Basingstoke was a bit of a strange place to me. Very sort of run down in the centre area, sad looking people in most places but once you got out of there to the Old Basing area it was different. Much nicer. So I did most of my running out to the east of the actual city and I liked it quite a bit actually.

The downside is the lack of sidewalks. It is a narrow road, 30/40 mph but people generally seems to drive a lot faster and the lack of sidewalks makes it a risky business to go running here in the dark so that is not recommended. I did my runs in the afternoon and that was ok though I had a close encounter with some stingy nettles trying to avoid a car at one time. I was running in shots.

Last day I ran in the War Memorial park, rather central to the Basingstoke city and it was a different experience. Lots of people there, children and dogs playing and then a number of drunks yelling offensive words at people walking (and jogging) past. Quite the experience when I answered back and decided to not run past them again

Day by day

Monday

Starting of from the hotel at London Rd. and then around Basing Commons and back again. A nice route actually with asphalt the whole way. Made a couple of wrong turns on my way back but it did not matter, I was not out to do it on any particular time, I was just happy to go running.

Tuesday

Another round similar to Monday run but farther away in a bigger circle and checking out that nice old railway bride (and the pub on the other side, where we went back in the evening to grab some drinks and a meal) and it was a beautiful run! My legs was a little tired but I managed a steady and nice pace anyhow.

Wednesday

Rest

Thursday

Rest

Friday

Around the War Memorial park in Basingstoke City. Nice place in general except for the drunks being rather offensive there.

Saturday

Rest

Sunday

Rest

This Week

Last Week

Better than last week, still under the 20 km I want to do in a a week on average (or more really) but still okay considering traveling and all that. Tempo is not so bad, running in unfamiliar terrain and so on, and the condition figures (mainly VO2max and ventilation) seems to be on the right track still.

I have decided that next week will be really good working out

Battery life on smartphones

Most users of their smart phones have realized that althought the phone can do a lot, battery time is definitely a problem once you start using it streaming music with Spotify, surfing, watching movies on youtube and so on. The reason is that the processor needed to run these applications needs to be quite spiffy and being spiffy means it will use a lot of power.

Since there is a limit to the size of most phones, there is a limit to the battery size that can be used and so the phones with the fanciest processors are left with low battery times – unless you keep them in standby most of the time but then they are not so bad and might last a couple of days actually.

But what is the fun in that, you bought the phone to use it so you want to use it but you still wish you could avoid depleting the battery before that important call comes through. Or what if your youtube watching escapades drained the battery just before you really needed google maps to find the address in the old town you where looking for?

Solar charger

There is a solution for that and this is to get a secondary power source. There are plenty of different versions out there, some with solar panels that claim to charge themselves in the sun light and then you can connect your phone to them to charge the phone. They also have an internal battery so you can let them drink the sunlight in the day time and charge its internal battery, then later connect your phone to charge it. However I have tested two different brands of these and it does not really works.

First of all it takes forever for it to charge the internal battery. On the box and in the manuals it says 6-12 hours of sunlight ought to do it. Well, not in Sweden, not even in the summertime, in broad day light the charging is acceptable but not more. Even after three days in the windowtill trying to charge it was not good enough, in the summer with a really nice weather. Fortunately that one could also be connected to a USB port and be charged by the computer. And on a clody day you won’t charge enough to keep the internal drain on the battery at bay…

Powerpack pre-charged

So unless you live in a country with a scorching sunlight, just avoid the solar charged power packs. What you want is something that can be charged in the car, from the computer or from a wall socket and carries enough of amps to charge your phone at least twice.

A lot of the modern phones can be charged on the USB port of an ordinary computer. This is good because it means we are finally seeing some kind of standard for charging small appliances such as MP3 players, phones and even camera batteries. So a power pack should have a USB port or perhaps 2 even.

My Powerpack

The site is in Swedish but the facts for this power pack are: 2xUSB ports that can do up to 500 mA (which is standard USB current) each. The pack contains 5000 mAh (or 5 Ah if you want) which is more than twice that of my phone pack which also has a lower voltage. I should be able to get 2-3 charges out of this pack and now that I have tested it for about a month I am really happy with it.

It is small enough to fit in my pocket, only thing I need to take with me is a USB cable to charge the power pack or the phone as I want. I usually charge it from a USB wall socket charger and then just use the standard data cable for the phone.

The powerpack can be charging at the same time as you put 2 more appliances to charge from it. This is really good cause you can thus use it to charge your phone while at the same time you charge the power pack.

I recently went to Singapore for the TETRA World Congress, a congress where users, providers and others related to the communication standard TETRA for land mobile communication meet and share experiences. I had been invited as a speaker to the seminar speaking on special coverage since my involvment in the Stockholm Metro underground coverage system.

But that was that and here are some of my pictures from Singapore, an interesting place for sure but I have been to some far more interesting places in the far east. For business however Singapore is *it* especially in the telecoms business.

Progressive Builders Plt.

Malaysian workers on their way back home across the border from Singapore again after a full days work on some construction site. It caught my eye because of the difference from us riding a grand tourist coach out to the Singapore Zoo in the evening for the night safari which was really great, more about that later.

Raffles Hotel

Raffles hotel is well known for the invetion of the drink “Singapore Sling” which they can make you here for about three times the price anywhere else in Singapore. However the feeling of sitting at the Long Bar is worth the extra money, isn’t it?

Buisiness Centre

The Singaporean business centre with it’s high-rise buildings where most of the banks, stock market and other such things resides.

Casino Boat

This casino does not float on water, instead it is floated atop three high-rise buildings complete with spa, pool, and childrens activities.

Fruit Bat

Went on the night safari at the Singapore Zoo and this fruit bat caught my eye. It was difficult to photograph here because of the limited light, it is just moonlight basically, and therefore it is a little bit grainy and blurry.

Spotted Leopard

The spotted leopard is an endangered species and very beautiful. This one fast asleep after a good meal. You may notice there are not fences or bars or anything, that’s because at the night safari the animals are out, there are no barriers between you and the animals which is quite and experience in itself.

I am sometimes fascinated by bridges. They have been around a long time and take many shapes and forms and they are always a bit suggestive to photograph.

Over the years I have been collecting a few bridges and I want to present some of my favourites here.

My first bridge is the old stone bridge in the center of the old city of Skopje in Macedonia on the Balkans. This bridge dates back to the roman empire and have of course been enhanced and worked on from time to time but the general construction is there as you can see. It is a bridge in more than the obvious way, it is a bridge between the new part of Skopje and the Old Town so it bridges in several ways in history. Last time I was there they talked about replacing it with a new bridge but I don't think the people living there would accept that if there is any alternative.

The Golden Gate in San Franscisco. Words are superfluous, what is not to like about this smashing piece of engineering splendour? My own relation to the bridge is that I did not think it was as impressing in real life as on picture but then again if you consider when it was built, the height, the sheer number of bolts used it comes back, grows on you becomes more impressive even. This must be the most famous bridge in the US and probably in the world by now as many movies, TV series and other media it's been in until today and it still stands strong. Check out the thickness of the cables...

My next bridge is the Humber Bridge. Located in Yorkshire in the north of England this was once the world's longest suspension bridge. My relation to this bridge is that I lived close to it for a time in 1996-1997 when I worked as a games programmer at a company called Perceptions writing computer games for a console that never hit the market but wasnamed "M2" by Matsushita. To bad the company whent bust eventually. In 2006 I went back and took some more pictures of the place and I got a lovely bridge photo that I used to have hanging on the wall where I worked.

The last bridge is one very close to my home here in Järfälla. This one leads over parts of a small pond and in the summertime it is usually just a gorgerous greenery around it that makes it into my favourite list of bridges.

These bridges are my favourite bridges so far in the world. Of all of them the bridge in Skopje is the most symbolic and the one I like the best. I miss going to Macedonia meeting the great people there and the country side and the food and everything else…

Faroe Islands. Nikon D70s, Nikkor AF-S 18-70/3.5-5.6G ED-IF, Adobe Lightroom.

The driving rain and the darkening sky, in the afternoon. The sun should still be up for several more hours but the weather is really bringing everything down on us now. On the Faroe Islands the ran does not fall from the sky above, it is driven by the wind side-ways and hits you from all directions at once. In some ways it is like being inside a car wash when it goes of. Freezing chilly north atlantic water dashing from the side. An umbrella is of course totally useless, you need layers and layers of good clothing and nice sweaters. And stay indoor in the worst.

The rain is like thick velvet curtains and a thousand needles at the same time. As soon as we step outside the car the door is grabbed by the wind and almost ripped from our hands.

Still the water is not angry or upset, we look at it for a few moments, not sure what to think. The next though that enters our head is that we have in 3 seconds gone from cozy in the car to soaking wet even with our trusty Gore-Tex clothes. The only thing keeping us warm now is the traditional wool sweater.

The temperature is not that bad actually, around 12C but the wind makes every raindrop feel like a needle of ice. Too many of those and not enough fireplace and you’d be done with.

We start hoping the car won’t break down before we get back to Torshavn and the nice hotel with the lovely lady in the reception. And the chef who wants us to try his seven course menu. The thought of this drives us back in to the car, wiping down the camera with a towel and laughing.

The car does start again.

Example of a Geocache

Do you have a difficult time to get inspiration for going on a phot walk or hike away in nature to take some pictures? Are you low on ideas of what to photograph? Do you have a GPS receiver suiteable for trekking/hiking (most car navigation systems are not, you want a smaller handheld device)?

Then this is an interesting hobby that you might want to check out! It’s called Geocaching and I will explain a little about what it is.

Basically geocaching is a treasure hunt. What happens here is that someone hides a “treasure” for you to find. There is usually not anything valuable in it, it is just the location actually that’s the whole point of it. These treasures are referred to as geocaches and when they are hidden they are also published with GPS coordinates on this homepage.

Hunters go to the home page and find some caches nearby where they live – or where they wish to go hunting, then they download the coordinates, descriptions and perhaps also the hints – called “spoilers” (they may spoil the fun of searching). Equipped with a GPS receiver, the coordinates, a pen they set out to try to locate the cache.

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A few years ago in 2004 I had the opportunity to go to Cambodia. It is a fascinating country in many ways and it serves us well to remember that it was not long ago Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge spread fear and terror in trying to implement his distorted idea of communism in the countryside. Pol Pot executed so many educated people that the country was left depleted of knowledge. With help of their neighbour countries such as Thailand and other world-wide associations Cambodia is coming back now as a proper functioning country.

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It was just before sun-set one beautiful evening in April when we had been driving down the pacific coastline from San Franscisco and we stopped at the beach in Carmel to sit together and view the sunset before we went to a local pub and had a beatiful steak dinner.

As we were sitting there, watching the sun slowly set into a rather calm pacific, this man an his dog came for  a walk on the beach. The stopped and played for a while, the man throwing sticks and the dog fetching and it was clear that they had known eachother for a very long time.

I managed to take this photograph which I really like, the captures the mood at this time on the beach very well in my opinion.

I had the great fortune to go to Iceland in my line of work and on top of it being able to negotiate a stay over the weekend thus cutting the cost for the flight in half and being able to do some sight-seeing in this fabulous country.

We set off by bus and went to many interesting places – but one of my absolute favourites were the hot spring area with the geysirs. It was fantastic! Even in the chilly Icelandic winter (the cold is not so bad, being Swedish I expected even colder weather but the Atlantic moderates the temperature) with not a dry cold but a rather humid damp cutting through bone and marrow coldness that was unexpected and hard to describe.

Anyway, coming to the Geysir fields was a real experience. The geysir “Strokkur” erupted every 8-12 minutes or so and I waited in the biting wind, bare hands with red knuckles holding my camera tight looking for the sign of eruption.

Just before it blows the water rises and looks like it is about to overflow, then it settles back again and just seconds after there is a rather strange gurgling-splashing noise as the whole thing blows water and steam about 30 meters (100 ft) straight into the air. It’s spectacular, and if you really want to shoot some interesting phenomenon I think Iceland would be lovely.

There are of course many other interesting places in Iceland as well certainly, more about them in coming posts.

Here some pictures of Strokkur:

Shooting these photos was not too difficult, I used a “point and shoot” camera called The E8700 one of Nikons finest PaS and although it is not an SLR it takes some rather nice pictures. It was the camera I used before getting the D70. I actually stepped down in megapixels but the quality of a proper SLR is worth it.

I was using the camera in serial-take mode taking about 5 photos per second. Not all photos were used and I had to get pictures from about three eruptions before I had all the pictures I wanted. It did take some experimenting. The whole thing, from when it starts to look like it is time to blow to the eruption has finished takes around 5-10 seconds. Make sure you can maintain the high speed shooting for all this time.

In some cameras this means you have to reduce the image size  or quality, for example in RAW+JPEG mode I can only shoot up to 4 consecutive images before the camera lose speed. If I select BASIC JPEG as format then I can shoot a hundre pictures easily and not hit the restrictions in the camera. Sacrificing quality for speed is sometimes necessary.

More modern cameras such as the Nikon D300 can do much better than this. Even up to 8 pictures a second with the battery grip and pack! That would be excellent to use.

Macedonia is a country located just north of Greece. It’s official name is still F.Y.R.O.M which means “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. The Greeks are contesting the name “Macedonia” for the country because Macedonia also refers to a region which is partly in Greek territory still.

The ancient city Ohrid is located on the lake Ohrid shore. The lake is mainly located within Macedonia but borders also towards Albania so there has always been connections to Albania via this place. It is a wonderful place in the summertime, many Macedonians go here to spend some holiday time and although not so many tourists have discovered Macedonia yet it is one of my favourite countries.

I had the good fortune to travel to Macedonia many times in the past and work there with some great people that took me around. I would like to return for a holiday some day and stay a while more in the Ohrid area which is very interesting.

The city Ohrid

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