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A view of the tea fields in the Kennan Devan hills near Munnar, Kerala.

After having experienced the hustle and bustle of Bangalore, the next plan was to explore Kerala, a state which is located on the tropical south-western tip of the subcontinent. On its coast it is home to vast stretches of palm tree adorned beaches, which are flanked by rice fields criss-crossed by small canals, just as in Venice. Going further inland, one meets the mighty Western Ghats mountain range, a high-altitude rainforest, home to elephants and tigers, which is ideal for escaping the oppressive humidity on the coast. Politically, it is also well-known within India for its high degree of development–it has the highest literacy rates, life expectancy and lowest impoverishment rates in the country. All great things. And they also love a bit of communism too it turns out.

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A streetscape in a slightly edgy neighbourhood in Bangalore.

Bangalore, which is known as India’s “silicon valley”, was my first port of call for my trip to India. It was the winter semester break and I had just been travelling around Venice and Triest, so my mind was hitherto occupied with the calm and cultured sights of northern Italy. However, this collected state disappeared as soon as my first night in India, when my long-neglected sense of culture shock arose again and brought me back into the present with the overwhelming feeling of newness that all travelers crave.

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Amerigo Vespucci being towed back into port.

I was returning to Triest on the coach, when overhead a troupe of fighter jets flew right over us, emanating smoke trails in the colours of the Italian flag behind them. Needless to say this was quite a surprise! It was because there turned out to be a major event occurring in Triest on that weekend: the return of the Amerigo Vespucci to Italy after a two-year long tour around the world.

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The gloomy weather in February keeps all but the most keen tourists away.

I’ve long been putting off visiting Venice as it has a reputation of being one of the most touristy places on Earth. It’s known as a place where the streets are clogged with Chinese and American group tours and everything is absurdly expensive to match. Then there’s the government’s response to the overtourism–fleece the tourists even more. Nope, neither of those sound particularly appealing. However, now that I live in Munich, it’s pretty easy to get a coach there and it’s not only cheap, but traverses some of the most beautiful countryside in Europe on the way there as it goes directly through the Alps on the Brenner Pass. So clearly it was finally time to make the plunge and visit.

I previously (probably like many “old-skool” C++ devs) thought of cloud computing primarily as renting other peoples’ machines at a high mark-up. However, I’ve been reading up on papers in the databases research field and so thought I would share some of my findings. The use-case I will be talking about here is how modern OLTP databases are designed for the cloud and their corresponding advantages.

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My Soviet mandolin after a bit of TLC.

Over Christmas, I was browsing eBay for mandolins and came across this beauty and my better senses did not prevail–so I bought it for €45. It’s a flat-top mandolin that was made in Leningrad in the mid 1980s.

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The new Alder body with all of the gear attached.

After a year’s hiatus from playing electric guitar (I usually play fingerstyle pieces on my acoustic nowadays), I had rediscovered my baby blue Tanglewood Stratocaster, which was my first guitar. I had already modded it to the stage where not much of the original guitar remained. The bridge was replaced by a MiM Fender one, the tuners are now retro-style Washburn tuners, and similarly the pickups have also been long since replaced by some nice “Warman” pickups made by a bloke in Wales.

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A relaxing shot from the garden of Nizwa castle.

Despite Oman having a long history, there wasn’t much evident of it in the capital city Muscat, which is a city caught between being a hectic middle-eastern metropolis and a resort town for rich oil-sheiks, depending on where you are and your station in life. Therefore, in search of some history, I took a coach out to Nizwa, a major city and oasis town in the desert interior of the country.