Above the line

One of my goals for 2008 was to try and average 6 hours of exercise a week, and burn on average 3,600 calories during that exercise. Apart from the first few weeks of the year I haven’t succeeded (see my goals page), but I’m happy to report that this week will be the first week since the end of January where I will be “above the line” with this goal. My exercise journal “week” runs from Wed-Thu, and I am over the 6 hours and 3,600 calories this week, with one day to go. Let’s see if I can keep it up for a few weeks.

Tonight’s exercise was a very enjoyable 28km ride on the bike around the local area, average speed just under 26 km/hr. I included some of the hilly streets so it wasn’t a bad effort.

John blogged about the new “Street View” available as of yesterday on Google Maps, and I have had a bit of a play with it today. If you haven’t tried it yet, go have a look it is pretty amazing, giving you a street-level virtual view of the streets (the majority of streets in Australian cities have been photographed). Adrienne was actually using it yesterday when I arrived home from work. She’d seen it yesterdays newspaper and was looking up some of the accomodation places she’s been reviewing for our Tasmania trip. I can think of many useful applications for this. I already use MapMyRun and MapMyRide to plan runs and bike rides, now you can use GoogleMap’s street view to actually see what the route looks like before you go (for bike rides, checking out the road surface etc could be really handy). I am also a bit of a nervous navigator when I’m driving to new places and can see myself using it to help me plan my drives (eg what does the destination building look like, what buildings are on the corner of an important intersection en route).

To the people who are complaining it is an invasion of privacy, I say, what a load of piffle. There’s nothing there that people can’t see by driving down your street, and as John pointed out, it’s not exactly “real time”, more like a few months old. Anyway, I think it is pretty good use of technology and applaud the Google folks!

I can’t believe my blog has ticked over 30,000 hits as of today – thanks to all you guys out there for reading – it means a lot to me.