The Solstice approaches, and with it a mere fourteen days until I fly back to San Antonio. A time for me to take a breather and make sure I've sorted everything out in preparation for my return.
The call centre job came to a successful end. It was a fun experience, and one which I'd be prepared to do again should circumstances require. Hopefully they'll have something for me to do when I get back to England in September, but that's too much planning ahead for my fragile mind to handle!
Since I finished work, I've given the Blog another Spring clean, and have upgraded to the latest formal release of BlogEngine. This is a good thing, as I'm no longer relying on my hacked together mid-release build. I've recently borne the brunt of a focussed spam barrage, so it's nice to upgrade to something that hooks up better with both Akismet and reCAPTCHA, ensuring the majority of comments are genuine. Once the backlog of spam had been flushed, I discovered a few sincere posts and contact messages lurking in the mire. It's always nice to be noticed.
With the coding urge temporarily strong in my being, I took the opportunity to hack together a simple Foursquare widget – displaying geolocation data on a static Google Map. Although I feel The Onion had the best thing to say about Foursquare, I'm still very much on the fence as to whether or not it's a useful service. I've always felt that publishing ones location on the internet is an immense security risk, and could attract all kinds of unwanted attention. Then again, I'm allegedly an international traveller now, and this kind of thing would be useful to help keep track of where I'm going and what I'm doing. So I'm torn.
There's an interesting – if biased – article on Techcrunch about location based services, mentioning Flickr's own entry into the field. But I like to think that's a bit different, as photos usually contain more clues to their location than simple latitude / longitude pairing. If I didn't want strangers to know where I've been pointing my camera, I wouldn't show them what I was pointing at.
I eagerly await the chance to be an Appleslut by nabbing myself an iPhone 4 this week. Got a feeling it'll be the usual mad early-morning queue on launch day, what with my mobile network not taking preorders, but I have ways and means. Either way, I'll make sure I take an unlocked phone over to the States, so I can get a monthly SIM card for staying in touch with everyone.
Two weeks to go. I still need to get money exchanged, car registered as off-road, bags packed and suncream obtained.
Lots and lots of suncream.
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