To be more precise: Naples Zoo – Florida. And I just had to post this one as a follow up to the guys that refuse to report theft and the picture not taken in a zoo.
Edit:
Just had to add a picture of one of the alligators in the Zoo as well…
To stay 8 hours in a plane isn’t fun for anyone. Especially not for a kid. To stay sane on a direct flight from Oslo to New York you have to bring every possible time killer available. No comparison necessary, the winner was the new iPod with video playback. Loaded with lots of Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam, Teletubbies etc.
Only one problem. It gives you 4-5 hours of video playback on one charge. As mentioned earlier – I’m in the US. It’s gadget time. CompUSA to the rescue. A little external box from Griffin Technologies. It’s called TuneJuice and is yours for $14.90 right now. One standard 9V battery gives you about 4 hours of extra juice.
I also considered a box from Belkin running on four AA batteries giving more power, but went for the small Griffin box after reading some reviews. Of course I can’t give you a proper description of my experience yet. You’ll have to wait until I have done the hard test: 3 + 8 hours on a plane on my way back from Florida to Oslo…
Coming up soon on eirikso.com:
– My experience in converting DVD and video to iPod files
– The Griffin PowerMate – why I love this little wheel
– Sleeptracker – does it work?
…and other stuff that I for some reason want to share. 🙂
At the same time I recommend you to subscribe to my email updates or RSS feed. As you may have noticed, I don’t post huge amounts of articles. Checking back and checking back just to find nothing new is boring. An update subscription solves that!
Context is everything. This picture is of a sign that is fairly common here in Florida. Quite exotic for a norwegian that lives in a country where a tiny snake is one of the most dangerous animals you can bump into. A tiny snake that will hurt you slightly more than a common bumble bee if it bites.
If this sign was placed in a zoo it would not be very interesting. Context and expectations are important for all stories. For marketing. For blogs. For podcasts. Don’t underestimate the value of a good backgound story. A story about yourself, about the situation around what you are communicating. The story about Herkko Heitanen and Lehtovaara is not that interesting without the background information that tells you that Mr. Heitanen is a lawyer specialized within IT-law and a founding member of one of the biggest cyber rights organization in Europe. The movie Super Size Me is of course not very interesting if you don’t know that it is a true story and that the maker of the movie actually did eat all that junk.
I have a brief About Eirikso page here at my blog. It is brief, but I think it is important. I think it adds value to what you read here if you have at least a little bit of background on the author.
Back to the alligators. To the right you can see the picture of the sign with a bit more context. The last time we where here we had a big alligator called Ollie living in the small lake at the golf course outside our window. He is not there anymore. Rumor says that he started a diet that included one of the gardeners at the course. Bad idea.
Anyway, I managed to snap this picture back in 2004:
Of course I didn’t feed him. And I don’t need the threat of a $500 fine to not consider feeding a gator like Ollie…
I’m currently in the US and will be here for about a month. I will mostly stay at the same place. What does that mean? People living in the US will of course not see any obvious and revolutionary advantages from this fact. Apart from the fact that being in the US is quite fun in general.
I’ll give you some hints: Amazon, eBay, Best Buy. Webshops! Ordering stuff from the fantastic assortement of Amazon when you live in Norway is OK, but it always include huge amounts of waiting, payment of taxes and hideously expensive shipping.
Now, for the next four weeks I can order stuff for something close to half the price compared to buying the same goods from my home in Norway.
I don’t have unlimited amounts of money, so I have to consider each purchase carefully.
That’s why I kick this off with a product that I have absolutely no faith in. The Sleeptracker. I have read fantastic reviews. I understand the concept. Still, I don’t think it can help this seriously sleepless blogger.
But if it can. I mean – wake me up after my not-even-close-to-enough hours of sleep at a moment that makes the horrible exercise of getting up slightly easier. It’s worth every cent.
Of course I’ll be back here with more info when it arrives.
First:
Because of several small happenings regarding this blog lately my logs tell me that I have a couple of new readers. So, first of all I want to say:
Welcome to my new readers! I hope you’ll find interesting stuff here. I’ll promise to not overload you with articles and will at the same time recommend you to subscribe to my RSS-feed or mail update. That way you will be noticed when I post something new.
So, back to this post:
I am currently travelling in the US. On my way to spend five weeks in Florida. I spent a night in New York on my way, and experienced the city in deep layers of snow. As a Norwegian, snow is something that I am used to. I guess the New Yorkers are used to snow as well.
Still, I found it interesting that most of the schools where closed beacuse of the snow. The winter in New York can’t possibly be that different from the winters in Bergen on the western coast of Norway where I grew up. I can’t remember one single day of closed schools because of snow.
Anyway, the plane to Fort Myers was nearly on time and I could continue my journey.
I was flying Continental and one of the biggest events of flying an american airliner is something that resides in the seat pocket in front of you. The insanely interesting magazine called: SkyMall. An amazing collection of products.
I will be back here soon with some of the gadgets and useful things I found interesting this time.
PS.
Yes, the picture is from New York, the 9th of December 2005. It’s not something from Norway that I found in my archive.
I have mentioned GeoBloggers here before. Now meet Panoramio, a similar and very user friendly service. It lets you place your pictures by simply click the map and upload.
Very nice navigation, search function and cool layout for the pictures with both the picture, satellite photo and map.
As a test, I just uploaded a beautiful picture from the Sognefjord in Norway. And of course I had to upload the picture of Odda as well.
Edit:
The name Panoramio does not indicate that the pictures you upload have to be panoramas. (Even if my picture of the Sognefjord is a nice – yes… panorama.)
Annelogue points me back to a project I read about in Wired some months ago. The disussion at her site suggests ways to place the Yellow Arrows geographically.
I just installed a small program on my Nokia 6630 mobile called CellSpotting. It works like this:
Your mobile is always connected to a mobile transmitter somewhere. These transmitters have unique ID’s and are called Cells. By reading what Cell you are connected to and do a lookup in a database on that particular cell, your location can be roughly determined (I think at a level of detail down to a couple of hundred meters).
With CellSpotting installed on your mobile you can always hit a “Go cellspotting” button. What it does is that it makes note of the cell you are connected to and do a lookup in a database on the web. If someone has spotted that cell already and submitted a description you will recieve that description. It could be anything. Info on nearby points of interest or simply a greeting. If the cell is “undiscovered” you can fill in info on the cell yourself. Anyone visiting that cell after you will get your info if they hit “Go CellSpotting” in the cellspotting application.
Now, if the people behind the CellSpotting program could enhance it with the following two features:
1. A possibility to let people snap a picture with their phone and add to the description of a cell
Would be great fun to be able to look up pictures of the surroundings where you are. Both because it would help you decide if the walk to the park described would be worth it and because having pictures from the actual spot you are, from different seasons and different points of time could be interesting in its own way.
2. A possibility to record the latitude and longitude and add it to your spot if you have a GPS connected to your phone
3. Some kind of possibility to send a mail from your phone with the cell and a link to the description in the CellSpotting database. Would be great information to add when moblogging
….anyway. CellSpotting is kind of Yellow Arrows… without the arrows.
Related post:
Odda GeoBlogged!
Slightly inspired by the soap boubles, here are some more reflections from the norwegian mountains. This time a glass of very good white wine. 25 degrees celcius today. Very nice at 800 meters above sea level here up north.
Related post: Soap boubles.
I am currently high up in the Norwegian mountains starting my summer vacation. Vacation means time to snap some pictures. Combine that with other serious activity, like making soap boubbles. And you might get some interesting shots…
BoingBoing pointed me to this German company selling groovy reproductions of 1970s-era wallpaper. My brain works quite visually and told me that I had seen something similar before. In Helsinki, Finland… At an art exibition… Hmm…
So I flipped through my pictures in Adobe Photoshop Album. And actually found the picture I was looking for. An equally groovy installation of psycedelic patterns and loudspeakers and microphones. Everything connected so the patterns got a very strange accompanying sound made entirely by feedback from the microphones and amplifiers.
Maybe they bought the wallpaper in Germany?
eirikso 