I found an email sitting in my inbox from Vista Print a couple of weeks ago whilst I was in Milwaukee for Summerfest. Can you guess what it said?

Truck this weekend! Oh yes, Truck festival time again. That one weekend of the year where apparently everyone you have ever known in the Oxford area gets together in a field, drinks horrendous amounts of whatever they can get there hands on then cycles off into the night.

Day 4 is easy, it was a relatively quiet day. We got up, had some brekkie and headed out to one of the many Malls. We went to the Florida Mall, there are 270 something shops in there, so what a surprise that I still couldn’t find the stuff I was after. Did pick up a couple new things and had my first ever Taco Bell. OMG what a let down! There was chatter about it I caused on Jaiku a while back when I was in New York. The advice was mainly to stay well away, and I did for a time, but just couldn’t resist. Zach Epstein from The Boy Genius Report has to go next!

After this we headed to the airport to collect bro, he got in on time and we drove back to the house. I started drinking and kept drinking and we ended up rolling off to bed around 3 with a few sore heads expected in the morning.

Uh oh, it appears I have gotten a couple of days behind. Luckily I’m waiting for my pizza to arrive, therefore have a couple of minutes to post some updates.

Day 3, the little beauty in the post here is not as suggested a Dinosaur, it is in fact an Alligator. There are over 2 million of these buggers in Florida, estimated of course. There are laws governing peoples interactions with Alligators in the wild, it is illegal to feed them at all. If you are caught feeding one it’s a hefty fine and upto 5 years in jail. They’re taking this one seriously folks. Back on topic, the gator in the picture is from a nature esq park called Silver Springs at Ocala (or just east of it). Firsly, bloody hot day, like 33-34 Celsius, luckily the park is built into an existing forest so the shade is always easy to find. There are two main selling points to the place, one the Alligators and two the glass bottom boats. First off we checked out the Alligators:

As you can see you can get nice and close, and we’re talking about there being only a thin piece of plastic between you and the big guy.

There was also feeding time, so the head keeper came along and fed the buggers. As you see in the movies they jumped up to get the food, impressive, but they didn’t fight for it like you see in the films. I’m thinking Indiana Jones when the baddies fall off the ladder at the end, that didn’t appear to happen, or were they Crocodiles?

After this it was time to go on the boat. The water you see is pure springs water, so its crystal clear. You can see hundreds of metres whilst underwater apparently. The lake has been used in many many films due to this quality. Creature from the black lagoon was filmed there.

Rubbish picture I know. After the boat there were a couple of demo’s by some of the keepers, playing with the baby gators and spiders and snakes etc. Good laugh and I got to stroke a real Albino Burmese Python.

Went out for dinner with everyone, had the best ribs ever!!!

Ok totally distracted from posting my day updates by a massive thunderstorm. Well for me its massive, its tiny on the radar apparently and nothing that exciting for the locals. However it is phenomenal for me, constant lightning, much of which is cloud lightning so no thunder. Then the crashing flashes to the ground and the thunderous bangs. Just had one hit maybe half a mile away, first time I’ve ever been frightened by thunder. Painfully loud. No rain, no wind. What is a storm?

Check out the radar here on the WFTV site, I’m under the Apopka writing.

In the last few days Myspace has become data portable.

I think that’s the verb for it, if not, then it is now. The concept of data portability has been bouncing around the web for a wee while now, the importance only really understood by the hardcore social media geezers. The basic concept is being able to take your data/information away from a website or social network. In practice, this is taking your contact list from Facebook and looking it on your PC in another format. The data portability row is all around who owns that information.

Back to the topic, Myspace has become a little but more open. Check out this Tech Crunch app which shows an early adoption of the concept. Admittedly its pretty useless at the moment as an app, but the possibilities are huge! I guess, instead of joining a new social network and using your email address to search for people you know on there already, you would be able to use your Facebook contact list, or your Youtube contact list or Flickr etc etc. Stay tuned for more untimely, late announcements.

So, after all the happenings of the last day 2 post I thought I best carry on with the rest of the day. After leaving the Saturn V room we went into a small cinema room where they were going to show the events of the Apollo 11 moon landed. It had a real life fake landing craft and everything. Now, I like to be very sceptical about the whole concept of the moon landing, did they actually go to the moon, or did they just go to Philadelphia? This show did little or nothing to prove either theory right or wrong.

Next stop on the bus tour was the future.

25062008592, originally uploaded by Colin Mercer.

GO team guess work…

Day 2, early start, well more just generally up early as I’m on the sofa bed in the living room and my uncle gets up for work at 5… Wakey Wakey.

Decided that today was the day to head over to the Kennedy Space Centre (Aka, NASA HQ), so those retards who guessed Disneyland yesterday were wrong.

Took a couple hours to drive over there, partly due to me programming the sat nav wrong and partly not having a map. KSC is located next door to Cape Canaveral, so you would rightly assume that Cape Canaveral Tours and Info would be a sensible place to head if KSC didn’t show on sat nav. Well no, we ended up at the University of Florida. Only a slight detour.

24062008568, originally uploaded by Colin Mercer.

So, guess where I went today….