Every once in a while a subject interests me in way that I like to blog about it. The art of Muay Thai or Thai Boxing to us in the West, dates back to the 19th century with the ascension of King Chulalongkorn to the throne in 1868.

Teachers in the art provided basics such as food and housing to students whilst training them in Muay Thai.

In the 20th century muay thai in thailand gained further momentum with the first boxing ring being built in 1921.

The basic techniques learnt in muay thai training include punching, elbow, kicking, knee, foot-thrust and clinch. Gloves and cotton coverlets over the feet and ankles are used for basic protection in the sport.

Muay Thai is a great sport to promote fitness and at a competitive level can promote a high level of toughness. It has been popularised by modern culture by actors such as Jean-Claude Van Damme and games such as Mortal Combat, Street Fighter, Tekken and Virtua Fighter.

The sport is open to anyone of any age and any level of fitness or martial art proficiency. Short Muay Thai courses are often taken as part of a holiday in camps in Phuket city. It is a unique experience and a great cultural experience.
 

After the publication of my book last week I've had a number of questions about how I went about getting it published. I'm using a print on demand service - therefore the book is only printed when ordered and no stock is held. This is great for smaller projects such as my Travel Photography book however the print cost per copy is higher as you cannot benefit from economies of scale. There are two major players in the print on demand market, Lulu and Blurb.

Lulu

Lulu offers a number of print on demand products including books, calendars, photo books and cook books. What Lulu provided over Blurb was a free ISBN number meaning that people could buy your book through shops such as Waterstones, WH Smiths and Amazon.

My problems with Lulu started when trying to upload my book. I had designed it using Apple's Pages application however Lulu did not support PDF's created this way (as far as I'm aware Lulu won't accept any PDF's created through Quartz based applications - even if the PDF is created through Adobe's Acrobat distiller, it is something to do with the way fonts are embedded into the PDF). I ended up uploading a 1.8 gig postscript file rather than a 300mb PDF to be able to print through Lulu.

When the proof arrived the print quality was poor, some parts were my fault for not adding images at a high enough resolution however ultimately it looked like it had been printed through an ink jet printer on the draft settings. Lulu do have another service just for photo book printing however this was a lot more expensive.

Blurb

I was originally recommended Blurb over Lulu because of the print quality issues however the extra options (such as an ISBN number) provided by Lulu were enough to convince me to try them first. Blurb have created their own book creation software called Book Smart however there was no easy way to import between Apple's Pages and Book Smart so I ended up recreating the book using this software. This was good in many ways as it solved many of the resolution/DPI issues I had with Lulu. Book Smart also handles all of the conversion/uploading when it comes to publishing the book.

Blurb like Lulu allows you to set your own price for selling a book however they offer no free ISBN number and no way to sell your book as an eBook. Annoyingly there is no way to print from Book Smart without Blurbs 'this is a proof copy' message all over the PDF. Therefore for the eBook version I sell on ImAFish I've had to go back to my original copy created in Apple's Pages.

Prices between Lulu and Blurb are very similar, my book costs almost the same between Lulu and Blurb (though the Blurb book is a couple of cm smaller). Both allow for sales in UK Pounds, Euros and US Dollars and ship worldwide.

If you are creating a text heavy book such as a novel then Lulu's extra features such as an ISBN number are a clear winner. If you are creating a portfolio or photography book then Blurb's superior print quality is much better however if you are like me stuck in the middle between creating a photo heavy based book targeted at a wide audience then its a simple decision between quality and audience - I chose quality.

www.blurb.com

www.lulu.com

GreenBoxDay is a clever website that simply emails or txts you when you need to either put our your recycling boxes or your trash. You can set it to email/txt you upto three days before so that you don't forget to put it out.

More at: http://www.greenboxday.co.uk/

A break down of my exam results for anyone who understands.

In a nutshell I did well :D

215IS Professional Skills and Group Project
Coursework (Cw) 91
Module Mark (Mm) 91
Grade (Gd) Pass

217IS Database System Concepts
Coursework (Cw) 70.30
Exam (Ex) 66
Module Mark (Mm) 68.15
Grade (Gd) Pass

225CS User Interface Design
Coursework (Cw) 67
Module Mark (Mm) 67
Grade (Gd) Pass

232IS Multimedia Systems
Coursework (Cw) 73
Exam (Ex) 72
Module Mark (Mm) 72.50
Grade (Gd) Pass

241CS Computability Resit?
Coursework (Cw) 71.70
Exam (Ex) 51
Module Mark (Mm) 61.35
Grade (Gd) Pass

245CS Computer Communications
Coursework (Cw) 65
Exam (Ex) 59
Module Mark (Mm) 62
Grade (Gd) Pass

262CS Commercial Programming
Coursework (Cw) 79
Module Mark (Mm) 79
Grade (Gd) Pass

268IS Information Systems Engineering
Coursework (Cw) 55
Exam (Ex) 45
Module Mark (Mm) 48
Grade (Gd) Pass

January has been quite a slow month it seems, not a lot has happened and I'm just looking forward to going home in reading week (mid Feb) now. Second year of uni seems so different to the first, in a way its almost boring. I'm not sure why my motivation isn't as strong this year it just isn't.

I'm looking forward to next year, getting a house in particular should be good. Advice to anyone who thinks its a good idea to stay in halls in your second year then don't. You realise how much more work you have and how much money you don't have so you just end up by being woken up by drunk people in the early hours of the morning and watching countless hours of TV shows.

I'm looking forward to my holiday in the summer with Laura to Spain, it should be good. As for the rest of the summer its too far ahead but I do intend to go away again at least once. Can anyone say group holiday? It may be hard to organise but could be good fun, even if it was just to butlins.

On the Switchweb front things are going well, we have recently expanded some more so should be able to take many more orders!

My last article on ImAFish covered legit music download sites in the UK. This week Apple's iTunes store launched so I decided to take a look. The program is basically a download extension to Quicktime with a couple of nice ways to order and store your music.

Tracks come more pricey than their American equivalents - they get songs for $99 (55p) while we have to pay 79p however this is better than OD2's and Napster's 99p price tag.

I thought iTunes had some nice content but was still lacking much of the stuff I was interested in. However there is a radio section which does include a link to digitally imported radio.

Hopefully I will do a follow up article in the coming weeks as its quite a popular subject.

I carried on working on the Switchweb site today and gave the shopping cart a big well needed overhaul. Hopefully I will get the rest of the site done over the next week or so and add some of the features I have planned, thats as long as I don't forget them!

I'm home from university now which is a bit of a shocker as I didn't quite realize how much stuff I have. Most still lies on my bedroom floor waiting for a home over the summer.

Just if your interested this column entry comes from my new PC in my room - yes I'm currently sitting in bed updating my column - how sad!

I keep reading how writing web-logs such as this have changed peoples lives, while I'm uncertain as to whether my "blog" is life changing for anyone else or myself it hopefully will be something to look back on in years to come!

Until next time the comfort of my bed is calling for sleep - night.

My exams have now finished as of yesterday! Which means my first year of University is now over. Went out last night for one last big piss up before going home this saturday.

Was a good night, lots of dancing, meeting new people and drinking. It seems a bit sad leaving everyone at uni for the summer but looking forward to next year living with Ben, Luke, Chris, Wayne and 1 random person!

Going to spend the rest of today and tomorrow packing all my stuff (to which there is a lot)!

Hopefully next week I will get some time to work on the switchweb site. After reading [url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3793825.stm[/url] today it looks like we are in a good market and hopefully a new design and a bit more marketing will increase our profitability even more.

I have been using SuSE Linux 9.1 over the past couple of weeks, most of it seems good though I'm having problems with media players atm. Will be sticking with Winblows for a bit longer. I tried out the MS Longhorn beta last week which is still pretty poor.

Anyway until next time - Laterz