We just got back from a gloriously off-the-network vacation in West Cork, Ireland. We rented a house with friends and generally stayed off the beaten path. Which was great and everything, except that even the beaten path in Ireland is still a pretty narrow road according to my tastes; I think that the street in front of my house in California would qualify as pretty much the widest road we saw in Ireland.

So staying off the beaten path meant that the ‘roads’ we drove along were more like narrow driveways, optimistically two lanes. Which, again, is fine, except that Hertz, out of gratitude for my loyal patronage, upgraded me from the cheapskate sedan I rented to an absolutely gorgeous — and completely impractical — Alfa Romeo 159. After getting over the normal adjustment to driving on the other side of the road and remembering how to drive a stick, I was still left with a terrifyingly large shiny Italian car that I had to squeeze down the rural roads of West Cork. I have never in my life been so glad to return a car as I was with this one, and I’m happy to report that it was mostly undamaged, except for some crayon stains in the back.

But there were many compensations: I think it was the best car I have ever driven. The engine was powerful and responsive, the steering — balanced and sensitive — was a revelation, and the seating position and dials were just perfect. I have never felt so connected to a car, so completely in tune with it. I sort of suspect that the intensity of the driving experience (raining, no visibility, one tiny lane, left-hand driving, twisting and winding road, howling three year in back, etc.) only added to that feeling, since I was required to be attentive in a way that driving down the interstate in a Ford Taurus does not demand. My current rental, an otherwise serviceable Subaru Outback, pales considerably in comparison to the Alfa.

It wasn’t a perfect car; unlike Jeremy Clarkson I thought that the triple headlights were bizarre-looking and it felt heavy in a way that I didn’t expect from an Alfa Romeo. Plus, the rear visibility wasn’t great and the stereo was crummy. There were times, though, that the car just sang; I remember one rainy early morning drive into town once I had the road figured out and it really felt like the car was responding to me. Or the time when we finally got onto a divided highway and I dropped the hammer; I could just imagine the car saying, palms up: “finally!”

Yahoo is testing a new locative service, “Fire Eagle.” Yahoo describes it as a ‘location data broker,’ which is useful enough. Navizon, for example, is a service that uses wifi and cell phone tower locations to triangulate your location; I’m trying it out right now and it found me, on my laptop without GPS, down to the street block level. If I wanted to, I could link up Navizon to Fire Eagle and make my exact location available. This will be even more useful when there’s a Navizon client for my now-outdated first generation iPhone without GPS. Navizon, or the native GPS functionality of the next generation iPhone, can automatically and continuously update Fire Eagle with my location.

But why would I want it to?

It might be useful have my general location available, for example published here on this blog, so that my friends and family could look and see where I am, but I don’t want the world to know that I’m on Old Country Road in Westbury, NY. Instead, something like “Long Island, USA” would be adequate. And that’s what Dopplr does; it takes location information from Fire Eagle and applies a set of filters to it and then makes the filtered information available. (Dopplr supposedly also identifies friends travelling to the same city as me, a problem I don’t need solved. Who needs that problem solved?) I use Dopplr now, published via RSS on the righthand side of this blog, to update my location via Tripit, yet another service that consumes and standardizes travel itineraries. I adore Tripit.

Fire Eagle’s position as a broker is smart, I think; there are all kinds of location-information providers (Navizon, car GPS systems) and lots of services that can consume that information (mapping services, geo-tagged photos), but too often there’s no way to go from one to the other. Plus, crucially, there is a tremendous privacy component to location; I like having the insulation of a broker like Fire Eagle between the raw data of place and that which is publicly available.

For me, as an end user, the developer release of Fire Eagle is still of limited value. I see where it’s going and how I could use it but the range of supported applications (Dopplr and Moveable Type but not Tripit or WordPress, and certainly not my camera or my car or my kid’s embedded beacon. I joke.)

All of these bits, of course, are just small specific pieces of functionality; the beauty lies in the elegant composition of them, a process that is only just beginning. A more fundamental question might be the business model for this brokerage service and, given Yahoo’s recent travails, the viability of the company itself.

We’re going on vacation next week to West Cork, in southwesternmost Ireland. I worked at a marine biological lab, Sherkin Island Marine Station, the summers after my junior and senior years in college and I spent a lot of time hitchhiking and walking around West Cork, but I haven’t been back since. Going through old journals — including some painstakingly hand-drawn maps — I found a description of a ‘solstice stone’ that I found in Slievemore, a remote part of Sherkin:

From Abbey Strand, where the boat docks, walk a mile to the crossroads. You will pass the store/post office on your left, Kinish Harbor on your right, and the Island House (on your right). At the crossroads, bear left up a small hill, with the church on your right.

After 3/4 of a mile you will be opposite Trabawn, a sandy beach. Slievemore is ahead on your left. Leave the road at a gate, where a rough track passes between two houses. This track disappears into a pasture — continue straight and up through bracken. Stay close to the stone wall (on your right) running straight up the hill. You should be going up the righthand side of a saddle. At the top, pause in a small clearing. Set in line with the stone wall is a Bronze Age solstice stone, a large flat rock with a round hole bored in it. It is exactly aligned N-S, so the hole catches sunrise on the longest day of the year.

The view here is excellent. The pond below, Lough Ordree, is used by gulls to preen their feathers. The Baltimore Beacon is also visible. On the ridge, the wind picks up considerably. The cove below is called Fourdree.

Maybe someone else pointed it out to me, or maybe I found it based on some written reference; I don’t now remember. They’re fairly common in that part of the world. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a map for this entry, but I’m hoping I can find it again, especially since we’re going to be there around the summer solstice.

Excellent series of retrospective articles from the Atlantic, via James Fallows, on Burma, ca. 1958:

Have I made Burmese life sound like one grand joyous song? Let me assure you that I have not really exaggerated its good will and fraternity; its spirit of helpfulness, its generosity, warmth, and contentment. Fortunately—or unfortunately—it is all too true.

Oh bitter poignancy!

I studied Tibetan history with Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, at Harvard; his Tibetan studies seminar in Sever Hall was where I met my wife, and his suffering at their separation was evident.  Years later, living in Bangkok, we made a deeply memorable trip to Burma.   The truth of the quote above does not conflict with the horrors of everyday life in Burma today, even without the natural disaster of Typhoon Nargis.