November 05, 2005
Yahoo creates the first decent road trip mapping program
Yahoo has released a beta of their new super swanky mapping program, clearly a salvo fired in the direction of Google Maps. It uses Flash (instead of Ajax), and it by-and-large feels like Google Maps, except for one key exception: the ease of creating road trip itineraries.
I love road trips. I love the web. I've long hated that I can't create a decent road trip itinerary on the Web. None of the standard mapping sites (Mapquest, Google, old Yahoo) offered the ability to connect more than two points. The travel sites that offered road trip maps (Rand McNally, AAA), typically had shitty shitty interfaces, and bizarre restrictions (Rand McNally allowed for only 10 destinations on your itinerary).
Playing around with the beta Yahoo Maps, I saw that you can just keep adding destinations, and they keep stringing them together. In no time, I was able to recreate the road trip I took this past spring.
Some drawbacks:
It's not clear that you can save an itinerary. I think you might be able to through "email this," but that's a bit of a hack.
The rendering of the map information is still ugly. Anti-aliasing, people! Love it!
October 30, 2005
more brief new york stories
It's been a while since my first full day in New York. I haven't had time to write, which must be a good thing.
1. Chinatown might be the most... neighborhood-y neighborhood on Manhattan. It's very clear that the residents live and work there... It's got a strong connectedness. Every other neighborhood is such a destination.
2. Brooklyn Bridge: Still fun to walk over.
3. Dinner at Celeste was quite good.
It's hardly a "find" (it's highly-rated in Zagat's), but still, with entrees that hover around $10, glasses of wine for $5, and truly immaculately prepared meals, there's a lot going for it.
4. H&H Bagels: still the fucking best.
5. Though wildly overpriced, taking a horse-drawn carriage around Central Park at night is delightful, and really, something you simply cannot do anywhere else on earth.
6. Dean and Deluca and the Gourmet Garage simply make me cherish the Berkeley Bowl all the more. But Zabar's... I mean, it's a mob-scene mad-house, but it's also got amazing stuff at good prices.
7. Seeing a Big Show at the Met on a weekend is an exercise in near-futility. The Van Gogh drawings were great, but the jostling... ugh.
8. That said, little is as serene as the under-attended Japanese Art rooms at the Met. And many of the pieces there are amazing. My favorite: the gibbons.
9. I don't think the shitty art in the Art Bar has changed in 10 years.
10. The cupcake I had at Magnolia Bakery was not all that. It was okay, but the frosting was too dense for dense's sake.
11. New York Unearthed is kinda pathetic. I mean, I love the material, what little is there, but it is sadly sadly unloved.
12. Hotel Chelsea - definitely grows on you. I'm quite enjoying it here.
13. St. Marks Bookshop - Still the bomb. Probably my favorite bookstore in Manhattan. Proves that Big Chains don't put independent bookstores out of business -- they just put bad independent bookstores out of business.
14. d.b.a. - still good stuff. I ordered an Old Foghorn, which is a barleywine brewed by Anchor. The bartender, not quite knowing what she was doing, served it in a pint glass. Typically, it's served in a smaller goblet, like a Belgian ale. Not that I complained.
