Stuff this cool should be illegal. Seriously, I thought only the military had access to satellite maps this good. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get yourself over to Keyhole.com and sign up for the 7-day trial.

My housemates and I spent at least a good hour bouncing around the globe checking out various landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and Washington Monument. It seems that some areas are censored out, such as the US Capitol, however the Pentagon is shown in stunning detail, as is my neighbourhood back home.

Unfortunately the town of Waterloo is considered ‘Rural Area’, so the images of campus are considerably less impressive. I was also disappointed to not see some international sights such as the Pyramids and the Palm in Dubai. In spite of these, it’s an absolutely stunning job they’ve done of compiling data from different mapping projects into a single globe like this. It’s my understanding that similar projects have been undertaken before, but never with this slick a result.

It’s hard to even describe, but it gives you such an incredible feeling of the enormity of the Earth when you’re able to zoom from street level to viewing the whole thing in just a few mouse movements.

This sort of thing has incredible potential as a teaching tool. I was embarassed with myself that I wasn’t able to locate the Eiffel Tower without cheating (looking up the co-ordinates). However, experience playing Scotland Yard gave me a significant advantage navigating around London and identifying a few of the buildings between Hyde Park and the Thames.

I don’t know what these people would charge a school board for a site license, but it would be criminal to not at least consider it. This thing has implementations extending far beyond geography. History, Geometry, Languages, Literature, anyone?

Mike

I want a Mac.

Seriously, I thought this day would never come. Jokes abound online and elsewhere about the technical skill level required to operate a Mac, and once upon a time, I was a participant in such humour.

But several months ago I discovered a good friend who’d purchased a Mac for his new home computer.

Since then, I’ve really re-evaluated what I even use the computer for. I realised that I don’t play games. I’ve never been a serious gamer. The last game I played was like grade 10, and that was Max Payne. Yes, it’s an awesome shooter with brilliant plot and gorgeous graphics. And it’s full of style. But the main thing is that it was second year of high school and I just wasn’t that busy, so there was time.

I don’t have time like that now. The time I’m using to type this up could be used to catch up on sleep before I head to a Calculus Review Session at four o’clock.

So what do I use the computer for? Well, primarily for word processing, web development, instant messaging, and multimedia. What of that functionality is not available for Mac? In fact, most of the software I use, like FileZilla, is open-source, and available for any platform.

The most attractive thing about the Mac, though, surpassing anything else, is iLife. For like $50, you get iPhoto, which completely owns Picasa or anything else available for PC, iTunes, a similar product for organizing MP3s, iMovie2, which destroys Windows Movie Maker in every way, iDVD, which lets you author and burn movies to disc, plus GarageBand, which is basically a clone of SonicFoundry’s ACID, a loop-music program that is very dear to me.

It’s not that I can’t handle a PC. I enjoy the fight. But between the iLife package, the chic appearance, the promise of no hardware trouble, you can’t really beat it. Except, of course, for the price. Like I have $2000 to throw at a PowerBook.

I do enjoy being financially independent though. The other day the ink head on my printer died. This is like an $80 thing to replace, and I’ve done twice before on the $120 unit. So I surfed to my trusty forums and asked the boys what to go for in terms of entry-level laser printers. Turns out that the Samsung ML 1740 is an excellent model, and with the right coupon codes, the price can be knocked down $90, plus a $30 rebate… and shipping is free. Well, Oreo_The_Cookie from Rage3d recommended it, corroborated by several review sites, so I’m having it delivered Tuesday. No printing until then.

Mike

This past week, the message chalked on pathways around campus has been, “Do You Agree With Byron?” Byron is a senior undergrad student who’s put up a testimony both online, and in the student newspaper. All of this is sponsored by the Campus Crusade For Christ.

I guess I was a little disappointed to find out today that this wasn’t a brilliant home-grown UWaterloo idea, but that similar ‘I Agree With…’ campaigns are going on at a number of North American schools, including Mac and Queens.

Many of the messages surrounding popular buildings have been defaced or supplemented in various creative ways by counter-minded individuals, and similarly, the online forum is beginning to be overrun by single-post users who drop links to Infidels and then never return.

Ultimately, whatever you believe, if you plan to take a stand on it in some way, make sure you’ve thought about a bit. Someone who claims his opposition to be blind followers and then cuts and pastes huge articles from other sites as ‘debate’ is useless except as part of a larger screaming body of Cyber Sisters.

I guess the lack of open, intellectual debate is the biggest frustration I have with this whole issue (and many others, really). Why can’t intellectual people just discuss things without resorting to insults and mud-slinging?

On a lighter note, for some good, Waterloo fun and hijinx, check out our very own PhoneBooking.com, now hosted separately from the school, since it was eating up too much bandwidth…

Mike

PS — And for the record, yes, I do agree with Byron.

I must have a soft spot for weepy chick-flick dramas. I mean, the critics would never admit to liking something like this, but I really enjoyed it. I’d never have gone with the boys to see it, but 50% of my housemates are female, and they won.

The films I like all fall somehow into one or more of the following categories: They either make me laugh, make me think, or make me feel good. I need a mix of all three types though — if I’ve had too much of one particular one, I don’t enjoy those as much for a while.

But ‘feel good’ movies are like drinking hot chocolate on a cold day. A film like A Knight’s Tale has some humour, but a large part of it is the feel-good factor. Ladder 49 is like this.

There’s simple, honest, hard-working people living a real — if sugar-sweet — life. There’s no villain. I guess I enjoy a movie like this for the same reason I enjoy Legally Blonde or Ocean’s Eleven. It’s a pure fantasy, but it’s a pleasant one. Baltimore firefighters a big happy fraternity? Probably not, but it’s nice to imagine a life where no problems lasts longer than the time it takes to put out a fire.

Mike

When I was originally figuring out my living arrangements for school and decided I was cooking for myself, I budgetted a lot of money for eating out, figuring that I could, considering the savings on rent.

But I hate eating out. The food on campus is awful. In an emergency last night between a meeting and WCF, I had the special at a major campus eatery. Terrible. For the $8.50 that cost, I could’ve made three meals each twice as good. And I’m not a chef. Definitely not a chef.

But I had a nice piece of success Thursday after the bananabread fiasco. I thought I’d make Pizza for the other Mike and I. Now, I know making pizza is supposed to be really difficult, but I also knew that my sisters and I had had a moderate amount of success with it a couple months ago at home. Well, it worked famously — absolutely delicious. I bought a slice of Pizza Pizza today just as a control variable to make sure, and it was sort of lousy in comparison. :)

I might as well take this opportunity to link for the first time to my other big project — the Quickcook Database. It’s not finished, but there’s still a lot of great meals there that my family members and I have contributed.

It exists primarily to provide me with things to consume so I don’t starve, and secondarily as a playground for me to work on my PHP and MySQL skills. It’s not supposed to be a gargantuan beast the way some recipe sites are, just a small collection of honest, reliable, simple food ideas. That said, the database behind it is far more sophisticated and intricate than anything I’ve seen anywhere else to date.

I’ve updated the Pizza Recipe to reflect my observations from the other day. And I’ve got the other half of the dough in the freezer for another time.

Mike

After a 3 hour Autocad and sketching lecture-lab, our prof announced that in twenty years of teaching this material, he’d never seen so many people asleep by the end of it.

I managed to stay alert and internalize everything, but I guess time will have the final word on that. There were several assignments due at the crack of dawn this morning, all of which were more ambitious than they appeared to be from the outset. Besides that, we had a practice-midterm last night until ten, so a lot of folks were up well into the night working… and posting occasionally on our class forum, which I set up and have been administering with moderate success.

The practice midterm was a short paper with a handful of questions from each course stapled together so that we could get an idea of the difficulty level. It was deceiving to have it as multiple-choice, though, since neither of the math exams are to be that way. As it was, I scored almost perfect, but that’s because of good educated guessing where I wasn’t positive.

I’m going to try making pizza tonight… we’ll see how that works out, but I was responsible for the crust the last time the sisters and I did it, and it was great then.

In other news, it looks like the major project for our Mechatronics course is an obstacle course in Mindstorms. The most severe limitation is that we’re only permitted to use a single kit. In terms of sensors, that limits you to two binary touch, and one photocell. Trying to reliably follow a line with a single light sensor when one of the guidelines is ‘as fast as possible’ seems like a somewhat futile exercise, if my experience with campers over the summer is any indication. I was thinking more along the lines of an encoder for very precise distance reckoning. But of course, since it’s one sensor and two wheels, this requires a devious gearing arrangement whereby a single motor powers both, but a nonfixed axle allows it to steer… differential, anyone? (Rob’s influence over me is profound)

Chemistry lecture was cancelled today, so I had a few moments this afternoon and thought I’d try my hand at baking a banana loaf.

Well, something went wrong…

I took it out after an hour of cooking, plunged a knife into it, and realised it was still mostly dough inside. Was it missing some key ingredient that I neglected? Is the tired old oven in our kitchen just not able to hit 350F any more?

I stuck it back in for another 20 minutes. The results can seen on the right. Yes, it was cooked all the through. No, it wasn’t burnt. Yes, it is in many small chunks. Yes, I did grease the pan.

Baking is sort of like studying. You spend time studying in order to purchase the satisfaction of a good mark on the test — and that of having learned something new, but it’s less tangible. When you bake, you invest time in the present, and the payoff is a yummy snack.

Well, I’m pretty sure that loaf’s pieces will be yummy when I consume them slathered in butter with chunks of cheese and a tall cold one of milk… but not quite the way I envisioned it.

Mike

EDIT: It seems that all unsatisfactory results were the product of a single miscalculation. I used a slightly smaller pan than was recommended in the recipe. This caused the loaf to be a lot thicker, and therefore not cook properly in 60 minutes, leading to the overdone crust and subsequent disintegration.

Our modern society promotes a free flow of information. Some topics, like hate-material, of course, are excluded. Some other topics are officially permitted, but really just shouted down in any kind of debate.

Out of curiousity, I checked out the Waterloo Student For Life presentation this afternoon. It seemed like lots was said both by the presenter and a very vocal heckler, but ultimately it boils down to a single issue: Whether or not a baby before birth is a human. In one case, it’s a medical procedure, in the other, it’s murder.

I haven’t really had the time to research the whole matter properly and form an opinion, so I can’t and won’t say.

But I do get very frustrated by the amount of the debate that’s just plain appeals to emotion. Is it the child’s right to live or the woman’s right to choose? How come the question isn’t just ‘Do you support legalized abortion?’, rather than ‘Do you support the murder of unborn babies?’ or ‘Do you support medieval ideas about women?’

At the moment, it’s just one more issue that I can close the book on for now. I do know, though, that I could never go to sleep at night having been a doctor involved in an abortion procedure. And it’s more than just the blood.

Mike

Some time ago, I remember playing an amazing game that was tons of fun, but afterwards I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called. Well, I met up with it again this weekend, at the WCF retreat. It’s Catch-Phrase. Now that link points to the electronic version, since it seems the classic mechanical/paper one is out of print right now. But the concept is the same: It’s like Taboo, except with elements of hot-potato and charades thrown in. The girl who brought it said she got it for her birthday and it’s become a phenomenon on her floor.

I could believe it.

I just love games like these, where you’re investing in it creatively a little more. Bluffing games fall under the same general blanket, too, maintaining a friendly conversation to keep calm. Liars dice — great!

In a similar vein, I had a desire to try a really classic PC game that I remember from the BBS days — Lexi-Cross. Hails from 1990, and is one of the earliest games (that I’m aware of) that sets itself in a fictitious game show, a tradition that You Don’t Know Jack has proudly carried forward ever since. I snagged it off The Underdogs, but it’s running rather briskly on my machine. Once I’ve got it slowed down properly, I’ll check it out some more. It’s just astounding the stuff people did graphically before the days of scanners or drawing tablets. This is one of those early gems.

Mike