There are nearly 40 photos available taken underwater or topside in various places such as Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania. There will be more variety to come as I gather feedback and then carefully select new images, process, soft-proof and print them (repeat and rinse until satisfied)

Printing sizes are for now available in 8 x 12″ (20 x 30cm), 12 x 16″ (30 x 40cm) and 16 x 20″ (40 x 50cm) and start at 35€ or $50. To celebrate the launch and benefit the (few) readers of this blog, until August 23 there will be 20% discount with coupon code SBBLLCH (enter at checkout time).

As mentioned on the online store, prints are 100% guaranteed, and if for whatever reason you do not like the print, you can ask for a refund or reprint whichever you prefer.

Again, I cannot thank enough all the people that have encouraged me to do this, should they be friends, family or people I bumped into while traveling and I hope the end result is to their liking. (and big thanks to the one who pre-ordered).

Hertz Mustang Shelby GT-H for sale!

The retail price for the Shelby GT-H is € 45000.-

More information on Hertz website

• Google – because I use it for searching information constantly, as well as GMail, Documents, Maps and News on a daily basis
• Flickr – A nice place to share photos but also to look for inspiration.
• LinkedIn – I’m absolutely terrible at keeping contacts with people, LinkedIn changed this radically for me as it makes the contact information all accessible in one place with an incentive to update it.
• TripIt – In the same area, a regular complaint from family and friends is to know where and when I’m going to some places, with TripIt, it made it substantially easier as it will broadcast the information automatically.
• Amazon – Most of the books I buy are from this place.
• Wetpixel – To keep in touch with what’s happening in underwater photography land
• ScubaStore/DiveInn – I tend to buy most of my underwater gear online if I can. Fast and reliable service.
• InfoQ – The portal I regularly visit to get some tech news update. Agile articles are a bit overwhelming in the last couple of years though.
• Wikipedia – So convenient to read complete information about a topic in a digestible format.
• dpreview – To keep an eye on photography-related news
• TED – Because some things are worth spreading

I would have loved to have this from people from a much diverse background (ie non-technical), but the sinae qua non condition is that this person actually has a blog, so I do have to fallback to technical people on this one:
Emmanuel, Geir, Leo, Sylvain, Torsten

Dell did not follow up with any of my emails regarding cancellation and refund but apparently managed to find a unit god knows how and shipped it to me in a week time. I suspect it looks better in the quarterly report to have a return than a canceled order.

I got it yesterday afternoon. In a normal situation I would have simply returned it, but the fact it was started to be equally a mission to order a Lenovo W500 in the Netherlands (shop says delivered in 2-3 days… a week later received an email saying it is not available, that it is too difficult to get and that I can choose a ‘similar’ system), I just gave up and decided to try my luck with the Dell M4400 I originally ordered. I looked eventually at the HP 8530w but wasn’t convinced… I even considered a MacBook Pro so that says something…

I’m quite pleased with the laptop for now, even though when I opened the box, I wondered if the keyboard was fitted by a monkey at the factory, as it wasn’t even done properly. The WUXGA 1920×1200 RGB LED screen is really nice and it’s appreciated for photos though it will need a bit of calibration. On the negative side, the Intel Wifi 5300 AGN seems to create havoc with my old Linksys WRT54G router which just dies consistently after several minutes of video call with Skype so I suspect I will spend a bit of time digging deeper in the settings.

Fingers crossed.. let’s see how this laptop holds in the upcoming weeks.

Now is install time of all applications before traveling.

The next day I receive an email:

I’ve spoken to our Escalation manager, we would like to the exact status of the order before we act.
We are able to inform you tomorrow.

It takes them obviously so much time to figure out the status, that they need 48h to craft that simple email, I can already tell them the status… It wasn’t not delivered in a timely manner. A week later, I didn’t receive any news.

I’m sending again an email early friday…no reply. I’m calling the sales person. There’s only a voicemail. I’m calling his manager, there’s only a voicemail. Apparently nobody works on friday at Dell NL. I dropped a message making clear I’m starting to be really fed up by this lack of professionalism.

Monday has passed without any sort of information, today has been a week since I cancelled and asked for a refund. Way to go Dell !

The fact the Dell was so sturdy and I did not have any problem with it kind of influenced my decision to continue with Dell, so I was looking at something a bit more up-to-date, so my choice settled on Dell Precision M4400 which seemed to have reasonable reviews..wasn’t perfect by any mean, but it looked pretty much acceptable.

So I went to Dell Netherlands website and started to configure my laptop…just to realize that it was impossible to select the LED screen I wanted against the 2CCFL one since the webcam and LCD cover were incompatible with it and impossible to deselect. So .. fall back to phone call and do the configuration on the phone… a bit of a lenghty process, I receive the configuration via email, doublecheck and fix some mistakes… all in all it took about 3h and it’s the next day… and I wait to receive the payment instructions.. which I do immediately (bank transfer).. and this is yet another day.. and to next week.

So for an order placed on July 23 (thursday), it is effective on July 27 (monday) and the target delivery date is set to August 13. Uh…well, that’s no fast delivery is it ? Too bad, as I will be in Indonesia starting from the 13th.. so hopefully it will be arriving a couple of days before.

On August 9, I receive an email stating the delivery date is pushed to August 20.

On August 16, I receive an email stating the delivery date is pushed to September 18

On September 15, I impatiently wait for this laptop to arrive so that I can book my flight to New York..I have a friend on Skype who is joking that by the way it looks I will still be waiting for my laptop in January, which for some reasons makes me check the order status on Dell website…to realize it doesn’t display September 18, but October 26 ! All hell break lose and I’m calling customer service to have a nice lady in India who recites her text saying that there is a huge demand, etc etc… well thank you very much, I immediately write a mail to the sales manager I had on the phone as well as his manager saying I want to immediately cancel the order and get a refund within 48h. In the meantime, I go to a Dutch online shop and order a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 to (hopefully) be shipped within 2-3 days.

On September 16, I receive an email stating the delivery date is pushed to October 26. As I don’t have acknowledgment of reception, of my cancellation..I call the sales manager.. who tell me it has been escalated to the escalation manager and seem surprised I didn’t get any call yet…well sure enough by the end of the day, I still didn’t get any call back from the escalation manager.

So in the end, I’m far from being impressed with Dell and you can bet I won’t exactly run to place another order near time soon…and I’m still waiting for my money back.

Robert van der Hulst, ENT surgeon at Amstelland hospital in Amstelveen with specialty in aviation and diving medicine.
More information at KNO Consulting.

Information communicated to me thanks to Dr Menno Gastraa, National Medical Director for The Netherlands at DAN Europe
NB: It is also possible to find online the list of physicians certified by the Dutch Society for Diving Medicine (NVD)

YOU SHALL NOT:
….
(iii) use the Yahoo! Music APIs to operate nuclear facilities, life support, or other mission critical application where human life or property may be at stake. You understand that the Yahoo! Music APIs are not designed for such purposes and that their failure in such cases could lead to death, personal injury, or severe property or environmental damage for which Yahoo! is not responsible;

Mid-February 2008, Allan and I headed to climb Kilimanjaro. It was something I wanted to do for a while and since I went to Mount Kenya in 2003. The fact Allan signed up immediately when we talked about it in December was for sure a great source of motivation to do it fast . I activated some contacts in Nairobi and was expecting to make a cumulate with a trip to Kenya but the events in Kenya early January forced a backup solution to Tanzania only. I picked mid-february as the ideal last moment period since it was a full moon week and not too late in the season to benefit from clear weather. We got the perfect week. Climbing with only the moonlight, reaching the summit and all that with fantastic clear weather.

This was definitely a up for this year. Thanks to Allan for that.

On the down side, in august 2008, I suffered a sciatica which left me with immense pain for a few weeks followed by entire loss of strength on the left foot for about 2 months due to nerve damage. The origin of the sciatica is hard to figure out, but likely due to a sequence of bad move over a short period.
The experience was sure scary in itself and not being able to walk, run, jump, or even cycle decently was not a very thrilling period. As of today, I mostly fully recovered and this made me more concerned about general physical shape since the occasional 10km weekly running was obviously totally unsufficient. I’m now hitting the gym 2 to 3 times to get back in shape and for general toning and this feels great. I don’t think i’ll come back to running anytime soon. I was last year nurturing the prospect of training for running a marathon, but I think this one is going to wait for a while.

For 2009, I really have no plan whatsoever, maybe some travels here and there, probably a diving trip and more pictures. Ludovic made me think about going with him for a gorilla trek either in Rwanda or Uganda for some nice photos and memories. Incidentally Fiona is just coming back from it and posted some pictures on Flickr.

This would be about 20 years since I went to see the gorillas in the Volcanoes National Park of Rwanda. At this time I was living in the nearby country of Burundi. Memories…

To support Mountain Gorillas, there is a nice website from the Virunga National Park