Herra BRE segir hikstar!

Ewelina and I have a pair of joint blogs to document our travels around the world:

• The English Slog Blog
• The Polish Slog Blog

If Ewelina can keep up with writing and translating, both should end up with roughly the same content. So go there if you want to know about our trip. This blog will probably stay relatively quiet for the next few months, although when I have nerdy things to write about they will still end up here.

So here comes something nerdy about the blog itself!

When setting up the blogs, we decided we wanted to have a map. Preferably an interactive, easily updated one. It took me a while to figure out all the bits and pieces, but these are the tools I ended up using:

• Godaddy for a domain: sacrifiction.net (Ewelina invented that word!)
• Google's Blogger for the blog itself
• Google's My Maps to put placemarks on the map
• Google's Javascript Maps API for embedding the map in the blog

The trickiest part was figuring out how to get the data from My Maps in a format usable by the Maps API. Try as I might, I couldn't find any documentation on this anywhere, even though it seems like an obvious use-case to me. Oh well. Documenting is hard, let's go coding...

The trick? In My Maps, there is a RSS feed link button. If you copy the URL it references, then that can be used as an overlay source in the Maps API. Even better, if you edit the URL to replace the word 'georss' with 'kml', you get a full KML feed which includes lines, areas and custom place markers. Voila, problem solved!

Oddly enough, using the Maps API and the KML feed also loads faster in my browser than the embedding iframe solution suggested by the My Maps interface.

Today is my last day at Google.

I have submitted and approved a few code changes, the last one removing my access to submit or approve code changes. I deleted or transferred ownership of my shared documents. I've sent a good-bye e-mail to my teams and friends. I just completed my exit interview.

It's a slightly sad day, as I'll miss all these people and miss being part of a very cool company. But mostly it's a happy day, because I am excited about moving on and doing new stuff.

One of my coworkers pointed out that I've been with the company for exactly 1001 days. Pretty cool! :-)

Good-bye Google! Thanks for everything.

Next: Travel around South America for a few months. Feel free to send me job offers sometime after the New Year... :-P

In only 17 days, Ewelina and I will leave Ireland, probably for good.

We fly to Poland, then Spain, then Mexico... and then who knows! We might fly back to Europe 5 months later from Brazil, or we might change our mind and do something else entirely.

Today we got vaccinated against all sorts of diseases. We've bought most of our plane tickets, I've given notice at work, we have a nice camera and a pair of portable hard drives to store the pictures on. We have various credit cards and sums of money in various bank accounts. We have anti-malarials and prescriptions for all sorts of other fun drugs. We have been taking Spanish lessons since February, we have valid passports and according to the Internets we don't need visas for the places we want to visit.

There are still a few things to sort out, but I think we're almost ready.

We still have 17 days... :-)

Ég ætla að skreppa aftur til Íslands um þarnæstu helgi.

Ég lendi í Keflavík kl. 23:10, föstudaginn 15. maí (flug FI455) og flýg burt aftur eldsnemma á mánudagsmorgun.

Tilgangur ferðarinnar er að heimsækja afa minn, en vonandi hitti ég einhverja aðra líka. Langar einhverjum að sötra bjór á laugardagskvöldinu?

Meðan ég var á Íslandi, kaus ég VG.

Rökin voru nokkurnveginn á þá leið að ég vildi fyrir alla muni refsa þeim flokkum sem höfðu setið í ríkisstjórn meðan allt fór til fjandans, og mér leist betur á VG en nýju smáflokkana.

Flóknara var það ekki... en ég er mjög sáttur við þessa ákvörðun. Ég hvet sem flesta til að gera eitthvað svipað.

My Bell's Palsy is almost entirely cured. Yay!

Last week I discovered that I have super-teeth: I visited the dentist for the first time since 2001 and he had no complaints at all. Very cool.

I am back in Dublin, after an amazing trip to Iceland.

The trip was too short though, I really wouldn't have minded missing my plane. Oh well. Time to try and get back into the Dublin routine... for a few more weeks anyway.