Here are a few Hindu youts celebrating Deepavali.

Found in the seaside village of Melaka in Malaysia.

I love this shot. It looks best in this large on black version.

Normally I don’t blog about business stuff, but this was an interesting experience.

Today I went through the process of signing up as a Director of a Malaysian company.

It required driving to a circumspect-looking shopping area in Kuala Lumpur where I had to walk by live rodents, reptiles, and insects being sold for lunch to find a narrow, poorly-lit stairway that led into darkness. It was extremely muggy, and it occurred to me that I prefer my outdoor experiences to be approximately the same temperature as my hotel room.

Upon finding my way up the distressed metal stairs and touching the wall by accident, only to have asbestos-laden substance coat my arm, I made it to the top to find a pock-marked metallic door ajar bearing the name of the lofty-titled Malaysian occupant inside. Upon entering, I could not help but notice it was the size of a double-wide phone booth cramped with papers, bad Indian radio, stickers from 70’s rock bands that were never popular in the states, and a dodgy-looking 60-year old Malay whose toupee was nearly half his age but did not make him look so.

The process of signing the papers involved a myriad of stamps, signatures, staple-reomovers, re-stapling, re-staple-removing, stamping-to-the-beat of Indian music, and his proud motioning to a crooked and faded photograph on the wall of him shaking hands with another government functionary, also clad in garish garments and an organ-grinder monkey cap, at a hotel conference room with bad wallpaper. He babbled inconceivable noises to me as his head bobbled like a Sikh in a sandstorm, the staccato rhythm to which I found myself nodding in absent agreement, so as to expedite the process and allow me to make a hasty egress as a new director of the company.

Well, this wasn’t in Turkey, but it reminded me of that for some reason. This is the central market area of Kuala Lumpur that seemed to have a lot more Muslims than other areas of the city.

Here is yet another sunset picture from the beach in Langkawi. I think this is one of those “categories” of shots that are always popular. The other one is dogs. I think it is strange why the two most popular categires of things humans like to see in pictures are “sunsets” and “dogs”. I think there is an interesting psychological reason for this, but I have no idea why this is.

This old tree has overgrown an old Chinese gravestone.

This is the market area of Melaka around midnight. Melaka was a really cool place, but I only got to spend a few hours there. The cab ride back to Kuala Lumpur was brutal. These tiny cabs use natural gas and their tanks only hold about 45-minutes worth of fuel for some reason. We had to stop at least 4 gas stations to get back…

Here is a cool barrel-chested monkey I found in the jungle when I was some place deep in Malaysia where I probably was not supposed to be.

This will sound strange, but I enjoy walking around cemeteries listening to ambient music on my iPod and taking pictures. I think about dissolving patterns, in the Wolfram sense.

That’s why I was excited to find this really unique cemetery on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. You can see little pictures of the dead on top of each tombstone. The cemetery was vast and would have taken many hours to circumnavigate.