A few years ago a good friend and I were walking through Munich’s famed Englischer Garten when we came across some guys surfing in a fast-flowing canal. It was really amusing to see these guys surf back and forth for a minute or two before falling or conceding to the next surfer. While it was highly unusual to see people surfing downtown in a city, it was at least summer-time and quite hot. It turns out there are crazies there all year surfing. I was in Munich over the weekend with my wife and her sister Alix, and so I told them about the surfers I saw a few years back. We were close to the area, and so I walked them over there. It was fairly cold out, 2-3 degrees Celcius, but there were 4-5 guys having a blast surfing in the canal. I snapped a few shots. And my favorite: (Surfing and bathing forbidden!) If you’re ever in Munich, take a couple of hours to walk through the English Gardens. It’s huge and quite enjoyable to walk through, and be sure to look for the surfers of Munich. The canal is near the south-west end of the park, or just ask a local to point you in the right direction.

We’ve finally recieved our pictures from the photographer, over a month after our wedding (that’s another blog entry). About a third of the pictures are on Flickr.com, so head on over there to see our gallery. Be sure to add comments and contribute your own photos taking during our celebration in our Wedding Images Group. Thanks again to everyone for helping us celebrate.

Rebecca and I had a great time today in Esslingen at the annual Esslingen Weinwandertag, an annual wine hike through the vineyards surrounding the town of Esslingen. We started off in Esslingen and wandered up a path leading to the vineyards and a few hours (and many wine glasses) later we arrived in Mettingen. At the start in Esslingen, we purchased a wineglass with a leather strap that brilliantly holds the glass upright around your neck, and every few hundred meters along the path we filled up with some delicious local wine and German snacks. We ran into some of my co-workers so we made the rest of the trek with them, which made for never empty glasses. It’s a brilliant festival and loads of fun. These kinds of events are what’s missing from life in America.

Chrys lent me his Canon 100mm macro lens a few weeks ago, and I haven’t really played with it until now. Rebecca and I came back from Obi with a ton of new plants and flowers for our balcony, after we planted them I had a good excuse to use the lens. Wow, what a sharp lens. I’m impressed.

There’s a new photohosting site that just got out of public beta - Zooomr.  The similarities between it and Flickr don’t just stop at the name - the rest of the site seems to take all of Flickr’s good UI points as well.  However, it’s obvious that the people responsible for Zooomr, BlueBridge Technologies Group, fully intend to innovate. Homer!Hosted on Zooomr One of the first thing you notice when you go to register at Zooomr is that you don’t have to actually register.  You can log in using federated ID authentication from numerous other services - Level9 R5, OpenID, LiveJournal, Google, and Meetro.  I logged in with my Google account, and within seconds I was able to edit my Zooomr profile.  After finding a test picture to upload, I was able to upload and start my Zooomr experience within minutes of signing in (the longest time was spent trying to find an actual photo to upload).  The basic interface is fairly clean, but that is due to it taking LOTS from the flickr interface.  All the basic elements are in the same place as on flickr, and there’s even a photostream, in this case called a "photo catalogue."  Unlike flickr, I found the text elements on the right side of the photo a little distracting - they are too bold and pronounced, whereas on flickr they are more subtle. Aside from this,  Zooomr has all the basic web 2.0 features you would expect - tags, comments, social communities, RSS feeds, AJAX-y interface, etc.  However, they’re adding some pretty cool features like Zooomrtations and Geotagging.  Zooomrtations are basically audio annotations embedded into each image.  This could allow for some pretty interesting visual and audio storytelling.  Geotagging, called Lightmap on Zooomr, is done via GoogleMaps at the moment, and holds a lot of promise.  By extending it a little further, Zooomr could mesh together the functionality of Plazes and Flickr, and in turn create a hot new web 2.0 site. Check it out for yourself, there’s no need to even register! http://beta.zooomr.com/home