I just discovered the National Geographic podcasts: I’m in so much trouble, I already have so many podcasts that I download every day, soon I’ll be a professional podcast-listener…

I’ve already subscribed to “50 Walks of a Lifetime” from Traveler magazine (a publication to which I used to subscribe, and longingly read each issue) and “Video Shorts”, which included a 3-minute video on how to make the rotten shark dish that I narrowly avoided eating while in Iceland a few years ago.

I can’t, however, get a list of the podcasts so that I can send a link to a specific podcast to my friends who haven’t yet figured out iTunes.

Some beautiful long-exposure photos of the rides at the CNE by night — you can feel the motion! Via blogTO.

I haven’t spent this much time on non-productive work since I discovered RSS readers: Flickr’s new geotagging/mapping feature was released this week, and since a lot of my pictures are from my travels, I felt compelled to map them all. Since I tagged most of my photos with the place name, it was pretty easy: just search for all the photos for a location using the tags, then drag and drop them onto the map at that location.

The satellite views can be particularly compelling: try going to this photo of mine, taken at Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) in Australia. Then, under “Additional Information” at the bottom of the right sidebar, note that it says “Taken in Northern Territory, AU” with a (map) link. Click on that link, and you see a popup of the satellite view of this location, which clearly shows the rock in all its enormous glory.

You can also just go to my map, scroll around and click on locations to pop up the photos, but I’m not really keen about how they’ve implemented that since there are a maximum of about 250 photo references on any given map, and my map runs to 6 pages already.

In rereading the Flickr blog post about geotagging, I also noticed a reference to some new Upcoming.org integration: use the tag shown on the Upcoming event page to tag the photos in Flickr, and the photos will show up on the Upcoming page as well as having a direct link back to the event from Flickr. I’m going to head over to the farmer’s market at Nathan Phillips Square at lunch today (an event that I put on Upcoming) and shoot a few pictures to try this out.

With the acquisition of my new digital camera, I decided to go pro on Flickr, which in turn has led me to start uploading all of my travel photos that have been previously hosted on my travel subdomain. I’m putting them in sets by trip, and tagging with the locations, so this could take a few days.

Many of these were taken with either a crappy old digital camera, or were scanned from 35mm negatives, so the quality is variable. Lots of great old memories, however.

I arrived in San Francisco this week on Tuesday, well in advance of Friday’s BlogHer conference in San Jose, to spend a bit of time seeing the sites. Although I’ve been visiting San Francisco for almost 20 years on business, I rarely get a chance to just be a tourist.

Tuesday was hot (for San Francisco) and sunny, and I did the Barbary Coast walking tour: from Union Square through Chinatown and North Beach to Embarcadero, then over to Fisherman’s Wharf. Along the way, I climbed Telegraph Hill (whew!) and took the elevator up Coit Tower for the most amazing view of the city and beyond. Unfortunately, I didn’t (yet) have a camera with me so none of the views were captured. I ate dinner at Scoma’s on Pier 47, a somewhat pricey but nice seafood restaurant right on the pier that I remember from a visit years ago. It was crowded with a huge wait for groups, but I was able to snag a little table for one without a wait, and enjoyed a beautiful dinner of seared ahi and a nice bottle of Pinot Noir. Heading back to my hotel near Union Square, I spent a chilly (by now) 30 minutes waiting for the cable car — forgetting that walking up to the first stop past the terminus would have saved me the wait.

Wednesday was cool and foggy in the morning, which made it a great day for shopping. My prize purchase of the day was a new digital camera, a Canon PowerShot SD550 Digital Elph, although I had to experience a particularly stupid sales process through Circuit City. That was the end of the day already and I had a business meeting in the evening, so I didn’t get a chance to start snapping until Thursday.

Thursday was also cool and foggy to start, but eventually the sun came out and it warmed up. I took the F train along Market and Embarcadero all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf on a wonderful old wooden streetcar that rattled and shook very much like a wooden roller coaster, only not so much. I was going to take the Powell-Hyde line back, but it was out of order and they offered a free shuttle up to the Cable Car Museum where we could catch the other line to Union Square; I stopped in at the museum and was absolutely fascinated, since it’s really more than a museum, it’s the actual motors and sheaves driving the entire system. Very cool, you can walk underground and see the cable as it spins out to the rest of the city.

I had a meeting that evening in South San Francisco before heading down to San Jose for BlogHer, and I arrived early so spent a bit of time walking around Sierra Point, snapping some more photos.

My first efforts with the new camera can be found here.

This is the coolest photo that I’ve seen for a long time. I used to write software to analyze satellite data, so that’s saying something.