability of all this information also varies wildly from route to route.

One route that seemed prime material for bringing to Placecloud, is the Historic Cafés Route. Just under 100 cafés, in a dozen, or so, countries. Each place, each café, is in a specific location, that is, it’s not a region, or area, and, surely, as they are all historic, they all must have an interesting story to tell. Right?

Turns out they might, but, for some, the available information was limited, or simply not very interesting. One café has since closed down, seemingly as a consequence of the pandemic, and several don’t even have a website.
Strangely, there seems to be no restriction on who, or what, can become a member of the ‘HCR’, which might be the reason why some cafés are listed as ‘friend’, including the Lavazza Museum in Turin.

I ended leaving out a few of the ‘friends’, for not being able to obtain any usable information, anywhere. I also left out the Lavazza museum, the café that had closed its doors, and one café for which I couldn’t get a usable Google Street View.

Placecloud mixes the short location-based podcasts with Google Street View. This way, you can use Placecloud to explore the world on foot, or stay at home, and explore the world of Placecloud through Google Street View. So, a location without a Street View is not usable.

I wrote to the Greek organisation who manages the Historic Cafés Route, asking if it would be possible to use the photos on their website (properly sourced, of course), but never received a response. So, I ended up using Midjourney to illustrate all viewpoints on Placecloud. All texts were put together by ChatGPT (hopefully with little hallucination, but with hard to weed out cliche), and all these texts were then read by a synthesised version of my voice, courtesy of ElevenLabs.

Take a look, explore the world of European coffee.

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Agência Tatu https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/work/agencia-tatu/ Tue, 12 Sep 2023 01:01:14 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?post_type=work&p=25263 Agência TatuThe website of an investigate journalism outfit in Brazil which focusses heavily on data-centric reporting. The design is not mine. I built a Bootstrap-based WordPress template, and cleaned up legacy configurations for more streamlined content management.]]> Agência Tatu

The website of an investigate journalism outfit in Brazil which focusses heavily on data-centric reporting.

The design is not mine. I built a Bootstrap-based WordPress template, and cleaned up legacy configurations for more streamlined content management.

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in loving memory https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/project/in-loving-memory/ Mon, 11 Sep 2023 19:03:13 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?post_type=project&p=25259 Questioning how and why we choose to remember and commemorate, in this intervention, I place commemoration plaques in a few score places around the world. What is worth remembering? Who is worth remembering? Why? Who decides? And if we deem something, or someone, worth remembering, how do we choose to remind ourselves, and why do …]]>

Questioning how and why we choose to remember and commemorate, in this intervention, I place commemoration plaques in a few score places around the world.

What is worth remembering? Who is worth remembering? Why? Who decides? And if we deem something, or someone, worth remembering, how do we choose to remind ourselves, and why do we sometimes choose to remind others as well?

Also, who is allowed to decide on what form commemoration takes? Is it not enough to remember through thought, or sounds or smells, concepts that have no form? Why does commemoration need to be publicly acknowledged or have a public presence?

At the same time, the plaques identify locations that exist in my loving memory, representing a publicly identifiable collection of places that, for one reason or another, live on in my memory.

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micoleao.org.br https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/work/micoleao-org-br/ Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:54:57 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?post_type=work&p=25252 My reputation in Brazil spreads, which, here, meant I’m now maintaining this small website for an organisation which focusses on conservation. Based near Rio de Janeiro.

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Parabereforum.com https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/work/parabereforum-com/ Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:51:07 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?post_type=work&p=25249 Over the years, a number of times I’ve come to the rescue of this small, but surprisingly popular, website. A recent hack, and my subsequent resolution, meant I’m now effectively maintaining this website.

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Sliders Ultimate https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/project/sliders-ultimate/ Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:49:11 +0000 https://babakfakhamzadeh.com/?post_type=project&p=25233 Sliders UltimateShortly after I shut down Sliders for Flickr, I discovered the MacOS app Plash, a lovely little app that allows you to set a website as your desktop background. I made some small changes to my web-app andiquote.org, optionally removing some interface elements, and added some configuration, and now I’ve got one of the screens …]]> Sliders Ultimate

Shortly after I shut down Sliders for Flickr, I discovered the MacOS app Plash, a lovely little app that allows you to set a website as your desktop background. I made some small changes to my web-app andiquote.org, optionally removing some interface elements, and added some configuration, and now I’ve got one of the screens in my multi-screen set up rotating between famous quotes, with a ‘magically’ attached, related, image.

This rekindled my desire to also set a webpage as a screensaver on my Mac.

It felt the last time I looked for this is a long, long time ago, as webviewscreensaver was released some 8 years ago. Even better, it still works.

I now could show famous quotes, as screensavers, but it made sense to revive Sliders as a web-app, with the specific intention to use the result as a screensaver, or desktop background.

So I did.

I originally built Sliders to turn my iPad into a digital photo frame. I recently bought a very large screen to work on as my main monitor, and now use my photos as its screensaver.

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