After posting for the last time more than two weeks ago I thought it was about time to post some new pics, but unfortunately there are some problems with my photosoftware. Also having some hardware problems with the computer. My PC probably need a good clean-up and replacing some hardware (probably one of the harddisks and powersupply) and a reinstall of Windows. Hope things will be solved soon, so please have a bit of patience. I'll try to add new pics as soon as possible.
This time I'll post a link to a photowebsite with photos made by Robert Knoth, a Dutch photographer from Rotterdam. It's called Nuclear Nightmares: 20 years after Chernobyl. I ran into this website a few weeks ago. This week there was some item on the news about the disaster 20 years ago on the night of April 26th 1986. It's not a very cheerful subject but the photos and the short descriptions of the people behind the photos makes it a shocking, but also a powerful and very impressive statement.
You can check at:
Nuclear Nightmares
Here are the photos I promised in my previous post from Iriomote Island, one of the islands of Okinawa. The photos date back to September 2002 and were taken during the Shichi Festival.
We spend about 10 days at Okinawa and we visit a total of six islands. First we flew from Tokyo to Naha on the main island of Okinawa (Okinawa-hontoo). We only spend the first night there and the night before we flew back to Tokyo. The other islands we visited were Zamami-jima, Ishigaki, Taketomi, Iriomote and Hateruma, the most southern inhabited island of Japan and much closer to Taiwan than to mainland Japan.
It was an excellent holiday, with nice sightseeing, nice food and drinking, interesting culture etc..., a nice mix of activities and relaxing. We also liked the people. Way less stressed and much more relaxed than on mainland Japan. They know how to party and they like drinking. We liked the Orion beer and the local drink Awamori, the notorious strong liquor of Okinawa that can contain between 30 to 60% of alcohol. Okinawa is also a great place for snorkling and diving. We did some excellent snorkling at Zamami-jima and saw gorgeous marine life, like lionfish, seasnakes and manta-rays. At some islands there are also spots for watching hammerhead-sharks and whalespotting during January to April. You can see humpback whales and also whalesharks. It's still one of my wishes to snorkle once with whalesharks. I already did with dolphins (also in Japan) and that was awesome.
I might post some more pictures from our Okinawa-trip later, but this time I will post pics from our trip to Iriomote-island from the Shichi-festival. It was a very scenic and colourful local festival with lots of interesting rituals. Some of the festivals on Okinawa have a long and rich tradition. Some more info of some of the festivals at Okinawa can be found here. More general and pretty good tourist information can be found here.
Enjoy the pics. For me they bring back some good memories. 
Since last Thursday I add a new search engine to my weblog in the right frame just below my profile and webstats. There used to be one of Technorati, but after I tried to find something in my archives and not getting the result that I expected I decided to look out on the internet and see if there was a good alternative. It took some time to find what I wanted, but finally I ended up with a service from Google, called Google Free Way. On this page you can find some HTML-code which can be copied into your website/weblog template. You can choose from three options, depending what you want. But on this page they also offered a fourth option.
In this fourth option you can customize the HTML-code through some wizard and give the Google website/weblog search-box the look of your own website/weblog. Also the searchresults will be presented in the look and feel of your own website/weblog. This fourth option can be found here. It cost me some time and some trial and error with the HTML code (long time ago I did some basic HTML-course, but most of it is forgotten) to get it exactly the way I wanted, but it works now.
You only need to register and they show some sponsored links on the page with the searchresults (Google also does that on their regular searchpages, so that's no big deal I think). But apart from that it's totally free.
Later this week some more pics will be posted. This time from the Shichi Festival at Oriomote Island at Okinawa, Japan. So stay tuned.
