fouldsy.com

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

The last week or so I’ve been having problems getting anything on the webserver that runs a few of my sites. No big deal as most of them serve static content or are handling podcast media delivery of the Unsigned Rock Podcast, but it’s only from this home connection that it fails. The sites are still working as I’ve got a few hundred hits from various football sites recently about my Sunderland vs Newcastle derby match post from last year given the next derby is coming up next month, and there’s been comments left on the blog, so it just seems to be me.

The ISP is clueless (literally…), and a traceroute happily shows data being routed well outside of the Unicom equipment and down through LA to Phoenix and ping works. Isn’t a browser or OS issue as it’s replicated across OS X, Ubuntu and Win XP, and so across Safari, Firefox and IE. FTP also works without a problem, as does my e-mail.

I’m running through Tor at the moment which is running fine (although obviously a little slow), so it’s not like the ISP is dropping all the traffic. Just seems weird the Unicom routers handle the traffic in + out fine on other protocols, but HTTP fails running direct through them yet pointing the browser to a Tor proxy works. Doubt the ISP would be blocking the server on their proxies, but maybe. As it’s not just one domain having a problem, I don’t think it’s an ISP proxy or firewall issue though. Any suggestions welcome as I don’t want to run through Tor everytime I want to make a blog post!

No problems on the flight to Bethel at lunchtime, and had plenty of time to pick up some groceries, pet food, and Subways Only had to hang around at Yute Air for an hour an a half as they left an hour earlier than scheduled since everyone was there and the plane loaded. So it ended up being only 23 hours round-trip

Think I’ve also found my new favourite website after picking up a link in Flying magazine - LiveATC.net. It’s been fun after getting a cheap $10 voltage converter to get my radio scanner from England working to listen in to the air traffic around here, but it’s not exactly constant transmissions as it’s mainly just picking up on Common Traffic Advisory Frequencies (CTAF) so is just short messages from pilots announcing their intentions to land at a certain airport or when taking off. LiveATC has feeds provided by people around the world connecting their scanners to the computers and broadcasting them across the Internet. Pretty cool listening to flowing traffic at Las Vegas or Seattle in real-time!

A couple of months ago whilst continuing my quest to read the Internet at least once, I came across various forums and articles on ‘freebie’ sites. To be honest, it all sounded well dodgy - you complete a trial offer such as DVD rental program like Netflix or music clubs with discount CD’s, right through to weighloss pills and stop smoking programs. You then need to get a certain number of people to sign up and do the same thing. After figuring it out, it’s not like a pyramid scheme when it builds up and you need dozens of people to get anywhere - for most rewards, 5-7 referrals is often enough depending on what scheme you attempt.

You’re still left trying to convince people to sign up for the offers, unless you hit somewhere like the Anything4Free or The Free Lunch Room forums where people looking to make a little extra money will complete the offers for you for say $10 or $20. Again, to me, that sounded even dodgier, but it’s easy to play safe and stay sensible.

Fast-forward to a couple of days ago, and Nick arrives with two Nintendo Wii’s - one for me, one for him (after he also cottoned on to how easy it is)

I’ve been after a Nintendo Wii since they first came out, and I spent 3/4 days in Anchorage popping into every game store and electronics department we came across trying to find one! No luck, so stumped up a little more money and bought an Xbox 360 instead. Haven’t regretted it as I love it and probably waste too much time playing it (though it’s not like I have much else to do, is it?!).

But, the Wii looks so appealing from a fun perspective, and Kat was also really drawn in by the TV commercials, so was still wanting to get one. The Xbox 360 is great when Nick or Jason come round to play video games, but there’s not much that Kat’s interested in, and with Wii Sports and Wii Play having fun little games such as tennis, bowling, golf, boxing, table tennis, etc. it’s something we’d both like to play. Not working made it a little difficult from a money point of view aside from actually being able to find a Wii stock, especially online, but thanks to a scheme on ClickPerks, I paid out less than $60 to complete a trial offer and then ‘hire’ enough referrals to do the same

Kat loves creating the Mii’s, which are little characters you create based on your appearance - I’ve also found a nifty little script called Mii Transfer for OS X that let’s you transfer your Mii from the Wii controller onto your computer, and you can then edit them online using Mii Editor. You can see the Mii’s Kat and I use around here It’s pretty cool replicating your appearance (or make yourself look however you please!), then see yourself playing golf or tennis in Wii Sports. When Kat first saw the Wii and looked at the TV to see what I was playing, she went “Wow, it’s you!”

The motion sensing controls on the Wii are are an awful lot of fun, and even though I’m used to high definition graphics on award-winning games like Gears of War on the Xbox 360, you’re not paying any attention to lower quality graphics of the Wii whilst you dodging + weaving punches with a controller in each hand or lining up your tee shot on the 2nd hole in a quick 9-hole round of golf. Whether the novelty will wear off after a while remains to be seen, and this is one of the main concerns over the Wii all over the Internet, but the games are so addictive and easy to pick up and play (Kat beat me first time on the bowling game…) it’s something that’s always going to be around when you just want 20 minutes of fun. I’m also really looking forward to hooking it up to the Internet to download Virtual Console games since you can pick up original NES titles to rekindle my childhood!

Slightly downplayed from the Wii, but I also received a Playstation 3 from ClickPerks a few weeks ago too This turned out to be a bit of a disappointment - though considering it cost less than $150 to complete the scheme, I wasn’t that bothered in a $500 state-of-the-art gaming system failing right out the box. For a full read on the hoo-hah getting it sorted and my opions on the PS3, check out my gaming blog on Live Space. A dodgy slot-loading Blu-Ray drive required a return right back to Sony for a replacement unit, a process which took a month. Poor customer support from Sony turned me off, and although the PS3 is actually a pretty impressive unit, I think I’ve spent too long playing the Xbox 360 to look at it objectively.

Still, it’s a nice system to have, even if a lot of the major titles coming up over the next 12-18 months are also releasing on the Xbox 360. I’ll always get the Xbox 360 title simply down to the achievements system, something sadly lacking in the PS3, even with Playstation Home and their trophy idea - that’s only one per game, a limit of 12 in your cabinet, and you must be online to show them off. But, considering various taxes, shipping, and warranty exchanges (easily bringing it close to $700), I’m not complaining for $150. Hell, even with the Nintendo Wii, around $200 has got me $750+ worth of video game consoles

Now that I’m spoilt for choice with an Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii, I’d also ran out of space on the TV cabinet! I managed to get hold of a few sheets of wood and time in the workshop at school to knock up nice little shelving unit to hold everything:

I got a set of component video cables for the Wii to allow me to hook up all three consoles via a Impact Acoustics A/V Selector (cut price deal on Amazon ) and I also have a Netgear WGR614 802.11g Wireless DSL router sat in another corner of the lounge pumping the Internet around the house including to all the consoles to stop me getting bored. Considering I got somewhere in excess of $800+ worth of video games consoles by the time you add on taxes and shipping for around $200, I’m not complaining Certainly all keeps me entertained!

I’d signed up for Xbox Live last week to see how it worked on the internet connection at home. It was really good fun on the original Xbox I had back in England, but that was on a much faster connection (3Mb at one point in Gateshead!). Although it would happily download various updates for the Xbox 360 itself and the different games, online gaming just isn’t gonna happen Keeps disconnecting from EA servers on Burnout Revenge and Madden ‘07, and after a few rounds of Gears of War with so much lag I couldn’t even get a shot off, have decided to call it a day!

But, means my gamertag now gets sync’d online whenever I plug the Xbox 360 into the network:

The achievements are a cool idea, rewarding you for completing various levels on a game, or winning a basketball match with a certain number of assists or free-throw percentage for example. Some games handle achievements better than others, but it means on games like Burnout Revenge, there was more incentive to go back through and perfect different driver levels and race formats to gain extra achievements and points. Keeps me entertained during the day, and is fun when Nick or Jason come round to play - when they were playing NBA 2k7 on Friday night I just watching and it was more like a real game in terms of graphics!

I was pretty impressed with how quickly Gamefly managed to send out my first couple of video games - they arrived 4 days or so after adding them to my queue which is pretty good considering the mail up here! I sent back Lost Planet and Rainbow Six Vegas on Monday or Tuesday, so logged in to see if they’d arrived yet. Wasn’t expecting much, but it seems Gamefly use a ‘Fast Returns’ system whereby if you return the games via a postal sorting office which scans the barcodes on the outside of the envelope, Gamefly will be notified the games are on their way back and automatically send out your next games. Very cool, and means turn-around should be pretty quick as they’re not having to go all the way to California before the next games are despatched.

I guess the Anchorage sorting office does the scanning, as I’m pretty sure Tunt’s post office doesn’t quite have that facility

I went round to Jason’s tonight since his wife, Kimberly, headed into Bethel after school to meet her sister - we watched some boxing, playing a few games on the Playstation 2, and laughed at Koda wanting attention all the time. Was a good few hours. Came back home to see a nice pretty box from United Utilities, our phone company. The engineer in the village had obviously been told we’d signed up for DSL at home, and so had called Kat before disconnecting the phone to upgrade the line at the exchange, then dropped the DSL modem round. Very nice surprise

Couldn’t get it going on the Mac at first which was a bit annoying, especially when it worked first time under Windows XP. Figured it was because the Mac was being smarter Sure enough, it was. Double-checked the settings under OS X and there’s an option for ‘PPPoE Service Name’ under the network connections for connecting via PPPoE. This isn’t an identifier like the ‘Service Provider’ option, so after leaving it blank, the connection immeadiately came straight up. If you’re having problems configuring a PPPoE DSL connection on a Mac, I couldn’t find anything in the FAQ’s or knowledgebase on that one - just remove the service name and try connecting again.

And, just to completely reassure me that the Mac works much better, it repeatedly disconnected under Windows every couple of minutes (prompting me to fear the phone lines simply couldn’t handle a DSL connection…), yet under OS X I’ve been sat online for 20 minutes without even a little hiccup. Happy days