Lately I’ve been riding my mountain bike to work. It’s really been great. I love it, other than the fact that I can never seem to get to work at a decent time (ok, maybe I love that too). The ride in is quite the workout as it’s pretty much all uphill. Which means, the ride home is… fun, really really fun.

Between my excitement to be off, and my excitement to be riding.. and my excitement to be riding downhill.. I get a little too excited sometimes. Yesterday was one of those days. MacbookPro on back, clipped into my pedals, I braved the hill. Screaming down Lady street was I.

“Oh, there’s a bump in the road?” I thought to myself.

“No problem, I’ll ease back over my rear wheel and let the bump bring up my front wheel. Then, I’ll ride it out.”

Usually, this goes without incident, mind you. Yesterday however, things were different. Perhaps I wasn’t used to the added weight of the Macbook on my back, causing my case to swing like a pendulum behind me.. pulling me farther and farther back, all while causing me to simultaneously lose balance. It was then that the park bench came into view. I was fighting to gain back control of the bike, but I couldn’t maneuver its front wheel back to the ground. Gravity had taken over. My bike slammed into the bench, throwing me sideways. Clipped in tight, my bike came up and over with me. The Macbook? It raced in an arc over my head, strap in hand, my eyes on the prize. In an effort to save the Macbook from certain death, I allowed my hip to slam into the top of the far side of the bench. Thousands of traffic laden eyes watched in entertainment as I picked myself off the ground and untangled my handle bars. Like a kid with a trophy, I smiled ear to ear. Epic, truly epic. 

There’s a nice pic of my bruise below. Good stuff, indeed.

Did I watch the NCAA championship? Please, I’d rather fill my weekend with twitter spam. This past weekend was the Championship I had been looking forward to. The first Major League Gaming (MLG) tournament of the 2008 circuit. Location? The Meadowlands. Time? All weekend, baby. Aired on television? Nope. Live feed online? Indeed. How’d it go? Read:

Team Final Boss, the Halo 2 Champions won the first event of the 2008 MLG Halo 3 circuit in the Meadowlands. Final Boss fought back from the losers bracket after being defeated by Team Instinct, who eventually placed third overall. The Championship game came down to Final Boss vs. team Classic who had gone undefeated throughout the tournament, including a decisive victory against pro team Carbon. Since the tournament was double elimnation, Final Boss had to defeat Classic in two best out of five series’. This proved to be easy work for Final Boss, who paved over Classic on the main stage at MLG Meadowlands.

Google just released a Static Maps API. That means no more grabbing screenshots. This is some great timing as I’m currently working on a project which needs to incorporate static Google Maps. It’s really quite cool how it works. No javascript, just an image. Within your html, you simply place an image with the source pointing to a URL which contains parameters such as location, zoom level, map type etc.

Here’s an example using the following url:

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?markers=29.204019,- 81.049919&zoom=12&size=512×512&maptype=roadmap&key =MAPS_API_KEY

In the example URL above I’ve bolded all of the parameters. There are numerous available parameters, of which I used five; markers, zoom, size, maptype, and key.

You’ll see that I used the markers parameter to define where I wanted the marker placed. In this case it’s at Daytona Beach (Bike Week starts this weekend, after all). If you don’t want a marker, and just a clean map of an area you would use the center parameter rather than the markers parameter. Those numbers that come after the markers parameter are the latitude and longitude. How did I come up with these values? I visited google.com/maps and brought up the location I wished to mark. Then I clicked the “link to this page” button at the top right of the map. The url it spit out contained the latitude and longitude I needed.

The next parameter used was zoom. This value can be set anywhere in the range of 0-19 with 0 being a view of the entire earth. The next two parameters I could have left out, as the values I selected for size and maptype are the default values anyway. But, it is nice to have the option to select a size, horizontal pixels by vertical pixels as well as the option to select a mobile map type using the maptype parameter. The last parameter I used was key. This is required as this is where you place your specific API key. You can obtain this key for free.

This is just a very brief example of what you can do with the Google Static Maps API. For more information check out Google’s documentation.

Wired posted an article yesterday about the GM built self-driven car, called “Boss”. It’s really interesting stuff. The SUV is slam loaded with number crunching processors, lasers, GPS, and all kinds of geeky goodies. What it does is quite amazing. It literally drives itself down the highway, stopping at stopsigns, merging to traffic, etc. etc. Below is a video of the beast.

Mentioned in the video is the idea that we’ll see consumer cars with this capability within about ten years. TEN YEARS! How awesome is that? Now, of course this would raise all kinds of concerns. First, you wouldn’t want your car’s trunk to be full of servers and you wouldn’t want a dozen antennas and orb like projectiles sticking out from every angle.

So, first and foremost the technology that makes it happen would have to be seamlessly integrated. I don’t see that being too big a deal. What I do see as a big deal is, how good will it really be? Will we be able to actually sit back and relax enough to trust our car to drive us around? At first, I think it would be quite terrifying. But, where I see this being particularly applicable is on Interstates. Perhaps auto-pilot.. err auto-drive wouldn’t be able to engage unless you were on an interstate. In which case a new option would appear on your touch screen HUD dashboard reading, “Auto-Drive” for example.

Then, of course, the question of how comfortable are you allowed to get will come in to play. Once Auto-Drive is enabled can the driver rider fall asleep, swivel his/her chair around to partake in the entertainment facilities of the back of the vehicle? I think that will all be figured out in time.

But, to help limit incidents I imagine in the initial stages it would be limited to interstate only use (which makes perfect sense and is probably the only situation I’d want to use it in anyway) and the driver would be able to take over control at any point by simply grabbing the steering wheel, or hitting the brake or accelerator. I wonder what effect this would have (coupled with a hybrid or electric power plant) on the airline industry. Anyway, I won’t be getting a car anytime soon but now ten years from now is looking like a good purchase time.