breathtaking, geotagging

I usually don't enjoy driving to school. It takes about twenty minutes, a far cry from the five minute drive that it took to get to my high school. People generally drive pretty poorly too, which puts a bit of a damper on my mood. Today though, after I drove one block, I looked to the west, yielding for oncoming traffic, and was met with something that, at least ten days out of the year, catches my attention: the sky.

Beautiful shades of purple, pink, blue. I think there was some yellow in there, too. Yeah, my rhyming skills are second to none. I was tempted to stop and take a picture, and I regretted that I didn't. The sky with the tops of houses and tree branches reaching up looked absolutely amazing. Even the smoke from IPSCO, billowing up into the atmosphere, looked incredible and I couldn't help but be astonished. Should I be hypnotized but the miraculous colours of the sky? Probably not the best idea when I'm driving, but sometimes one has to stop and smell the roses, even if it's during a mechanically routine drive to school.

On a somewhat related note (because I wanted to so badly take a picture of the sky) I started playing around with the camera on my Blackberry last night. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera, like my phone a couple of years ago (though without the xenon flash and auto focus), but the picture quality still seems pretty decent. One aspect that I had heard about for a few years but has never experiences before if something called Geotagging.

I'm not an expert yet, but I tried it out with one picture. I took a picture of my room. I then went to the picture in my phone's album and went to its menu. There was an option to "View on Map". I clicked it and Google Maps popped up, indicating exactly where the picture in question had been taken, information I assumed was gathered from my phone's GPS, wifi signals, cell tower signals, or a combination of them. I immediately thought of educational uses. Remember those old scavenger hunts? Imagine students having to photograph certain things, and then using their GPS-equipped cellphones, they geotag the images so that people can see where they are getting their scavenger hunt items from. I'm pretty sure most image hosting sites, like FLICR and Photobucket support geotagging. The real-time aspect of this opens up a ton of possibilies that I hope will be explored by educators.