How To Accessorize With Tiny Birds: They love new friends. Especially adoring friends who write nice things on their delightful blogs.

How To Accessorize With Tiny Birds: Their keen senses allow them to uncover pleasant surprises. They like pleasant surprises. They also like thanking the Blogger Team.

If Twitter is your preferred method of receiving new content, I'm happy to say that Another Chance To See is now on Twitter, and the posts are automatically getting published there.

I've just returned from vacation, so normal service will resume shortly.

I think I've just solved a curious Internet Explorer error that was causing text to appear and disappear strangely. I'm almost exclusively a Firefox user these days and haven't looked at the site in IE for ages. I'm not sure how long its been in that state. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Just a quick note to say that a Facebook icon has now been added to each post. Share and Enjoy.

The BBC site has a place holder page for what appears to be the official Last Chance To See blog of Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine's new trip. It's very broken right now, and full of lorem ipsum, but the RSS feed is available for subscribing at least...

Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine travel to some of the most remote places on earth in search of animals on the edge of extinction. Follow the journey online through exclusive video and blogs.

Another year has slipped by, and this site celebrates its fourth birthday today. Has it really been that long? There's now over 1000 posts on the blog.

I know I don't post as often as I used to, but I still try to keep up with the big news, and there's been plenty of that this year.

Stephen Fry has already done some filming for the TV series of Last Chance To See, and unfortunately came off second best with a boat-dock and broke his arm. His Stephen Fry podgram tells the grim tale. Good luck to Stephen and the rest of the team as they continue their adventures. Be safe!

The Kakapo Parrots enjoyed a decent breeding season with 7 chicks hatched, although one died soon after. The Rimu crop looks very good this year, so we're optimistic for a great 2009.

The Northern White Rhino has not fared quite so well, and there has been no sign of any remaining animals in DR Congo. It looks very much like the magnificent Northern White Rhino is now extinct in the wild.

Last year's fundraiser "720 Dollars for 720 Mountain Gorillas" raised $96, so a huge thanks to everyone who contributed. Thanks to George for pointing out in the comments that FirstGiving has expired my fundraiser so I'll need to come up with something new soon.

Here's to the fifth year of Another Chance To See. Thanks for visiting.

I've recently discovered that this website is not rendering correctly in Internet Explorer due to a serious problem deriving from my Comcast webspace. While I explore my options for moving images and other page elements away from Comcast, may I HEARTILY recommend using Firefox where the problem does not seem to occur. That's the reason I didn't know about this problem earlier, because I ditched IE years ago. I have no idea how long this problem has been going on. Apologies for any inconvenience.

I'm thoroughly enjoying my latest toy, the new Sony Reader PRS-505. It's been a very enjoyable experience, and I've already read three books on it. Surprisingly, the short "flash" between page-flips has not been any distraction at all, and I'm finding that I actually engage MORE with the Reader's text than I do with a regular paper book. Once I get comfortable, I never need to move, save for a thumb-blip on the page turn button every few seconds.

The beautiful electronic-ink screen is truly marvellous, and because there is no back-light there's no eye strain at all. When I'm tired at the end of the day, I sometimes boost the font-size up to "Large", so every book can be a big print book. It's a shame that the older generation who would most benefit from such a feature, are the least likely to be interested in such a device, but every "more mature" person I've shown it to really likes it. You'll still need a book-light if you want to read in the dark, but that's not something I do anyway.

It's a great device, solid of construction, but nice and light. It will be perfect for my trip back to the UK in November, and my carry-on luggage will be considerably lighter than it would be normally. I won't need to carry three or four bulging books with me, instead I'll have the three new e-books I bought from the Sony Connect store (Stephen Fry's "Revenge", Alan Alda's memoirs and Ewan McGregor's "Long Way Round"), plus a dozen of the "100 free classics", Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin etc. In addition, there's also 2000+ public domain books available on MobileRead.com, where I picked up some of the less well known Jules Verne stories.

I also converted Stephen Fry's blog posts for the Reader by copying and pasting the contents to a Word Doc and then dragging them across to the Reader via USB. Stephen Fry's "blessays" are the longest and most entertaining blog posts on the web, and with a little jiggery-pokery they became almost like book chapters on the Reader. Very worthwhile train reading. The good folks at MobileRead.com have lots of other tools that can be used to convert or make content for the Reader.

Below you'll find a quick slideshow of my Reader in action, as well as the home-brew "softcase" I made from a $0.50 clearance item at Staples.

There's no doubt that this technology is still in its infancy, but over the next few years these screens will get bigger and more usable for student text-books. Right now they are a perfect replacement for reading novels on the go, and considerably lighter! I won't be carrying any more hefty hardbacks around in my backpack if I can avoid it.

The Reader is available for purchase at SonyStyle.com, Borders and Best Buy stores, and online in various places. Purchasing from Amazon.com will help me with the up-keep of this site, and some other projects I'm working on.

Any website owner is probably familiar with this one. Checking your Search Engine Referral logs for the wild and wacky searches people are performing that enables them to land on your site. Here's a couple of doozies from the last week...

Query: where can I buy condoms in shanghai?
Result: Post about the condoms for underwater sound recording in the Yangtze River

Query: Hugh is the only person I know who doesn't talk bollocks.
Result: Post about the Stephen Fry webchat at the Douglas Adams Continuum

I have a modified template launching soon which means you'll see a few "permanent post placeholders" appearing for Shopping, Links, RSS and Labels. Just so you know...

Please bear with me as I test a new version of the Another Chance To See template. If you notice anything particularly horrible, do please let me know. I suspect any major problems will be with Internet Explorer at low resolutions, so time to upgrade folks!

I've been using Google Reader for quite a long time now, and I've decided to add a "More News" list to the right side-bar of this site. It will show the latest stories that I've tagged as "ACTS-Extra" in my Google Reader. The stories may (or may not) be tenuously linked to Last Chance To See, but I've found them all to be interesting. You can also see the list by visiting the "Read More..." link that appears below the bulleted list, or subscribing to the RSS Feed.

I am in the process of upgrading Another Chance To See to the new version of Blogger. Please bear with me as I go through 700+ posts and and sort them with Blogger's new Label feature. This will replace the current hack that I have been using to categorize the posts. This process is sending the RSS feed a little screwy, but it should settle down in a day or two.

I've also used the Custom Domains option to make www.anotherchancetosee.com the new, easy to remember, address for the site. The old blogspot address will automatically forward to the new address, so any bookmarks or favourites will still work.

Hurray! I was delighted to discover that Another Chance To See has been named as today's "Blog Of Note" by the Blogger team.

So, welcome to all our new visitors! I hope you enjoy learning a little bit about the endangered animals and birds that Douglas Adams wrote about in his marvellous book "Last Chance To See". Adams was best known for his "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" series of course, but "Last Chance To See" is just as much fun, and well worth reading.

As a quick summary of important developments since the book was published, there are 86 Kakapo Parrots left, the Baiji Dolphin was recently declared "Functionally Extinct", and the Northern White Rhino may be down to as few as 2 animals left in the wild.

We sponsored an endangered Mountain Gorilla called Urwibutso in 2005 (one of about 700 left), and we're currently raising funds for "Save The Rhino" through the JustGiving network. Douglas Adams was patron to the charity before his untimely death in 2001, so I'm very proud that we've managed to raise over £160 for them. We still have a long way to go in reaching our £500 target, so any spare Dollars, Pounds, Euros or Krugerrands will help us towards our goal.

** UPDATE 1/9 ** Thank you for all the lovely comments, and a great big thanks to Mark Neale for adding £50 to our "Save The Rhino" fundraiser this morning. Very much appreciated!

Sincerely,
Gareth