monitorhead

I downloaded and installed Google’s latest free offering, Google Earth.  It’s an application providing satellite photography of the whole Earth.  Detailed coverage is available for the U.S. and a handful of other countries.  This means you can zoom in and see objects as small as your car.  The photos are not real-time but represent a collection from different satellite providers taken in the last 3 years.  Still it is pretty impressive.  The animation is quite seamless as you zoom in from outer space right down to your street.  They have even included rendered building shapes for 38 American cities.  This along with the ability to tilt the map at a 45 degree angle allows you to get a feel for the shape of the city skyline.

Other cool features include driving directions (with a fly over perspective), ability to place markers at specific locations, and the price = $0.  I recommend downloading and trying it out, especially if you enjoy mapping things or looking in your neighbor’s backyard.  It does require a somewhat modern graphics card and reasonably fast internet connection to enjoy the full experience.  Well done, Google, well done.

I previously posted about my favorite new sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica.  Well, the season premier is just a few weeks away, July 15.  To bring everyone up to speed, the SciFi channel is showing a marathon of the complete first season next Wednesday, July 6.  The episodes start at 10am/9Central.  If you missed this show the first time, now is the time to set your Tivo/VCR to record the season.  I’m excited that I’ll have some TV show to look forward to during the summer.  Check out the website for Battlestar.  There is lots of extra content including episode summaries, Podcast commentaries to listen to during the episodes, etc.

By the way, I’ve been watching season 2 of The 4400.  This is another intriguing sci-fi program with plenty of political undertones.  I’m sorry I missed season 1 but the show has done a good job of recapping the highlights, so I don’t feel left behind.  I’ve also been watching Into the West, a mini-series capturing the drama of the settling of the American frontier.  It’s been fun to watch. 

Originally, I thought this blog would focus on my obsession with computers and especially my quest for the ultimate HTPC.  However, few of my posts have been related to those topics.  Today that will change.

For Father’s Day, Megan gave me the Logitech Harmony 680 - a multi-fuction remote that is programmable using your computer and an internet connection.  What?  How do you use the internet to program your remote?  Well this is the beauty of the remote.  It plugs into your computer via USB cable and then opens a webpage where you can update and configure it from the Logitech website.  If you know the model number and manufacturer of your TV, VCR, DVD, etc.  it does all the programming for you.  In typical wizard style, it asks you to set up simple tasks.  For instance, Watch TV: What channel do you watch TV on? Do you use a cable box?  Do you control the volume on your TV or on your stereo amplifier?  After answering, it sets all the controls for you and a single button now turns on the appropriate devices and tunes them to the correct inputs.

If it seems a little complicated still, there is a help button that will ask you questions and make corrections until the system is all running properly.  Of course, if you are like me, you still want to have fine control over how the remote behaves.  That is possible, too; you can tweak the time between signals, the repeat rate, and many other things. 

Over all, this is the best Father’s Day present I have ever received (I have only celebrated 2 Father’s Days but this will probably hold up for a while).

Last week Megan watched a 5 episode mini-series on VH1 called "100 Greatest Kid Actors."  One segment of the show included the scariest kid actors.  The scariest was the kid who played Isaac in Stephen King’s "Children of the Corn" from 1984.  Megan had never seen this so we rented the movie at our local Blockbuster. 

This movie is not at all scary and I found it hard not to laugh at most of the acting.  I guess it would have been scarier to me in 1984 when I was a kid. It did have some great lines like Malachi (the gangly red-headed enforcer) yelling "Outlanders!" repeatedly.  That guy had an enormous mouth!  By the way, Linda Hamilton (later played Sarah Conner in The Terminator) was in this movie.

Have you watched any old movies again that weren’t the same as you remembered them from when you were a kid?

As a side-note: I took Connor with me to pick up the video.  While checking out, the girl behind the counter looked at me funny and asked, "are you getting this for him?"  What kind of a bozo does she think I am?  Just because the word "children" was in the title, I don’t think it is a children’s movie.  I made sure to grab a copy of "The Incredibles" so she wouldn’t think I was a psycho.

I have been back in California alone for 3 days and I have come to these conclusions:

1. An empty house is not fun to come home to.
2. Really good meals can come in frozen packages.
3. Left to my own devices, I would sleep until noon and work until 10pm.
4. My wife is my reason for coming home at night.
5. A queen size bed is too big for one person.