Posts

Sehr lecker.

It’s now almost official: Ollanta Humala and Alan García will get into the second round of the Peruvian presidential election. The official ONPE Web site states, that 98.872% of the votes have been counted. Ollanta Humala now got 30.7% of the valid votes, Alan García 24.3% and Lourdes Flores 23.7%. Let me give a short summary of the two candidates in the second route. Humala is a left-wing politician, former military commander and doesn’t seem to have very clear visions for the country. Mostly he wants to help the poor and has a few very drastic ideas. Some Peruvians fear that Humala would prohibit Peruvians from leaving the country, because he claims that mainly the rich Peruvians leave and thus the country gets poorer. García seems to be a bit more on the center, though his party APRA is counted among the left ones. His party has a long history as a strong opposition party in congress and García was himself president from 1985 to 1990 and his term is mainly remembered for extreme inflation, increased terrorism and general chaos. I haven’t yet heard good things about his term from any of my Peruvian friends. So it’s no wonder that in Peru the current saying solo queda elegir entre el sida y el cancer (it now remains to choose between AIDS and cancer) is very popular. It seems probable now, that García will win the second round, because supporters of Lourdes Flores are more likely to vote for him than for Humala. Many Peruvians feel, that at least they can get rid of Alan after his five-year term while with Humala it seems much more likely that he would try to stay in office for much longer. In that aspect, Humala is often compared with Hugo Chavez, who was originally elected in a democratic process but has since then used his powers to extend his term limit. That assessment has been repeated to me by several Peruvians. A current poll by the pollster DATUM currently predicts that García will win with 54% over Humala. But if we have learned one thing from the first round it’s that pollsters can’t be trusted in Peru either. The second round is scheduled for May 28. ...

I translated the KAYWA weblog software to Spanish. I’ll now blog a bit in Spanish as well here in order to keep my Peruvian friends updated. Just ignore the Spanish noise or subscribe to one of the single-language feeds.

El proveedor de weblogs de Suiza KAYWA ya esta disponible en español también. Eso significa que ya puede usar el interface de administración en los cuatros idiomas inglés, alemán, francés y español. Yo hice la traducción en español y por eso creo que no esta perfecto todavía. Si tu idioma maternal es el español y quieres ayudar en mejorar la traducción podemos darte una cuenta gratis de KAYWA. Si quieres una cuente de KAYWA puedes escribir me en los comentarios o por correo electrónico. ...

I still feel jet lagged from returning to Switzerland. One night last week I wasn’t able to sleep and the product were these beautiful night shots of the lovely city of St. Gallen. Taken from near the “drei Weiern” near to the restaurant Dreilinden.

Ich hoffe mal dieser Moblog funktioniert jetzt.

My future employer local.ch has gone live with the first public release two days ago. I actually worked for local.ch before as an independent programmer in my Arroba times and when the project didn’t even have an official name yet. I first had contact with that project on January 17 of last year. At that time there were some ideas and not much more. Now, a bit more than one year after those early ideas, the site is live for the first time. I for one am very excited. What you see now is a start. A good start I like to think. We will be able to give you a lot more services in the future. I don’t think we will run out of ideas any time soon. Other participants in the local.ch project have blogged as well about the launch: ...

I got home a few hours ago (yesterday actually). No problems on the way. So I’m now in Switzerland again. Thanks again to all the friends who came to the airport in Lima and in Switzerland. Llegué hace unas horas (ayer el viernes). No tenía problemas y ya estoy en Suiza de nuevo después de más que seis meses en Perú. Voy a escribir más en español en este weblog en el futuro. Gracias otra vez a todos los amigos que me han despedido al aeropuerto en Lima y también a todos los amigos que me han recibido de nuevo al aeropuerto en Zurich.