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Well, I’m finally making my first post since we returned from our vacation in Scotland. We’ve been back for two weeks now, but I’ve been battling a sinus infection that I probably caught on the plane, and I’m just now starting to feel better. I’ve been collecting plenty of things to post, but I’ve just been too out of it to do much posting.

Scotland was amazing. We were pretty lucky with the weather, as we only had a couple of days where it rained all day. We got to see a lot, racking up over 1300 miles on the rental car. If there’s enough interest, I might post excerpts from the journal we kept of all the interesting things we saw and did.

Of course we took lots of pictures, over 1500 between the two of us. Going through all of those pictures has been slow going, but I think we did really well. Above is a picture from early in our trip that illustrates a typically idyllic scene in Scotland, this one showing a rainbow over the hills near Loch Fyne in the town of Inverary. I’ve been slowly posting my pictures to a Scotland photo set in flickr. I’ve only gotten through about a quarter of the pictures we took, so keep an eye on the set as I continue to post more. I’ll also be posting Scotland photos to my personal gallery in this folder, which is empty at the moment.

While I was away, flickr added several new features, and I think one of the best is integrated geotagging; FlickrBlog has a nice post introducing this addition with some tutorial links. As a result of this new feature, you can now view maps of geotagged photos for individual users. If you go to my flickr Map, you’ll see icons with numbers of photos taken in the US and Scotland. I like the way that as you zoom in, the numbers separate themselves into more distinct areas showing exactly how many pictures you took in each location. The interface for geotagging photos in flickr’s Organizr is very easy, and it even imported photos that I had previously geotagged through other third-party solutions. Picasa had previously integrated geotagging of photos with Google Earth, and although Google’s maps are much more detailed than those of flickr/Yahoo, I like the map interface in flickr a lot better. It’s worth checking out geotagging in both applications, although it kind of sucks that there isn’t a definitive way to geotag for both.

I hope that I’ll be posting more in the near future; it’ll be nice to finally get back into the swing of things…

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but I’d been quite busy preparing for my vacation, among other things. Anyway, I’m in Scotland for about two weeks and may or may not have Internet access. This particular guesthouse in Inverness has free unsecured high-speed Internet access for its guests, so I’m living it up while I can. However, more than likely I’ll be way too busy enjoying myself to make any more posts. 😉 It’d be cool to see some of occasional contributors Shaft’s or Czar’s Interweb meanderings in the meantime, but I do understand if things are too hectic to make any guest posts.

I hope all’s well back home, and I will definitely have some stories to tell (and pictures to show off) when I return. 🙂

Geody is:

a new location search engine. Enter a name, or coordinates, for a location and it gives you all kinds of methods for viewing. For example, [you can view locations] with Google Earth, NASA WorldWind, Celestia, Google Maps, and Mapquest. You can export a location to a GPX file, Geocaching.com, etc. Also, you can get hotel and other travel information and links to Google and other search engines. What’s more, you can search for locations on the Moon, Mars, and other space locations.

Loc.alize.us is a:

mashup that combines the popular photo sharing site Flickr with Google Maps. It allows you to cruise Flickr photos, tags and people based on geotagged location. … Loc.alize.us also gives you a how-to (see: ‘create’ tab) on geocoding your Flickr pictures so they can be displayed in this way

CNET presents ten real PC games you can download for free.

alanbecker’s deviantART work Animator vs. Animation is pretty cool:

An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself.

A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find – the brush tool, the eraser tool – to get back at his tormentor. It’s resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself.

Check out the YouTube of a world record one-handed Rubik’s Cube solve time of 20.09 seconds. Wow.