Category: Thoughts

An early flight from Chicago’s O’Hare airport required a stay at the O’Hare Hilton, not recommended but the view is good..

Interesting fact courtesy of wikipedia, the IATA code for Chicago ORD comes from its original name Orchard Field, another name to bring back perhaps along with Idlewild ?

Talking of lost traditions..

Posted from the American Airlines Flagship Lounge, Chicago .

Showing my age a bit I know, but my first real exposure with web mapping was supporting the use of Autodesk’s then revolutionary MapGuide software for the 1997 General Election on the UK.

Web Mapping was young then.. a bit like Tony Blair !

Over the next few months people will be rushing to their shiny new web tools to visualise the election on May 7th, but have we really moved on in our efforts to explain the geographic distribution of results..

You are likely to see maps like this ..

Which are highly misleading as the electoral system in the UK  is not based on the area of parliamentary constituencies which is a key feature of this map!  For a well argued criticism of  choropleth mapping like this in elections, take a look Ken’s excellent blog post on the subject from a few years ago.

With this as motivation I’m pleased to announce that Google is sponsoring a special prize at this years British Cartography Society awards for the “Best Election Map”, hopefully we will see some innovative approaches that go beyond the choropleth!

I very rarely get spam or junk email at work (Gmail is really very good a filtering out the stuff you don’t want to see) but this email dropped into my inbox today..

If only Waldgoel was real..

Hello,

Compliment, Am Chnatal Waldvogel, I work with a pharmaceutical company here in Canada and I got your contact from Indo Canada Chamber of Commerce in Canada and I decided to contact you directly for an investment with my company if you can understand English, Bahasa.

Our company is into production of Pharmaceutical products and Animal Vaccines. There are some agricultural seeds that my company needs from Indonesia for the production of our Animal Vaccines and Anti-viral drugs.

We have been purchasing the materials from Pakistan and Sri Lanka but it is very scarce now and we got information that it also exist in Indonesia but we are having problem with the owner of the products due to language barrier.

Please take a moment out of your very busy schedule to respond back to me at my private e mail address for more detail.

Regards,

Waldvogel

OK maybe not, but the development of OpenStreetMap as told by its founding father, Steve Coast is going to be a great read. A truly game changing event in the mapping industry, the project has always attracted strong characters as contributors and in as much as it’s possible to say leaders.

The story of how and why the project took off will be of interest to industry insiders, OSM’ers themselves and to any interested in, after wikipedia, perhaps the most well known product of the wisdom of the crowds.

Steve has his Kickstarter page here, publication if funded is scheduled for next summer.

Who knows in a few years this could be a successful Broadway Musical !

One of my earliest memories as a child was flying, then still a little glamorous, to Belfast to see my mothers family. This I guess was in the mid 1970’s and was the first time I visited Heathrow’s Terminal 1.

Early this month I visited the terminal for the last time, most airlines have already moved across to the new Terminal 2, and the British Airways flight I often take to Dublin is moving to Terminal 5 at the end of the month.

I took the opportunity to take a few photo’s to record the last days of Terminal 1.

Thanks for the memories, the long walks, slow moving security lines, the waits for arriving passengers to pass and allow mysterious doors to be opened and for being a gateway to world !

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Having spent the last few days in the tourist hotspot of Florence, it’s clear that the mobile gadget of the year is the selfie stick, a telescopic stick with a mount for your smartphone to take the perfect selfie beyond arms length.

It’s seems that you have not visited somewhere or taken part in any activity without the accompanying selfie  and it’s only a matter of time before Samsung and Apple start putting more effort in the front facing camera that they do with the traditional one.

The ultimate selfie however may come from a relative of this prototype.. the Nixie.

The Nixie is a personal photography drone,  and finalist in the Intel wearable technology contest, and is brilliant in two ways..  As an example of user centered product design and secondly as a insight into the potential legal and privacy concerns that will come when micro UAV’s become our personal companions.

I’ve already played with this cheap toy, much to the annoyance of the rest of my family.. imagine in the near future when the streets of Florence are swarming with them !

This weekend I have had the pleasure of taking part in the European GIS Education Symposium at University College Cork.

I organised a workshop on Scrappy GIS, using simple web mapping tools in this case Google Maps Engine Lite to teach the concepts of GIS, without needing a GIS !

The tutorial is online here and should take around an hour to complete. It could form a great introduction to GIS at any level, and is of course a bit scrappy itself !

Scrappy is popular approach at Google, building simple and cheap tools from what you have to hand rather than waiting for the ideal solution, the famous Lego rack used for Google’s first server is the classic example of the approach.

Now I’m off to find a pint of Beamish..