I don’t know if many of you have heard of the X Prize but it’s a competition with the goal of making privately funded space flight a reality. The rules of the competition are that the manned vehicle must be put into orbit, return to earth and then repeated within two weeks. The team named SpaceShipOne has just announced that they will be prepared to go for the X Prize from September 29th - October 13th. If successful, the team will be awarded the $10 million dollar prize. On June 21st, SpaceShipOne was the first privately funded manned vehicle to go into space during a suborbital test flight. The team that is said to be closest to this team in terms of completing the task is the Canadian team da Vinci Project. You can find out more here in an article from Wired.

More photos are now posted. I’ve just updated The Great Outdoors section of the photo album with pictures from our hike along Heart Creek Trail a couple weeks ago as well as pictures from this past weekend’s backcountry camping trip to Ribbon Lake. The Ribbon Lake photos are in reverse order in a way since we didn’t take any pictures on our hike to the lake, but instead waited for the trip back down. That should help make a bit more sense of them. The pictures where we are holding the chains are not just for show - we actually climbed up and down those steep rock faces with our full packs on our backs. It was a lot of hard work but worth it when we finally got up to Ribbon lake and our campsite as it was simply beautiful!

The long-awaited photos from our trip to Brazil are finally posted. It took me a while to organize all the photos from three different sources but they are finally ready for viewing. They are arranged by location and I hope to eventually have descriptions for each, but for now, it’s just the pictures. You can see them here.

Hopefully I’ll have the pictures from our camping trip and hike from a few weeks ago posted later this week. Enjoy!

Just a quick update to let everyone know that we made it back in one piece from our camping weekend. We are exhausted though after the 3.5 hour hike with full packs on to get to the campsite at Ribbon Lake yesterday and then the return trip today. We are sore everywhere! I’ll try and get the pictures up soon, but I’ve made a deal with myself that no new pictures get posted until the Brazil ones are up - so until I sort all those out, just stay tuned!

I don’t usually follow cycling throughout the year, but the past few years I’ve become amazed with the Tour de France. I can’t beleive how well conditioned Lance Armstrong is and how he continues to dominate the sport. I watched the 16th stage last night and couldn’t beleive how he dominated the time trial up the mountain. Performances like that solidify that although he arguably has the best team in the race, he is still able to build on his lead by winning individual stages. It looks like he should go on to win his 6th consecutive Tour de France with only 4 more stages to go and a commanding lead - simply amazing!

I also recently read a really good article in Wired that describes everything his team/sponsors do to make his equipment the most technically advanced in the world. It’s a really interesting read.

I’m sure you’ll be hearing about this everywhere today, but Apple just released the latest version of its popular music player the iPod today. For just slightly more money than the iPod Mini, you can have 20GB to store your music. For a little bit more, you can get a whopping 40GB of space. The new player’s sport the same scroll wheel design that was incorportated into the Mini. The most impressive upgrade however may be the change in battery life - a single charge will now last up to 12 hours! Get yours while you can!

After riding to work on a cheap bike for a few years now, it was time to upgrade to something at least half-decent. I didn’t want a bike that I was going to have to worry about locking up outside everyday, but still wanted to be able to do a bit of trail riding. After some research and taking a couple for a spin, I decided on the Kona Fire Mountain. I picked it up last night and took it for a little ride. Today will be the first day it makes the trek to work. I can’t wait!

UPDATE: The bike made it to work and back. I had to make a pitstop back at Bow Cycle to get the gears readjusted since I was having a bit of trouble. A few minutes in the shop and it was good to go! I never knew riding could be so much fun. I even managed to get up Home Road Hill on my way home! I’ll have to get it out on the trails soon…

I know that sometimes hoydnewsnetwork.com is hard to remember - and a lot of people always ask me what it means, or they need to ask me for it again after they forget. To make it easier, and as part of the site overhaul, I’ve now registered www.andyskinn.com. Both addresses point to this website, but it means that you can now use either to get here.

For those of you waiting for pictures to be posted from my recent trip to Brazil, I can assure you that they will be posted soon. I just need to finish sorting through the hundreds of photos that we took and choose which ones should be posted so you all aren’t bored with many pictures of the same thing. Keep checking back - I’ll post an update here when they are online.

I know it’s been a long time since my last update, and I’ve also decided to do a major overhaul on the site. I hope that the new sleeker and simpler design will mean that I will spend more time actually posting new information instead of coming up with new ideas for the different sections. I still have some finishing touches to figure out as well as layouts on the various pages (i.e. I’m working on getting the formatting on the photo gallery to match) so please be patient. Also, let me know if you see anything really out of place. The following questions/answers will give more details.

Why the new layout?
I was getting tired of the old look and wanted to change things up a bit. It was time for a fresh start!

Something doesn’t look right?
I’ve done my best to test everything. My browser of choice is Firefox so everything should look fine in the latest version of that browser. I’ve also tested it with IE 6.0 - some of the PNG graphics transperencies don’t work right in that browser, but the site should be functional. If you are using an older browser, it’s time to upgrade to Firefox! If you still have problems with something, email me to let me know.

Why get rid of all the old sub-sections like the ‘Technology’ and ‘Music’ sections?
I decided that one of the main reasons I wasn’t updating my site as much is because there was just too much to update. Now, instead of having many different pages, all of the new information will appear right here on the main page. The photo album and all the pictures that were in it before are still there. The new Files section will contain my favourite free downloads. I’ll also try and post new links there as I discover new files.

What if I want to see something that was on the ‘old site’?
No problem. All the old pages will still be accessible - at least for a while. The old ‘Main’ page can be found here.

The formatting of the posts seems a little different - are you using a new ‘blogging tool’?
The new software that I’m using is called WordPress. It uses PHP for its coding and is much faster than the old software I had originally been using. If you’re looking for blogging software, I would highly recommend WordPress - they claim their installation to be 5 minutes, but it actually took me even less time than that! Plus, customizing the look of the site couldn’t be easier!

Let me know what you think!