with Lorelle and Brent VanFossen

Yahoo Has New PhotoMail Service

If you are sending a lot of photographs via email, for business or pleasure, you might be interested in this. Yahoo announces it is rolling out a new PhotoMail service. PhotoMail will let users insert “up to 300 digital photographs into the body of an e-mail and store an unlimited numbers of photos on the Web and media company’s computers.”

May be interesting. Just don’t send them to me. ;-) Gads, why would I want to send 300 low quality photographs to ANYONE? Even as a professional photographer, I narrow down my selection to 20-40 images. 300? That would overwhelm any photo buyer unless they specifically asked for it. Still, that’s a huge number. Interesting.

10 Bad Project Warning Signs

We’ve written a lot of articles about the business of nature photography and photography in general, helping people move photography from a hobby to a profession.

One aspect we’ve only lightly touched in our article on Hiring Yourself, there is a lot more involved when it comes to becoming a freelance photographer working under contract. And a lot to learn.

Andy Budd’s 10 Bad Project Warning Signs is a great article for the freelancer or beginning freelancer.

One of the great things about being a freelance web designer is the ability to turn down projects. I’ve come across a few projects recently that sounded interesting but made me feel nervous. It wasn’t any one specific thing; rather a series of small little things that set my internal alarm bells ringing. As such I’ve written up a list of bad project warning signs. Individually none of these signs should be deal breakers. However put a few of them together and it may be worth thinking twice about taking on that project.

The ten things are a must read. Check it out.

Canadian Directory for Photography Lists Camera on the Road!

Okay, here is a brag. But it’s a special kind of brag. The Canadian Content Directory for Photography Tips and Techniques has not just listed us, Taking Your Camera on the Road, in their directory for photography tips and techniques, but they have a screenshot of the look of our new website. That’s very exciting!

Screenshot of our new site at Canada Content Directory

Lactose Intolerance Linked To Ancestral Environment

The things that scientist are finding that might help genealogists trace their family history! Wow. Lactose Intolerance Linked To Ancestral Environment. It seems that a new Cornell University study finds that it is primarily people “whose ancestors came from places where dairy herds could be raised safely and economically, such as in Europe, who have developed the ability to digest milk.”

Paul Sherman, of Cornell University says many people can’t digest because their ancestors lived in places where raising dairy cattle wasn’t safe or economical.

On the other hand, most adults whose ancestors lived in very hot or very cold climates that couldn’t support dairy herding or in places where deadly diseases of cattle were present before 1900, such as in Africa and many parts of Asia, do not have the ability to digest milk after infancy.

According to the article, “The implication is that harsh climates and dangerous diseases negatively impact dairy herding and geographically restrict the availability of milk, and that humans have physiologically adapted to that.”

Here is one more piece of interesting information to add to your genealogical research.

New Laser Might Revolutionize Photography

The development of the laser seems more like technology limited to weapons or medicine, but there is news that new laser technology might make it’s way photo technology?

New Laser Provides Spectrum Of Sensing Data, an article found recently in Science Daily, explains:

In art, color is information. Just look at a painting by an artist such as Monet: Each uniquely hued brushstroke brings to life a new blade of grass, a leaf, a flower petal, a slice of sky — each a component of the complete picture.

Scientists, too, use color to paint clearer pictures of the things – everything from combustion gases to cancer cells – they study. And as a result of a new laser system that rapidly delivers a pulsed rainbow of colors, those pictures will contain more information than ever before.

Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Scott Sanders, affiliated with the UW-Madison Engine Research Center (ERC), developed the system featured in the May issue of Optics and Photonics News.

According to the article, “We can get a lot of information about the subject by monitoring its color-sensitivity,” says Sanders. While this technology may be limited to only using colors to gather information, it may lead to future digital cameras using laser technology to increase their ability to record colors. Who knows where this may lead.

It might be a peek into the future.

Debating and Pricing Wireless Cell Phones

We are really unhappy with our TracPhone that we got upon arriving back in the United States. In fact, we are disappointed with everything we learn about using cell phones in the United States. Customers are getting short changed with lousy service, high fees, and pitiful phone choices, but Americans just seem to tollerate and accept it.

Well, I found a service that searches the prices and services of various cell phone and wireless service companies. You can search by location or other methods to track down your service provider choices. It provides you recommendations based on their rating system and JD Powers and Associates ratings, and you pick the ones that look good and they give you a price and feature breakdown. Great information.

Check out WireFly Wireless Services and Cell Phones and see if they might be able to find you a better deal for taking your phone on the road and staying in touch.

We’re still shopping, but we’re going to use this information to help us compare. Staying in touch on the road has gotten much cheaper, but it still isn’t convenient all the time.

WordPress Codex Cleanup Week

As part of my ongoing efforts to volunteer within the WordPress Community, to give back a little for the fabulous software program I use, I’ve been working for the past few months to create a “Codex Cleanup Week” from June 18 – June 26.

During the entire week there will be plenty to do to cleanup the Codex, like simple things of copy editing, spelling checks, validation, and general housekeeping. There is also a drastic need for a wide range of articles.

Here is what you need to know if you would like to join us and help:

Volunteers will be ready to help live on the IRC FreeNode #wordpress-docs channel as well as on the WordPress Support Forum.

All help of all levels is welcome. Come join the fun and BYOB and Pizza!

Alan Dean Foster and Research To Investigate Links Between Ancient Greeks And Modern Science Fiction

As a long time fan of science fiction writing and books, I was thrilled to find this article in Science Daily, Research To Investigate Links Between Ancient Greeks And Modern Science Fiction. According to the article:

There is a long tradition of fantasy in Greek literature that begins with Odysseus’ fantastic travels in Homer’s Odyssey. Dr Karen Ni-Mheallaigh, at the University of Liverpool’s School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, is exploring fantasy in ancient literature, examining theories of modern science fiction writing and how these can be applied to texts from the ancient world.

Dr Ni-Mheallaigh is looking at the work of 2nd century AD writer, Lucian of Samosata, who wrote True Histories, a travel narrative that includes an account of a trip to the moon and interstellar warfare. Antihanes of Berge – who wrote about his travels in the far north of Europe, where it was so cold that conversations ‘froze in the air,’ – will also be examined, as well as the writer Herodotus who wrote about ‘flying snakes; and ‘giant gold-digging ants’ in India.

Dr Ni-Mheallaigh explains: “Fantasy writing in the ancient world is still relatively unexplored from a literary perspective. What is so interesting about these fantastical journeys is that many of them are written in the form of truthful travel logs and historical texts. The Greeks had a fascination with the exotic and other worlds and some writers travelled to the north and Far East to satisfy their intrigue. The cultures they found there were so different from their own that they were inspired to fantasize and speculate about even more remote and exotic worlds.

“The Greeks seemed to have had an anxiety about writing pure fiction, and so writers who were notorious for their ‘tall’ tales — such as Ctesias, Antiphanes and Megathenes – would write about their adventures in the form of travel logs, or back up their findings with pseudo-documentary evidence, such as ‘rediscovered’ texts or invented inscriptions.”

This is so exciting to me. For ages I, and obviously many others, thought that science fiction was a new concept. That people didn’t appreciate stories about other worlds. Well, guess what? They did.

The idea that science fiction is a long held tradition and has such a legacy in history gives science fiction more credibility. I can’t tell you how many times people scoff when I tell them I read science fiction. I scoffed for ages before being led by the nose into science fiction and became infatuated with it. The idea of the “impossible” being possible excites me. I want to know what it is like to travel the stars, explore strange new worlds, and discover that we’re not the only things floating around the universe with two brain cells to rub together.

The Legacy of Science Fiction and Alan Dean Foster

I’m a huge fan of Alan Dean Foster, the first science fiction author I became acquainted with. I’ve read just about everything he’s every published, including his writings on his website.

I love this quote from the introduction on his website:

Hello – my name is Alan Dean Foster. I’ve been trying to see as much of this planet as possible, and using my imagination to examine worlds beyond it. Worlds both possible (science-fiction) and impossible (fantasy).

Right in keeping with the article above. His books are indeed a journey into new worlds, and new ways of thinking. In his book, Spellsinger, Foster drags a pre-law student and horrible guitar player through time and space to a world where the animals walk, talk, wear clothing, and have an opinion and attitude. In The I Inside, a love story turned confusing nightmare with aliens and genetic manipulation will hold you riveted to every page.

Early on with his Flinx series, he introduces us to a world where aliens are just “different” from us, like bipedal humanoid species shown on Star Trek, but REALLY different. In a prequel to his Flinx series, Phylogenesis : Book One of The Founding of the Commonwealth, Foster slams our prejudices and entomophobia (fear of bugs) in our faces with the human species meeting up with one of the more powerful and interesting races in space known as the Thranx. The Thranx are insectoids, like giant ants, and through his careful and caring descriptions, we not only come to appreciate these aliens, we actually suffer for them.

To the Vanishing Point is fabulous for the traveler, like Brent and I. On a road trip with the family to Las Vegas through the desert, picking up a hitchhiker takes on new meaning when the road you are traveling leaves the planet.

In Glory Lane, Foster introduces us to a very real future of the US/Mexican border becoming one long town where you can get anything you want, for a price, and murder and mystery are commonplace. Aliens are absent in this futuristic police detective series, combining technology and Native American tradition, which continues in Cyber Way.

I have a lot of favorites when it comes to Alan Dean Foster’s work, but one book and one series of books stands out over all of his other work as my absolute favorite books of all time.

The Journeys of the Catechist series is an amazing journey of an African style man through foreign lands on his quest to do “what is right”. It speaks to the moral issues of choice and decision and keeping promises, but the amazing landscapes and creatures he experiences in his travels will not only astound you with their imagery, but remind you of a few people you know. His ability to anthropomorphize animals is incredible. The series begins with the start of the quest and the gathering of traveling friends in Carnivores of Light and Darkness, and continues in Into the Thinking Kingdoms, and the quest is settled, to a point, in A Triumph of Souls.

The other favorite book, and I wish he’d do a sequel on this one, too, is Quozl. Think about this plot. You are an alien species who have been sent out, in a generational ship, to find a new world because yours is overpopulated and out of control. You land on the perfect planet and start to breed and expand your population slowly, in preparation for moving out of the ship and onto the planet’s surface, and while studying and preparing, you find out that the planet supports not only intelligent life forms, but ones who will probably not like you. So what do you do? You’re stuck there? Well, with the help of a young human child who stumbles on you, you develop a marketing strategy to convince humans that you are “nice”. Of course, nothing is as simple as that, but I love the satirical poke at the marketing and advertising gimmicks on earth.

As one of the most prolific writers of our time, Alan Dean Foster may be well remembered hundreds of years from now as the man who prepared us for those future meetings with aliens, maybe shifting the human paranoia away from the fear of bugs when these bug-like creatures arrive.

Thank you, Alan Dean Foster, for changing the world and the way many people think of science fiction. You brought the humanity back into science fiction writing.

Digital camera sales in Asia surge to record 10.6 million units in 2004

According to a news report republished on Yahoo News, Digital camera sales in Asia surge to record 10.6 million units in 2004. The article states that outside of Japan, sales of digital cameras is up almost 40 percent from the previous year. It seems that the majority of the demand for digital cameras is mostly coming from China, Australia and South Korea. It goes on to say that “India and China are expected to be the fastest growing markets for digital cameras with compound annual growth rates of 50 percent and 26 percent, respectively, from 2005 to 2009.”

That’s a lot of photographers getting into digital cameras.

30 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do on the Internet

My growing dependence on the Internet as a way to stay in touch, get information, check weather reports, and be entertained has grown to an amazing obsession. Actually, it’s more like a desperate dependence. With all the information that is out there, it is overwhelming. And yet, after almost 20 years playing on the Internet and World Wide Web, I find myself getting bored.

Now what? Haven’t I seen it all?

Then comes a neat article from PC World called 30 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do on the Internet. Wow. I haven’t see it all.

And yes, you can still show a dog new tricks. Doesn’t mean you can teach him anything, but you can still show him. ;-)

Bad Behavior Stats in the WordPress Admin Dashboard

After months with little or no comment spam, I got hit with a bunch. In the newest versions of WordPress, right out of the box, I don’t see the comment spam unless it slides through, and those are very few. I use a plugin by ColdForged called Paged Comments, which allows me to view the comment spam that is caught, and then delete it. This saves space in my database.

When a ton of caught spam came through, I decided I would try more harsh measures, especially after a few managed to slip into the regular comments. WordPress is really good about catching these, but these particular posts “appeared” safe but weren’t. So I decided to go with the popular Bad Behavior Comment Spam Plugin and see if that made a difference.

Indeed, it did. The result was that I saw a huge reduction in comment spam viewed when using the Paged Comments plugin feature for “include spam”. But it also got my curiosity up. What was it catching and how many?

(more…)

World’s Largest Disposable Camera Production Facility

Growing up next to the world’s largest building on one floor, Boeing’s manufacturing plant in Everett, Washington, which grew to more than double it’s size while I grew up, I can respect large production facilities. China and Kodak have just announced that Kodak has built the world’s largest disposable camera production base in Xiamen of east China’s Fujian Province.

The new factory, covering 60,000 square meters, was backed up by investment of US$20 million. The whole production base, including an existing factory which was built in 2001, is now capable of producing 100 million disposable cameras every year.

Antonio Perez, president and CEO of Kodak, said that the building of the new factory indicated their confidence in China’s emerging market for the imaging industry. Though facing a challenge from digital cameras, Perez predicted a 7 to 10 percent of growth rate in disposable camera business…while demand for disposable cameras in China is relatively low….the majority are exported to the United States, Japan and European countries…reaching US$100 million last year.

With all these new disposable cameras coming into the market, it’s also good to know that Kodak has also announced that it has been “setting up a recycling network across the world to make use of the disposed cameras. So far, some 80 to 85 percent of disposable cameras have been recycled.”

So if you do take a disposable camera on the road, which is a great idea for the traveler traveling lightweight, remember to recycle the camera so we can increase that number to 100%.

Hurricane Names for 2005

Well, we’ve been hit by the first Tropical Storm in the Altantic Ocean that, luckily, did not turn into a hurricane, but I thought you might like to know the storm names that will be issued this year.

Since we are in the direct path of many of the potential tropical storms and hurricanes that come either across from Africa or up from South America, these names have more meaning than most names. In areas where hurricanes hit, these names are used like time references, recalling a moment in time when things were, shall we say, not at their best.

People around here talk about Ivan, Bonnie, Camile, Floyd, Hugo, and in Florida, they still speak of Andrew, which decimated much of the southern tip of Florida.

It’s strange to be on a first-name basis with the wrath of nature. I often wonder if Mother-Nature names her storms and what those names would sound like. “Theodore is a bad boy. I’ll just send him out to see what trouble he can get into on his own.” “That Samuel, always a bother. About time he got out of the house and figured out what all this nature business was about.” “Annabel, you would think such a pretty little thing would keep a cleaner house. Pity she never learned how to clean up behind herself.”

Still, as I sit here, relieved that the first storm of the season fizzled out in Mobile Bay before it reached us, I wonder what these names will portend in the future. In the future, we will look back and talk about what happened during Cindy, Emily, Gert, or Katrina? I sure hope not.

Here are the names for the Atlantic storms for 2005:

Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Dennis, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harvey, Irene, Jose, Katrina, Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia, Philippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, Wilma

Darwin’s Descendents to Count Flowers – First Ever Biodiversity Audit

According to an article in the BBC Science News, The Darwin family will repeat the flower count. To honor their ancestor, the descendants of Charles Darwin are “retracing his footsteps by surveying wild flowers in the meadows around his former home at Down House in Kent.”

Begun in June of 1855, Charles Darwin studied local plants as part of beginning his theory on evolution, and this summer, his family will walk through the same fields, counting the descendents of those same flowers, in a way. The three generations of the Darwin family – aged from 21 months to 78 years – will repeat his original survey in an effort to show how “flowering plants have changed over the past 150 years.” This is considered the first “biodiversity audit in history”.

Scientists from the Natural History Museum and conservationists from English Heritage will help with the survey.

Jet Lag Website

Suitcase tags, photograph by Brent VanFossenBrent and I have dealt with more than our share of jet lag over the past few years. There are all kinds of techniques, pills, diets, sleep re-arranging, and gimmicks for speeding up the process of recovering from jet lag, that nasty bodily response to dramatically changing time zones. The ancient mariners and travelers of old took months to get from one place to another, so their bodies had time to embrace the changes. For us modern travelers, we can be on the other side of the planet within hours where our morning is their night, screwing up our internal clocks and making us miserably uncomfortable to actually ill feeling with headaches, stomach aches, sleepiness, nausea, and serious irritability.

According to an article in ScienceDaily, a Website Offers the Web’s Most Comprehensive Information About the Anti-Jet-Lag Diet. The site is called Anti-Jet Lag Diet and supposedly offers the most extensive information online about how to use the famous Anti-Jet-Lag Diet, developed by biologists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

According to the article, “the Anti-Jet-Lag Diet has helped hundreds of thousands of travelers avoid jet lag over the last 20 years.” For a small fee, travelers can also use their software program to customize an Anti-Jet-Lag Diet tailored to their schedule and itinerary. But most of the information is free.

Research shows that travelers who use
the Anti-Jet-Lag Diet are seven times less likely to
experience jet lag when traveling west and 16 times less likely
when traveling east.

The free online information provides extensive information about food choices, caffeine use and the Anti-Jet-Lag Diet’s origin and history, including research from a study by the medical journal Military Medicine proved the effectiveness of the Anti-Jet-Lag Diet.

It might be worth a try for your next trip overseas. We’ll be looking more into this.