Traveling Down the Information Backroad

Comcast tells FCC to pound salt. Sony VAIO 440,000 machine recall. Yikes. New Tivo to have a terabyte. Yay. Hard disks down to $189 for a terabyte. Michael on Facebook. Better than a blog? Or no? The little Dell laptop is out for $349. Huge patch Tuesday coming next week. CNBC doing a deal with LinkedIn and we can now expect content on LinkedIn. Chrome has weird security issue. Beware.

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GIS and Geographic Inquiry

This is a nice resource from eSchoolNews. Lots of cool ideas.

“When most people hear of geospatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), and remote sensing (RS) tools, they often think about car navigational systems or mapping tools. But these applications can be used as learning tools in the classroom, too.

Educators are using geospatial tools to help students think spatially, an increasingly important skill used in hundreds of today’s jobs in fields such as law enforcement, environmental management, and public safety.

School leaders, too, are using geospatial technologies to help with planning and decision making. These tools can help districts make more informed decisions related to facilities planning, student transportation, school safety, and more.

To help educators integrate GIS and other geospatial technologies into classrooms and district offices, eSchool News has assembled this invaluable collection of stories, best practices, and other resources to further enhance your arsenal of teaching tools.”

Tags: gis, geography, map, mapping eschoolnews, geoweb

I’ll be honest right now…it felt good not to blog this summer. It’s been a nice break, but school has started again, my other blogging buddies are blogging after their breaks, and I’ve got lots of stuff to ramble on about in the coming weeks. A few things:

THE CHROME BROWSER - This has already been covered ad nauseum everywhere. I haven’t downloaded it, but after looking at it and reading about it my reaction is “meh” I don’t see our school districts adopting it anytime soon, so until then I’ll avoid it until I need to make sure my code works with it.

MY PHOTOBLOG - Amateur Photographer is up and I’ll be posting there fairly regularly. I know most readers of this blog aren’t into photography as a hobby, but I ask you to drop by and post a comment or two to get the ball rolling. I’ve linked it from my flickr profile page and I hope to eventually have a solid community there. Check out my post on the most fun I’ve had this summer, at the Charleston Photowalk. A number of you may also be interested in the new Nikon D90, the first DSLR to shoot video, and it does it in HD.

You’ll notice I’ve got ads on the site. I’m not going to ask you to click on them. But maybe regular users of the new blog will click enough that I can purchase a lens in a couple of years. I still have some cleaning up to do over there. I copied all of my photography and geotag posts from here to the new site, and I haven’t yet deleted the categories. Anyway, I hope you check it out and enjoy.

WINDOWS VISTA - I installed the upgrade package. Oh, the stories I’ll be telling.

Googlers try to sneak in onerous EULA. BUSTED! The company should be ashamed of itself. Web controlled door locks announced. Dumb idea. Xbox 360 to be reduced to $199. Corning warns of LCD glut. Sony raising the refresh rate of its LCD-TV. Why is the phrase "Upping the ante.." showing up a lot?

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Googlers gah-gah over the Google Chrome browser. Will Microsoft be affected? I think not. Chrome is more of a competitor to Safari than anything else. I think it leads to the Google OS. Dell bringing out a ultralite notebook. WiMAX rolling in Baltimore. 802.11n still in draft mode? Why? GUN now 25 years old. Picassa to add face recognition. New iPods on Sept. 9? Looks like it.

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Veoh wins court suit regarding video uploads. Good news for Google in Viacom suit. Jobs given false obit. He’s still alive. Apple applying for touch screen Mac patent. Microsoft gets patent for the PageUp PageDown butons. nVidia SLI now runs on Intel motherboards. Dell slipping again. Virtual worlds being hacked. Quebec sued for not considering Open Source. Sony-Ericsson may be over.

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Orange throttling iPhone 3G speeds. Why offer 3G if you do not want to deliver the product? D90 comes out but not seemingly as good as the Canon. My thoughts on Nikon versus Canon. Computer virus found on Space Station computer. IE8 getting more and more useless PR. Sneaky deal done between Microsoft and Immersion. Lawsuits abound. Dell explaining the Cloud Computing trademark debate. Cisco needs to buy more companies says THE STREET.

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Amazon to use Kindle as a platform for textbooks. Canon EOS 50D getting ink. N96 from Nokia has the Smartphone folks buzzing. nVidia getting ink for speeches and the Tegra chip. 120 GB Zune coming out. Will HP target Sun now? Intel spent half a million in lobbying. Photoshop Elements 7 now out. IPO deals off 75-percent. FAA mess needs to be talked up a lot more.

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Microsoft versus Adobe. Silverlight versus Flash. Microsoft selling Avenue A. AMD selling TV chip business. IE will include Porn Mode. Microsoft looking at HD online video services. Cows line up North and south. Why? Mac Clone company for sale. People do not want VOIP on airplanes. Everyone going to game conferences. Gold farming worth $500 million. People not ready for digital TV. Is Google giving up the free food?

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Microsoft to hire Jerry Seinfeld for TV commercials. Comcast has to fess up about P2P throttling or else. Microsoft PhotoSynth site rolled out. Servers go down immediately. This is cloud computing. Big Foot hoax getting funnier. WTC 7 collapse caused by fire. Poland out to get Microsoft. Plasma still good to go.

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