Douwe and our own travel maps

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Douwe Osinga works for Google in Zurich, but he also dreams up fun things on his own. One of them lets you make a map of all the places you've traveled in the world. Another is less creative, but fun: he pronounces his name, which doesn't sound at all like it looks, unless you're Dutch.

Back to maps: it takes just a minute to do and you find out what percent of the world's countries you've seen. I thought I had been nearly everywhere except India and the Middle East, but it turns out I've seen only 15% of the world. Time to book some flights!

It is slower to load than I would like, at least on Flickr, and I had to ask a Japanese Flickr friend, the mysterious Mr. Baron05mouth, how to add it to my Flickr profile. Very easy (follow Douwe's instructions, then paste the html into "Describe yourself"). It's so easy that I decided I could add it here, but then realized I had to resize it to 50% so it would fit on this page. Bingo, done.

And speaking of the Baron, yesterday he posted pictures of daffodils in his garden (I've just blogged it on this site, as well), taken with a Vodaphone cell phone. I knew the cameras in cell phones had improved - I see the ads and hear them and mostly ignore them - but it was enlarging his picture and seeing the texture of the petals that made me realize what you can really do with the newer phones. Very impressive.