Rotacoo

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Yesterday Microsoft’s Virtual Earth blog announced a whole host of new features for their Live Maps service (that’s their version of Google Maps) and Virtual Earth 3D (that’s their Google Earth competitor).

For me, the key feature of the announcement is “Neighbourhood Subscribe via GeoRSS” which provides an RSS feed of your area, aggregating geo-located content that Live Maps has scraped off the web. Sounds great!

But, when I tried to actually use Live Maps, by clicking an example link to Virtual Globetrotting sights in Spain, I found myself at the homepage of multimap.

Surely I must have clicked the wrong link? Nope, turns out any UK visitor to maps.live.com gets “helpfully” redirected to multimap. The Multimap blog explains how, since being acquired by Microsoft, they are now “the lead consumer mapping experience for Live Search in the UK”.

This would be fine if Multimap was just a re-branded live maps, but in fact it only offers just a small subset of the Live maps features! All the information in that Virtual Globetrotting link above is ignored and you end up at the useless homepage.

The Multimap blog acknowledges that “it may have been a while since you last used Multimap.com”, but there’s a reason for that - it’s rubbish. Adding a few of the Live maps features only makes it slightly less rubbish, and for UK visitors breaks every link to a specific map.

For now, you can around the redirect by going to this Live maps link or by adding “mkt=en-us” to the URL parameters, but that’s not really enough.

If the goal is to lure visitors away from Google Maps then Microsoft are going about it the right way with Live maps, and the very, very wrong way with Multimap. Hopefully they reverse this decision sooner, rather than later.

Updated: Well everyone shouted and eventually they listened: Live Maps UK has been restored.

I always thought the best thing about having my own domain name was being able to invent crazy email addresses off the top of my head and have them still work, through the magic of “catch all” email. Sadly, for me at least, the catch all is no more.

Way back in the dotcom era (as it is known) I purchased my very own domain name, shreddies.org. Back then I had little interest in hosting a website, as blogs hadn’t been invented and I had nothing to sell or advertise. But I did like the idea of being my own email provider.

While everyone else’s email was either jamesturnbull9992@hotmail.com or 789789798@compuserve.com I was using ad-hoc e-mail addresses all over the place. When I was signing up to boo.com my email address became boo@shreddies.org, and I followed the same logic for everything. This was much to the confusion of people asking me for my email address in the street - “Your email address is the same as our company name? What a coincidence!”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well the move went well, my wife and I have arrived in Oxfordshire with no major breakages, and starting to adapt to the English way of life.

What I want to know is why does it take so long to get ADSL installed? What are BT doing for those “7 to 10 working days”?

Anyway, if you’re ever looking for wireless in Abingdon, look no further than Cafe Gia’s. They also do good cups of tea.

(Disclaimer: this post should probably be on my personal blog, but I got rid of that after I never posted there. If you’re only reading this site for the Google Sightseeing meta-news then I suggest you stop reading now.)

My wife and I have both lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for our entire lives so it is with some trepidation that this Friday we will be permanently relocating 400 mile south to Oxford, England.

Apart from the stress of moving away from all our family and friends, I was a little worried about employment in Oxford. We are moving for my wife’s new job, so I have given up my position at LEWIS (who are hiring by the way, great people to work with) and, for the time being, I will be unemployed.

Edinburgh seems to be overflowing with design agencies, which means there’s a lot of Web Development work around. To be fair I’ve not exactly been looking until now, but I’d never heard much about Oxford’s design agencies. The last thing I want to do is write software for a bank, so I was worried about job prospects.

I voiced these concerns to a few England-based visitors to last month’s Refresh Edinburgh and they all told me there was loads going on down south and mentioned a few names of folk in the area. I subscribed to a few key blogs and soon discovered Oxford Geek Night, a regular get-together of web geeks in a pub somewhere in Oxford. It’s very comforting to know that there’s enough people in the business down there for them to get together and fill a pub with geekery.

I’ve missed the most recent Geek Night but will be attending the next one, and in the meantime I’ve subscribed to a bunch of job-based RSS feeds and begun updating my CV. Since the last time I was seeking work the percentage of boring .net development jobs seems to be even higher, but it looks like there’s one or two positions doing agency web development.

Of course, with some free time I may even manage to implement a few things from the massive Google Sightseeing to-do list.

I just watched a video on Lifehacker about how to wrap your headphones around your iPod. It reminded me of the “Oooh, that’s clever” moment I had when I first watched Ninja T-shirt folding - a movie that revolutionised my holiday packing forever.

So I followed the movements in the clip and ended up with this mish-mash of cables:

I think the clever system fails when a) Your headphones are of the “different length to go around the back of your neck”¹ style and b) Your cheapo eBay iPod case has a cord attached. I guess I’ll go back to the old “stuff em in your pocket” style.