Archive for June, 2007
Today is D-Day
Jun 6th
Today (6 June) in 1944 the biggest amphibious invasion in history began when the Allies landed on the coast of Normandy in France. An incredible feat, and a battle which lasted over a month ensued. Although the Nazis fought hard, by the evening of June 6 things weren’t looking too good for them. Especially since Adolf had already started to go completely nutty in his military strategies.
I know it’s geeky but I dig D-Day.
Google Street View – awesome and get over the privacy
Jun 5th
You may know that Google offers quite a cool map service. It has satellite imagery of most of the earth, as well as good road maps, etc. Pretty cool to check out a satellite image of your house. For instance this is the building that I am currently sitting in:
Recently they added a really cool feature called Street Views. They got some cars with about 10 cameras mounted on the roof and cruised around some big american cities. Now when you are in Google Maps you can get a look at what you would see if you were on the ground (only in those cities though).
This is pretty freaky because now you can see individual people. For instance one woman found her flat and could see her cat looking out of the window! I think it’s awesome and I wish that we had it in Cape Town. People see you walking around all the time – now there is a permanent record. It’s not the end of the world – get over it.
Here is a site dedicated to interesting sightings in Street Views. My favorite so far is this one which captures a small car crash in progress:
Amazingly high resolution photos
Jun 4th
Check out this link to a 720 megapixel photo of Sydney. Your normal camera probably takes pics at about 5 megapixels, so this is some serious resolution. His blog says that he creates these things by stitching together hundreds of individual photos. He must have a mean zoom, a good tripod and some real patience to get it right.
This is a screenshot of part of the zoomed out image.
And this is a zoom in on the bottom left of that screenshot.
He also has links to other photo’s, one at 1500 megapixels which is well worth a look.
Lightning in Cape Town
Jun 4th
There was an awesome storm last night with plenty of thunder and lightning joining in. We don’t often see lightning in Cape Town (although I feel like it is much more common these days) and it was really beautiful. I have seen a few pics floating around – this is one of them.
Moving into our new place
Jun 1st
Jules and I ‘moved’ into our new apartment yesterday. We were staying in a furnished place so we shouldn’t have had too much to move… No way, we worked hard all afternoon and we don’t even have our furniture yet.
Update: Here are some more pics of us enjoying the balcony.
Insane airport queue
Jun 1st
Air travel is something that people love to hate. So extremely useful that we all use it, but it often seems very disorganized. On top of that terrorists love to make their point on airliners so airports must scramble to handle security. It can be chaos.
Check out this truly enormous queue in Heathrow. It’s all to get through a security checkpoints and took around 3.5 hours to get through. I found myself wondering is someone was keeping a place for the guy taking the video.
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