Kevin Whitworth / Jacurutu

Good news - driving back from York tonight, all the signs for Cawood bridge being closed have vanished, so we headed over through Stillingfleet from Escrick to find the B1222 and Cawood swing bridge are open again. No more trips via Selby to get to York (well, until next time...). The B1222 through Naburn has also been open for a few days now. Fingers crossed someone has told Arriva, and that a number 42 bus turns up to take Jenny to work tomorrow!

On a related note, I'm considering setting up something to keep people posted about whether Cawood swing bridge is passable. The only down side is finding out where to get a definitive answer on when it's going to be closed and re-opened (or when river traffic is passing through it). If anyone know where to get this information, or anyone is interested in me posting info about the bridge being open or not, please post comments here - thanks!

Well, that's really annoying. I just spent half an hour writing this on the (now free!) wifi connection on a National Express East Coast train back up to York, and one wrong click of the mouse and it evapourated into the ether! Oh well, try again!

It's been a while since I last posted, mostly because I haven't had much time. A large part of this has been due to the flooding of the river Ouse. We live in Cawood, between York and Selby, and last week the Ouse burst its banks and flooded the area on the other side of the river to the village, known as Kelfield Ings. Whilst this may look pretty, it means that the road we normally use to get between Cawood and York has been under about 8 feet of water. Journey's have to be made via Selby, significantly increasing the journey time. I'm getting the train down south a couple of times a week at the moment, but Jenny has to do this every day to get to work, and unfortunately the local bus service has become rather erratic as a result. Still at least we weren't flooded, unlike some people, including those who've only just started recovering from last autumn's floods.

The image on the right, showing the B1222 vanishing under water, is part of a series taken the night the Ouse burst its banks. I've also a number of other shots showing how close Cawood bridge came to being swamped, and how the flood defenses kept the river out of the village (the river level was about 6 feet above Old Road, which runs along side the river).

I also took a few shots on the morning of Thursday 24th, after Kelfield Ings had completely filled with water. I haven't had time to process these fully yet, but I did have a quick experiment with the shot on the right. The aim was to take the sunrise over the flooded fields, but it wasn't particularly spectacular, resulting in some rather dull, grey images. With a little tweaking in Photoshop (rather more than the exposure correction and sharpening I normally do) I was able to produce the image on the right. There's a few issues with it - mostly the sky is blown out - but overall I think I'm pleased with it.

To produce it, I used the shadow/highlight tool to bring the grass bank on the right out of the shadows, and then applied graduated tints to the sky and foregound. These were done with a new, completely orange layer, with a gradient applied to a layer mask. I fiddled with the blending mode until I got the desired result - I think it was using colour dodge. The opacity was then changed, stronger for the sky, weaker for the foreground, until the right balance was acheived. A touch of vignetting was added using the oval selection tool on a new layer, heavily featherd, then inverted and the corners filled in black, again blended with the rest of the image to acheive the right look. A touch of dodging and burning on the sky brought out the clouds, and finally a touch of sharpening to finish things off.

When I get time, I'm going to go through the rest of the set and see if I can find a better starting image, to avoid the floating bit of grass on the lake, and the blown out sky. Or failing that, I might use the same image but edit from RAW instead of JPEG. (This is what I'd normally do, but this started as a quick experiment.)

The full set (Cawood Flooding January 2008) can be found on Flickr, and as and when I finish editing the other shots of the floods, I'll post them there too.

A couple of days ago, I received the following via Flickrmail:

	From:	Emma J. Williams
	Subject:	Schmap: London Photo Short-list
		Hi Kevin, I am writing to let you know that one of your photos has been short-listed for inclusion in the fourth edition of our Schmap London Guide, to be published mid-January 2008. www.schmap.com/shortlist/???? Clicking this link will take you to a page where you can: i) See which of your photos has been short-listed. ii) Submit or withdraw your photo from our final selection phase. iii) Learn how we credit photos in our Schmap Guides. iv) Browse online or download the second edition of our Schmap London Guide. While we offer no payment for publication, many photographers are pleased to submit their photos, as Schmap Guides give their work recognition and wide exposure, and are free of charge to readers. Photos are published at a maximum width of 150 pixels, are clearly attributed, and link to high-resolution originals at Flickr. Our submission deadline is Sunday, January 13. If you happen to be reading this message after this date, please still click on the link above (our Schmap Guides are updated frequently - photos submitted after this deadline will be considered for later releases). Best regards, Emma Williams, Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

Now, I must admit to being quite excited. When I first read it. But then I thought about it a bit, and decided to file it for further reference. (Plus until I got somewhere with a decent Internet connection.) I tend to be sceptical about things like this (and offers of large sums of money to help move someone's husband's/dad's/etc ill-gotten life savings out of some African country), so I wanted to do a bit more digging.

It turns out that it's legitimate. But I still have this nagging feeling that Schmap are asking me to give them my photographs so that they can make money. OK, they're not selling my photographs, and they're not selling their product to their customers, but their business model is supported by advertising revenue. So, at the end of they day, they want my product (a photograph) to improve their product (a city guide) in order to make money. And they don't want to pay me for it. I know they're offering a photo credit and a link to the original on Flickr, but is that of any real value to me?

There is much discussion, on Flickr and elsewhere, about how amateur photographers (and sites like Flickr) are killing the photography business, making it difficult for professionals to make a living when amateurs will give away their photos (or photography services) for nothing (or a link). As a keen amateur with wanabee-professional aspirations, I have mixed feelings on this. I've done a couple of jobs for friends for little or no financial profit, no doubt depriving a real pro from some income. However, I've gained experience and (hopefully) references, and they've had to take a risk that I'm actually capable delivering what they've asked me for. Clearly this isn't a long-term sustainable business model, so the amount of work I'm taking away from pro photographers is limited, and hopefully it helps me get to the point where I can start to earn a real income from photography.

Anyway, I digress. Having searched around on Flickr and elsewhere, there quite a few articles about Schmap asking Flickr users for a free license to use their photographs (eg Editorial Photographers UK, telescreen.org, Joe Gratz). Having read a few of these, and the discussions that they've provoked, I was still initially undecided.

However, on further reflection (and a couple of cups of coffee), that the excitement of being "discovered" was clouding my judgement. It's my work, if someone wants to make money from it, I want more than a photo credit and a link to a photo on Flickr. Schmap are welcome to license it from under commercial terms, and until they're prepared to do so, they can't use it.

Clearly plenty of Flickrites think otherwise. I'm not going to have a rant about how they're eroding the commercial photography market - plenty of other people have done that (and no doubt many more will do so in the future - perhaps even those who've crossed over to the pro side!). I'm not even going to have a rant about misleading people that Schmap is non-commercial (Joe Gratz did that).

What I am going to do is have a rant that I've got much better photos of London, and of the Royal Observatory, in my Flickr stream (although maybe I need to learn to separate myself from my photographs). Actually, I'm not going to have a rant about that either (mostly because I'm running late - I'm off for a curry and need to wrap this up), but I will express some level of mild annoyance about it.

Grrr...

I've just tweaked NP_Ping (an update to NP_PingPong) because it doesn't seem to be pinging Technorati. I've added some tweaks I'd originally made to NP_PingPong to log stuff to the Nucleus Action Log (success, or failure with the error message), because although it appears there's code in there to do this, it doesn't seem to log anything. I've also got a feeling that the ping to Technorati is using the wrong URL (rpc.technorati.com:80/rpc/ping/ instead of rpc.technorati.com:80/rpc/ping - ie with a trailing slash instead of without).

Lets see if this works... (Perhaps I need a development environment, instead of testing on a live server?)

PS The result was inconclusive. When I started writing the post, Technorati hadn't picked up my last one. After I first posted this one, Technorati has picked up my previous post. I'm guessing they're running slow, so perhaps that was the problem? Still, I like my tweaks to NP_Ping. Plus - good new - Technorati's stopped displaying the raw HTML, so at least the Atom update worked! Hurray!

Update: I've posted the code in a separate article.

In my ongoing quest to get my entries on Technorati to display correctly, I found an upgraded Atom 1.0 skin for Nucleus courtesy of Rakaz. It upgrades the Atom 0.3 feed to Atom 1.0, and more importantly, my Atom feed now validates at FEED Validator. It needs tweaking slightly to insert the code from the Technorati Tags plugin - the feeds/atom/entries template changes the contents of the <content> element from:

to:

Actually, at this point I think I realised what the problem was. There's far too many square brackets in the old Atom 0.3 template (which I dilligently backed up), so I suspect I made a cut-and-paste error at some point and corrupted it. Nevermind - hopefully when I post this, Technorati will get properly pinged (I'm not convinced that's working properly either now...) and it can then read the feed properly and render the content correctly, rather than as raw HTML.

You may ask why I bother? Well, mostly because I hate it when something isn't working! Fingers crossed... 

PS I've just discovered NP_GeSHI2 and NP_TinyMCE2 don't get along. In fact I'm thinking about taking TinyMCE off, as it doesn't do half the stuff I'd hoped, and doesn't look anywhere near as slick as the example on the Tiny MCE website. Fingers crossed this post will now display on my own site, let alone Technorati!

This weekend I played for NEM-OC (formerly referred to by me as the ONE Team) at the BOA's Nautilus competition at Pond's Forge in Sheffield. Being a new entrant to the competition, we had to start at the bottom in division 5. Slightly disheartening was the fact that the only team we've previously played against (in fact, the only time we've ever played together as a team) was against Nero's from Sunderland, who beat us fairly comprehensively. Fortunately, they were in division 5 for more or less the same reason we were (they hadn't played at Nautilus for a while, if ever), so the hope was that we'd be more evenly matched against the other division 5 teams.

We got there early to watch some of the matches from the morning session, and to see how the in-water substitutions were going to work. That all seemed fine, and we got signed in, tattooed (with magic marker - we had to have our player numbers on our arms) and had our equipment inspected. So far so good. Unfortunately, we were a bit slow off the mark for the first game (coincidentally against Nero's). As I now know (having read the captains brief this morning), there was only a minute between games, and play would start regardless of whether teams were ready or not. As a result, I think we started with about 3 people in the water, and Nero's scored before we had a full team. Things didn't get much better, and the final score was something like 10-0 to Nero's. And we got warned about in-play substitutions, to make sure the retiring player had surfaced in the subs box before the new player left.

Things picked up after that - we'd all got warmed up and woken up, just about worked out how to play in a 3 metre deep pool and started to gel together as a team. The next 3 games were quite close - we beat Inverness (although I gather there was some controversy about that - not quite sure what though), lost to Orkney, and beat West London C. To be quite honest, I think any of the games could have gone either way - I don't have the scores, but I reckon there can't have been more than one or two goals difference in each game. After 3 games with only one match break between them, we then had an hour off before our final game against Solent Viragos. We'd kind of figured this was going to be an easy game, as it looked like they'd been beaten by everyone else, but although we won, it was hard work. They may not have had the speed and power that we had, but I think they probably had better puck skills, and every attack seemed to be countered by several of their team.

And the overall result? Nero's won, unsurprisingly, and I think they only conceded one goal in all their matches. Orkney came second, and we came third - much to the dismay of Inverness!

Considering we'd only played together once before, I'm quite chuffed with the result. I think we could have beaten Orkney, but equally Inverness could have beaten us. More time playing together would help, and I do think we improved throughout the day (up until the last game, when we'd cooled down and people were feeling rather tired).

It was also nice to run into some old acquaintances, Neil Dixon and Jo Pitchforth, from my days at Batley, and to put names to faces of people at the BOA I've been conversing with over email - namely Phil Lawrence and Phil Thompson.

The overall division 5 placings were as follows:

• 1st: Nero's
• 2nd: Orkney
• 3rd: NEM-OC
• 4th: Inverness
• 5th: West London C
• 6th: Solent Viragos

As and when I get the results tables (and the NEM-OC team photo Ali's dad took on Claire's camera), I'll try and post them up here.

What's next for NEM-OC? Well, we should be playing in the Nationals later on this year, but I've been asked if we want to play at MOT (Manchester Octopush Tournament) at the start of March, so I'm hoping Jamie and Gareth can be persuaded to get the team together for that. Meanwhile, next week sees the start of training at York Uni after the Christmas break. Hopefully I'll have recovered from Nautilus by then!

Well, I'm working through some of my New Year's resolutions. So far I've renewed my hosting and domain name, and I've just upgraded to NucleusCMS v3.31. All told it was a very painless process (to be fair, all previous upgrades have been too). All I had to remember was that index.php needed tweaking to support fancyurls. As far as I can tell, everything seems to be working fine.

Now I know Imran suggested that I should switch to Worldpress, but it wouldn't be as much fun. I'm trying to kid myself that I have some hands-on technical ability left (OK, that assumes I had some to start with...) by tweaking the off bit of PHP from time to time. Which reminds me, NP_Ping, which seems to replace NP_PingPong for Nucles v3.31, doesn't seem to log to the ActionLog anymore (or maybe NP_PingPong didn't either - that might have been one of my own tweaks), so there's something to do straight away! I've also added NP_TinyMCE2, a WYSIWYG editor for writing blog entries. Mostly this was because my own plugin to make external links open in new windows didn't really work how I wanted, but a quick look at the Tiny MCE website showed a few useful features like a spell checker (to save me cutting and pasting posts into Word), although some of these don't appear to have been implmented in the Nucleus plugin. Still, it looks good so far, and it may be possible to add those features with a bit more tweaking.

Well, that's it for now. Tomorrow I'm off to Ponds Forge to play Octopush in the Nautilus competition, so I'll post the results when I get back.

Well, whilst looking into the problem with Technorati displaying the HTML content of my posts, rather than the plain text or rendered content, I discovered that it seems to be double-tagging my posts. A quick look into the Atom template show that this is because Nucleus is creating two sets of tags in each entry in the atom feed. This is because I had two entries in the template - one to create '<category>' tags, and the other to create '<a rel="tag" ... >' tags. I think this comes down to me trying to get Technorati to pick the tags up in the first place. Well, fingers crossed there's only one set of tags listed with this post...

Well, it seems I'm having a late Christmas today - a couple of parcels were delivered to me containing Christmas presents from me!

First up we have some new fins. My old Mares Avanti Tre fins are feeling a bit tired, and they've never had the power my old jet fins had (and that I had to stop using as people complained they banned by the rules of octopush). So, when Gareth Ayres (from NEM-OC) offered me a pair of Technisub Stratos FPs for £35, I thought I'd give them a go. They definitely have a big power advantage over the Avanti Tres, but unfortunately they just don't fit my feet well, and even with socks I get blisters on the top of my 3rd and 4th toes, and on the outside of my right big toe and on the right side of my left foot. It started feeling like it was taking me much time to patch my feet up as I was getting time in the water during training sessions. Given that the Avanti Tres never gave me blisters, I figure that Mares' Avanti Quattro Powers should fit just as well, whilst being equally (or more) powerful than the Tres. At which point I discovered, just like the old Alas, they're no longer made. One of the guys in the York Uni Octopush Club has a new pair, which he informed me he'd got from a place in France. A quick search on Google turned up a place in the US selling them at a reasonable price, but shipping was extortionate - and shipping two pairs (Ali wanted some as well) didn't bring the costs down. After much trawling of French online dive shops, I finally found somewhere that sold them and had both mine and Ali's sizes in stock. However, they didn't seem to deliver outside France. Many discussions about friends in France led nowhere, and in the end I dropped La Palanquée New's an email asking if we could order them for delivery to the UK. A very rapid response came back explaining how to do this via the site (which took a bit of thinking seeing as it was in French - but I worked it out in the end), and, having ordered them on Christmas Eve, they arrived this morning! The only slight downside is that the Quattros are a size smaller than my Tres - but as I've had to use fin retainers to stop the Tres occasionally coming off my feet, I don't think this should be a problem.

When I've had a chance to try them, I'll post more details. I suspect they'll be quite similar to the Stratos fins - great for straight line speed, but not so good for manoeuvrability, so I'll probably still use the Tres when that's more important (like at the Nautilus competition this Saturday). And yes, I'm well aware of the discussions on Underwater Hockey World about fins (here, here, here and here) in the equipment forum, but I'm afraid I'm sticking with what I know, and can't justify the cost of fancy fibre fins (I'm having enough problems justifying the cost of the Quattros!).


So, on to my other present: The Dune Encyclopedia (Wikipedia entry, Amazon). I'm a big fan of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, and a friend of mine owns a copy. At the time I graduated and was looking to set up my first ISP account (way back in 1997 - with Demon), I had to pick a username. Everything else I tried had been taken, so I resulted to skimming through the encyclopaedia until I found something that I liked and was still available - and that was Jacurutu. The name's stuck ever since (hence jacurutu.org.uk). I've been keeping my eye out for a copy for a long while, and even once got Amazon to check round second hand book stores to see if they could find a copy (yes, way back when before Amazon become just another marketplace, and they had a service to find out of print books). They did track a copy down, but it was £65! That kind of put me off looking again, but out of interest I checked it out on Amazon again last week, and found a copy for a much more reasonable £10.25 (inc delivery - from gracehorne). Condition isn't perfect, but quite frankly it's better than most of the books on my bookshelf once I've read them a couple of times, and I didn't buy it as a collectors item, but to read and for reference (even if it's authority is now questionable).

In case you're interested what the encyclopaedia has to say about Jacurutu, here's the start of the entry (sorry - it's taken on my N73 camera phone, so the quality isn't great):

And the final present? It's snowing!

OK - it's a few days late, but better late than never!

So, the start of a new year is traditionally a time for making resolutions about things to do in the coming year. Obviously I can't say things like "find a new job", because you never know who's reading this (although anyone that knows me will know how much I love my job, and how unlikely it is that I'd want to look for another one). However, I do have some resolutions related to this site:

1. Finish editing the Kenya photos!


2. Upgrade to Nucleus v3.31.


3. Re-vamp and re-skin this blog - I've found a couple of other Nucleus skins I like the look of, but I think I want to tweak them a touch first.


4. Upgrade to JAlbum 7.4.


5. Re-skin my photo albums - again, although the BluPlusPlus skin is good, I want something better. However, I'm not sure it exists, so I may have to create one myself. I'd also like something that feels more integrated into the blog - even if it's just navigation etc.


6. Donate to both Nucleus and JAlbum - they're great, and I should have done it before!


7. Renew my hosting - or else this will all vanish in the not very distant future!


8. Fix Technorati - last time I checked, it was picking up posts, but displaying the raw HTML, not the plain (or formatted) text. Which looks really crap if I start a post with a load of HTML to show an image in my Flickr stream.


9. Do more photography - and I don't mean snap shots, but actually put some effort into creating wonderful images. Then write about it here.


10. Try and do something useful about my commercial photography business (Kevin Whitworth Photography)- like put some effort into it and get it off the ground!


11. Stop staying up late writing my blog!

Well, that's it for this post. In light of the last point, I'm off to bed!