fouldsy.com

After having a photo selected for the Schmap! Edinburgh guide, I’ve now had two photos included in the guide to Anchorage The first was showcasing the shuttle bus the zoo operates from downtown to the zoo which is a pretty cool deal as it wasn’t exactly the easiest place to find otherwise! The original photo can be found here on Flickr, and the photo in the Schmap! guide is here

This second one is of a dall sheep within the zoo, a pretty good closeup given the camera I had at the time! Here’s the Schmap! page with the featured photo, and the original on Flickr. One of my friends on Flickr also has a photo or two listed which is pretty cool.

The mail has been a little hit + miss the last few days with the weather a bit rainy, so Photoshop Elements hasn’t arrived yet - looking forward to touching up the photos from our trips around Anchorage from a couple of weeks ago when it does as really want to get the photos online I’ve also just redesigned iainfoulds.com, the side-arm with a selection of prints available for purchase.

Hopefully tomorrow’s opening kickoff of the 2008-2009 Premiership season will be as entertaining as my virtual game in Fifa ‘08 on the Xbox 360 this evening - final score was Sunderland 4 - Liverpool 1 Somehow, I think it’s still being slightly optimistic to expect a similar result tomorrow!

I’m going to try watching the match via foxsoccer.com which holds the broadcasts rights over here in the US - our pitiful satellite can’t pick up the actual Fox Soccer Channel, but I’m going to try streaming it online. The first three Sunderland games of the season are being broadcast, and the lads at safc.com have also just fired up the podcast again after doing nothing last season Providing the internet doesn’t disappear in the morning, will almost be as good as being at the Stadium of Light with dad having a pint at half time…

Okay, maybe not. But I will have the new strip on that my parents brought over a couple of weeks ago!

A few weeks ago I was e-mailed to ask if one of my photos on flickr could be shortlisted for inclusion in a Schmap! guide to Edinburgh. I agreed not thinking much of it, as it wasn’t really one of my best - it was taken from a moving tour bus taking us around the city! But, the latest guide was published online and my photo was included for the Dynamic Earth center. It includes a few other photos too for the area, but is still pretty neat to be on there.

They’re also working on an updated guide to Anchorage and another couple of my photos have been shortlisted for inclusion (better ones from the Alaska Zoo this time, so I’ll be quite happy to see them included!) which should be fun to see what happens with those.

The last couple of days I’ve been tinkering, mainly as it had been raining solid for pretty much a week. It did finally break this morning letting us glimpse sunshine + blue sky, and the temperature is up around 60F I was chatting with Carl Andrew yesterday and he told me that the elders always say if it’s a bad summer, it will be a mild fall (autumn). Here’s hoping, as the locals can’t remember such a poor summer - I don’t think we’ve gone more than a couple of days in the past 6 weeks without rain, and one of those spells was when it somehow got to 83F!

Anyway, the tinkering has been moving some of my back-end services onto the hosted Google Apps for Your Domain offerings. I’ve used them since the start of year on another site without problems, but fouldsy.com (and it’s associated e-mail, chat, documents, etc.) is my main focus, and it was getting a tad slow with a compressed local mail file over 500Mb, and way too many saved RSS articles to search through. Both mail + RSS have moved between multiple computers and apps for 3-4 years now and it was probably time for a clear out anyway, and since Gmail provides IMAP access, I could easily transfer out any e-mails from Mail straight into Gmail. Mass deletion has brought me down to only 40Mb in Gmail now I also imported all my RSS feeds into Reader, tagged a bunch of the old articles from Vienna in del.icio.us, and setup Fox Marks to sync all bookmarks between the different systems I use. All the mail functions got themselves up + running during Wednesday evening, but some e-mails from Europe still seem a little delayed as it’s taking a while for all the MX changes to propagate. Anyone getting e-mails bounced, try sending again, sorry.

But, it’s only a few days until we head into Anchorage now. We have our bush flights booked for Monday morning (for all that means!) and I already have the number for Domino’s on speed-dial for the Monday night My dad retired today (technically…) after 40 years of teaching today, even he can’t explain how he managed it, and they’re both excited to fly out to Vancouver on Monday too before heading up to Anchorage on Tuesday. So long as the weather stays like this rather than all the rain!

The internet was off all weekend, made even more annoying by a) their customer service lines were also closed all weekend and b) it came back online first thing this morning meaning when they got into the office and saw the problem, a simple remote equipment reset or similar fixed it in a matter of seconds Still, least it’s working now. It gave me a chance to play with using IR detectors on the Boe-Bot to act as eyes for navigating which was pretty cool:

As opposed to using the wire ‘whiskers’ which have to physically touch an object before then backing up and moving away, and the light-sensitive photoresistors which weren’t really useful for navigating around objects at any great speed, using the IR sensors allowed it to continually send out pulses to detect objects and then react to them before they became an obstacle. This allowed much faster movement through a small maze (another USPS-sponsored event!):

I also set it up using basic code for a sumobot where it would lock onto an object and try to follow. Mia was not impressed! I was though, as it was able to successfully track a very fast moving dog

Seriously, we are! Well, our names are anyway

NASA is launching a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter towards the end of the year, and they’re including a microchip in it containing a bunch of names submitted to them by the end of June. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to get our names out there, such as being on the Honda F1 car last season, Kat + I added our names. Simply enter your name on the LRO submission form and you’re set.

Maybe I’ll end up flying over the acre of moon I bought a few years ago…

Since the photographs I’ve taken over the past few years have been well received and generated a lot of positive comments, I’ve started up a small side-business of sorts at http://www.iainfoulds.com with a collection of the some of the highest quality photos available for purchase.

All prints come presented on 5″x7″ premium photo paper with a gloss finish, mounted in a pure white mat frame and individually wrapped in a clear plastic display bag. If I do say so myself, the prints look very impressive - Kat has one in her classroom which is getting quite a bit of attention

Priced at only $10 per print (check local currency rates), they are attractively priced and available from the comfort of your own home. Shipping is free for all US customers, and international orders are only $10 (up to a maximum of 40 prints…) via Priority Air Mail. Given the exchange rate, most international orders are getting a right steal!

Browse the available galleries, or feel free to request a custom print of something not currently on there, and see if anything is appealing for yourself or as a gift - the “Yup’ik Life” collection of photographs from up here in Alaska are certainly unique!

US orders are ready to ship now, with International orders ready to go in a few days (feel free to order now so your prints can be shipped as soon as possible), and a replacement or money back guarantee is provided on all prints. More information on shipping + ordering is available here.

So, my PayPal account back in the UK is under review in-line with European money laundering regulations. First a hunting licence, then money laundering. Am on a roll this week!

Since I’ve been moving money back + forth between US + UK accounts the past year or so, I’ve hit some monetary limit they have in place before a review is required to prevent naughty going’s on. Is a bit weird, as it isn’t actually limiting me from doing anything as they detailed, since I was able to go ahead and withdraw the money I transfered in anyways There’s two verification steps you have to complete for the review - first, PayPal deposit two small amounts into your bank account and you report back what they were. I’ve already done that years ago, but PayPal want to give me another 7p… Second, they set up an automated phone call where you enter a provided security code, but, they let you change the number they call you on anyways. So if someone was fraudulently accessing my account, they could simply have changed the telephone number, requested the call, then entered the security code shown on screen…

Ah well, it’s the last payment going into my UK account as everything will be cleared up once the withdrawal is complete. As a 7 year PayPal customer, seems like as with most things they inconvenience the genuine users due to the actions of the few.

After 8 weeks of nothing to get excited about with my fantasy football team, everything seemed to fall into place last weekend. I never paid much attention to trading players as I had the mentality from fantasy soccer in England where you only have two or three trading windows. I didn’t realise people over here were trading players every week to score maximum points against weak opposition and to avoid players being out on bye weeks.

Regardless, my points score last weekend ranked 37th in the entire RotoHog league and I was ranked 5th biggest overall mover. Not too shabby. This afternoon I then got an e-mail asking me to confirm my postal address to receive a prize for being ranked in the weekly 25 biggest movers! Think it’s only going to be a t-shirt, but better than nothing

We were weathered in again this morning, although a couple of airplanes did circle overhead for a few minutes before giving up without landing, but this afternoon the weather broke and a bunch of planes made it in to land. Thankfully our food from Bethel was on one of them - only took 6 days to travel 40 miles! Was also pretty fun riding the 4-wheeler on the boardwalks when they’re covered in compacted snow like this At least we have some decent food to eat for the next couple of weeks until our big Span Alaska order arrives.

Today’s been kinda fun though as I e-mailed Tony Richards from Lakeland Cam last night as his daily photos yesterday were stunning. I’ve checked his site daily for about 7 years and he always has excellent photos of the Lake District - lucky guy gets to wander the fells every day and photograph them as he does so. He included my e-mail on his site (he usually puts one or two messages from visitors on there each day) and it’s pulled close to 4,000 visitors to my photo gallery in the last few hours Kinda cool, as I think there’s some pretty good photos in there and no-one’s e-mailed yet telling me otherwise!

It’s been weird the last few weeks though as I’ve had an offer for carrying advertising for sports/entertainment, an offer to review computer certification preparation software, and an offer to write a weekly report for a snowmobiling site out of Canada. There’s always been a good number of visitors each day to some of the Linux stuff or web scripting I’ve done, but for something that’s really just a personal blog, it’s cool to see people coming in from all over the place and getting involved. The more the merrier!

Now, if there’s any breweries out there wanting someone to review a beer or four, or if Cessna want to provide one of their Private Pilot Training Kits for review (I’d also go for a G1000 equipped 172R if they were really pushy…), I’m all ears