101 Uses For An iPod

One of the things that I like to do when planning for a trip is to seek out shops that pertain to my areas of interest. For example I am a great fan of comic books so, when in another city or country, I will find a local comic shop to visit and then I will write down it's location in my little Moleskine so that I can reference it while traveling. I've been doing this for all my trips since my first trip to France in '03. The only problem was that sometimes I would have difficulty finding the address if I had not written down nearest cross streets and all that.

About a week ago I stumbled on to a solution to this problem. It came to me while perusing this site, which has chopped up subway maps for various cities for storing on an iPod. I realized I could do something like this for the various stores and restaurants I had made note of.

So I went to Mappy.com and entered the addresses of the places I was interested in, made a screen capture of the map, took it into Photoshop and sized it down to fit on my iPod screen. The resulting map looks something like this:



I then load this into iPhoto and sync it with my iPod. And voila, ready to roll.

I know this probably seem terribly anal, but as should be obvious from this blog, I like to use the tools and technology available to me. You should see the detailed itineraries I make for the trip. Now those are anal.