I had a very nice day on the day I visited Putrajaya. It could have been hotter there, but I don’t know how. The best part was the cool shower afterwards.

Putrajaya is the new capital area Kuala Lumpur. It is the most sterile and lifeless place I have ever visited. But there is very nice architecture for photography… so I guess it’s not all bad.

This is my own little part for World Peace.

Since I get over 250,000 visits on my blog per month (and more than that direct to my Flickr pictures), I thought this would an interesting idea.

First, this may be the dumbest-looking photograph, but most hilarious from a pure silly point of view, that I have ever made.

Ali (left) and Amin (right) each work for me at John Galt Games here in Kuala Lumpur. They are two of the sharpest programmers in the world and incredibly funny and cool guys. Truth be told, Ali is a bit overpaid, but that is between you and me.

As a CEO, entrepreneur, and blogger, I think that little guys like me can do more to solve the world’s problems than so-called world leaders. Ali, Amin, and I all agree the that our world leaders are kind boneheads, except for that guy that runs SeaLand, who we think is pretty awesome.

Insofar as people like me making the world come together, this shot was taken at a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur where we took our Malaysian development team (about 40 people) to dinner for Chinese New Year, where I gave a speech in English before handing out the traditional “Hong Bao” or Red Envelope, the traditional “lucky money” gift to people from half a dozen countries.

The amount you put in the Red Envelope is very important and should always be an even number. If you give $4 dollars it is considered very rude because it means that death may be soon. $8 is generally a good number, but as long as it is even, the Feng Shui karma will end up going your way. I also have a theory about the billions of dollars that circle around the Chinese culture every year in these money-switching celebrations — I don’t think anyone actually makes any money, since you have to give Red Envelopes back to all your other friends. It ties up an enormous amount of money so that people can just switch around money and they are forced to keep a heavy cash-balance on hand during the Chinese New Year. However, tying up billions in cash has a net positive effect of a lot of happiness since everyone seems blissfully oblivious the the mathematical net-zero gain.

Anyway, I digressed there… This was supposed to be about Iran and stuff.

So we had a heck of a time taking this picture because Ali and Amin kept cracking up. These guys cannot keep a straight face. I said, “Okay guys act like you hate me and you hate Americans. Remember, we are Imperialists and all we care about is oil, right?” I think we had to take over a dozen pictures to get them to look half-way serious and not-thrilled. The worst thing was that Hafiz (yet another Muslim in the mix) was taking the pictures and constantly cracking jokes to mess up the mood.

Anyhoo, while the rest of the world is completely chaotic, our little international team of creative geniuses is having a blast designing and creating innovative online games for the world to play. We still have to deal with the world at times. For example, I’d love to bring Ali over to the US next week to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, but there is no way that the US would let in an Iranian — especially one with long hair that looks like that Iraqi swarthy multi-cultural lover from Lost.

Coming up soon, I have another portrait coming up of Amin, which turned out really nice. He has that commanding Picard-like nose that is useful for balance and staying upright in strong winds.

In closing, bringing so-called democracy (my Libertarian spidey-sense thinks “mob-rule” when I hear democracy) to the world is not the answer. The real key is the free trade of goods, services, and ideas. Having little guys like me be able to hire smart, able, and cool guys like these, is the proven answer to the world taking the next step towards prosperity, peace, and really sweet online games.

Langkawi is a tiny island off the west coast of Malaysia. It’s filled with tiny little archipelago islands, kind of like the one that was converted into that evil lab in one of the James Bond movies. Luckily, for picture-taking, the clouds were very interesting during my short stay there.

I am back in Malaysia after a long series of flights. I have determined that I think my frequent flier membership card should change its logo to Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill. I do collect a lot of miles, but, ironically, when I do actually have time off, the last thing I want to do is fly. So I am trying to figure out a way to trade in my frequent flier miles for something that I can actually use - like sleep.

I took that shot above at the Batu Caves just north of Kuala Lumpur. Below is another picture that I took nearby, with the dark black of the cave in the background.

Believe it or not these two shots were taken on the same day within just a few hours. A series of violent storms came through Kuala Lumpur, allowing a few surreal shots of the city. It went from very dark and cloud to torrential downpour to beautiful sunset. It reminded me of the storms on the plains of Texas.

Kuala Lumpur is a very interesting city and is quite unique in Asia. I’d love to get up on top of those Petronas Towers there to take some shots, but I look like a suspicious white guy with my huge backpack. They tell me all white people look alike. …and smell like wet puppies.

Someone made a comment that this looks like the Klingon capital… from some alien sci-fi show that I have never heard of.

The first is a city shot at sunset just after a storm. The second is from the island archipelago of Langkawi.

I think the city has a very unique skyline with green the mountains of Malaysia in the background. This was shot on one of the few sunny days there when the wind changed from the Indonesian firestorms.

Here are a collection of photographs I have collected from Chinese cemeteries.

I got in trouble from a Flickr fan for saying that he sounded like one of the bad wizards from Harry Potter, but here he is, standing 140 feet tall in the jungles of Malaysia.

These shots are normally really hard to grab at night, but this HDR turned out nice. Chaotic, but detailed and nice.

I’m sure I could just post pictures from around Malaysia and there would be plenty of variety. Here are three I recently uploaded. The first is the city, obviously, of Kuala Lumpur. The second is a Vietnamese restaurant in a cool underground area. The third is a statue I found in Malaka.

This is a picture of the observation lounge itself, which I thought came out interesting.

You can see the barefooted Islamic family chilling on the right…

Here is a monkey with green eyes. Without that description, you would have no idea what you were looking at.

I saw this helicopter in front of the Petronas from the top of KL Tower, so I snapped a few quick shots and this is the only one that came out clear.

Of all places, I was surprised how much I liked the pictures that I took in the ancient Chinese cemetery during a break in a thunderstorm. I am not sure what these tombstones say, but I am pretty sure they say, “This would look totally radical in HDR.”

I have a ton of these pictures, and they all seem to come out very nice. It was so rare to have blue skies there, I had to shoot away.

This is a cool-looking mosque in Kuala Lumpur, although I doubt a lot of Muslims walk in and say, “Wow this place is like totally cool and rad.” You can see part of the cityscape behind the mosque.

The second picture is an older one of the same buildings from a different perspective at night.

The sunsets there were insane for some reason. Insane. Almost every five minutes the entire color palette changed.

Here is another shot from that cool cemetery I found on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.

Here are the Petronas Towers and downtown Kuala Lumpur after a summer storm. You can still see the low clouds covering the tops of the towers.

Here is an a picture I took on a morning walk around the park in KL. You can see the morning clouds obscuring the KL tower there on the left.

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.