Tech Blog

[#1]

I'm a child of the '60s, saw the first moon landing live, and read Popular Science well into my late teens (until I discovered girls didn't read PopSci).

I've always been blown away by how we simple hairless monkeys can take some bit of tech and put it to all sorts of uses.

Take the humble orbiting satellite for example. Put enough of those in the sky, synchronize their internal clocks, mix in a bit of fancy math and you've managed to create a GPS navigation system.

Now take that, bring in a big company called Google -- who then drives funky camera equipped cars around most of the passable roads on the planet, hooked up to that same GPS navigation system, and you've got a way to see what any street, building, neighbourhood, or wilderness area looks like from the comfort of your own computer screen.

In my case, all this tech came together on a a vacation -- we wanted to check out the narrow road and views from the lava flow field at Makena, Maui as we'd heard they were narrow, twisty and steep. So we turned to Google Street View .

And yes, the roads were as described, and so was the view when we got to the parking lot at the end -- which we may have likely passed up, if it weren't for the happy marriage of different types of tech to help make the vacation trip just a bit more enjoyable.

And yep, maybe I'm easily amused or easily pleased, but yes, I do like it when tech can be used to make things simpler or, through easily distributing (maps, images etc), simplify the sharing of knowledge.

[#2]

google map is a very useful tool, full of fun, I can even found our samll village, this is unthinkable in the past