A pretty cool new service that should help, if in just a small way, to make us better informed about the rest of the
world. According to this TV
Squad post, Jump TV, an online subscription service, will allows media
fanatics to have channels from around the globe beamed directly to your computer. From Thai TV Global to Nepal 1
in India and TRT Int’l in Turkey, you can watch the history of global programming as it unfolds. It will cost a small
fee for each channel, but perhaps that’s a small price to pay for global enlightenment.
Lewis and Clark by Satellite
The story of the Lewis and Clark expedition has been told so many times in books, articles, TV and Web sites, you’d
think there’s nothing more to learn about one of the greatest American expeditions of all time. But you’d be wrong. The
USGS (who’s site I really enjoy and which ought to be explored in your free time),
has got a section on the Lewis and Clark expedition where they track
L&C’s route via satellite. It’s quite interesting.
The group of twenty-two individual images in the collection are satellite scenes that provide a modern view of
historically significant stops along the expedition route. It’s an interesting, space-eye view of an epic trip.
Worldview Widget
Mac users who have the new Tiger OS installed are probably aware of one of the new OS’s great new features: Dashboard, which lets you keep a series of little apps called Widgets right up front for immediate use. Upon installation, some of the widgets are installed as defaults, like a clock, a calculator (very useful) and a stock ticker.
But at the Apple site you can also download various widgets to enhance your collection and improve productivity. For travelers and folks who are just generally interested in the rest of the world, there is an interesting widget called the WORLDview widget that I just installed. It is quite useful for me, as I try to find information about various countries I might be blogging about. The widget displays all the countries in the world, and gives you the country map, the national flag, country coordinates, the capital and the continent. It’s pretty cool, if a bit limited. I’d love to see them incorporate news links for each country, so that if you click on, say Finland, you might get a quick dose of news about the country. But even as is, it is quite cool.
Bill Bryson Working on New Book
I caught this on Writtenroad and thought it was interesting. Bill Bryson,
one of my favorite travel and science writers (if we can call him that after just
one science book, a wonderful book, by the
way), is said to be working on
a new book about growing up in the US in the 1950s. He says the book, “is a complete change from A Short History of
Nearly Everything”, but knowing Bryson it won’t be that different as it is sure to be hilarious and informative.
Bryson, who recently moved back to the UK after years in his native US, says he is staying put. He was doing so much
travel back and forth anyway, he says, that he figured he ought to just stay overseas. That’s fine. In this day and age
and writer can pretty much work from anywhere. As long as he keeps on writing, it doesn’t matter much where he
lives.
Glorious Norway on Foot
The name’s Olsen, O-L-S-E-N. So yes, you might have guessed that my forebears come from Scandinavian lands. Indeed
they do. Yet while I have seen every continent except Australia, and lived in a couple of other countries, I have never
been to Scandinavia. Needless to say, this is a HUGE goal, up there high on the life list. And while I will be making a
trip to the “homeland” at some point over the next few years, for now I suppose I have to content myself with articles
like this one in the New York Times about the glories of Norway.
As you probably know, Norway is UP THERE. It is at the same latitudes as Alaska, Greenland and Siberia. So it can get
cold (hence my inclination to walk outside in the dead of New York winter without a coat). But the Norwegians still get
out a lot and explore their country. As the article says, they are avid walkers, and spend many hours and many calories
hiking through the country. And it’s fairly BIG country at that. The national park mentioned in the piece,
Hardangervidda, makes up one-third of the
Hardanger plateau, a 3,860- square-mile wilderness that is four-fifths the size of Connecticut. And the place is
teeming with wild reindeer. One of the beauties of these place where people have been hiking for years is there
are vast networks of mountain cabins where you can crash after a long day. Norway is no exception.
So even before reading this piece I was ready to go to Norway. But as a big outdoors buff, thanks to the article, I
now have a couple of places in mind I’d want to go. A place where I can just walk and keep on walking.