Remember the Mustang and the Volvo I received last year from Hertz when I’d reserved a “Toyota Camry or Similar.” Well I’m on to their game: now I regularly reserve the cheapest car on offer, usually “Ford Focus or Similar,” and every time I get automagically upgraded to a more interesting car. Sometimes, of course, interesting has Ford Mustang downsides. But this summer I’ve received a very nice (though gas-poor) Subaru Impreza hatchback and, today, a Mazda 5 mini-minivan (very good on gas and surpringly fun to drive).

If I’d reserved either car up-front I would have paid twice as much; somehow my seemingly perpetual Hertz #1 Club Gold status means that they hit the interesting button every time I rent. I’m not complaining. But what if I actually did want to rent a “Hyundai Accent or Similar?”

Update: here’s a possible explanation for all this foolishness… I rent so often that I’m a “Five Star” member, which includes auto-upgrading.

I head off for a loop of travel tomorrow: first stop, Yankee, where I’ll head on the direct Delta flight Sunday afternoon, driving up to my usual perch at the Jack Daniels Motor Inn before spending two days with my colleagues there on part two of a site re-architecting exercise.

Tuesday night I’m driving down Route 3 to Burlington, Massachusetts for some morning meetings on Wednesday, and then, that afternoon, down to Boston Logan to fly up to Toronto.

In Toronto I’ll rendezvous with Catherine and Oliver where we’ll fly together up to Thunder Bay for Theresa and Brad’s wedding. It’s also a chance to show Oliver the birthplace of his grandfather and his great-grandmother, and to visit the gravesite of his great-great-grandfather.

After three days of wedding festivities, we’ll fly back to Charlottetown a week from Sunday for three more days of Maximum Summer Fun before school starts on Thursday, September 4.

Remember my mobile web server? Well, in addition to all its juicy mobile goodness, it also has a nice RESTful API. For example, this URL:

http://ruk.mymobilesite.net/rest/presence/devicestate

will get you an XML file, served from the web server on the phone, that looks something like this:

<devicestate>
    <battery_level>100</battery_level>
    <localtime>2008-08-23T17:04:57-03:00</localtime>
    <connection_type>WLAN</connection_type>
</devicestate>

Similarly, if you do an HTTP POST to:

http://ruk.mymobilesite.net/rest/inbox/message

you can send me a text message. It’s really quite neat.

I’m doing some experimenting with Nokia’s Mobile Web Server application, and so, at least while I’m within wifi range, you should be able to visit ruk.mymobilesite.net, which will connect you to the web server running on my phone.

Once you’re there, you can ask me to take a picture, find out whether I’m on the phone, send me a text message, and more. The site has an RSS status feed that will tell you whether I’m online or offline.

I’m headed out to lunch with my webserver now, so we’ll see what happens…

(Emphasis mine).

Lost in Iceland? suggests that it’s because the government’s price for the GIS data is too high:

Karl Arnar Arnarsson, a staff member from Ísgraf, an Icelandic company specializing in selling mapping software, said that he had a few theories about Iceland’s long absence from Google Maps. “Now that Google has mapped [everything else], they’ve moved on to Iceland and because the maps are owned by the government, they’re not willing to pay a lot for them,” Amarsson said. “They’re not looking at Iceland as an isolated problem; they’re looking at the overall picture.”

Nokia Maps and ViaMichelin are missing Iceland as well. OpenStreetMap, however, seems to have pretty good coverage, especially of Reykjavik. Here’s the Iceland project page at OpenStreetMap.

How to Drive in Iceland is a useful video. In particular the section on seat belts, starting at 4:35, is enough to convince anyone of the utility of seatbelts.

Some short video clips of the Gold Cup and Saucer parade this morning in downtown Charlottetown:

For Maximum Fun, start all playing at the same time!

I’m deep into “finding places to stay and things to do in Iceland” mode this week, planning for our family trip there in late September. When you spend time corresponding with Íslendingur, you start to see interesting names flow into your inbox:

Icelandic has an interesting alphabet and Icelanders have interesting interesting names.

If I understand the system properly, then my name would have ended up as Peter Normsson and Oliver’s name would be Oliver Petersson.