Until recently, good interactive maps were something you could only get from desktop software like Streets and Trips or MapSource.

When Google Maps came out, it was quickly hacked for use on other websites. I didn’t think this would last, but when I did, I started playing with it myself. And then even more surprisingly, they opened up their API for everyone to use.

The utility here it to simply share some geographic data, plotting custom points on a map that they can look and and really understand where things are and how far apart they are – without installing CDROMs full of map data and deciding amongst a bazillion different mapping formats.

I’ve got my implementation in a good state now and I’m opening it up for others to play with.

My Coordinate Maps allow you to plot all kinds of data:

• A single point
• Points from the Geocache GCNHFG
• Aquariums of the World found by Geocachers
• Disney Benchmarks (dynamically scraped from this page)
• Some Geocaches in the San Francisco Bay Area from a GPX file

And there are number of not-so obvious features:

• Click a point for more info about it.
• Click and drag the map to move it around.
• You can use arrow keys, +, -, page up, page down for navigation
• GPX files of Geocaches will display with custom icons.
• GPX files can be uploaded in .zip format so they will load faster.

It gets kinda slow when you start trying to display hundreds of points, but it’s good up to a thousand or so. Check it out.

Check out the new Yahoo! News Labs, a place where we’re experimenting with new ideas in Yahoo! News. I can write more, but you might as well just read my post on the Yahoo! News Labs 360 blog.

Here are two amazing stories from Geocaching logs I saw this week.

The first was a guy who lifted up a random light pole cover in a parking lot to demonstrate where people sometimes hide caches and actually found a cache – mine!

3 PM Some friends and I came to this “Museum” after lunch and I was showing them how some of the geocaches could be hidden. Well, guess what? Look there is a chache here! How surprising! No GPS, no coordinates, didn’t even know there was a cache here! (I did have my GPS in the car, though). Oh, well. I took nothing, left a penny, and signed the log. I then looked up the cache and found out it was a multi. I do know where all the answers are though (and I do own an Apple I ) . So I did it a little backwards and got cache #296. It counts. Thanks for the cache and interesting adventure!

The second is the story of a guy (not me) who decides to take a “shortcut” through the woods, falls off a cliff and continues on to the cache.

TFTC! An early morning hike and cache that went very wrong. Originally thought somehow that the trail to this was off of the main road: another lesson for me to read the logs first that I won’t soon forget this time. I decided to try to orienteer my way down to the cache from the main road (my first mistake in judgement.) When I got near the cache, I tried to work my way along a steep slope, (my second and REALLY bad mistake in bad judgement.) The earth gave way and I wound up sliding down the slope about 10 feet, and then there was no more slope! I fell another 15 or 20 feet after that onto loose earth. I sled down feet first with my front against the slope. I landed hard, but was fortunate not to break anything. My back was (is) VERY SORE , but my legs were not hurt at all, and after a few minutes of taking stock of myself (First Aid training came in REAL handy today!) I knew with confidence that I could walk out even if I found no help along the way, which proved to be the case. It took me 2 searches to find my glasses, which made me feel even better. The sore muscles made breathing a pain and I tried to limit myself to short shallow breaths. I must have taken about 3 hours to slowly walk out back to the car parked at the gate from the cache, with lots of stops that didn’t do much to make my back feel better. At the end, I walked along with both hands pressing against my lower back to try to support the aching muscles.
Otherwise the walk was beautiful. Amazing how you can still aprreciate a beautiful day in the woods when you are hurting ….
The show must go on: despite (or maybe because of) the pain, I still went up to the cache and took the Jeep Travel Bug. However, I did pass on taking pictures ….
The rest of the day has been spent laying in the tub in hot water or laying on the back porch couch with a heating pad under my back. Wearing the backbrace helps me get about.

In his defense, it was a really nice spot!

My Mom won a Sirius satellite radio receiver with a free 3 month subscription. My parents didn’t want it and I wasn’t eager to start paying for radio either, but it seemed like a fun thing to try for free, so they agreed to send it to me to try. It arrived on Monday and I set it up.

The model in the box was the Sirius Sportster. Unless this is built into your car, the setup is going to be pretty clunky. There’s the receiver which you plug into a dock, which you mount to the dash which you plug into wires that lead to an antenna puck and the cigarette lighter for power. Now if I want to charge my cell phone or something, I can’t listen to the radio. The receiver has a built in FM transmitter, so I found an empty channel (not easy to do here) and heard it start to play.

I was expecting that the sound quality would be really great digital quailty. Instead it sounded like a low-bitrate MP3 – all swishy on the high frequencies. FM is not as full-sounding, but at least it doesn’t sound distorted.

I also expected there would be hundreds of channels to choose from, but there’s only 65 and of those only a few interested me. Heck, I can get nearly that many over FM now, even if half of them are talk radio in Spanish.

The receiver itself was easy enough to navigate and change settings. 20 presets would useful if I could find that many stations I liked. They have NFL, NBA and NHL coverage, but no MLB. It would killer if I could listen to Red Sox games, but I guess not today; XM’s got that.

On my way home I stopped at a light underneath a tree and I lost the signal. What’s with that? My old analog radio doesn’t have that problem. Well, it does have that problem under long bridges, but so would satellite radio. I’m not the ideal satellite radio customer anyway – my daily commute is only about 7 minutes long.

Maybe this would be a great thing for long-haul truckers who are always looking for a decent station, but I can’t see myself keeping it past the 3 month trial at $12.95 per month. The future is in customized radio folks, not just more of the same old channels. Forget the expensive satellites, give me WiFi in my car and let me listen to my LAUNCHcast station or whatever else I want on the net. I can already get a decent net connection using my Treo as a modem. Those networks are only going to get better. Proprietary networks such as satellite have no chance once the Internet goes completely portable. Siriusly.

Here’s a typical Wednesday:

8:30 – Wake up unnaturally late and realize I’m missing an 8:30 conference call
8:40 – Dial into conference call from the couch while reading email
9:00 – Take a shower, get dressed
9:40 – Arrive at work, look at calendar for the day: mostly meetings all day
9:45 – Status meeting
10:00 – Schedule conference call for 3 pm
10:15 – Add 5 pm interview to my calendar
10:17 – Respond to request for for a 2-4 pm meeting. Reschedule 3 pm conference call to 4.
10:30 – Find out my 11 am meeting was resceduled to 3. Respond by saying I can’t make it.
11:45 – Do my 10:30 meeting
12:00 – Run errands. Recycling has been in my car for 2 days and is starting to smell. Stop at Wendy’s on the way back.
12:45 – Eat lunch at desk
1:00 – Meeting, wait, no it’s cancelled, spend the hour doing email and writing some documentation
1:30 – Cancel scheduled 2 pm meeting so I can go to the entire 2-4 meeting
2:00 – Go to 2-4 pm meeting
2:30 – Meeting actually starts. Since much of the topic at hand is not directly related to my job, spend most of the meeting reading email on my laptop
3:00 – Respond to IMs and phone calls asking why I’m not at the other meeting.
3:30 – Still reading email while trying to pay attention to meeting at the same time where necessary
4:00 – Run back to my desk to catch conference call.
4:30 – Reread email and discover conference call is tomorrow (misunderstanding), try to figure out what to do with an extra half hour
5:00 – Interview
5:30 – More email and random stuff; no point in starting any projects now; write blog

In summary, my day starts with a schedule which is rapildy changed in the morning, followed by cancellations and movements throughout the day, making it completely unrecognizable by the end of the day. So much for planning.

The upside: I’m pretty much caught up with my email.

My Dad forwarded this one on. Some really good puns here, more than the usual vulgar joke!

Energizer Bunny arrested – charged with battery

A pessimist’s blood type is always b-negative.

Practice safe eating – always use condiments.

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.

Shotgun wedding: A case of wife or death.

I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded.

Marriage is the mourning after the knot before.

A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

Corduroy pillows are making headlines.

Sea captains don’t like crew cuts.

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

A successful diet is the triumph of mind over platter.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

A gossip is someone with a great sense of rumor.

Without geometry, life is pointless.

When you dream in color, it’s a pigment of your imagination.

Reading while sunbathing makes you well-red.

A man’s home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.

Dijon vu – the same mustard as before.

When two egotists meet, it’s an I for an I.

A bicycle can’t stand on its own because it is two-tired.

What’s the definition of a will? (Come on, it’s a dead giveaway!)

A backwards poet writes inverse.

In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism, your count votes.

A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.

If you don’t pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

Show me a piano falling down a mine shaft, and I’ll show you a flat minor.

When a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds.

The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered.

A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

You feel stuck with your debt if you can’t budge it.

Local Area Network in Australia: The LAN down under.

He often broke into song because he couldn’t find the key.

Every calendar’s days are numbered.

A lot of money is tainted. It t’aint yours and it t’aint mine.

A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.

He had a photographic memory that was never developed.

The short fortuneteller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

Once you’ve seen one shopping center, you’ve seen a mall.

Those who jump off a Paris bridge are in Seine.

When an actress saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she’d dye.

Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead-to-know basis.

Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.

Acupuncture is a jab well done.

Marathon runners with bad footwear suffer the agony of defeat.

The poor guy fell into a glass-grinding machine and made a spectacle of himself.

Thanks MediaPost, for announcing my promotion from lowly Engineering Manager to Yahoo! Executive Management! I’m sure my boss will be by my cube any minute now to hand me the keys to the executive washroom.

But calling Jeremy a Marketer – isn’t that considered libel for an engineer? Factchecking is for wussies anyway.

By the way, the position is still open. Apply today!

12/2011 Update: I can confirm that the Splix drivers work great!

Dear GoogleBot, Yahoo! Slurp, MSNBot, Ask Jeeves/Teoma, etc.,

Yesterday I purchased a really cheap laser printer, the Samsung ML-1740. There were conflicting reports of whether or not the printer would work with my Mac. Apparently Samsung had a driver, but then pulled it. After a lot of searching, I finally found a link to the drivers which were not pulled from the Australian version of the Samsung website.

I’m replacing my Epson Stylus 777 printer (in iMac blue) which prints nice photos, but I don’t print photos often or realy print often at all. That was actually the problem. The ink cartridges would clog up and I’d always have to clean them before I could print anything legible. The printer was slow, noisy (it freaked out the cat) and produced soggy paper.

The new printer is quiet and prints pages quickly in one fast pass. Back in college I remember first using the $1,000 Apple Laserwriters and wishing I could have one of my very own. Now the same quality is available at less than $100. Amazing.

Anyway, please consider this blog for your index when people search for “Samsung ML-1740 Mac Drivers”. It would have really helped me out.

Sincerely,

Jeff Boulter
Search Engine User

Update: It worked! I’m #2 on Yahoo. Still waiting for that “other” search engine to return some quality results though.

In LA, if you want to watch for celebrities, you go hang out in Hollywood, Burbank or Rodeo Drive. Apparently in Silicon Valley you hang out in Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve.

On Saturday, I put on my headphones and went on a solo 13-mile, 12-geocache hike of most of the trails in the park. Near the end I saw some people I recognized.

The first was Udi Manber, former Yahoo! and current CEO of A9.com. Or at least I’m pretty sure it was him. He was running and I’m not used to seeing him in running shorts and no shirt.

Later on, I saw Michael Toy, Manager for the Netscape Browser back in its heyday. I probably wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t been wearing a big blue shirt with “Zarro Boogs” on the front.

What, you’ve never heard of these people? Well, they’re celebrities in my tech-centric world.

I first met Dinesh and his wife Joy at the highest point of the PG&E trail in Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve. We were exhaused after climbing the steep trail on a warm day. They were resting at the top of the hill. I was trying to discretely search for a cache there while they sat nearby until they figured out what I was doing and said they were geocachers too.

We started chatting and it turned out that they had pushed up these large, heavy carts they had made up the mountain as training for some hiking they had planned in Death Valley. Nuts. I’ve run into them a few other times as well, usually in the middle of nowhere on some crazy hike.

I just noticed that Dinesh has a website where he lists all the quirky long-distance hikes he’s done. It’s entertaining stuff and proof positive that there are people out there that are crazier than me.