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I’ve been casually following the exploits of Colin Angus ever since I first read Amazon Extreme, in which he recounts rafting the the Amazon river. With next to no sponsorship and very little experience he and two friends walked to the Amazon’s source and then rode the entire length of the river into the Atlantic ocean. Following the Amazon, Colin rafted the Yenisey river - the world’s fifth-longest which flows from western Mongolia to the Arctic Circle.

His latest adventure began nearly 18 months ago when he and Tim Harvey set out to travel from Vancouver to Moscow by human power alone. Upon reaching Moscow, and apparently not satisfied with the accomplishment, Colin decided to continue on and attempt to become the first to travel around the Earth entirely by human power.

Today he and his fiance Julie Wafaei are somewhere south-west of the canary islands rowing for the Florida coast. They left Lisbon on September 22nd and expect to be at sea for another 2 months.

Yesterday I happened to catch a conversation that CBC radio’s As It Happens had with the travellers and was inerested to hear Julie mention that the rowboat they are aboard is constructed of marine plywood and epoxy. It sounded to me like a very familiar construction method so I went hunting for more details. After one look at the photos on the expedition’s website I recognized some familiar ply panel seams in the craft’s chines. And a little more googling turned up a similar design for an ocean rowing sailboat.

Colin and Julie’s Expedition Planet Earth progess is being updated here.
A little more info about the boat and other equipment can be found here.
As It Happens has a series of RealAudio interviews covering the Vancouver to Moscow leg here.

Looks like one of the changes I made when cleaning up RMD for version 1.0 introduced a bug for some Thunderbird users. Thanks to Dan and Albert we’ve managed to track it down.

The link to the download should now be pointing to version 1.0.1.

edit - fixed bad link

This technote, published last week, details options for dealing with Flash Player secuirty security errors when running local swfs that communicate with a network location or the HTML page (via Javascript for example).

Security error appears when playing Flash content on a CD

It contains a couple of good tips that may not be as well know as they should be…
Trust Files which identify the path to Flash content that requires both local and network access.
The Local Content Updater is a free command-line utility provided by Macromedia to change the sandbox that a swf operates in when run locally. (Useful for updating existing content that is affected by the Flash Player 8 udpate - plus it can be included in a script for batch updating).

Browsing through the various tributes to Macromedia that folks are sharing as the Adobe aquisition is finalized I was reminded of Macromedia: the story put together back in 2002 for their 10th anniversary:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/story/

This image from that work seemed too good to pass up. (If anyone knows the story behind it it’d be cool to hear).

Last clip in the piece has then CEO Rob Burgess with one of those generic “just watch us” statements:

We’ve got some wild ideas about what’s going to happen here in the next few years, and its really going to be an unbelievable time for innovation.