Parking Spots

I'm easily amused. So?

More Fisheye Shots

It was a nice enough day today to take the lens out and try some test shots around town. I was hoping it would really open up on the cityscape shots but I'm somewhat disappointed so far. The colors are mushy and most of the pics feel like you're looking through a plate glass window. Part of it can be attributed to my inexperience with the lens so maybe the pics will improve with use. I wanted crisp, wide shots with a nice circular distortion at the edges. I didn't take any shots with the timer, that might help.

Keyhole Maps Trial

I decided to try out Keyhole and see what its about. Word of google's purchase has been floating around for months now. It resurfaced today on Google Code (2). It seems like there's a lot of overlap with Google Maps whose geek factor was upgraded after The Foot Stompin' 177 (Pookie BadMuffin) found this article on hacking Google Maps.

Keyhole's interface is very easy to use. The transition between levels of detail is slow but smooth and overall its a very cool app. In the screen cap above I entered in the latitude and longitude of a geocache we have yet to find. Keyhole flew from my previously selected location (Atlanta) and landed gravefully above the Appalachian Trial. I had to zoom out a bit to get the proper labels. I'm not sure how useful it is for geocaching in particular since the detail of the terrain is low, at least for this cache. When I searched for my home address, it zoomed in to street level and I could see the top of my apartment complex from a few hundred feet above.

The most intriguing part of it is not what it does so much as what it let's you do. Over at the Keyhole Community BBS people post points of interests (POIs) as xml files. Other users can simply click on these attachments and the open Keyhole application will glide over to the new POI, no matter where it in the world. The best data is for POIs in the USA though. I tried to get a street level view of Istanbul, Turkey but instead, no matter how far I zoomed in, all I got was a red circle that says "Istanbul" next to it.

All told, it has as much potential as Google Maps for photo location stuff, perhaps more since it doesn't have to "hacked" to insert your own waypoints and such. Google Maps looks better though IMO. I'm sure at some point in the future there will be a tighter integration of these mapping technologies along with Picasa and Blogger, all under Google's wing, such that photolocation will be available to the average user.

In the meantime, Keyhole user's can make these nifty overlays.

180

Since we've been bowling twice, I've officially added it to the Projects and Hobbies gallery. Joe even bought a ball, a ball bag, and shoes. Unfortunately, buying $180 worth of bowling stuff doesn't guarantee you the all-time 7-game high score of 180. It's a dark hour for the competition. Who can put forth the Herculean effort to best the impossible?

First Fisheye Photos

The correct adapter finally arrived.

Motorhomicus Vicaribus

I thought my last entry was cool and then I found this. I've never heard of hippie MechEs but these guys have it together.

Cool! I Know A Rocket Scientist By Proxy!

The web can be really boring. Especially when people you know only update their blogs on religious holidays. So sometimes I find myself searching other friends' blogs (not linked here) for interesting updates. Rarely, I find something pretty cool. As is the case of the Astronomy Picture Of The Day site, compliments of NASA. I came by this site through a link to a blog of a friend of a friend (C). I vaguely recall meeting this friend of C at the airport in Athens when the two flew in on a Cessna 152. The same plane I was flying briefly back when I had a job that provided lots of free time for that sort of thing. But damn it's expensive! Since then, she's (as far as I can tell from the blog) gone on to work at Mission Control in Houston. How cool is that?! Anyway, the Astronomy Picture Of The Day site has some pretty good pictures of the cosmos and other space-related stuff.