Category: General

Google Maps and Satellite images

Google has gone and done it again. Check out Google Maps and put in your address and find your home. Now click the "Satellite" link in the upper right-hand corner. My jaw dropped when I zoomed in and could clearly see my house in living color!

And for you Canucks out there, it works for you too. I just tried my old address back in Georgetown, Ontario which was just as clear. Interestingly, my Etobicoke address was modestly visible (read "blurry") at the default zoom so I couldn’t zoom on that. I guess we know where Toronto rates on the ol’ satellite image priority list! 🙂

Poll – Guys (and Gals) office shirts

Continuing the examination of “Affluenza” in North America, a comment in the last poll from Rose-Marie about ladies’ shoes got me thinking about mens’ shirts.

Office Shirts

Office Shirts

I’m curious how many shirts the guys out there have. To narrow it down I’m only talking about shirts that you would wear to work in a business-casual office environment. So, of course, this should exclude t-shirts. But it should include even old and obsolete shirts that you have worn to the office in the past. The rule is, “if it’s not in the trash can right now, it counts”. Feel free to chuck some of those old shirts to skew your shirt count! 🙂

To try to compare apples to apples, for the ladies there are a lot of garments that can be warn in lieu of a shirt (dresses for example). So the challenge would include basically anything that would take the role of a shirt.

To my utter amazement and chagrin, I counted an even 80 (!) shirts in my closet. Considering that I haven’t bought myself a new shirt in well over a decade I can only assume that there is a plot afoot to quietly bury me under a mountain of clothing…

If you had asked me before I counted how many shirts I have I would have said maybe 20 or so.

G’day World Podcast

G'day worldHot on the heels of the SlashdotReview podcast, I started listening to the "G’day World podcast" featuring Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic. These two Aussies live far enough apart that they maybe get to see each other about once a month, but through the wonders of technology (read "Skype") they pull together this podcast on a pretty regular basis.

Both have extensive backgrounds working in tech-related fields and they come to the "podcast table" with a wealth of insight and connections that they employ to great effect in both retaining interesting guests and offering commentary on current trends both within the blogosphere and in the tech world at large.

Beware, this is one of the longer podcasts. Typically each one is about an hour, but I enjoy them from beginning to end.

The presentation is very much as you’d expect (hope!) an Australian production to be. I’ve enjoyed the Aussie perspective and flavor ever since I visited Australia back in 1999 and G’day World doesn’t disappoint on this front.

They originally began the podcast with this site but, entrepreneurs that they are, they have since formed "The Podcast Network" and have plugged their podcast into a growing infrastructure of podcasts. As of this writing there are about 15 podcasts offered at the podcast network. I am listening to one other one so far – “The Tablet PC Show" – which I will discuss at a later time.

 

Ladies’ Shoes – poll

Green Shoe

All you ladies out there. How many pairs of shoes do you have? I’m talking just shoes. You don’t need to count boots. But shoes, sandals, beach shoes, shoes for buying shoes anything that you would class as shoes.

Mich has about 41 pairs of shoes and I’m trying to figure out if this is normal or if I have another Imelda Marcos on my hands.

Please leave a comment and let me know how many shoes you have in your closets and around your home. Any shoe that isn’t actually in the trash can counts! 🙂

Easter Funny

I’m not sure if my dad will appreciate this story now, but it’s been many years so I think I can safely tell the story without too much embarrassment.

Michelle likes to hide Easter eggs. Even though we’re fully grown and don’t have any kids around in need of such amusement, every Easter she will trundle off out of the conversation and activity that goes with getting together during the holidays and hide little chocolate Easter eggs. She picked this little tradition up from my mother who used to hide Easter eggs until we were all well into our late teens and insisted that everybody go searching for them.

Usually, Michelle gets creative enough that not all the eggs are found by the end of our Easter get togethers and she just leaves the rest to be found by whomever hosted the event over the next couple of weeks.

One year, while at my father’s place, she decided to hide an egg in the pocket of a pair of shorts that were hanging up on the hook of the bathroom door. Not surprisingly, this particular egg was not found before the day was out and she forgot all about it.

A couple of days later we received a call from my father. He has a nice pool / jacuzzi combination at his condo and he likes to swim daily and alternate between the cool pool and the hot jacuzzi. I think you know where I’m going with this…

Unfortunately, Michelle hadn’t recognized those shorts for what they really were, his swim trunks.

It might have been just a little bit of a shock or surprise for my father, but on that particular day my father was chatting with some of the other condo tenants in the jacuzzi when he happened to stand up and notice that there was a trail running down his leg. Not knowing what was going on, he quickly made his exit and went to the locker room to investigate.

The mystery was solved when he found the remains of the foil wrapping used on the Easter eggs in his mesh pocket. Needless to say he’d been finding eggs in socks, shoes, drawers etc. for the past couple of days, so it was quickly obvious where this chocolate trail began.

Michelle continues to hide eggs every year, but she’s a little more discriminating about where they end up. But every year at Easter we have a little chuckle over dad’s apparent post-Easter incontinence. 😉

New Birdbath!

Just picked up a new birdbath from Stone World Garden Decor in Cumming, GA. Thankfully, it came in two pieces ’cause it’s a lot heavier than it looks!

To give you a sense of it’s size, the diameter of the dish is about 2 feet and it stands about 18 inches off the ground. Our last (plastic) bird bath was impaled by a large branch Excalibur style. Unfortunately Mich removed the branch before I could get a shot of it ’cause it looked pretty bizzarre. No such fate is likely to befall this "mini behemoth".

Jekyll Island Day Trip

Marc and PlaneJust posted some pictures from our day trip to Jekyll island back in October. For some reason I thought I had already done this.

We landed at the Jekyll Island Airport which is non-towered and used our cell phone to call the Jekyll Island Club Hotel and they sent a van right over to pick us up.

We rented some bicycles from them, nothing spiffy, just single gear coaster-brake bikes that took a little getting used to, and did a pleasant cycle of the north end of the island.

The trip was partly for a getaway and partly to flex my wings by doing a longer flight in the Diamond DA-20 two seater aircraft. This is a new plane and is a delight to fly. I wish it had more cargo-carrying capacity so I could realistically look at it for a flight up to Canada, but everything’s a trade-off in aviation.

For this reason I expect that any serious trekking will be done in something like the venerable Piper Warrior II workhorse.

By the way, I’ve been to Hilton Head Island (just North of Jekyll Island) a couple of times and found it to be fairly cold and uninviting. It is very obvious that the locals don’t really want you there and they take pains to ensure that you know this. The beaches are largely inaccessible unless you are staying at one of the resorts or unless you know someone locally who can point you in the right direction.

A big exception were the local Hilton Head airport FBO folks at the Carolina Air Center they were great and if I ever do visit Hilton Head again it will be almost solely on the strength of their efforts.