Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Welcome to the websites of Babak Fakhamzadeh. Get book, movie, game and audio reviews, travelogues, photologues and much more. For the latest from each category, check the menu above.

Chachachacha Changes!

Dhow
I've been working hard on updating a lot of things 'under the hood' of my website, as well as tweaking a few visual aspects of the site, only to, somehow, have the underlying database swept empty, losing me some of posts I wrote over the last week. Gotta love computers and my one week old backup.

Cutie alert

Over the last week, Niamh also made her appearance here in Dar, on a welcome break from Lusaka. We visited South Beach here in Dar, Bongoyo island and, last weekend, Bagamoyo, where we stayed at Bagamoyo Beach Resort, a friendly hotel which seemed to have seen better days, not unlike the city of Bagamoyo itself. Bagamoyo, at mild traffic an hou... read more

Tagged with: Bagamoyo, Tanzania, glory, history, war, Zanzibar, Dar Es Salaam, food, FLEFF

A collage

The excellent software which is Shape Collage makes for lovely creations.

DAR
read more

Tagged with: collage, Dar Es Salaam

Resizing images on the fly using PHP

I'm currently working on the new Twaweza website (not online as I write this), and needed a library to resize images on the fly with PHP, without having to store the resized images.

Being a typical lazy coder, I looked around for an existing library and found a useful start in Simon Jarvis' library for resizing images on the fly. It almost served my needs, besides the ability to resize images to fit inside a user defined box.
So I added the function resizeToMax.

The updated file can be found in my dropbox. Obviously, change the ... read more

It. Is. Momentous.

Twaweza office
I paid off my student loan this month. Momentous!

Artsy competition

I'm still judging for FLEFF 2010, and in the meantime a not too dissimilar project is starting over in Singapore.
For an exhibition at the International Communication Association Conference in late June, they're looking for work on the theme of 'open space'. I always struggle with calls for proposals of this kind as they're often rather conceptual, but in its simplest form, open space is defined as "spurring collaborative knowledges and producing new provisional microterritories through engagement. Open Space is where technologies meet people meet spaces."
T... read more

Tagged with: money, FLEFF, Singapore, art, mapping, competition, space

Ceci n'est pas une peep

Ceci n'est pas une peep


With a link to the source image. read more

Tagged with: Lion, roar, Magritte

Mine? Yours!

Tagged with: Valentine

Shake that

Dancing in the rain
I cycled over to Kunduchi beach hotel and resort today as the Lonely Planet claimed that, besides the water park, they also had a video game arcade. So, hoping for DDR, I cycled the 20-25 kilometers up north. Without luck,

The park, with an entrance fee of 5500 shilling, less than 3 euros, isn't bad, though, and quite eclectic. For the peeps on the wet dance floor in the middle of the complex, the DJ was alternating between African pop, Hindi tunes as well as popular Arab tracks.
What was disturbing was that, during one song, several of the throng of young local girls went down on all fours, head on the floor, booty in the air, and started shaking and grinding their backside as... read more

Tagged with: bicycle, Dar Es Salaam, DDR, dancing, swimming, music