What a beautiful day. If I had to guess, it was around 75 degrees, with bright blue skies all day today. And windy. Windy as all hell. The Santa Anas, named after Mary’s momma, are doing their thing, raising the thermometer and blowing palm frawns all over the roadways. In fact, yesterday on my way to work I got a flat tire on my bike because there’s so much debris in the road.

I needed a one day break from the minority conservative series before trying to tie it all in with one last post. I’ve been really happy with the comments, though and I wanna thank y’all who have been following it all the way through. I know how it’s a pain in the ass to commit all that time to just one piece. I feel that way on Sundays when I pull out New York Times magazine and I see some 15 page story that looks super interesting, but I’m like, damn, do I really wanna invest the next hour reading through this thing?

So, I just downed my two cups of coffee, took my famed whiffle bat shit, and am ready to jot down some of what Myke calls random nueron firings.

Let’s start with Revaz. Dude has been on a tear in deep and meaningful reflection as he travels around India. You can almost see him growing and maturing with every post. I really relate to a lot of what he’s been jotting down. Here were some highlights for me:

Even just driving home to my Aunt’s house, it all seemed so vaguely familiar. My senses have been so awakened since coming here. Bombay is Juhu and Cowpatty beach. Its Bandra and Colaba along with so many other bubbling, thriving spots. It’s auto-rickshaws honking profusely at the pedestrians and bicyclists, whom are barely managing to meander their way through th lanes or scurry across the street…usually to miss getting nabbed by mere centimetres. It’s the infrastructure that makes Bombay beautiful. The congestion, traffic, floods of people, and how it all seems to barely work out in the end.

Then a little drama ensues in the comments thread over whether Revaz is romaticizing Bombay or not. He includes an excerpt of an email his sister wrote him which I thought was incredible:

“Hmmm… For sometime now both you and I have defended this place we know nothing about. We have heard the stories from Mom and Dad and we have listened…to them that should be enough right? To them, there was no need for us to learn Hindi…what’s the use? Well, they sure did miss the point. You can’t live through other peoples stories and you can’t fully understand through other peoples’ translations.

You may be asking yourself, what the hell does all this have to do with my email. Well, we have heard the negative side for sometime: overpopulation, to say extreme poverty is clearly an understatement, corruption, and lack of opportunity are a few that come to mind…so isn’t it natural for us, born and raised in the US of A, to take a romanticized outlook. To depart from the ideals of our parents and long to love and connect with a part our inner being that seems to have been erased or cheated from the identity we strive to embody?

If you feel that “romanticizing is to not do it justice,” realize two things:
1. You just arrived and are still in awe by the overwhelming activity of your senses
2. Realize that by surrounding yourself with the elite, or those who are more well off, you tend to see the “good side” of the tracks. Think about it, so many people don’t move to the U.S. because life is far too cushiony in India…

And I guess the last word of advice I can give you is that when you are challenged to step outside your sphere of intellect that is comfortable, take it in and ask yourself, are you being true to yourself, are you being true to the people who have to live there day to day, and are you being true to the people here: who have no choice but to take your words for truth…(hee hee).”

I also like a lot of his reflections about servitude while traveling and learning more about the Parsi community in India. But I’ll refrain from stealing more of his paragraphs and just link to his blog.

Geo meta-data

I’ve always had this thing for maps and atlases. When I lived in Ohio, my parents and I would actually have “garage sale saturdays,” driving around and buying other people’s useless crap. One of those saturdays we came across this gigantic wall map – huge, you have no idea. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world so we bargained him down and put it above my bed and each night I’d look at that thing and just stare. You’d think it was a television, I never got sick of looking at it. Then, while living at 1669, I decided to put up a big map on the wall facing the toilet. Now, I’ve never been a read the comics while taking a shit kinda guy, but I’d happily extend my session by a couple minutes every time ’cause I’d be looking at that map and I’d be thinking about places I’ve been and I’d think about how those little colored shapes and red dots on that map actually represented real places with real people and real food and real mountains to climb, conversations to be had, high fives to be given. I love maps.

And Willie has the nerve to take down my wonderful map to put up some sort of mispelt manifesto about the glory of marijuna. Willie, the guy who sings more about pot than smokes it. What the fuck man.

So, meta-data is information about information. For example, I’m writing this post here and it’s (sorta) filled with (a little bit of) information. But then, there is also the meta information which you see in that blue box below. It’s the stuff like what time I posted it, what I was listening to while I wrote it, where I was, what kind of mood I was in.

Geo meta-data is the information about information which is related to geography (which is more than just location – humidity, for example, is also geo-meta-data). Anyway, some clever people are doing some clever things with it. Last week I was surfing the net and was reading through Derrick’s weblog (a local emo podcaster here in SD) where I found out about Mappr.

I go to Mappr and what do I see?

What a trip. There’s Laura with her carnalitas in Torreon. So I click on it and I see this:

I love this shit. It’s like cyber-traveling around the USA in real time. You just load the page and look at all the pretty pictures pop up in this state and that.

You can see a map of all my photos here. It’s too bad they’re not international yet though.

Another great site using geo meta-data is Mikel’s the World as a Blog. Here’s a map of the world connected to tons of rss feeds from all over so as soon as someone updates their blog in, say Iceland, a little red dot pops up giving you an excerpt of the post. Mikel also did a great mapping workshop here in San Diego which anyone can add to.

Embarassingly, he’s still got my travel map up on his list of examples. The travel map badly badly needs to get redone, but there are plenty of other sites linked to which are well worth checking out. Geolicious for example is a god damn good idea and I am sure that Mikel is already working on integrating Flickr tags with WorldKit.

I wanted to write some thoughts about RSS and media syndication after listening to the latest Gilmor Gang, but it’s 7:30 and I’m supposed to be at 1669 picking up Raman. We’re off to Sushi Deli 2 and then Thursday Night Thing.