Holidays: Working at your own (and a bunch of friends’) company means that arranging holidays with friends will be easier and harder at the same time. But we did it anyway. I am just back from a road trip across Iran, going from Tehran to Qazvin to Zanjan to Tabriz to Kandovan to Jolfa to Kaleybar to Ardebil to Astara to Chalus and then back to Tehran. There were seven of us, five Iranians and two Irishmen, one of them Michael Everson (blog, wikipedia article), whom I have worked with on quite a few character encoding proposals for the Unicode Standard.

Among the most interesting parts of the trip, was going to the Babak Fort during a very mysty day when we couldn’t see more than five meters around. Michael remained in the car, and tried to decode the joining and shaping behavior of the Psalter Pahlavi script, a script that is only found in a fourth century CE twelve-page document (and also recently on a damaged cross found around Herat). We, the others, tried to find the path to the castle in the mist and was lost after twenty minutes, trying to find the coordinates of the castle by phoning friends and asking them to dig Google Earth and other friends with GPS devices but seeing no success, and then finally finding our way by Christian (our other Irish guest) hearing a loud radio playing in Azerbaijani which we followed and resulted in us getting found.

I’m looking forward to mapping the route to the castle on OSM.