Queen Paleotard Knighted

Or Queen knights paleotard. Whatever.

I was actually on the google plane over to Larry's wedding when I got the call. My iPhone lit up with a royal crest as we banked over some tropical island. I knew the call would come one day so I'd added her Royal Highness in to the address book as one of the first things I did with this pure beauty.

I'll be honest, I was a little dissapointed that they only wanted my advice and at that point I just wanted to land, wash and get naked in the hot tub with the Bransons. Necker island has a lot to offer I'm thinking. But then, what a great oppertunity this is to get to Blue Level Googler? Naturally I mentioned Larry and Sergey but there's all this nonsense about not doing enough for blighty or the commonwealth and not being citizens and all that.

I wasn't aware that someone had put the oil tanker in to full rudder deflection and would be launching Open Space (it remains to be seen if the rudder snaps off of course), so I thought keep your friends close, your enemies closer. So I said Vanessa. Vanessa Laurence.

I'm really not sure what she does any more but she's still 'officially' head of paleo-land and the award should inflate that head by another few hundred PSI. Perhaps just enough to pop or float away... then when the call goes out maybe I could get back to running OS if the Blue Level doesn't work out. With a bloke in charge I'm sure we'd have things ship-shape in no time.

But I'm babbling again. I thanked her most britannic majesty for thinking of me and sat back to think about the parties ahead on the island. It was a blast but I'll save those stories for after I've re-read the NDA - there are actual clauses about not mentioning what happens at Mr Page's events.

Paleotards launch maps with rounded corners

Thats right fans, exactly 1039 days since Google got with my program and launched the web's favourite mapping service paleotard central have finally pulled their thumbs out of their arses and launched a website that has rounded corners:

Ooo, we're civil servants, we can have slippy maps and take first class flights around the world too.

Hell no. Guys, its 420 days since you first announced it. How long does it take to imitate us? OpenSpace was cool when I was incharge, but without me, it just ain't the real thing. If they'd have got it together back when it was Ed's Magical Map factory, then this could really could have been something.

Written and submitted by one of my drones from my new Magical Map Factory.

Multimap get assimilated by the Microtards

Another day another acquisition and hardly a surprising one at that. If those Microtards think they can piss on our party by snapping up Multicrap they can think again. Seriously though, its really great to see Sean and gang's hard work paying off. Well, paying off for the directors at least.

This all reminds me of those all night hack sessions, when Sean and I were first creating web-mapping in the UK in the heady days of the 1990s. Good times. Not only did I teach Sean everything he needed to know to create the most successful UK born online mapping service, it was actually my idea to call it MultiMap. He wanted to call it 'Multi Media Maps', or some shite like that.

"You'll never get acquired by the Microtards with a name like that", I told him. And now, a decade later, I was right.

The guys I feel sorry for are the MultiMap developers. No more free teapots and hack-days for those guys. Hell no. Its Microtardation from now on. If I were them, I'd march myself down to the borg cube and beg to work somewhere a little more 2.0. Or better still, just come and join my mapping family. There's plenty of Ben and Jerry's to go around and still some spaces on the Google Space Ship (so Larry promises me, you don't get to see it until you've passed the secret test). If course, if you want to work for us you'll need to be able to compute the number of Google Maps tiles that fill Alaska at zoom level 6 in your head whilst juggling tomatos, but that's why we make all the cool stuff, isn't it?

And if its bad for the beardy geeks down at Multimap, its worse for the picture monkeys down in Hampshire. Their two biggest customers have just been compacted into one - they've really got to hope that their license with the Microtards foresaw this one.

Written and submitted from my brain, using my Google powers.

Questions, questions

Fake SteveC asks if I'm "still a signatory on the insurance policy" at paleoland.

Look. We all know what happened. I can't really talk about it, it jeopardises my substantial golden parachute of OS shares and they can only mature when it's sold off.

But maybe I can give some specific answers to some specific questions, where they don't threaten my blue-level ascent in the big G, or those paleo-options. So, no, I'm not a signatory to that and never was. Don't you know OSHQ can't burn down? It's cocooned in asbestos!!

If you have a question for old Fake Ed, post them in the comments.

The more pins the better

Sergey, Larry and I always have a good laugh when some neotard frigwit hacker sitting in their mom's basement hacks up another pin-pushing mash-up. I mean, I gave the world KML - the greatest geodata format ever invented - and all these bearded sandal wearing losers can do is put pins in my figgin maps. As if inventing KML wasn't benevolent enough, I then gave it away to those standards zealot paleotard losers over at the OGC, who'll probably just fuck the whole thing up anyway. Still, it makes us look like we give a shit. Good job I've been working on libkml in-between running consistency checks on the Google servers.

Anyway, I digressed, so back to the hacktards. You see, all these guys think they are so damn clever. Take a site like Opengeocoding.org. The idea being that you put a pin into one of my maps and save your address and so does some other freetard and whoopee, we have a free geocoding database. What all these guys have failed to consider is that they are my maps. My friggin maps I tell you. You know what happens when you put a pin in my map? I own the friggin pin. So actually, all of you neogeography pinpushers are just helping me, Sergey and Larry get even more 0000s on our pay checks. And you know what I'm gonna do when you put your address into OpenGeoCoding? I'm gonna cross reference your email address with all your other Google accounts and then send you junk mail. Its so friggin genius. I just sit here, designing the future of the geospatial web, getting that much richer every time you put a pin in one of my maps.

So go ahead, place that pin and make my day.

Those losers over at Slash Geo think they're one step ahead of the game, don't they. They better not forget - I invented the friggin game. It was so obviously my post about UAVs that set things going in the first place. If I didn't notice SlashGeo's first post about OAM, its because those second hand news touting hacks are like so June 2007. Sometimes I feel like I'm just too far ahead of the game - good job I have a fully stocked fridge full of Google ice-cream in my Google office.

Written and submitted from the bottom of a tub of ice-cream

GyroGPS

Sergey wasn't that interested, Larry's still not talking to me. To top it off, someone took my bike. I confess, it's not mine, we share them on campus. But you'd think they'd honor the little 'Ed Parsons' sticker huh? I refuse to use the other color bikes, and of course no green ones left so I had to walk.

But better news!! Sergey said I might make it to be a blue-level Googler soon!! ...might have to start using the blue bikes though... I'll have to tell you about levels some time but the main thing is, and this is totally true, it's not like scientology or a pyramid scheme AT ALL. They tell us that on day one.

Anyway, Engadget re-discovered my Gyrolocator. It came out of my initial location research at Kingston:


It's basically a combination of elastic-bands and string but Honda got pretty far.

Written and submitted from the Google regenerative thought-bubble, using mind waves

AND the winner is...

I gotta run and tell Sergey about this, but I can't find my company-issue segway!

Sent from my iPhone in between buildings 4 and 87 on a company-issue bike (color: green), using the free Google Mountain View wifi blanket

Where 2.0 call going going... gone

Oh man oh man I'm wetting myself with what I'll be showing at Where 2.0 but you have to wait!! It's mainly just paleotards and freetards but it's nice for all our ex-Yahoo! employees to meet the ones left behind, see what the Borg managed to copy from us since last year. You're only really coming to meet me anyway, so just book the flight and don't bother speaking!!

I'm soooooooo jealous

So I'm wandering down the corridor painting relief contour tiles with my iPhone and bump in to Larry and Sergey. They're arguing over some stupid math problem again, something about optimal network utility functions and I'm like guys you need to get out more. Larry's totally offended but Sergey says "You should check out our phone company" and I'm like "Woah".

We're buying all this spectrum so we can totally like nail Nokia or something with my Android OS. But I was like "Guys, give me this budget and we could have totally nailed TeleAtlas or NavTeq" but then I ran the numbers and the spectrum is like half the cost of buying one of the paleo-tard companies. I mean these guys drive around bright yellow vans all day - is that the business we want to be in??

No, of course not. Thats so like, web -1.0. Or something. So 1997. But we're tied to these guys, we have like a 10 year deal to show these maps and every time you view a map tile we have to give these guys a free adwords click or something.

But then Sergey is all like "You don't see it do you?" and I'm like "no" and he's like "We're gonna bury Nokia with the whole spectrum/Android thing, and then we're gonna buy them and we get NavTeq for free". That just totally blew me, it's so cross-paradigm we get two companies for the price of one!!

Written and submitted from the Google 757 at 30,000ft using my satellite uplink.