Blog This...

I hope this plays out.

And for you fans, there's a muppet wiki!

And finally, I noticed I didn't have a drinking game for this(!), so I started one on the Drinkiwiki. Thanks for help filling it out!

Labels: drinking game, muppets, tv

This makes me ill.

More details here, including a petition you can sign.

One of my favorites - Family Guy - has inspired an art exhibit at the Museum of Television and Radio in LA, running from Nov 9 2006 - Jan 21 2007. Click the link for a few other samples.

Stewie. Rules.

I doubt I'll make it to the exhibit, but if you go, drop me a comment and let me know how it was.

Finally, here's a plug for the Family Guy Drinking Game, of course.

Labels: drinking game, family guy

So Google Earth came out with a new build with better support for photo-textured, 3D buildings. While it continues to get better, this feature is still a distant 2nd to Microsoft Live's support.

Here are some screenshots of Denver - a city Google Earth actually has decent support for - in both GE and VE.

Google Earth


Microsoft's Virtual Earth


[Updated, here's a fly-through video of Denver in GE. ]

Pan back to see more of the city, and the lack of textured building support in GE is even more apparent. Virtual Earth is the clear winner on this feature.

It remains to be seen whether Google's "let somebody else build it" strategy will win over MS's "we'll build the models ourselves" approach. In the long term, I'm hedging my bets on Microsoft here. I'm not sure how long they've been gathering their data, but it's unbelievable how many building they already have coverage on - I'm stunned every time I find the shack in Joe Random's backyard modeled.

I'll still stick with Google Earth for most of my earth lurking; the satellite imagery is better (Santa Barbara street level is still in black and white! C'mon guys.), and the 3rd party options are a generation ahead in GE. I don't care about lack of Mac support, or having to use IE - support for Mac and Firefox would be nice, but neither affects me personally.

Folks will continue dinging VE for embedding the street names into the image (so the text is upside down when South is "up"). But the 3D buildings are just so much more pretty in Virtual Earth.

Competition rocks.

Labels: 3d, google earth, maps, virtual earth

Stumbled on this interesting school mascot(?) painted on the roof of a school in the UK.

Darn [funny] kids. Headmaster Dunn must be so proud.

Labels: maps

Why does the world need yet another blog? I've got stuff to say. It may not be important. It may not be relevant. It may be wrong. But it's stuff. And you apparently care since you've gotten this far.

The mission statement for this blog is to post interesting (to me at least!) findings and thoughts on topics relevant to my interests. This will include:

• Work. I'm the engineering manager of a small software team - you can see what I do from my resume. Mostly embedded stuff, revolving around multimedia and system frameworks. I work for Texas Instruments, so most of my work-related posts will revolve around the devices and environments I'm working on. Tools, tips, tricks, etc.
  
• My interests. I enjoy looking/lurking at the earth (Google Earth and Virtual Earth are my favorites), as well as drinking beer and hacking up scripts (mostly WSH, javascript) to make life easier.
  
• Who knows what else? Stay tuned and find out!
  

I'd like to hear from you, too. Blogs are an interesting 2-way street, where I can tell you how things should be, and you can disagree with me. Help me keep things interesting for everybody, and post your thoughts, however wrong they may be.

Thanks for coming by, hopefully you'll find value in what I've got to say.