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While over in Italy for our Honeymoon back in 2010, I used my trusty G1 for all our navigation.  Two years later, I finally got around to uploading the GPS tracks into Google Maps.  I had to use a trick to get the map into one page (typically, Google Maps tends to split the tracks over several pages, so you don’t see the whole view), but phew, I finally did it.

(Hit the ‘view larger map’ link below).

View Larger Map

Things to note:

1. There is a straight line going from Venice to Bologna.  At this point, I switched off guidance and ‘did it live’.
2. There are a few times I was literally going around in circles.  You’d have to zoom in to see it, but for example the Cinqueterre area has a few loops where we couldn’t figure out where the exit was (on the map, this is just a little to the South-East of Genoa).  I swear it was just crazy confusing.  I also did a lap or two around the hill our accommodation was on in Florence.
3. The top speed I reached in our rental, a Fiat Punto, was 119 km/h.  That’s pretty tame by my morning commute standards, and I’m actually a bit disappointed that’s the fastest I drove in Italy… given it’s Italy (drivers seemed to be in some sort of race I didn’t know about).  The coolest thing about the driving over there  – only people going fast were in the fast lanes.  Florida – you suck at driving.

Photos from this trip are all here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daecks/collections/72157624337372920/

Ages and ages and yonks ago, we went on a drive up North to Georgia and South Carolina. On the way we stopped off in St Augustine and among other other things, saw Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the US. They were firing a cannon, so I filmed a somewhat shaky video of it.

I procrastinated for ages in fixing up the shakiness, never bothering to fix it offline. Today Youtube came to my rescue by adding some new editing features. I used the powers of Youtube against the video and I’m pretty impressed with the results (I ain’t doing anything about the child-like glee at the end). I did notice a funky 3D-like parallax effect in areas where there was a lot of camera movement, but I think that also depended on the strength of the effect. Also, the higher the amount of shake reduction you want, the more cropping that will occur. Note that the brightness difference in the edited video below is intentional.

This youtubedoubler link shows the difference between the two videos more clearly.

I haven’t been able to be much of a couch potato lately, what with all the wedding organising going on and due dates for work deliverables shouting out “you’ve forgotten about me!”

I haven’t, dear deliverables.

So some part of my brain, the part that likes to be a couch potato, came upon an idea at lunch time. How about creating a device that replaced your dreams with your Netflix queue, or the contents of your DVR while you slept? Then, your dreams wouldn’t be dreams anymore but rather what you wanted to be watching while sitting on the couch, but of course you don’t have the time to do that anymore… but you do while you sleep!

But then I decided that would be a silly idea. You’d forget what happened in the movie half an hour after you woke up.

I like watching Glee. I like watching musicals. I liked being a part of one in high school. I think I’ve watched “Grease” too many times to admit. I think I’ve admitted too much.

Have I mentioned that I really like Inca Kola? I really like it. There. Thank you to Adriana for locating the diet version today, and for buying two six-packs. The diet is really quite difficult to find. The great thing is that the diet and normal versions taste exactly the same, so I can drink a six pack of diet in one night and not have the Wii balance board scold me in the morning.

I think that’s the end of my ideas and thoughts for today. I think I’ll drink another Inca Kola.