The pathway to Doom?

May 25, 2005 eirikso19 Comments

These pictures are not modified in any way.

One very strange door in Pezenas
While visiting the city of Pezenas in the southern France I discovered this strange door.

So, what is this?

1. Someone trying to make their door look more impressive than it actually is
2. An architect eating magic mushrooms
3. Made on basis of blueprints from a very buggy 3D software
4. My digital camera eating magic mushrooms
5. This is actually the pathway to Doom 12 (to be released in 2012)

I have no idea. Of course it makes me wonder what’s inside. Comments please…

Edit:
I can see that a quite busy site in Hungary called szanalmas.hu has linked to this article. Cool! The problem is that I can not understand anything of all the comments about my pictures over at szanalmas.hu. Please throw a comment here in english if any of you actually find some information on why this door was built like this…

Update!
Following a tip from one of the comments below I have contacted the tourist board of Pezenas. They have promised to send me information through the good old postal mail. I will make a new article here on my blog when the information arrives.

Check back, or even better:
Sign up for mail notifications or subscribe to my RSS-feed, and you will know when we have the full story on this strange door. As a bonus you might learn something about the media industry, food, other travels and all the other stuff I post here at eirikso.com… 🙂

Invasion of the space invaders

May 25, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I was travelling in Montpellier. I snapped this picture. I had some idea that I had read an article on this project in Wired, but did not remember much of what it was.

Then this article on BoingBoing brings it all together and points me to www.space-invaders.com.

High flying broadband

May 20, 2005 eirikso1 Comment

I have been reading about airliners implementing WLAN and broadband in their planes, but never tried it. I know the tecnology, and I have been using mail since 1992. Still, it was somewhat special when I just recieved a mail from a coworker.

He is on his way to somwhere far east and is right now 11 000 m over Mongolia.
He is sitting there, 11 000 meters over Mongolia, watching Norwegian TV, listening to his favourite radio channels and sending email to his coworkers.

I was pretty impressed when I travelled with Singapore Airlines from Penang to Singapore back in 1999. They was very early in including personal entertainment in all seats, including computer games and a broad selection of movies. But, having broadband internet while flying is of course quite unbeatable. Now we’re talking! For a long flight, I am without doubt willing to pay extra for that kind of functionallity.

My friend is flying SAS, but as far as I know more airliners plan to include broadband on board.

Well, add "choose an airliner with broadband on board" to my current
list of travel essentials for long commutes:

– Active noise cancelling headphones
– A bottle of tabasco (to give the airline food some taste)
– The latest number of Wired
– Patience

Download the Excel Sheet for GPS matching

May 18, 2005 eirikso3 Comments

I have updated my post about travelling with a GPS and a digital camera and included the excel worksheet for download:

“For the people that are familiar with excel and visual basic for applications (VBA) you can now download the very undocumented excel sheet with the code that match gps points with pictures here:
PlacePicturesGPS.xls”

Click here for the complete article.

Aerial photo of Odda and the Folgefonni glacier

May 6, 2005 eirikso17 Comments

I shot this nice photo of norwegian fjords, glaciers and mountains on my way from Bergen to Oslo. It is a part of the Hardanger Fjord called Sørfjorden. This fjord leads into the industrial centre of Odda. The white mountains to the right in the picture are parts of the Folgefonni glacier.

This could have been very nice to add to Geobloggers …if I had the GPS coordinates and GoogleMaps would extend their service with proper maps and satellite photos of Europe as well.

Google sightseeing

April 21, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

The other web site I am running, Trendmapper leads me to all kinds of cool stuff. And, related to my article on trevelling with a GPS and a camera, I found this: Google Sightseeing.

I still encourage people to travel and visit the world, but maybe you can use this kind of sightseeing to plan your trip?

Update:
And here is another site with lots of cool details from Google Maps:
GoogleGlobetrotting

Travelling with a GPS and a digital camera

April 17, 2005 eirikso15 Comments

I just read this interesting post after finding a link to it over at brilliantdays. Some more searching and clicking, I also found this, and I came to think of the following story:

A couple of years ago I traveled through Alsace in France by bicycle. I had my GPS attached to the handlebars and took lots of pictures with my digital camera during the trip.

When I came home, I transfered the pictures to my laptop as usual. I also transfered the GPS-log with all the coordinates to the same machine. I started thinking about how nice it would have been if the GPS was built into my camera so that I could have placed all my pictures on the map.

Thinking a bit further, I realized that I actually had the data to do exactly that:

1. A track from the GPS. Basically a long list of time stamps and GPS coordinates
2. Huge amounts of pictures. All of them time stamped
3. OZI Explorer software, supporting links to pictures in the maps

So, I have data telling me where I was when. And I have pictures telling me when they where taken. There is a link here: when.

I figured, how difficult could it be to match the time stamps from the pictures to the closest time stamp in the GPS-log? That would actually place the picture quite accurate. Well, that was not too difficult. I imported a list of the pictures and the complete GPS-log into Excel. A little VBA code, and voila: a file that was compatible with OZI-explorer placing all my pictures amazingly accurate on the map.

You can click the picture in this post to see one of the results.

For the people that are familiar with excel and visual basic for applications (VBA) you can download the very undocumented excel sheet with the code that match gps points with pictures here:
PlacePicturesGPS.xls

If you manage to import a list of pictures with time stamps in the sheet called pictures and a tracklog into the sheet called track, keeping the right data in the right coloumns, running the script called PlacePics2() will match the closest track point to each picture. Running the script called GenerateOziMapComments() will generate a text file with the information needed to place the pictures on a map in OziExplorer. The last script, cleandups() is simply a script that you can run if you want to delete the rows where several pictures is placed on the same GPS-point.

This whole process is very undocumented, but if you want to try it out please do not hesitate to ask questions through comments here. If people show any interest I will consider a major upgrade of the documentation!

Kite update

March 7, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

It has been a memorable weekend and here are some pictures of the norwegian winter at its best.

1. Anarkistix checking da weather.
2. The bus on its way to the kite spot

Da instructor and da lunch.

1. The road over Hardangervidden is spectacular. If you at any point plan to drive from Bergen to Oslo or Oslo to Bergen, then try this road. It is the most scenic route between these cities.
2. Myself beeing nice to the group carrying 5 kites in a slighly large backback.

1. Da kite in da air
2. Da bus driver

You find a related post here.

Snowkiting at Hardangervidden

March 5, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

Click on the pictures for a larger version.

Basic training this weekend. Not very windy, but fantastic weather. I have never tried this before. After one day of training I must admit that this is seriously fun! And we haven’t even tried with our skis on yet…

And for the people that want to take a little tour of some very nice pictures, here is some pictures from a friend of mine, Anarkistix:
– – Anarkistix Kite Photo Gallery – –

The Venetian

March 2, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

The Venetian

Originally uploaded by eirikso.

Just testing the blog functionallity from flickr. The picture is taken inside The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. A truly insane place.

I have been in Venice in Italy and was somewhat disapointed because I found it too crowded with tourists (…a strange thing to say, as I visited Venice as a tourist myself – but don’t we all want to be the only tourist at the places we visit…?). It was difficult to find people actually living in the city and restaurants made for the people living there. Venice is truly beautiful, and all places that have no cars is kind of tranquil in their own way. Still, I prefer to meet real people and visit real cafes and restaurants when I travel to a city.

…the Venetian in Las Vegas and Venice in Italy have as much in common as a fake Rolex and its real counterpart, still it is kind of interesting to have visited both places.