Entries by Lindsay Bruce

This week has been a busy one for WDCS, and for me personally, and it’s only Wednesday so far.
One of the joys of working in the not-for-profit sector is that everybody just kind of mucks in and helps with whatever needs to be done. This week has been a lot about that. First of all, we’re working on a video for a new campaign we’re launching (shhh, don’t tell anybody yet) and I’ve been up to my eyes in video editing and animation this past week. Hey – check out our page on YouTube for our Stop Bloody Whaling videos at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk2SfDpBsNM - and watch out for the new video next week!
Elsewhere, we have two teams who have just started fieldwork projects; one in Salt Cay over in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) studying humpback populations (you can read Sue Rocca’s Fieldwork Blog here: http://uk.wdcs.org/fieldblog/; and the other led by Simon Keith is just kicking off in the Moray Firth of Scotland. Hopefully he too will be posting to the Fieldwork blog this week, so keep checking back.
So before, during and after fieldwork teams go out, it’s a busy time for us technical people. There are computers, cameras, GPS units and other silicon wizardry to check and if necessary repair – quite often after the team has left base, as was the case this week. Sadly, the rise of the Internet and remote access technology mean that I didn’t get flown out to TCI for a week to fix the GPS unit - it was all attempted remotely at 3 in the morning over a dialup connection. There was a time when fixing a GPS in the Caribbean could easily have taken, oh, a week to 10 days? But not they have Remote Accesss protocols over the Internet we can just log in from home! Ya, great. I mean, not all technology is progress, is it? Sadly, turns out that the software drivers for this particular beastie just weren’t going to play ball with Windows XP SP2, so they are currently down one GPS unit (see, I don’t think a plane ticket was an unreasonable ask).
What else? Oh, a small network outage at HQ in Chippenham, more work on the new website (it rocks – and it’s coming soon), and - hey did I mention I have a cold?
Just another regular week saving the whales…

Lindsay filming whilst on a field trip.

There's something inviting about a clean, white page that just begs you to scrawl all over it. Being WDCS UK's IT Manager, and this being a brand new blog that we've set up for WDCS staff (strictly speaking, that should be stakeholders as we have lots of highly valued volunteers too) to communicate our thoughts and ideas with you, Dear Joe Public - I get to try it out first! Lovely.

So welcome to our blog site. Here you can read the thoughts and challenges that individuals working on behalf of WDCS face, what we’re doing to save whales and dolphins around the world, and what type of ice cream we like to eat whilst out on fieldwork with the animals (maybe not that last one).

I think our Chief Executive will be along shortly to give you some more useful insights – but don’t worry, I’ll check back with my own updates often, so please come back daily for the latest in WDCS news, gossip, and musings from the frontline of Marine Mammal conservation.

Ta ta for now.

Lindsay Bruce

UK IT Manager

P.S - for the record, I like mint choc-chip.