Archive for August 2005
I'm frantically packing for a long weekend in the South of Spain - I'm off to see the first stage of La Vuelta a Espa??a (the Tour of Spain) in Granada, and hopefully to get in a few long training runs around the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
I'm taking my decent camera and I'll post some photos from Saturday's prologue time-trial stage when I have the chance. Speaking of cycling, I've set up a web magazine about bikes. It's in the 'experimental' phase at the moment (and I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with it) but it's something I've wanted to do for a while.
Hasta luego!
{ Filed under Cycling on August 26th, 2005 | No Comments }
- More inspiration: This Time Next Year (blog of a ‘married mom of two preschoolers, juggling family, career and (Ironman) triathlon’). Cool.
Monday morning inspiration from Tim Krabbe's 'The Rider':
The greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is nature's payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses; people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. 'Good for you.' Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few friends these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms, she rewards passionately.
{ Filed under Inspiration and motivation on August 22nd, 2005 | 2 Comments }
This is fun. If, like me, you use one of Garmin's dinky little eTrex GPS units, I've just discovered that it has a few little secrets. Believe it or not, there's at least one website dedicated to hacking 'em, and the best news for me is the hidden 'Service Mode'.
To see it, you press the 'up' and 'page' buttons as you turn it on. The reason I'm so excited is that among all the data that flashes up is the temperature, four lines down (click the photo to see what I'm on about). It seems that every eTrex has a built-in thermometer, but this is the only way of seeing it. Believe it or not, I didn't have a thermometer during my last expedition (it was left out of the sledge on weight-saving grounds) and I skied for 72 days over the Arctic Ocean without knowing what the temperature was (other than 'cold', obviously).
{ Filed under Miscellany on August 18th, 2005 | 5 Comments }
After a bit of a rethink, I've decided to upload all of my expedition photos to Flickr. You can see the pics here and you can subscribe to my photostream's RSS feed here.
A few things prompted my volte-face. First up, one of my geek heroes, Matt Haughey (the founder of MetaFilter) blogged about what I was up to. Secondly, I noticed that an even bigger geek hero, Pierre Omidyar (the founder of eBay) had posted a photo of me speaking at TED in his Flickr stream. Next, John pointed out that I could subscribe to a 'recent activity' RSS feed so I didn't need to keep going online to read comments, and that a few people had found a nice way of stiplulating licence/attribution details for their photos.
Last up, I discovered Fraser Speirs' *brilliant* Flickr Export Plugin for iPhoto (it's quietly uploading 185 photos as I type this). Ain't the internet brill'?
More uploading tomorrow…
(NB - the photos are straight from the camera, completely un-photoshopped. I might tart a few of them up if I have the time.)
{ Filed under Miscellany on August 17th, 2005 | 8 Comments }
Another of my 28 Things was to start using the account I opened with Flickr a while back.
As an experiment a few days ago, I uploaded a batch of photos from a couple of my North Pole expeditions. Within hours, comments appeared, the page views shot through the roof and I had dozens of messages saying people had added me to their contacts.
The problem with Flickr is that it's just too good. There are so many gorgeous photos that you could lose days browsing through, and it's a devastatingly effective medium for social networking (neither of which I really have much free time for).
I've taken the photos down again for now - I'm slightly concerned about people nicking expedition photos that I've nearly lost digits trying to take, but the main reason was that checking in on who was looking at my photos (and what they were saying about them) was so compelling that I could see it was going to take up a lot of time…
I know a lot of you use Flickr - are you all insatiable junkies, or did the initial excitement wane after a while?
{ Filed under Miscellany on August 11th, 2005 | 9 Comments }
- Slovenian mountaineer Tomaz Humar rescued by helicopter after being trapped for six days during a solo Nanga Parbat expedition (video here).
It seems that a number of AOL users have been receiving email apparently from PayPal.com, requesting PayPal login/account details and the like, listing bensaunders.com as the 'from address'.
Rest assured, I'm not PayPal (or Nigerian, for that matter), nor do I have $20 million that I need to launder through your bank account (more's the pity).
In fact, the email didn't come from me at all - it's a form of spam known as spoofing, and I don't think there's anything that can be done about it.
{ Filed under Random thoughts and reflection on August 10th, 2005 | 6 Comments }
Ben Saunders is the youngest person to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton.