wanderingken.com

Back in December, while hanging out in Sydney, Australia, I recorded an interview with news.com.au’s Editorial Development manager, Charles Brewer. Charlie and I had a very nice chat about the internet, THE FUTURE, and a rather adversarial front-page article from Macleans magazine. Turns out the interview was posted a few days before Christmas, but I was not aware of the fact (or able to listen to myself!) until recently.

If you care to listen in, or to find out what I sound like (though I’m not sure why you’d want to do THAT), a transcript and link to the audio file are posted on Charlie’s blog.

Photographs of children in the midst of war zones are always incredibly striking, due, I’m sure, to the seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of innocence and oblivion in the midst of deadly serious battle.

Fortunately, we don’t have many deadly serious battle zones in Canada, and so children-in-war-zone photographs can usually be nicely filed into the ’somewhere else’ category. I think that other worldliness is perhaps why I find this photo, snapped at a Canadian-Afghanistan mission deployment ceremony in Edmonton, so incredibly captivating. Little Mackenzie Graham is completely oblivious to the heaviness of the moment.

(John Ulan/Canadian Press, courtesy CBC News)

Thought I’d forward this info along… Turns out, first of all, that Google has branded a plane (see below), and, second, that Google used this plane to take aerial photographs of Sydney, Australia today as part of today’s Australia day celebrations. Well, tomorrow, according to my clock, but it’s already happened, so I guess it’s today. The date line is so confusing.

The aerial photographs are intended for Google maps, and, according to Lars Rasmussen, the Google maps godfather, should be ready available online in about 6 weeks. He also stated they may try this stunt in other cities in the future, though I’m sure Edmonton is not anywhere near the top of the list.

In a bizarre twist of the sort one only finds in a turf war between global tech companies, Microsoft has apparently announced a similar flyover of Sydney on the same day, taking their own pictures for their own maps product. I haven’t found any info on whether Microsoft has branded their plane, nor on whether or not they plan to take pictures of each other…

In any case, here’s the plane I’d have needed to watch for, had I been in Sydney tomorrow. I wonder if the stickers peel off?

Well, I’ve survived the Australian outback and am back in Canada, arriving just in time for Christmas. Christmas was packed, what with dinners, parties, gift-giving, a trip to northern Alberta at winter solstice (6 hours of sunlight!), a new niece (yay, Areigha!), and a newly minted RCMP officer brother, but, in between it all, I did manage to sort through my photos and post a selection to flickr. You can find them here.

This set includes the Sydney and Melbourne photos highlighted in an earlier post, adding a few photos from the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, and some shots from a journey I took from Central to South Australia — Alice Springs, Uluru, King’s Canyon, Kata Tjuta, Coober Pedy, and Adelaide.

As always, I must post my favourite… It’s a tough choice this time around, but I’ve settled on this desert sunrise: