How Google Maps Saved My Marraige

So, I'm back. Where did I go? Oh, you didn't miss me while I was gone on my honeymoon? That's alright, I didn't forget about you guys... just taking some chill out time with my new wife @Andrea915 now Andrea Self (as soon as she gets her new Social Security card). We had a great time and got to visit all the cool places that I mentioned below (Outer Banks, NC; Washington DC; and Philadelphia). Now we're getting everything moved in and starting to plan for this new "together" thing. Other than the fact that she wants to throw out all my cool posters and collections, I think we're getting along fine.

Thanks to everyone who came to the wedding and contributed to our new life. We got alot of great gifts and got to see alot of friends and family that we hadn't seen in a while.

There was one thing that really saved a lot of fights during our honeymoon. Believe it or not it was a little piece of software from a little company called Google called Google Maps. I used Google Maps every day during our honeymoon to navigate and find our way around the strange an large cities that we were visiting. The version I used was on my Blackberry Curve 8330 and it worked perfectly every time updating in almost real time with the GPS function as to what road we were on. The only time it even tried to flake out for a second was in the rural town of Legget, North Carolina where we stayed at our friend's plantation house called Cedar Lane. (Check out some pics of this awesome historic house on my Flickr page) And I assumed that we only had one tower in the area so it couldn't triangulate my position. I also actually set up Google Latitude on my phone to follow us around so people could see where we were real time during our expeditions around the east coast.

After that, we used Google Maps and my Blackberry to navigate the streets of Philadelphia (isn't that a Bruce Springsteen song?) flawlessly. I looked like I knew where I was going and my wife believed I was an exellent navigator for the week. So, thank you Google. You've saved another marraige (yea, they're in the business of saving marraiges too... didn't you know?).

Geek Gear For A Roadtrip

Well, as most of you know, I'm getting married this week to my fiance Andrea and we are taking a road trip / honeymoon to Washington DC and Philly. So I wanted to share with you guys some essential gadgets and geek gear that I will be taking along with me to stay connected during the trip. Most of these involve my laptops and staying connected to the Internet and Wi-Fi while we're on the road. So essential #1 is:

The Laptop

This is probably the most obvious essential for any trip. A wi-fi enabled laptop can be used at a hotel, coffee shop, and even in the car on the freeway (more on this in a minute). Most hotels offer free wi-fi on the property with a log in password that they give you when you check in. Also while you're out and about, most coffee shops, airports and some restaurants now even offer free wi-fi to their patrons. Some great businesses offering free wi-fi nation wide are:

• Panera Bread Company
  
• McDonalds (not all locations)
  
• Starbucks (must have an AT&T account)
• Buffalo Wild Wings Grill and Bar
• Hooters
• Whole Foods Markets
• Krystal Restaurants has free Wi-Fi in 253 locations.
• Speedway Gas Stations
• McAlister's Deli has many locations nationwide with Free WiFi, use their location finder to check for access.

Power Inverter

This is an essential survival tool for any geek on the road. A power inverter converts your DC power coming out of your car's battery and electrical system to AC power so you can plug in household devices. Some of the things it allows you to do on the road:

• use your laptop for an unlimited time
• recharge your batteries
• power a small TV and DVD player or gaming system on the go
  
• power a small refrigeration device for cold drinks and food on the go
• plug in lighting for camping or emergencies

Smart Phone

To me this is an essential for the road warrior. The new iPhone 3Gs would be the ideal, but any phone with unlimited Internet access will work. You want to have a backup to get your email or access any emergency contact information that you might need over the net. I personally use the Blackberry Curve 8330. Some essential aps that a road warrior should look into:

• Google Mobile Ap - available for almost any brand of smart phone out right now. Check all of your Google "stuff" from the road!
  
• Viggo - available for Blackberry and HTC. Best RSS and news reader for mobile.
  
• Pandora (Mobile) - Pandora is exploding right now. A virtual streaming jukebox for Blackberry, iPhone, PalmPre and WinMo (be sure you have unlimited minutes!)
  
• Google Sync - sync your Google calendar and Gmail address book with your phone. Work in the cloud!
• Facebook Ap - receive and update your status and upload mobile pics from the road... uh yes! essential!
• Twitterberry (or other Twitter ap) - I would consider this an essential (even though my fiance wouldn't) - tweet from the road, plus upload pics and other Twitter essentials.
  

Flip Video Camera
(or other sub-compact HD video camera)

This is another essential for on the go video of your trip that can be easily uploaded to YouTube, your blog or web page so you can easily share your trip with family and friends during and after the trip. See my blog GetAFlip for more info.

A Good Book

After being geeky non-stop, take a second to just chill out with a good book, turn a page, stop worrying about where you can connect and just disconnect. Leave the laptop in the hotel room and turn the smart phone off (but keep it in your pocket for emergencies right?)

Spend time with your family / fiance

Especially if its your honeymoon... nuff said ;-)

I'll see you guys after I get back! Thanks for reading.

Photo by Major Clanger / Flickr

Riding The Next Google Wave

Last week Google previewed the next step in interactive social media communication called Google Wave. Wave will be a combination of:

• - cloud document and media sharing
• - email / threaded email (like Gmail)
  
• - instant messaging

But what Wave will add to the mix will be features like:

• Twitter / social media site search and posting collaboration
• real time media insertion into blogs and web pages
• real time typing for all those on a Wave
• "playback" feature to rewind or forward to see what changes or comments were added in the past.
• live collaboration wiki style
• drag and drop files and media into a wave
• open source API
• Wave applications like Twave (for integration with Twitter) and other apps being developed later
• real time spell and grammar checker using the context of the sentence
  

This could be the first step from just the information age to the interactive information age. It really looks like Google has combined the quasi-real time features of Twitter and Friendfeed with cloud collaboration and added the real time interactivity into it. With many individuals and even families now choosing to leave the "land line" behind and rely on cell phones and their computers for all communication, tools like Wave will become more and more useful and important as we leave old technologies behind.

Old technologies that required us to use multiple steps and to switch between a myriad of different programs are being combined into one with new platforms like Wave. For example:

The old way:

1. You want to share a picture with your friends
2. you email you picture as an attachment to your friend
3. they decide to post the picture on Facebook
4. your friend Tweets about the picture
   
5. another friend emails you asking if they can post the picture to their blog
6. you email them back telling them its fine...
7. the picture has to be manually uploaded to the blog and formatted
8. someone wants to comment on the blog picture but isn't registered with the blog
9. that someone flame spams your comments because he is the ex-boyfriend of the girl in the picture
10. etc...

The new way:

1. You decide to share a picture with your friends
2. You start a Wave with any friend that has a Google account and post the picture for everyone's approval
   
3. You add Twave, Facebook app, and the Bloggy apps to the wave.
4. people on the Wave comment, delete, or add information in real time
   
5. you post the Wave to the Internet (which gets posted to Twitter, FB and your Blog all at the same time in real time.
6. The other people on the wave can keep the wave moving on by adding more people to the Wave and encouraging more interactivity.
   

Where we had to use 4 or 5 different tools before (email client, twitter client, FB, FTP or uploader) we now just use Wave to share and collaborate with anyone on the Wave.

The only problem I see with it is that Wave will make the tsunami (pun intended) of information overload that RSS and Twitter have brought to us look a ripple in the pond. Get your surf board waxed up, its gonna be a gnarly ride dude!

Its The Final Countdown! (to our wedding)

Some of you may have been wondering why its been so quiet this month. Well, I don't want to give you some lame excuses, but there have been some other things on my plate this month, the biggest one being my soon to be up and coming wedding on June 27th 2009 to my best friend Andrea. I'll refer you to my earlier post about us if you want to read up a little.

So, I've been working on wedding stuff with her. I designed my own wedding invitations, RSVP's (see above) and programs, planned and booked our honeymoon roadtrip and helped her in any way I could (without getting in the way). So, we're in the last stages of doing that stuff and trying to finish up the little things that are left.
Things we still need to do:

• new springy looking engagement pics (this Sunday)
• final catering order
• get fitted for tux
• get a haircut
• get marriage license

I'm sure there's more stuff that she has to do but she seems to have it handled. I'm just gonna sit back now and... (yea right!)
I've gotta say, Andrea has done a great job organizing and putting together this wedding. We sent out over 150 invites and have gotten almost 90 RSVPs back. Right now we are looking at a little over 100 peeps coming to our little shindig and we are still waiting on about 50 RSVPs.

Its just been exhausting emotionally, worrying about all these little things we need to do. We both can't wait until June 28th and we head out on our roadtrip to have some fun. Oh, yea, and I know your curious about our honeymoon plans so here's where we are going:

1. Tutwieler Hotel (Birmingham, AL): historic hotel in Birmingham, on wedding night (I don't know whats going to be happening then... probably watch some TV and order room service ;-)
2. Outer Banks / Nags Head (North Carolina): Checking out the Wright Brothers memorial and the best beaches on the East Coast.
3. Washington DC: staying in Arlington, VA actually, which is right across the river, I want to see the National Archives and Library of Congress, she wants to see the boring monuments (JK!)
4. Philadelphia, PA: staying in another historic hotel in Center City (about 5 blocks from Independence Hall), checking out the Franklin Institute, Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, eating some Geno's cheese steaks, fancy dinners and doing our own M. Night Shyamalan film location tour (a film geek idea I came up with that she reluctantly agreed to). Then we're gonna go see a Phillies game. The grand finale will be our last day (July 4th), so we'll be downtown for the festivals, parades and fireworks over the museum and then head out at about 8 or 9pm and drive till we're tired back to Bama.

So, you can see, I've been working like a maniac trying to save up some money for this trip. So, please forgive if you don't hear from The Horse for a few more weeks. Thanks for reading guys and I'll be back real soon with more fun geek info for ya!

My friend Natalie provided me with the title to my blog today (and got that dang song stuck in my head! Thanks Natalie!)

New Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol is found!

The Horse has been following rumors of the new Dan Brown book since The Da Vinci Code came out in 2003. Back then, Dan Brown said that he had started working on a new book about Masonic Symbology and Washington DC. So, the official word is finally out, and the word(s) is The Lost Symbol. The date is September 15th and you can preorder from Amazon here at about a 50% discount!:

What is the book going to be about?
According to early rumors from Brown's website, the new book (now The Lost Symbol) will be about Freemasonry and the way it influenced the founding fathers, the Revolutionary War and the founding and layout of Washington DC.

There was also an alleged plot leak that has been confirmed by Doubleday Publishing. The plot leak concerns George Washington and the secret reason for the American reverses (?) early in the Revolutionary War. Also a scholar discovers a secret in Washington's tomb and is murdered by the CIA.

"Brown's promotional website states that puzzles hidden in the book jacket of The Da Vinci Code, including two references to the Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, give hints about the novel's story. This repeats a theme from some of Brown's earlier work. For example, a puzzle at the end of the book Deception Point decrypts to the message, "The Da Vinci Code will surface."
(from Wikipedia)

One other evidence is some of the books that were published a few years ago that hinted at possible plot lines that Brown might use for The Lost Symbol. One of the better books that I read during this time that I definatly recommend, was David A. Shugarts' Secrets of the Widow's Son. This book goes into the complex layout and symbology of Washington DC and details the early American Freemason practices from founding father's like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

Leave me a comment here if you hear any more plot leaks or rumors about The Lost Symbol and give us a quick review of your thoughts on the book after you read it. (If you can read it quicker than I will be reading it!)

The Hunt For Gollum debuts online today!

If you haven't heard about the new Lord of the Rings "fan fic" film, The Hunt For Gollum, then you've been out of the loop. This was me Sunday when my sister-in law Hannah told me about it. (Thanks Hannah!) I felt kind of out of the geek loop. But I'm back!

Apparently it has been in production for almost 2 years and was created on a budget of $3000 by writer-director Chris Bouchard with all crew and cast working for free! The film is 40 minutes long and made its debut at SCI-FI-LONDON film festival this past Saturday. As of today the owners have released the film to the public on Dailymotion.com as a free view in HD! I haven't had a chance to watch it all the way through but the trailers are VERY well done, and rival anything that Peter Jackson has done in my opinion. The story from the official website is:

The script is adapted from elements of the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. The story follows the Heir of Isildur; the "greatest huntsman and traveller in Middle Earth" as he sets out to find the creature Gollum. The creature must be found to discover the truth about the Ring, and to protect the future Ringbearer.

The official website has all the great interactive content that a big name film would have plus "making of" and deleted scenes, downloads, stills, banners, etc.

Go right now and watch it! Leave me a comment or review here so everyone can see how awesome it is.

Here's the link to the Dailymotion The Hunt For Gollum channel

Full review of the film coming soon from The Horse (after I get a chance to watch it!)...