Lately I’ve been riding my mountain bike to work. It’s really been great. I love it, other than the fact that I can never seem to get to work at a decent time (ok, maybe I love that too). The ride in is quite the workout as it’s pretty much all uphill. Which means, the ride home is… fun, really really fun.

Between my excitement to be off, and my excitement to be riding.. and my excitement to be riding downhill.. I get a little too excited sometimes. Yesterday was one of those days. MacbookPro on back, clipped into my pedals, I braved the hill. Screaming down Lady street was I.

“Oh, there’s a bump in the road?” I thought to myself.

“No problem, I’ll ease back over my rear wheel and let the bump bring up my front wheel. Then, I’ll ride it out.”

Usually, this goes without incident, mind you. Yesterday however, things were different. Perhaps I wasn’t used to the added weight of the Macbook on my back, causing my case to swing like a pendulum behind me.. pulling me farther and farther back, all while causing me to simultaneously lose balance. It was then that the park bench came into view. I was fighting to gain back control of the bike, but I couldn’t maneuver its front wheel back to the ground. Gravity had taken over. My bike slammed into the bench, throwing me sideways. Clipped in tight, my bike came up and over with me. The Macbook? It raced in an arc over my head, strap in hand, my eyes on the prize. In an effort to save the Macbook from certain death, I allowed my hip to slam into the top of the far side of the bench. Thousands of traffic laden eyes watched in entertainment as I picked myself off the ground and untangled my handle bars. Like a kid with a trophy, I smiled ear to ear. Epic, truly epic. 

There’s a nice pic of my bruise below. Good stuff, indeed.

Did I watch the NCAA championship? Please, I’d rather fill my weekend with twitter spam. This past weekend was the Championship I had been looking forward to. The first Major League Gaming (MLG) tournament of the 2008 circuit. Location? The Meadowlands. Time? All weekend, baby. Aired on television? Nope. Live feed online? Indeed. How’d it go? Read:

Team Final Boss, the Halo 2 Champions won the first event of the 2008 MLG Halo 3 circuit in the Meadowlands. Final Boss fought back from the losers bracket after being defeated by Team Instinct, who eventually placed third overall. The Championship game came down to Final Boss vs. team Classic who had gone undefeated throughout the tournament, including a decisive victory against pro team Carbon. Since the tournament was double elimnation, Final Boss had to defeat Classic in two best out of five series’. This proved to be easy work for Final Boss, who paved over Classic on the main stage at MLG Meadowlands.

Google just released a Static Maps API. That means no more grabbing screenshots. This is some great timing as I’m currently working on a project which needs to incorporate static Google Maps. It’s really quite cool how it works. No javascript, just an image. Within your html, you simply place an image with the source pointing to a URL which contains parameters such as location, zoom level, map type etc.

Here’s an example using the following url:

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?markers=29.204019,- 81.049919&zoom=12&size=512×512&maptype=roadmap&key =MAPS_API_KEY

In the example URL above I’ve bolded all of the parameters. There are numerous available parameters, of which I used five; markers, zoom, size, maptype, and key.

You’ll see that I used the markers parameter to define where I wanted the marker placed. In this case it’s at Daytona Beach (Bike Week starts this weekend, after all). If you don’t want a marker, and just a clean map of an area you would use the center parameter rather than the markers parameter. Those numbers that come after the markers parameter are the latitude and longitude. How did I come up with these values? I visited google.com/maps and brought up the location I wished to mark. Then I clicked the “link to this page” button at the top right of the map. The url it spit out contained the latitude and longitude I needed.

The next parameter used was zoom. This value can be set anywhere in the range of 0-19 with 0 being a view of the entire earth. The next two parameters I could have left out, as the values I selected for size and maptype are the default values anyway. But, it is nice to have the option to select a size, horizontal pixels by vertical pixels as well as the option to select a mobile map type using the maptype parameter. The last parameter I used was key. This is required as this is where you place your specific API key. You can obtain this key for free.

This is just a very brief example of what you can do with the Google Static Maps API. For more information check out Google’s documentation.

The site is a really cool take on a short film by Adobe. You don’t just click play and watch. Instead you grab the scrobber and work your way through, as slow or fast as you’d like. It’s a perfect take on their motto, “Creative License - Take as much as you want”.

AdobeCards.com