There are several great articles by Andy Kirkpatrick available at his site PsychoVertical.com. It seems that book of the same name is in the works as well.

Andy collaborates with Climb Magazine, which currently offers host of articles for free divided in three sections:

• Articles
• Gear Reviews
• Mountain Info

To access those articles you have to registered though.

This winter has been extremely disappointing for us Finns willing to climb ice. Actually you pretty much need the calendar to know, that it, indeed, is mid winter, not early autumn as the weather has been plenty misleading. Should winters go on like this, retailers should probably forget about long screws and only stock 10 and 13 cm versions; there's not much use for the 16 or even 22 cm screws when your drink has more ice than local ice falls.

Lucky for me then, that since I happened to own a pair of recalled Petzl Sharken crampons, I decided to take single 10cm Petzl Laser Sonic ice screw as part of the compensation for returned crampons. I initially though that that screw wouldn't see much action. How wrong I was! This year I've placed it on most of my leads, to the point that I went on and bought another one, this time Black Diamond Express. Seems like American 10cm is more than 1cm shorter than the French one.

Although 10cm screws don't look like much, if you only have 10cm thick layer of ice, those certainly are the best options, much stronger than tied of 16 or 13 cm screws. Furthermore, fully sunk 10cm is way preferable to 13cm screw that made a little too close contact with underlaying rock. Saves plenty of money as well. Obviously quality of the ice is even more paramount to the strength of the placement than is the case with longer screws, though.

After reading some very interesting stories about the climbing life of Briton Mick Fowler, that can safely be described as eventful, not to mention hardcore, I decided it was time for me to buy his autobiography Vertical Pleasure: Secret Life of a Taxman. For brief foretaste, read the article The Secret Life of a Tax Collector: Climbing Mountains.

Turned out that buying that wasn't nearly as straight-forward as I expected. British Amazon offered it for a bargain prize of £75.00. Most of my usual suspects don't seem to list that at all and those that do offer prices even higher than Amazon, culminating in thoroughly affordable $350.00 at Chessler Books. Surely it is supposed to be superb read according to reviews (eg. Vertical Pleasure), but $350 sure is steep. Finally I stumbled on Antiqbook, which offered it for much more reasonable € 29.50 + shipping. Not exactly affordable either, but not too astronomic.

Since I have recently employed quite a few web 2.0 techniques, I decided to continue the trend. This time around, I added mashup of sorts, namely I exported newly geo-tagged locations from Glockner Group page (Hohe Tauern) to Google Maps map and embedded that map to said Glockner group page.

While I was at it, I also implemented a couple more microformats, this time hCalendar and hAtom. This essentially forced me to employ tagging as well. Next time I feel the need to review something, its likely to mean the inclusion of hReview.

Finally, I fixed some bugs in RSS creation (change log), added tiles to index page entries, and changed the presentation of the said entries slightly.

I decided it was time to go more semantic by implementing microformats. In more exact terms, I implemented hCard (html vCard) to item list type, which I use to contain information about huts, hotels, lifts, tramways etc. The big idea behind hCard is to allow browser to recognize contact information on a web site so that it can be easily picked up and exported to vCard, common standard to store contact information that can be exported from and imported into common contact management applications, such as Microsoft Outlook or Google's gmail. Somewhat related, postal address works poorly in the mountains, therefore coordinates are much more usefull in locating huts etc. Especially if you use gps device. Luckily, there's microformat for that as well, namely geo. My own homebrew linking system seems to be not too far away from xfolk so I might change the site a bit so that it takes advantage of that as well.

Forthcoming Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 are likely the first browsers that can handle such microformats out-of-the-box. That being said, there are already plugins for current browsers, eg.

• Tails Export
• Operator

Parts of the site now has new layout based on the techniques and ideas behind 3 columns fluid layout by TJK design website relying on Faux Column technique and stylesheet branching to keep things compatible and manageable.

Being anal retentive tinker I am, I couldn't go with the solution as it was, of course. Instead I had to roll up my sleeves and incorporate some changes. As I get the rest of the kinks ironed out, the whole site will switch to new layout. After Ajax, RSS is the next web 2.0 technique employed by the site.

Pretty complete rework of info page. Most of the information is the same, but organization is improved and some more information is added. Also some of the dead links have been removed.

I added nice javascript code tablesort.js which uses Ajax technology to turn static tables into sortable ones. While I was at it, I also tweaked table css a bit to produce nicer looking table. Also, I couldn't resist adding title attribute to grade link to show link description as tooltip. All this is currently in action on 4000m peaks in the Alps.

On the climbing side, few Finnish climbers have been in Kunlun for a while, doing a couple of first ascents. Hats off! The expedition has a blog at: Kunlun2007.

I recently saw a document film called movie Farther Than the Eye Can See . It’s a true story about blind climber summiting Everest. I have to say I was scared when watching him cross numerous crevasses using unstable ladders in Khumbu Icefall. Somebody once said that many of the most incredible feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they are impossible. After seeing the doc, I must admit there might be some truth to it.

Keeping to the theme, I was wondering whatever happened to Stephen Daldry’s film Everest. It’s filmatization of infamous 1996 incident on Everest (you know, that “Into Thin Air” deal)? The crew went to summit Everest few years back with several elite climbers acting as stuntmen (David Breashears, Ed Viesturs and Veikka Gustafsson among them). Gotta admire the strive for authentity.

bookSpeaking of David Breashears , if you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favor and read High Exposure . It ranks very high on my list of best biographies, climbing related or otherwise. It’s full of interesting, and sometimes funny, anecdotes related to his previous filming projects. Best known of them being movie Everest (Imax) . and movie Cliffhanger ..

I did a pretty substantial change on a publishing side. Earlier details of books referenced in this page have been stored either directly in source document or in manually maintained xml-file that was used as central book database. While solving one of my requirements (reusable data), manually maintaining xml-file was not the most convenient of solutions to achieve this. I finally got bored to this and did something I had planned on doing for ages, namely switched over to real book collection management database. My choice of application for the need is Bookcat. It has neat features for data input, including internet lookup from various sources, nice lookup tables that help to standardize the way the data is stored, can store every piece of information I need and can export xml.

The latter makes it relatively easy to extract the data I need to be used on the site. Furthermore, it uses Microsoft Jet database engine (Access), which while not being too great a database fulfills one of my paramount requirements: it's open in a way that I can access the database directly to perform maintenance tasks using all sorts of SQL trickery should I need to. Furthermore, not being a big fan for doing the same tasks again, this makes it possible to transfer data to different database system should I want to do so at some point. Finally, this also makes it possible for me to write code that accesses data directly from the database rather than relying xml-export function.

Right now there is only one entry making use of Bookcat data, but now that I have all the code needed for this in place, it is just a matter of inputting the data in Bookcat, then replacing book data stored locally in source file with reference to books (I use isbn as key). Now, if only I could figure out a convenient way of reading xmp or iptc metadata from image files with xsl. Or failing that, creating xmp-sidecar files for images.