After a whirlwind tour of England, I am happily back in Berlin thumbing through my book score of the century:

A box of books for ?Ǭ£40, hand delivered from Bath by the lovely folks at the local English bookstore. I wasn’t really sure what was in the box beforehand, so it was a bit of a risk. However, I am very happy to report the book Gods have looked after me: There are charts, sea safety books, day and coastal skipper theory books, yachtmaster theory, offshore sailing books… The list goes on. Very happy.

While in England, I naturally hopped down to the boat near Southampton, and slept the night on it. Being the airhead I sometimes am, I forgot my camera and had to use my cameraphone, but you kind of get the picture. I have a nice view from my boat and felt very happy sitting aboard talking to old sailors and scrubbing the teak stripping. The boat certainly needs TLC, but the fundementals are there, and she’ll be great when I’m finished.

The location of the marina is on the river Hamble, in a beautiful part of England - As I walked down to the river, I wouldn’t have been suprised if fox hunters rode past on horses… It was that kind of place. It’s ashame I can’t work from the boat and live there, but the time will come when I will have more than enough time sitting in a boat I can’t stand up in.

Some of the repairs I noted were a replacement speed log and depth transducer. The speed log is a small ‘water wheel’ that sits beneath the boat to show speed, and the depth transducer is a small patch that hugs the inside of the hull and provides depth readings. Reports are that the VHF radio works, but the antenna is broken. I guess that means I’ll have to haul myself up the mast on the bosins chair and take a look. I wasn’t sure what to do maintenance wise, being a novice boat owner, but the teak stripping looked grey and mossy, so I scrubbed it all back and put two coast of teak oil on, and it came up nicely. I’m going to teak the rear of the boat if I can find some decking cheaply, and also put paint stripper on across the top-decking and repaint. I’d like to repaint the hull, but I’ll wait and see what colours the sails will be and match it.

I will report back on the sponsorship scheme soon, I am still organising and figuring things out before putting it ‘out there’. All I can say is, it’s genius!

There are a few more photos on the Flickr page including one of me looking stupid. It’s always impossible taking photos of yourself.

nick

So I am really excited right now, as the letters that I claimed were simply going into ‘black holes’ have found readership. I’m not going to talk about who, or what the idea is just yet, but what I can say, is that the sponsorship concept is highly unique.

The company in question has worked with Coke, Adidas, SIMs Snowboards, MTV and a whole host of magazines, as well as doing their own unique work and publications. I think what we are going to do is quite spectacular.

I will be in London for the first time next week on work (and to see the boat!), and will also possibly be in Munich for a day or two, to see a friend off who is moving to Australia (to marry a lovely aussie).

More news as things move forward!

nick

The past few days have involved writing several sponsorship emails. It’s no easy task succinctly stating your intentions, and hoping you get past first base with your email. Many appear to have fallen into black holes, but then again I guess these things take time. I have pitched myself to some large media companies, because I see the content I will make along the way with this thing as being quite valuable to someone. Heck, I’d go so far as to say, if I could get a loan to pull this thing off entirely on my own, I would feel confident this site would pay it off. It’s probably a bold statement, but the web is pining for unique and interesting content, and without sounding arrogant, I think I could do it. I think I could attract enough interest via the mediums I have talked about here, as I strongly believe the web is ripe for singlehanded media generation and distribution.

We have reached a stage where promoting yourself to the entire world is relatively simple: Now the barriers for entry have come down, the barriers for ‘interestingness’ have gone right up. So I will continue pursuing tech companies with the idea, and see where it goes. Either way, I’m sailing “Constellation” home no matter what, but some extra help wouldn’t go astray.

In other news, a number of people have contacted me out of the blue, and it’s a really nice feeling getting responses from people who’ve found the site. So thanks to everyone who has written, and feel free to randomly write - I like email. A lot.

nick.

I need to get a camera capable of doing Geocoding.

Heres why:

Geocoding is ‘tagging’ a digital image with GPS coordinates at the time of shooting. Can you imagine, if I shot profusely, all the way from Britain to Australia with a geotagging camera? Lets say we then load those images into Google Earth, you could almost literally be there along with me.

Physical space has become so abstracted now, mere imagery is pass?ɬ©: Today we need to know an images location in space and time. This locality data is another addition to the images ‘context’ - It becomes more than merely mnenomic data, it gets closer to real experience, which as I’ve stated before, is really important to me - sharing the whole thing with the world via the web. I mean, not only can you place every image spatially, it can be placed in context with other images nearby to give even greater context.

I really see this as being a new form of book: Instead of a flat piece of paper with expressive terms, it becomes a multidimensional repository of data for 3rd party experience. What this really equates to, is that you no longer necessarily have to have the authors expressiveness manipulate you like a standard book. You are given the raw data and the tools to create something within your own imagination. Obviously it is not entirely democratic, because what I choose to provide as data is up to me, but it is certainly getting close.

I love the possibility of this so much, it’s going to be a really exciting addition to my arsenal of tools for bringing ‘deep’ data to the site.

Now, to get my hands on a Nikon D200… Or take a look at Mappr for examples.

n.