Month: November 2005

Trip pictures in Google Earth

Google Earth Trip Map

In my never ending quest to make things MORE complicated… I decided to use Google Earth as a slick way to show some of my pictures from my trip to Europe. This was a bit more difficult than I had originally expected, but the results were fantastic! (A good argument for that GPS digital camera!) I didn’t really want to show them on Thanksgiving, but the family was all together and they wanted to see them! After 2 hours of going through pictures (I used our projector in the living room so that everybody would be comfortable) we reached Budapest (the half way point) and decided to continue next time!

For those of you with Google Earth, I have converted my local version of the show to a downloadable .kml.

For those who don’t have Google Earth, I highly recommend trying it out! It is truly incredible!

I basically took a few pictures of each city, used Google Earth to figure out where I took them from and then created a link with the actual picture. It took long enough for the 70 or so pictures that I selected, I can’t imagine doing it for ALL of the pics! 🙂 Stay tuned for more location based imagery as I start sifting through the rest of my 10gb collection of digital pics… uggh…

As if I needed another project!

Any given Tuesday?

Today started out like any other day. Get up. Go to work. Sneak away to take 15 min nap at work because I was literally falling asleep WHILE working with my new co-worker. Not sure what that is all about. I’ve been exhausted as of late. Maybe it has something to do with Dave and TK’s party on Saturday. Who knows… but either way, I felt totally beat. But we did get another program to work on the wall – a window to the milky way!

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After work I picked up Katty to go to Centro Romero where I have been volunteering the past few weeks teaching an after school class to help kids learn how to use computers. Katty was gracious enough to come help me out as Ben, the regular instructor, was not able to go today. The kids didn’t seem to enjoy my “lesson plan” all that much. Perhaps they could tell how exhausted I was.

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And that was just the beginning!

Continue reading Any given Tuesday?

For the Newlyweds

I have decided to try something new with my blog. I sometimes take pictures of things with somebody in mind that I then forget to share with them. This happened in various places during my trip, but also happens regularly at home. To begin this segment I bring you the newest and hippest piece of bedroom furniture, direct from Milan!

For the newlyweds… (even those celebrating their one year anniversary!)

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Round one — FIGHT!

20 cents

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I woke up late this morning, exhausted from my lack of sleep last night. I hurried off to work, not really paying attention to anything around me, primarily worried about getting there on time. As the day droned on, I decided to take care of a few things. I had returned a package, a computer part, and I wanted to make sure that they would send me the correct part. I also wanted to make sure that they refunded me the $7.50 I paid in shipping charges. I then called my credit card company, for they had charged me $18.45 in finance charges, seemingly out of nowhere. I spent a good 30 minutes of my time on these efforts this afternoon, mostly getting more frustrated at the incompetence of the people with whom I was dealing with.

In the end, I did get my the money back, a whopping $25.95, which was promptly spent on another computer part, and later on a magazine and iced tea. Its funny how when I feel that I have “recovered” money I feel as though it is something that I can now spend… but I digress. Katty and I just went shopping and as we returned home we realized that they had overcharged us on some frozen shrimp we had purchased. Said shrimp was $15.60 but we didn’t get the 50% off. I made my way back to Jewel to get our $7.80 back. In writing this, I am embarrassed about how stingy I must seem. My only explanation is that it was a coincidence that this all fell upon today. As it turns out, the return trip to Jewel was not a coincidence at all.

Continue reading 20 cents

Tile Display wall — or — what I’ve been up to

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So I had a bit more success getting the Tile Display Wall running properly today. I fixed some issues it was having accounting for the screen bezels (the “window frame” bars that putting LCDs next to each other will create). I also got the biggest data set we have tried on it yet! 8gb – 85000×30000 pixels or 2550 mega pixels. Pretty damned big! Very cool to see Chicago with that much detail! I’m excited to get bigger data stets on it! Now to just get it a bit more stable…

The data is from the US Geological Survey . It is a high resolution satellite picture of the Chicago area. I think it equates to one meter per pixel. The Tile Display Wall is running on a cluster of 6 Redhat Linux computers ( Shuttle SN25P with a 64bit AMD 4000+ processor, 2gb ram, and nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX) powering 12 Samsung 21″ LCDs. All of this on a budget of ~$25,000! That includes the custom designed, by yours truly, enclosure/frame.