Here are some cool (and somewhat random) things that I made or came across while creating the website:
While I was looking for good pictures to put in the website, I came across a picture of a yak. It was really cool, so I put it in my website (Click here). The yak really inspired me, so I later made an AI generated picture of a yak with DALL-E 3, OpenAI's (the maker of ChatGPT) state-of-the-art image generator. If you try to go to a page that doesn't exist, you will see "Jak the Yak" (Zak the Yak was already taken. See the next section). However, this has been taken away as I moved it onto the webserver. Go the the picture attribution page to see Jak the Yak
So, why did't I call my yak Zak? Because it Zak was already taken. See Zak the Yak with Books on his Back. It is a cute book, and I came across randomly. And, as it turns out, the person who wrote the book left Microsoft to make a non-profit organization called 'Room to Read' that promotes eduction. I thought that was pretty cool, and it also is related to the Peace Core part of this project.
Ever wonder about where many of the pictures I used came from? The came from Wikimedia, a website full of pictures that you can use. Most of them specifically came from Vyacheslav Argenberg, someone who takes tons of very high quality images in Russia, Asia, and the Middle East. I found it really easy to use (and attribute to) his pictures.His website is called Vasco Planet.
I learned a lot making this website. Especially the scale of these mountains. Many of them are 8000 meters above sealevel (Hence the name eight-thousander). That is >26,000 feet, which is more than twice as high as I have ever been on land. When people are up that high, there is not very much oxygen. That is why people bring supplementary oxygen up with them. It decreases the altitude you feel, and it keeps you warm. It is an impressive feat to climb a mountain in Nepal without supplementary oxygen.
When I work on coding projects, I often listen to music. When working on this project specifically, I listened to many Led Zeppelin songs, including 'Kashmir'. In the song, there is a stanza that goes like this:
"Oh, pilot of the storm who leaves no trace
Like thoughts inside a dream
Who hid the path that lead me to that place
With yellow desert screen
My Shangri-La beneath the summer moon
I will return again"
I was curious what a 'Shangri-La' was, so I looked it up. It is a fictional city in Tibet's mountains, right next door to the very place I was doing my project on. And, people have search rock caves in the Annapurna Massif for evidence of Shangri-La. Also, there is a Scooby-Doo episode with Shangri-La in it.