UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
We can ill afford another Klendathu  feed it up!
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You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION Dan Deacon: Bromst Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2010 Jeremy Broomfield 
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Thursday, July 14, 2005
Here's what I don't like about Gator: everything. Gator is a data-mining program records your internet browsing, surfing, shopping, and buying habits and reports them to their centralized servers. From there, your information is mushed together with that of all other Gator users and sold to any old corporation or entity who wants mailing lists of, say, 25 to 30-year-olds who smoke Camels, read the Onion, and purchased a book by Donald Barthelme in the last six months. What does it give you in return? It remembers all your internet usernames and passwords for ya!
After all, peeps, why should you have to do any of that pesky rememberin' of secret codes that provide access to your most personal information? That's child's play. You got more important things to do than memorizing a whole bunch of random numbers. Why not outsource it to a digital version of a carnivorous reptile? That sounds trustworthy! Seriously, where's the danger, chicken little? Computer programs don't steal stuff. What would a computer program want with your money? I think it's a GREAT IDEA. Maybe if you're lucky you can talk the programmers into letting you see some pop-up ads too! Maybe they can bundle them right in there for you! Hey listen, I'm going out of town for a week, but I've got this huge bag of weed that I don't want to carry around. I'm gonna ask my neighbor Tommy Chong to keep an eye on it for me. He totally offered to do that, even though it's illegal. Can you spell sweetheart? What -- you want to come with me? Sure, just leave the kids with that nice man next door who does a clown act at birthday parties -- you know, Mister.... Gacy, that's it. What a nice man. * * * Hello. My name is Universal D. I am, and have always been, a Super Geek Nerd. I was a SGN before it became voguish to claim nerdhood and my stories of childhood victimization at the hands of jocky meatheads are not Hollywood fabrications designed to make me look more human to Jay Leno's viewing audience. My stories of indian burns, titty twisters, nurples of purple are old, hurtful, true -- and boring as a plate of skim milk. ANYHOO I'm saying all this because I'm about to go nerd-pocalypse on you by singing the praises of a piece of software. Yes, software. My friends, I am here to tell you about a program called Google Earth. (I must warn you now that they do not have a Mac version yet, and the system requirements are steep. The program is a resource hog and a half.) Google Earth is the best new program of the last five years at least. Oh hell, I'll just say it: Best. Program. Evah. In terms of its innovation, staying power, functionality, and grandeur, Google Earth is on par with the grandpappies of popular software: Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, ProTools, Word. I predict that it will take its place in the software pantheon within the next six months. The only recent pieces of software that can compete with it for title of "Best New Software, 1995-2005" are the Propellerheads' music-generating package Reason, Apple's iTunes. Firefox is great, but it just does internet browsing better than its competitor-predecessors. Google Earth outstrips its predecessors, too, and where it overlaps with other services (like, say, MapQuest) it blows them out of the water without breaking a sweat. Okay, I'll tell you about it, but if you have meet the min. requirements, you need to download this program NOW. Google Earth is nothing less than a digital model of the surface of the planet Earth. Note: I first encountered the idea of an interactive globe in Neal Stephenson's classic 1993 sci-fi novel Snow Crash*, when the protagonist is logged into the Metaverse (a sort of immersive, virtual-reality version of the Sims) and uses a program called "Earth" to locate someone who's floating around on the Pacific. Still I don't think Stephenson would have a case for copyright infringement (even if her were the litigious sort, which I kind of doubt he is, especially vis-a-vis software) because Google Earth is just a logical extension of the human desire to model our surroundings as accurately as possible. Ahem. Like I said, Google Earth is nothing less than a digital model of the surface of the planet Earth, with your desktop PC as its interface, a terminal to what I can only imagine is a warehouse full of thrumming supercomputers, concatenating updated satellite images and drawing 100 miles of road every minute. The program, once you've downloaded the 10Mb installer and installed it, starts you off staring at the big blue marble floating in space. One thing you'll notice quickly is that if you click and drag on the earth, you can spin it like a traditional globe. Use the scrolly wheel on your mouse, and you will dive toward the surface of the earth like a supersonic skydiver. Watch the surface get sharper and sharper as the program downloads the appropriate satellite images. You can probably see the roof of your house pretty clearly. Type in an address -- pretty much anywhere in the world -- and watch the POV zoom back out to traverse any oceans that might be in the way, and marvel as it zooms back down to your new destination. Click and drag around if you want to explore the neighborhood. Type two addresses just like you might have into Google Maps (or, if you're still in the dark ages, MapQuest), and it will give you directions from point A to point B. But if you press F10, it will tilt the POV down so you can see the horizon and take you on a flying tour of your route. Like oh my god. It's got layers of information that you can toggle on and off in any combination, so you can show borders, major roads, schools, volcanoes, libraries, National Parks, stadiums, postal zones. In Certain metro areas, they've even rendered the buildings from 3-d information to give the illusion of height while you're flying around. I could go on about the finer points, but at this point you should either have downloaded it or headed to the house of somebody who can. I wish I had had this program as a child -- I might have felt very different about history class. But even now, I am learning so many cool things about the world. The resolution varies from place to place, but Tokyo National Airport is so crisp that I can discern individual baggage handlers on the tarmac. (while you're in the area, make sure "terrain" is turned on and check out Mount Fuji. It's awesome.) Learn for the first time how big Greenland really is. Trace the 405 over the hills from Los Angeles and into the San Fernando Valley, if you want to recreate that special feeling of L.A. traffic. Look at the bizarre street plan of Canberra, which I swear must have been drawn up by Masons, aliens, or both. Just do whatever! Google Earth Lets you fuck around with the planet. I could do this all day, every day. Give me a call when you find something awesome. * Snow Crash has the distinction in my mind of being the coolest book with worst cover art ever. That is, the coolness of the book is directly inverse to the coolness of its cover; so the worse you think the cover looks, the more you will like the book. Yeah, well, if you want to try to convince your friends to read the book (which really is a lot of fun) I recommend you tear the cover off rather than try to explain the mathematical bit. 0 comments |
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MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" - misuse of reflexive pronouns, as when someone says "Please talk to Bob or myself." Come on people now. "Myself" is not just a fancy version of "me"! LEARN IT. - tattoos in the Courier font - any use of Comic Sans |