Bug-Man’s Blog

As Spring is drawing to a close London is beginning to warm up and I’m starting to see a side of it that I didn’t expect. I suppose having arrived in Winter I have not had a chance to see London so warm, colourful and nice. When Lindsay and I arrived the days were short, wet, dark and cold, and now they are long, warm and getting brighter!

It is amazing how quickly the sunrise and sunset can change and for the past couple of months the days have been getting longer and longer, usually by a few minutes each day. Today the sun rose at 5:16AM, last week it was 5:30, and next week it will be rising at 5 o’clock. Sunset is currently 8:39PM! The longest day of the year last year was sunrise at 4:47AM and sunset at 9:21PM!

With all this nice weather one would think that it would be a great opportunity to go out and see some more of London’s night-life, but alas, everything closes at 11PM! Confused? I am! One of the biggest drawbacks about London is that when you go to a pub, you’re often booted out before midnight. If you travel, you have to contend with the tube, which closes often around 1AM as well. So what are people supposed to do late at night if they want to make a night of it? I’m not sure! Go into the inner city and go to a few late bars and night clubs I suppose, but you’re not always in the mood for that kind of night, and you don’t always want to wait until the first tubes start running again. There are always 24 hour night buses but they are not always as easy as the train.

Boris Johnson, the new Mayor of London has instigated a ban of drinking alcohol on the tube and bus network effective June 1st. I’m glad I’ve had at least one beer on a train, and boy did it feel weird having come from Adelaide where it’s always been disallowed. Oddly enough, the rail staff are complaining that they will have to be the ones to enforce the regulations, and they are not happy!

Any travel plans? Well, Lindsay and I will be going to Berlin in a couple of weeks and that should be great. We know Justine who lives there (Hi Jus!) and she’ll be our guide, which is always awesome because you get to go to all the places you never would have seen before. Now that Lindsay and I have been to Paris once, if we go back we will probably go to different places to see different things, now that we’ve got all that main tourist stuff out of the way!

Here are a few snaps from a recent trip to Brighton:

I’d hardly call it a beach, considering the whole beach front is made up of pebbles!

Don’t forget, there are many more photos here!

Work is keeping me very busy and I have learned so much about the company in the past three weeks. I’ve asserted myself as Team Leader moreso and am settling in now. It’s tiring work and the days are longer than I’m used to (think 50 minute commute, working 9-6 with a one hour lunch break, and then another 50 minute commute) but I’m happy to be working. Lindsay’s got it easy, working 9:30-5:30 means he leaves for work after I do and arrives home before me! Gah! We may look at moving soon, either somewhere closer to each of our workplaces and Lindsay has suggested perhaps even moving to Brighton, which is quite some distance, but the rail system is faster so the commute is not too much longer. Time will tell and we will see what’s around!

What else is there that I should cover before I go? I’m not sure, but if I think of it, I’ll let you know!

Normally I don’t do very much for Australia Day but considering I’m living in London, but this year Lindsay and I went out and celebrated being Aussie London. Not surprisingly, London’s city streets were packed full of Aussies with aussie colours, flag tattoos on arms, cheeks and foreheads, flags draped over them like capes, and they were all hanging around the Aussie bars, of course. Lindsay, Michelle, Adam and myself went down to Covent Garden where we picked up a few necessary Aussie supplies: Chickos, Arnott’s Shapes, Mint Slice, Ice Magic, Vegemite, and a couple of other Aussie things. It’s amazingly strange standing in an Australian shop with just about every Australian food icon on display. It’s almost like being back home and going to a deli. About the only thing we didn’t buy was a carton of Coopers Pale Ale, for two reasons: a) It was sold out and b) It was £36.90/carton (around AU$80.)

Onwards with our supplies we headed to the pub.

No, we avoided the Walkabout because it would have been just far too busy, but went to another pub instead which we knew served Coopers Pale Ale. Downing a couple of those, we were surrounded by Aussies. Trying to explain exactly what a ‘Bush Pig’ is to Adam the Texan was something interesting and there weren’t too many examples of them around; they were probably all at home in Australia. It was getting late and Lindsay and I needed to head off to Justin’s place where there was a late night Australia Day BBQ. Outside the pub I let out one loud “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!” and was glad to hear several people immediately respond “Oi! Oi! Oi!” That made my day!

We headed off to Justin’s house and although he lives only a few miles away it still took 1 hour and 2 buses to get there. I carried my backpack with a carton of beer inside of it, and we arrived. We had a good night meeting a few other Aussies, watching Skippy, singing Australian TV commercial jingles and getting drunk like Aussies should. It was meant to be a late BBQ and it wasn’t until 11:30PM that we actually started eating! Nonetheless it was a good night. Here are some snaps:

But there are more on Flickr.

Sunday was spent in bed.

I’ve wanted some good integration between my Flickr Photo Feed and Google Earth for some time now but what’s out there isn’t that awesome. I’ll discuss a few things –

# Flickr

Flick’r own KML (Google Earth) feed is good however, restricted to the last 20 photos or so, which is really awful. This means that anyone browsing your photos in Google Earth will only see a handful.

# Metal Toad Media

These guys provide a fantastic feed which I use all the time! Check it out. Once installed it will scan Flickr for the nearest 200 photos (sorted by most interesting) and insert little pins on the map. You can then click the pins and view the picture. This is awesome, as it means you can visit anywhere on the planet and as well as looking at the aerial view you can see all the photos people have taken of that area, too! Because it sorts by most interesting first, the further you zoom in on any one space the more you see. Every time you move around the map it updates the feed and within a few seconds Flickr photos begin appearing. It’s great! I recommend it.

http://kmlphotos.metaltoad.com/

What would be great is a version of the above that works on a single user’s feed (or group/tag/search) only!

# Trippermap

These guys have a couple of great tools. The Trippermap Geotagger (free) will let you Geotag Flickr photos using Google Earth instead of the clunky horrible Yahoo map. Basically, when enabled, you line up the crosshair with the coordinates you want to mark a photo or photos, click the link in the bubble and it will take you to the trippermap.com page where you can update any photo. Because it uses the Flickr API there’s no need to sign up to their services or anything like that! This is the tool I use to tag my photos. I need to get myself a better GPS system

Their website offers you the ability to create your own Flash Google Map with your own photos all over it however, if you want the ability to create a Google Earth KML you need to subscribe to their Premium service (for $10). No thanks. Not for a simple KML feed!

# loc.alize.us

http://loc.alize.us/ is a website that provides a fairly flexible Google Map & Flickr Mash-Up, and it’s pretty good, too. Here’s a small version which shows the map with only my photos:

Apparently this small version only shows the last 99 photos but there’s a full-sized version which is much easier to use and shows more photos.

These guys also offer a service that will let you Geotag a Flickr photo however, you need to go to Flickr first, click the photo, click a Bookmark and then find your location in the small Flash Google Maps window. It’s all a bit slow.

# Yahoo! Pipe by steeev

steeev has created a Yahoo Pipe which will create a KML of your last 500 geotagged images. All you need to do is put in your Flickr username (as NSID) and it will output a KML of your photos which you can use with Google Earth! The only problem is, of course, that it outputs a KML file that has a static list of all of your pictures, so if you install it permanently, it’s no good for new content.

You can copy the link that outputs the KML and visit it over and over again, eg. here is the link to my photo feed. Click on that any time and it should bring up a KML of the latest photos in my feed. I guess that’s one cheater’s way of doing it but the draw-back is you have to click on the link from a web browser every time.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has found any better tools!

It’s fun being a tourist but I’ve never like to think of myself as one. I am enjoying moving around the city and taking in the sights, however slowly. With Lindsay working every day it leaves us only the weekends to do anything, because as soon as it hits 4 o’clock in London, it starts getting dark. Really dark.

Lindsay and I have now got to know our own area very well, which I think is a good thing because this is our home for the next 12 months at least. This weekend we went up on the London Eye at night time and travelled out to the Tower Bridge area, albeit rather late in the day and we didn’t have much time to do anything else. I would have liked to have gone up but we are being a bit careful with our finances until things get back in shape after that hefty rent payment! These are some things we’ll come back and re-visit just as soon as I feel more safe

Here are a couple of shots from our ‘flight’ on the Eye and the Tower Bridge! You can check out more over at my Flickr feed. I have been keeping it up-to-date as regularly as possible!

The Tower Bridge	The Tower Bridge
The London Eye	The Palace of Westminster
The IMAX Building in Waterloo	A London Eye Capsule

Don’t forget you can view more at Flickr.

I’ve been Geotagging as many photos using Flickr as I can so that you can see exactly where they were taken from on the surface of the Earth, using Flickr’s maps or Google Earth (but Google Earth only receives the last 20. Grr.) I think my next project will have to be automated geotagging.

PS. I thought this was a great little picture with the caption included

“Welcome home from your holiday!”

PPS.
I won’t mention much about how the job hunting is going at this stage in case I’m being ego-surfed by a prospective employer… (Hi Employer!!) and perhaps I’ll blog about it all later once it’s all over and I’m gainfully employed. Suffice it to say there is plenty of work out there and I’m still applying and at the same time waiting for the whole Christmas/New Years period to pass over so that all the HR departments can return to normal.

Ever done an ego search? That is, searching for your own name in Google or some other search engine to see what comes up about yourself. I was doing this tonight. I googled ‘bugmancx‘ which is a username that only ever applies to me. It’s great, though. It shows up my YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc all in the top results. But if you continue down those results you start seeing some really weird stuff.

It all revolves around the concept of tags. To sum it up basically a ‘tag’ means the keywords you apply to any video you upload to YouTube or image that you upload to flickr so that people typing in something like ‘eiffel tower’ can find your image of the eiffel tower. It seems that in order to draw people in, websites are making use of this tagging technology by using the tags of successful websites like Flickr and YouTube. Before I even reached the end of page one of ‘bugmancx’ I’d come across websites like www.adelaideindex.com and www.gnosh.org which all trawl the web looking for content to re-display.

Re-display? Well these websites are using the tags to re-display content from the internet that already exists elsewhere. For instance, the gnosh.org site basically picks up on Flickr tags as well as many other image sites and shows you the results in one page. While this might be handy it means that every time I upload new photos to my Flickr profile they’re appearing in Google results on varying sites all over the web.

I suppose this is a smart way to re-engineer and make money from things that already exist on the Internet without breaching any terms and conditions and without having to do any actual work. I did feel quite some annoyance when I started seeing my YouTube videos being displayed on websites using the YouTube HTML include functions and being surrounded by Ads. A few of my videos are even featured on ‘AOL Videos.’ I put those videos up on YouTube for my own entertainment and enjoyment, and not so they could be plastered all over the web for other people’s financial gratification!

Look out people! It’s true when they say that once you upload something to the Internet it’s up there forever