Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Here's a nifty little piece of Google Maps hackery...

It's a tool that lets your blog's readership pinpoint just where they are on a map. As it uses Google Maps, all they need to do is zoom in to their location, and click to add their name to an icon (and a message and a URL). If your host supports iframes or JavaScript then you can embed the whole map in a blog entry, otherwise you'll just need to put a link to your guestmap where folk can find it...

Sort of like this: My Google Guestmap (I've also put a link into my layout's sidebar).

For further demographic research you can export the resulting data into a copy of Google Earth.

I'm revamping (and relaunching) lav_reviews.

Now going by the name of "Publicly Convenient Architectures", it's intended to be a group blog for sharing the architectural and design quirks of that much maligned feature, the public convenience.

I've given the site a redesign, and will be posting to it regularly - and of course, the more the merrier! I'm also looking at creating a related Flickr community to make it easier to post camera phone shots of interesting public convenience architecture.

You've got to love bands that sing speed metal songs about SF writers and throw books at their fans while touring libraries.

Crowds at BlöödHag shows can expect to be pelted with classic Sci-Fi novels while their hearing is destroyed by the balls-out attack that is uniquely Edu-Core. BlöödHag tears up the stage in a freaked-out frenzy of activity, pausing only to elaborate on the personal histories and great works of the authors the songs are about. In around twenty minutes the show is over, and class is dismissed. The crowd mills about, reading the books they were just hit in the head with, and feeling a whole lot smarter.

BlöödHag songs are biographical/bibliographical compressed works like this little ditty on Neal Stephenson:

On All Hallow's Eve in Fort Mead
In the shadow of the National Security Agency
Away in a mainframe, no crib for a bed
Born and bred by Propellorheads!
Snow Crash ensconced you as a prophet
Silicon Valley copped it to profit off it
Mysteries with just hints of SF Twists
Sealed with a kiss, language virus!
The Command Line Is The Beginning, where does it end?
Quicksilver writing with a fountain pen
Decode and encrypt! Decode and encrypt!
And write! Write now!

Or this one on Alfred Bester

$50 winner, S.F. contest proved Alfred Bester better than the rest
A few more stories pseudo-science non-stop
Like the plot of the Bester book you couldn't drop!
Wrote comics & radio on an 8 years break
'Til commercial TV proved more than he could take
He wrote... The Green Lantern Oath!
He Knew... What the Shadow knows!
When Campbell fell under L. Ron's spell
Alfred said, "You can fuckin' go to hell!"
Bloodhag think and drink to him still
Left his estate to his bartender in his will
Man is not slave to science. Science slaves for a man's mind
When that man unwinds- that's when Alfred Bester writes!
The Demolished Man!
The Stars My Destination!
Fondly Farenheit!
4,217,409!

Oh yes. And there's more...

   

A public toilets in Otorohanga, New Zealand. But why do the ladies get all the delicate terms?

(cross-posted to lav_reviews)

Salon reviews Carla Speed McNeil's wonderful Finder.

Carla Speed McNeil describes her comic book series "Finder" as "aboriginal SF," although "anthropological SF" is probably closer. More than anything else, it's about cultures both pre-technological and post-cybernetic, with all their totems and taboos, and the sparks that fly when they come into contact with each other. The science fiction part is what allows her to bring in any ideas she likes from history, technology and pop culture, real or imaginary, from yurts to robot secretaries to talking dinosaurs.

So rush out and read it now!

There really aren't any excuses - especially now there are several issues up on the web, including the first part of Talisman, the moving story of a young girl learning the joy of books and of reading.