The couple of years I spent in London in late 80s I was fascinated with the hobbies the English get in to - from heritage train spotting to pub and inn sign watching to crop circle speculation.
Circa 2007, I wonder if they are in to two more recent technology driven hobbies?
Geocaching - I took my son to a couple of caches recently. Silly me, I thought the GPS would just get us there. The hiding places
are evil. Of course, did not help that I punched the wrong coordinates
in to the GPS - I entered degrees and minutes when the GPS unit expects
decimal degrees. About a 30 mile error. So I turned off the GPS and
drove mano to the location in a park, and we looked and cursed and
kicked. The next time I punched it up correctly, and as backup got a
printout with a zoom on Google maps and went back. A nice way to show
your kids different sites and technologies. There are 450,000 caches
worldwide. BTW - non-cachers are also termed "muggles" in this community.
GoogleEarthChasing - this one is about finding interesting and mysterious things using GoogleEarth and Google Maps. Like why the Veep's house is de-pixelated. Or what the Tuscon airplane "boneyard" looks from high above. Or how the Google 767 will look at Moffett. Man, the tabloids could have a field day with this technology -)
I am going to try out a mashup. Use GoogleEarth to help me ferret out those pesky Geocaches. Even the second time, we could not find the cache. Any British folks want to help out?
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