Remember how everyone started to bang on about how mobile phones would be used to track people’s whereabouts as soon as they’d seen mobile phone triangulation on the TV? Then GPS was added to phones and people started to think that if they gave their 7 year old kid a mobile phone and tracked them on a computer, it would stop them getting in trouble.

Now there’s Google Latitude. Free, as Google services invariably are, Latitude actually allows you to create a network of friends who are moving around on a map according to their fairly frequently (every 5 mins or so) updated GPS location.

Amazing. It’s like the Marauders’ Map in Harry Potter. Here’s the little snippet that Google kindly gave me which should show you my actual, real physical location.

See if you notice me going to the pub at about 6 o’clock.

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Now I’m not an old duffer, but I do remember a time before the internet and before mobile phones. When I was 19 I lived in Sydney for a year. I hadn’t heard of the internet, didn’t have a mobile phone and traveled with travelers cheques.

Instead I went surfing a lot on the beaches up the North Shore. North Styne on Manly was generally the easiest to get to on the bus and that’s where I surfed most.

This all came back to me this morning when I read a retweet from my mate on twitter (@andygozo) with a link to an amazing image in Google Maps showing a surfer very close to what appears to be a shark. Take a look at the actual Google Map Image (you’ll need to zoom in on it).

It’s amazing that the image was captured by the Google Earth satellites. Incredible that someone actually spotted and recognised it for what it was and wrote a blog about it. It’s almost unbelievable that the information managed to find it’s way through the internet maze to be in front of my eyes.

It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come and how fast. As far as I can tell we’ve only just started. I’m actually looking forward to being an old duffer, shaking my head at innovation in a world I no longer understand. When I were a lad…..

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The four of us carried on a great week of skiing with a ski tour from Flegere to Vallorcine. That’s about 20km by road. Even on skis taking a more direct route we probably covered around 14km over the 4 hours before stopping for lunch at the Buet hotel & taking the Vallorcine bubble back over to Le Tour and skiing home.

I’ve been trying to use my iPhone’s GPS to track our ski tours, with some success. Unfortunately the device ran out of batteries half way through this tour, but you can clearly see our route on the following GPS track mapped onto Google maps right up until the point where the power ran out.

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It was another lovely day out in the mountains.

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