Hoke’s Ramblings

Wow. I was going back through Ye Olde Hoke’s Ramblinges Archyves and came across a post from 28 November 2005 stating that news of my (then) recent Mozambican dive trip was imminent. Hmmm.

In honour of this momentous occassion, I dug up this video taken by some Hungarian tourism scouts who happened to be on our snorkelling trip, where we came across a feeding frenzy of countless mantas and whale sharks – definately the highlight of the trip!

Here’s Ed finning like there’s no tomorrow trying to keep up with one of these magnificent beasts…

Maybe I won’t be so shoddy posting about my upcoming trip to Sodwana in early December. But you never know.

It seems to me Kalahari understands the true spirit of Christmas shopping…
And on that note, I’m feeling like a bit of an e-commerce junkie, with three orders pending at three different stores.

I know the whole world’s getting a bit tired of the all the rah-rah for Google, but besides being generally on the ball with good usable stuff, every now and then they pull something out of their hat that just makes your day.

For example… I have a colleague stuck in the sticks in Mexico who needed some touch-ups done on some UI screens he was working on. They were too big for our work server, so I suggested he mail them to my gmail account. Obviously no problems there. That’s not my point.
The mail comes through and I see all these images come to about 15 MB. Silently cursing to myself about what a dolt he is for not zipping these things, I click on the ‘download all’ button, expecting to say goodbye to a not insignificant portion of my remainging monthly ADSL cap.

Lo and behold, Gmail comes back with a neatly packaged zip file, less than 300kB in total, which I downloaded in a matter of seconds!

Thank you, Google

PS: for another good rah-rah blog I recommend Google Operating System (not affiliated with Google in any way).

Warning: sever techno-babble follows…

I found via Google Earth Blog that there’s a network link that will show you episode-by-episode break-downs of what’s been happening to the Fox-River fugitives each week.

As an exercise in on-the-fly unpacking and re-packing of zip files (because that’s all KMZ files are, really) – I decided to take that file, unpack it, go through the KML code and insert the appropriate timestamps so that you can use Google Earth’s funky new time-slider gizmo to scroll through the episodes and only show the placemarks for a particular time.

I won’t mention the usual cliches of too much time etc, and I’ll hear none of it from y’alls, either!

PS – major spoiler alerts, obviously, if you’re not current with the US/Canadian episode schedule.

Get the timestamped network link here

Note: if you just get some meaningless text, instead of launching GE, try pressing F5 or Ctrl-F5. Otherwise just get the direct link here (will not update automatically)