Travel
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Aerial map mashing
Thanks to Jeff Warren (also here) of GrassRootsMapping and Public Laboratory, I now know — and am highly turned on by — the possibilities of mapping in the wild. That is, mapping by the 99.xxx+% of us who are not in the mapping business, and are in the best multiple positions to map the world(s)… Continue reading
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Portraits of New York from altitude
On my way back from SXSW a couple weeks ago, I got some terrific shots of many things, including portions of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky (including mountaintop mining), Virginia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Trenton and Providence. Most of those aren’t uploaded yet, but I just put up the best of the bunch: this series of New… Continue reading
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A small market fail
Airport wi-fi isn’t the biggest business, or the smallest. I’m not even sure it’s a discrete category. Some of it is a phone company side business (T-mobile, AT&T). Some of it is a business in itself (Boingo). Some of it is just a supply of overhead to airports or lounges that want to provide free… Continue reading
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The death rattles of AM, then FM
Check the Arbitron radio listening ratings for Washington DC. You have to go waaaay down the list before you find a single AM station that isn’t also simulcast on FM. But then, if you go to the bottom of the list, you’ll also find a clump of Internet streams of local radio stations. You’ll see the… Continue reading
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What I’d like to say on the subway
When I was young, New York subways were dirty, noisy and with little risk of improvement. But, even if the maps weren’t readable (as with this 1972 example), there were lots of them. Now the subways are much nicer, on the whole, and being improved. But there is now a paucity of maps. In fact,… Continue reading
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Holes in The Cloud
So our family of three is sharing a hotel room while doing some holiday stuff. The hotel charges about $20/day per device to use its wi-fi. We have seven devices that are Net-enabled, but so far have only one (my laptop) paying the fare — and the quality of the connection gets a D+ from… Continue reading
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Truly public radio
My favorite town in Vermont is Rochester. I like to stop there going both ways while driving my kid to summer camp, which means I do that up to four times per summer. It’s one of those postcard-perfect places, rich in history, gracing a lush valley along the White River, deep in the Green Mountains, with… Continue reading
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Now it’s NYC’s, Philly’s and DC’s turns to get clobbered
@marklittlenews (mark little) tweets, Soaked to the skin but awed beyond words by explosive lightning storm that just engulfed Manhattan #Kapow So I looked at the map and saw that there’s a line of strong thunderstorms in a line from New York to Washington. Quite a show. Of JFK, Flightaware says, John F Kennedy Intl… Continue reading
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Taking the heat
That’s how hot my car thought it was today. I understand it hit 103° at Logan. Right now it’s 10pm and still 95° on our back porch. It’s hotter indoors. Up in the attic, where I work, two window AC units bring the space down to about 82°. They can’t do much better. We have… Continue reading
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Free ways
The first time I heard the term “Sepulveda pass,” I thought it was a medical procedure. I mean, I was still new to The Coast, and sepulveda sounded like one of those oddball body parts, like uvula or something. (Not speaking of which, I no longer have an uvula. No idea why. It used to… Continue reading
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All the statues eat there
… so you know it’s gotta be good. (All’antico Vinaio, on Via dei Neri, in Firenze.) Continue reading
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Curing the commercial Web blues
Last week we spent a lot of time here, in Venice: The triangular marble plaza on the edge of the Grand Canal of Venice is known informally as Bancogiro, once one of Italy’s landmark banks, and now the name of an osteria there. The plaza is part of Rialto Mercado, the marketplace where Marco Polo… Continue reading
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Venice in a glass
That was shot (and enjoyed) here, at Banco Giro, a triangular plaza by the old marketplace. This was roughly where The Merchant of Venice was set, where Marco Polo did his business and where Luca Pacioli learned about and then shared with the world the essentials of double-entry bookkeeping — in a form that hardly changed over the… Continue reading
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Restaurant redux
The best Romans we ever knew were former ex-pats there: Charles and Doris Muscatine. We didn’t know them well, having met only once, for dinner in the early ’90s, at their son Jeff’s house in the Bay Area. But it turned out we were going to be in Rome at the same time, not long after that… Continue reading
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When in Rome…
So we’re in Rome and I’m thinking about Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf and cable cars… When I lived in the Bay Area and hung out in San Francisco, I did like all the other locals, and stayed away from the tourist stuff. Sure, right after we arrived from North Carolina in 1985, when the kids were… Continue reading
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Prego re Vodafone land Net in Italy
Friday, 24 June… Heard from @VodafoneIT that there had been a “ticket” in Rome yesterday, and that the problem is fixed now. Usage (considered below) was not the issue. Hat tip to @VodafoneIT for getting back to me with the answer on that. Grazie. Not being a reader of Italian, it’s hard to tell* why… Continue reading
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Overlooking Detroit
Got my first good clear look at Detroit and Windsor from altitude on a recent trip back from somewhere. Here’s a series of shots. What impressed me most, amidst all that flat snow-dusted spread of city streets, a patch of grids on the flatland of Michigan and Ontario, flanking the Detroit River and its islands, was… Continue reading
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Overlooking Chicago
I know Chicago well — from the air. I’ve flown in and out of O’Hare countless times, always enjoying the view from my window seat. I’ve also flown over Chicago a lot, en routes from cities east and west. And I’ve shot a lot of pictures, which I usually used to put up on Flickr;… Continue reading
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Been there, still doing that
One hundred and fifty years ago yesterday, the scene above had no water in it, besides the Santa Ynez river, which barely flowed most of the year. Looking down on that scene was William Brewer, who led a survey sent out by Josiah D. Whitney, who had recently been named California’s state geologist, and… Continue reading
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Uniting airlines
I don’t envy anybody in the airline business. There is so much to do right, and the costs of doing things wrong can be incalculably high. Required capital investments are immense, and the regulatory framework is both complex and costly. Yet the people I’ve met in the business tend to be dedicated professionals who care… Continue reading