Furthering the discussion of geographic tags on websites, someone has now created a London weblog tube map. It's a list of personal web sites based on the owners' proximity to a particular tube station.

St. Louis: I am rather bummed to see that my old college radio station (for whom I dj'd for 3 years) has yet again been refused a wattage upgrade by the FCC.

KWUR (at Washington University in St. Louis) is one of the only things worth listening to in St. Louis, and the only station playing anything other than top 40 music. Unfortunately, their 10 watt transmitter only broadcasts to a radius of about a mile or so. They've been trying for years to get approval to go up to 100 Watts, but for one bureaucratic reason or another keep getting refused. The FCC has once again done a disservice to St. Louis listeners.

Having moved my never ending quest for free plane tickets to Europe, I am finding the project infinitely more difficult due to the dearth of methods by which one may attain "miles", the frequent flyer currency, as well as the insidiously miserly attitude British Airways has toward coach class passengers. That's another long story. The interesting thing I accomplished this evening was a calculation of the approximate worth of one BA mile: 0.61 Pence, that's just about 1 US cent.

How? By mock-booking numerous flights in various price ranges and comparing them to available mileage flights, I divided the prices I was offered by the number of miles that I could have used. Taking tax into consideration, the average popped out at just about 0.61p per mile.

This number is useful when calculating how much one would benefit from getting a mileage earning credit card, which pays you 1 mile per pound spent. For every £100 spent you therefore get about a 0.61 61 pence return, which is pretty pathetic really, but still justifies the Amex card I got because it has no annual fee. So I win, but barely.

The bottom line is that it is never worth paying extra for BA miles, unless you're receiving them at a price significantly lower than 0.61p. If the credit card has an annual fee, that's probably enough to destroy any benefit from it.

This is the kind of crap I think about. [more info]

If these people really want to accomplish something, they should take their protests to Walnut Creek. Repeatedly disrupting downtown San Francisco will not stop the war, it will only encourage ordinary people and their businesses to move to suburbia. That not only damages San Francisco but it entrenches what they see as "the establishment" in places that are much harder to influence.

A far more effective protest would be to get everyone in cars and stall 'em all on a major suburban freeway. At least it would be non-violent. Idiots who think smashing windows will accomplish anything deserve what they get.

I have been asked to shed light on one of London's most hotly debated topics. No, nothing about war. The question is: When is a "giant game" an altogether new experience, and when is it simply a larger version of the smaller original?

An obvious example is checkers, err draughts. Giant draughts is simply a larger version of the traditional tabletop game. The fact that the pieces are a bit more cumbersome to move makes no difference as the outcome of the game is entirely mental.

Giant Jenga, on the other hand, introduces profound physical changes to the gaming experience, in addition to a significant risk of injury. It is, in effect, an entirely new game.

The implications of this debate are that one cannot just walk naively into the realm of the gigantic expecting nothing more than a magnified version of traditional reality. Strange, unpredictable, and sometime dangerous differences await. What do you think?

For some examples of what the hell I'm talking about check these websites.

Went up to Liverpool with Andy last weekend. Nice town, friendly people, 1000s
of half naked women everywhere you go (no joke!). Despite it's apparant reputation for violence, it seemed pretty safe too. Photographic highlights:

	The famous Liver buildings are actually pronounced LIEver. They're the landmark buildings of central Liverpool along the riverfront.
	Andy and I at the Albert Docks, a very successful and interesting redevelopment on the riverfront with its own Tate Gallery and lots of tourists.
	The Anglican Cathedral. This place is spectacular and apparantly among the biggest in the world. Belive me, it's huge.
	This church was bombed during World War II. Now it's just a shell with trees growing inside. It's a pretty interesting sight.
	Those famous Liverpool girls like to flirt with the cops and try on their hats. Forgot my uniform.
	The hipper the bar, the more dangerous the fish. This place, Modo, features a tank of Piranahs. Sorry about the blurry night vision. I can picure a bar fight ending rather grimly here.

I read an interesting article in the latest Economist entitled "The revenge of geography". It's premium content, so you have to go buy the magazine to read it, but the main point:

"It was naive to imagine that the global reach of the internet would make geography irrelevant. Wireline and wireless technologies have bound the virtual and physical worlds closer than ever"

By associating users' IP addresses with geographic information it is possible to locate them physically with a fairly high degree of accuracy, and thus websites can decide which language to display, whether to allow people to gamble on casino sites, and most importantly, to target advertisments. Furthermore, websites that are mostly relevant to a particular city or region can be identified readily when conducting a search.

I found a rather neat resource called "GeoURL" which is a database of the longitue and latitude from which people maintain their websites. Click the little green box below to learn about websites geographically close to this one:

London has finally done it to me. After 6 months of somehow maintaing a fairly constant bank balance, I'm now heading downhill fast.

The power of this city to suck money out of your pocket is simply incredible. I paid $50 for a minicab ride across town last night. That's beyond obscene. The worst part about it is that I'm starting to accept this sort of thing as normal.

Another friend of mine, Thomas Korte now has a weblog. He makes some good observations about the potential importance of having organized personal information online. Too bad I'm too disorganized to make much out of it.

Legendary Brooklyn-based guitarist and hamburger afficionado Spencer Katzman has himself a website! If you happen to be in NYC I highly recommend checking out a gig. The one at the Brooklyn courts should be especially good... Excelsior.

Again, talking about "blogging" is something I rarely do, but I've stumbled upon a new resource called "Blogstreet" which purports to be a blog search enegine. Dosn't seem to be very complete, but it's a pretty interesting start, and there are all sorts of nifty statistics to check out. Now, I'm starting to regret starting my second blog in a wacky double format because it messes up all sorts of things. Oh well, maybe I'll combine the two, easier to update that way.

In terms of its being a great database of information, one of the internet's most glaring shortcomings is the complete dearth of maps available online. Granted, you can get pretty good street maps on mapquest, and streetmap.co.uk, but general physical and political country maps are very few, and very hard to find.

When searching for a map of northern Italy, for example, I either get listings of wall maps I'm supposed to pay for, or really lousy maps. The only decent repository I've managed to locate is the fabulous Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas.

But even this well organized collection is fairly limited. I wonder if there will ever be a more complete collection. If so, I fear it won't be free.

Very pleased to see that moving companies are finally getting hammered by the law. I have had more than a few friends totally ripped off by these shady punks.

Article: 74 Indicted For Alleged Moving Company Fraud, Extortion

I ate so much cheese last weekend I am feeling ill. Cheese ravioli in cheese sauce with extra chunks of cheese floating in it for lunch. 6 different kinds of cheese with 3 types of bread for dinner. Thought about fondue on Sunday, but I was already way over the line. Maybe next time. Incredibly good cheese though. Mmm... I was going to bring a bunch of cheese back to London, but I ate it. The only touristy thing I did last weekend was spend an hour at the medieval part of the Louvre, which was great. The activity under IM Pei's pyramid at closing time was impressive enough to inspire this composite image, and when I left the Louvre the sunset was absolutely perfect. (see below)