Simultaneous translation

[hirez]

Jeggsy Dodd and The Early Years. I'm only about six months behind the times. Soon my trousers will out-mass Mercury and the flappy bits will achieve relativistic speeds.

Woke up this morning at the correct time after a pleasant night. Dropped off sharpish the night before thinking cheerfully of Plot.

So the Saab misfired like a bastard (because the damp's got in the works) and caused the driver of a Golf to lean on its horn somewhat. Presumably my complicated hand-signals, meaning 'Look, the poor beast's got a shoddily installed 'alarm system' that's all chocolate block and insulation tape wired across all the electrial system like a terrible parasite. Give it a chance to warm up, there's a love.' were interpreted as 'Fuck off or you'll be wearing that bloody steering wheel anally.' Which would be a dreadful and unfortunate misinterpretation.

Google Earth is terribly good fun. Especially when being driven by a sad bugger of a map geek who can remember where his friends live. Want postcode and proper contour maps.

Comments

[aeia.livejournal.com]

Google earth is great fun, especially the conspiracy theories about bits that appear to have no data.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Google Earth is what the internet was invented for. Also, as there are undoubtedly lots of knowledgable people reading this - wtf is http://www.swinehood.com/alaskan.kmz

I like looking at the local stuff, but exploring the geology of the planet is also fantastic. The earth look sso much like a partially deflated balloon, all wrinkles and saggy bits. Then there's the big desert splat. Wow.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Isn't that a cloud ? Look a bit further north for some less dramatic cloud over land, for comparison.

[aeia.livejournal.com]

Just had a look too, it's been a while and they've got much better resolution images of Bristol now! The detail is amazing!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I can see them not wanting to map Humblebee...

[red-mel.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain, try startng a sodding 1984 Nova in the cold and wet. Have made the choke run a rich as it can, so I get through extra fuel but at least I haven't stalled it at anymore roundaboouts! Not that I will ever be able to open my boot again.

My favourite is when the fanbelt slips whilst you are in the middle of town in front of x amount of people staring at you and your beige wreck of a car!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reminding me that I should emit another chapter of 'A history in dodgy vehicles'. Mine was a 77 or 78 Escort (un)Popular. Bloody Ford bloody electrics.

The worst fanbelt/alternator embarassment belonged to a chap called Martyn who shared a house with Jon (Miller. Sometimes reads this. Hello.) round the back of a pub called (The Vauxhall/Last Drop/Sportsman) which is now a golf shop on the Tewkesbury road. He had a seventies metallic brown Chrysler Alpine that had been run into by an ice-cream van. (Only funny because it was a hit-and-run) I swear you could hear that thing screeching halfway across Cheltenham. Martyn gave me a lift in it once; I hid in the passenger footwell and made sure no-one was about when I scarpered from the vehicle outside Bristol Street Motors.

[mr-flay.livejournal.com]

Google's persistent refusal to support Macintosh fills me with woe.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Well exactly - the clouds to the north look nothing like that formation, nor is there any shadow evident (though I'm not sure it would show up against the sea).

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Right, but cloud has a lot of different textures. It's a plausible colour & swirliness for cloud.

[spride.livejournal.com]

It's in leaky alpha. I have it but damned if I can recall where I got it. Think there's a link in the comments on the Flickr macintosh pool.

[spride.livejournal.com]

the version I have here does postcodes, I think..I am sure I tried London E14 3GH to NY 10708 - the journey I will be making shortly..

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Doesn't the Earth tech come from somewhere else? It's still a rubbish excuse, mind. And it's not as if whoever-it-is has used the standard Windows widget-set and it kicks off with OpenGL support, so you'd think a portable application wouldn't be impossible...

Konqueror support for all the AJAX stuff would be Jolly Nice, too.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh, jolly good. I must admit that I'm probably a couple of releases behind; I'd downloaded the installer just before the last PSU went *phut* in August and haven't bothered to see if there's a newer one. (Got used to auto-updating s/w, probably)

[amanda-pink.livejournal.com]

Wow, you can compress all of that into one hand gesture? I'm impressed!!!

Err, I have to confess to being another Google Earth geek here as I've got a lot of my friend's houses mapped in England and in San Francisco... Oh dear.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I'm more convinced than I was, but still not convinced. I'll see if I can find the time to check out coastlines to see if I can find something similar elsewhere.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Yep - a lot of the UK was updated recently (though the data isn't neccessarily recent). See also: armchair_earth.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Is that the free or the paid-for version?

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Well, there was/is NASA Worldwind, which was much better in some respects (and at least you could control the location of the cache!). But I don't think it was based on that.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say I was convinced. It just looks more like cloud than anything else I can think of.

It's interesting that there's cloud showing at all in Alaska. I don't think I've seen any anywhere else, which must mean they had a hard time finding un-cloudy shots of this bit.

[spride.livejournal.com]

Strictly speaking it's no version at all - it's the leaked Mac OS X beta version 3.1.0371.0