The Where 2.0 conference was last week in Burlingame, CA in sunny Northern California where they were apparently having a heat wave. The heat, while not quit “right” for the area, was a highly enjoyable experience having come from (and returned to) the chilly, rainy East Coast.
The conference this year was a more enjoyable experience mostly because I went with the goal of just trying to talk to and learn from the people that I met rather than freak out about not being a crack programmer/hacker.
While hackers and geowankers are the people who pushed mapping for the masses (I’m not overly fond of the word neogeography) into the public eye over the past few years they are not the only ones who care about location and information. However, they are the ones who can make things work. Since I get frustrated with my limitations wrt programming the decision to just talk to people about why they were at the conference and to exchange thoughts with people was a good move.
I spent a lot of time talking to a very diverse guy named Thomas (website) about web stuff (he’s done a lot of web design), geo stuff, travel, family, and writing. It was good to have someone to bounce thoughts about the conference off of as compared to last year where I didn’t feel comfortable talking to many people. There was a wider range of participants this year: academics looking to expand their curricula, hackers, journalists, employees of the big guys, and people like me who are wondering where they can fit in now. It was interesting however to hear non hacker/programmers referred to as “tourists” on the back channel. Maybe that concept stems from how this conference developed and who was around when it first started four years ago. I wasn’t - I just found it last year.
And the back channel (IRC), now that was in interesting find. I was talking to a guy at lunch on the first day who said that he used IRC when he was programming. I had to ask what IRC was. Turns out I apparently had just forgotten about it because it wasn’t something that I had to use anymore after grad school. It’s sort of a Chat or IM service for groups and a lot of programmers still use it when they are fiddling with stuff in the middle of the night - because it’s not the middle of the night everywhere in the world and someone will be awake to help them out. Anyway, on the second day I decided to see if there was a channel for the conference and low and behold there was. And with a few minutes of experimentation and a quick trial download of mIRC I was on my way (I’ve since discovered Mibbit which will work for me at work). Wow, can those guys/gals? be catty! Brady stepped in at one point to rein them in but over all the commentary was pretty cool . Something that they (the conference peeps) might consider next year is streaming the IRC channel on stage - I got this idea from the woman I sat next to on the return flight to NYC. She said that is what they do at USC where she teaches and it allows for commenting/questioning but is almost self-policed in terms of cattiness. People tend to watch what they say when the anonymity is partially removed. While I liked the conversation alongside the presentations (it provided some valid commentary) - in this particular case it felt a little elitist.
After the conference I headed to sunny Oakland (which is often sunny anyway but was HOT this time) to spend some quality time with friends and not think so much about geography except to enjoy my current location.
OK - I was out there looking for cheap flight to Paris and came across Vayama.
The site is great - pretty flash heavy - but I can deal with that. It has a simple interface with all of the required flight booking things:
- Automatic airport lookup
- Calender
- Round Trip/One Way/Multi City lookups
- And the coolest map of all (it shows the great circle route that the plane fly - well approximately)
The prices are comparable to those found on Kayak plus they have extra information to help you plan your trip. Basic stuff like a city map, an airport map, links to visa/passport/health information and for those who are also looking for more interactive research - they have linked to the blogs on TravelPod.
But really it was the map that got me. I like to see my route - don’t you enjoy looking in airplane magazines at all of the flight paths? It also looks like they have created their own background map - it’s Flash - but one great thing is that you can pause over any country and the shading changes to show you’ve “hovered” over it and the name of the country pops up. This design is unobtrusive and easy to understand.
They must have paid bank for advertising though. The were in the “Sponsored Links” section when I did a Google search. I honestly picked them because it was something different and it has one of those nonsensical web2.0 names - the other two links were CheapTickets.com and www.wholesale-fares.com.
The United States has been lacking a good flight search site devoted to international travel - maybe this will start to fill in that hole.
Published by Nif at September 15, 2007
in Travel.
So I’m on a plane heading from NYC to TX crammed into the seat between my husband (who likes windows-but I get the aisle on my return) and an overweight hispanic woman and before we even take off the slight woman sitting in front of me and her travel companion at the window get into their seats and promptly recline.
“WTF are they doing?” I think to myself almost out loud.
It might just be my current slightly bitter, misenthropic view of the world (I need to snap out of it,I know) but what makes them so special that 1) they don’t have to follow the same stupid rules as the rest of us and 2) their personal comfort takes precedence over the politics of sharing public space?
Eventually, the flight attendant got them to “put their seatbacks up.”
All was well for awhile-everyone was reclined to some extent, sort of like scales on a centipede, when the nice lady decided to move to the empty seat on the aisle-leaving the center seat empty. She moved and put her aisle seat back and just left the center seat reclined. If she was sprawled out across the two I wouldn’t have minded-who wouldn’t want some extra space? But neither she nor her friend was using the seat for sitting. Why, oh why, can’t people just think a little bit about how their actions affect others.
I should add here that I’m fairly tall-5′10″- and any additional space or perceived additional space is welcome on an airplane. But this time instead of sitting there fuming and hating humanity for the next two hours-I took matters into my own hands and just asked her partner to move the seatback. And, yes, I did it politely.
How easy was that? The seat was moved and that added inch of personal space did wonders to my cranky mind. I think I even smiled at him.
Planes, at least the ones I can afford to fly on are always going too seem cramped and while we can adapt to the tiny space that we choose to be crammed into for hours on end it would be just dandy if we could try to take a second to think about who is sitting behind or in front of us on a crowded flight and think about what we can do to make their flight as comfortable as we want ours to be.
