I may or may not have mentioned before that I have a goal of visiting and photographing every state park in North Carolina. As a precursor to setting out on that goal, I have created a map of state park locations. Each location uses GPS coordinates provided by the state park service. Now that I have a GPS device that uses Google Maps (a Motorola Droid; review coming soon!), I figured this would be a terrific way to make it easy for me to get driving directions to certain locations.

While looking through all of the official state park pages, I learned a number of interesting facts:

• Four state parks require entrance fees out of the 39 parks in the state. They include Jordan Lake, Kerr Lake, Falls Lake, and Chimney Rock.
• Two state parks do not have public access or public facilities at this time: Mayo River State Park and Haw River State Park.
• One state park can only be accessed by taking a ferry: Hammocks Beach State Park.

The location markers on the map I’ve created are currently being used by me to keep track of where I’ve been. However, the map is publicly available, so feel free to use it to navigate to any of the state’s parks. If you have any suggestions on how the map could be improved, feel free to leave a comment. I’d like for this to be a helpful resource for people.

I recently stumbled on an incredibly wonderful website; one that threatens my productivity just as much as Wikipedia does. The Vintage Ad Browser is a trip down memory lane, showcasing magazine advertisements from as far back as 1800. All kinds of categories are available to peruse: from Airlines & Aircraft, to Gender (some of which, today, are quite sexist), to Transportation. This site is one of those black holes on the internet, where you can get lost down a trail of links. I highly recommend checking it out; definitely worth bookmarking.

Earlier today, Netflix announced some interesting changes they’ve made to the site. These changes seem to speak volumes about where the company is headed. First off, the “Watch Instantly” tab is now the default view when you log in. This clearly indicates that Netflix is wholeheartedly committed to a future where media streaming is the norm. Is this the beginning of the end for DVDs?

The second change is a relocation of the friends feature; from a prominent tab up top to the very bottom of the page. This must be an indication of how many people actually use this part of the site.

All in all, these are some interesting changes that Netflix has rolled out. It’s will be interesting to see where they go from here.

How many people here use Google Reader to follow RSS feeds? I use it as my primary surfing mechanism now, and I’m curious as to how many others use it. Although it has some quirks, I’ve gotten used to it. Google Reader has made surfing the ‘net way more efficient, so much so that I often look for new sites to troll. If you do indeed use Reader, let me know if you’d like to friend me up. I share stories on the service routinely.

It is being reported that Microsoft is trying to pay News Corp. to “de-index” their search results from Google. Rupert Murdoch (billionaire tyrant) has hinted that he’d like to prevent Google from spidering the websites for the companies that News Corp. controls. Ironically enough, what he wants can be done today for free using the appropriate rules in robots.txt.

If this report is true, it sure seems like a desperate attempt to gain search engine market share by Microsoft. What might really happen if this deal goes through? I’ve got to believe that viewership at the various sites would drop considerably. “The masses” know how to use Google to find stuff. If the stuff they’re looking for disappears, will they be willing (or knowledgeable enough) to use Bing to find it? I’m not sure that’s the case. Should this scenario play out, I can see things going one of two ways: either Microsoft wins and gains market share, or both Microsoft and News Corp. lose big time.

Gizmodo has a good take on this situation, claiming simply that, in the end, we’ll all lose. This will definitely be an interesting thing to watch in the coming months.

Has anyone seen the following bug with the Amazon wish list system? When I purchase something from my list, the purchased item is no longer automatically removed. Instead, it reports a “quantity received” value, and apparently must be manually removed from the list. This is highly annoying, and applying the “unpurchased” filter doesn’t affect the purchased item’s visibility.

Am I the only one seeing this problem?

I just found out that Intuit will acquire Mint for $170 million. Though I’m not surprised to hear about this, I’m a little disappointed. Intuit is the company that owns Quicken, so there are now fewer players in this game (which is never good). Time will also tell whether or not the service gets any better or worse as a result of this acquisition. The recent updates to Mint were spectacular, so I’m hoping their momentum continues. Being sucked into a large company, however, is never an easy transition. According to the Mint CEO, Mint will remain a free service, though I can imagine Intuit charging users for a “premium” version of this tool in the future. Only time will tell where this goes.

I have yet to check these out, but it looks like the folks over at Mint.com (which I recently wrote about) have made things easier in various places around the site. The biggest improvement for me is that you can now view a detailed time line of your net income, with way more stats than before. I am very excited about this new feature, and am looking forward to checking it out this evening.

Update: The new updates to Mint are outstanding! Everything I’ve wanted in the tool, plus more, is here. An already great tool has just gotten even better.

The Register recently had an an interesting article on GFS2: the replacement for the Google File System. It offers insight on the problems Google is facing with the aging GFS. In today’s world of video streaming, GMail account checking, and more, the GFS model doesn’t hold up as it once did. According to the article, the new Caffeine search engine that Google is rolling out supposedly uses this new back end, resulting in faster search results. It should be interesting to see what other benefits come our way as Google tinkers with their engine.

Way back in January, I bit the bullet and signed up for an account at Mint.com, a free, web-based personal finance tool. Moving into a new house had brought with it a substantial amount of financial responsibility, and I wanted an easy way to track where my money was going. Now that I’ve been using it for 7 months or so, I thought I’d post a few thoughts on the service.

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