Caboose

I’ve added an illustrated glossary so that when you encounter a Nigerian word like okada you can find out what I’m talking about.

Admittedly there’s only one illustration so far, but I’m planning to go round taking some photos of everyday things soon.

The good news is that I have internet access at work again, the bad news is that some spamming scumbags seem to be trying to use the contact form on this site to send junk mail.

I don’t think it’s working, it all seems to be ending up in my inbox instead, but I’ve disabled the contact form until I can be sure I’m not acting as an unwitting intermediary for these vermin.

Update: the contact form is back up again, the attempted spam was just being sent to me instead of the intended victims. I’ll have to think about ways of avoiding this as I don’t want hundreds of these messages clogging my inbox.

Just a quick message to let you all know that I’m still alive. Unfortunately events have conspired to make it difficult to stay in touch.

The British Council (with free internet access) suffered a power surge that blew up their server and, almost two weeks later, they still haven’t fixed it. Something has also gone wrong with the server that provides internet access at work, and it’s taking them weeks to fix it.

This means that for internet access I have to go out and find an internet cafe or use the hotel’s business centre (at an extortionate NGN30 per minute!).

To make matters worse sending text messages has become very unreliable over the past week or so, it seems to take about 24 hours for messages sent to the UK to be processed.

I’m hoping internet access at either the British Council or work will be working again soon…

House update: the repairs to the house are apparently now finished, it has new lights, fixed plumbing and a fresh coat of paint. We’re now just waiting for some appliances (fridge, I think) and final approval from admin.

I’ve been making some dramatic changes to the software that runs this part of the site.

Things look a bit different as the page templates have changed, but old links should still work (several hoops had to be jumped through to make that happen).

For the technically-minded the change was from Movable Type to WordPress.

Let me know (using the ‘Contact me’ link below) if you manage to break something.

I’ve created a mailing list for people who want to receive email updates on what I’m up to in Nigeria.

Most of the same stuff will be appearing on this site, but email is sometimes less hassle than having to remember to check a website.

To subscribe, send an email to:

  kevinnigeria-subscribe at caboose.org.uk

The mailing list software will reply with more instructions (although it seems to take a while).

After months of neglect I’ve been tweaking a few things on the site, mostly not visible but it’s all part of the plan to let me update this from Nigeria.

The Contact me links at the end of each post now include some information about the page they’re on, so I can work out what people are on about when I get a message.

I’ve got fed up with the comment spamming scumbags attaching adverts for their dubious sites to mine. If you want to comment on something here, use the ‘Contact me’ link instead.

I’ve finally got round to rescanning some of the pictures in the Journeys section of my site. When I originally scanned them I was using a laptop, so couldn’t get much of an idea how light/dark the pictures were, some of them ended up way too dark.

It didn’t help that my scanning software was outputting 16 bit per channel (48 bit per pixel) TIFFs but that Paint Shop Pro just threw away half of those bits on loading the files.

These days I’m using VueScan on my Linux box, so the scanning is much less painful than using Minolta’s horrible software on Windows. It’s still pretty tedious though.

Here’s one of the rescanned pictures:

I’ll be doing some more tomorrow…

After several emails asking about how to get to Kerguelen I’ve added a page with some information.

The short version: it’s difficult and/or expensive.

I’ve added a GeoURL to the front page of the site, which makes fun things like the World as a Blog work.

You can find people (geographically) close to me by clicking the button: