Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Magic

Thanks to R. I finally scored a job after a year of joblessness (more on that later).

Part of the job description is use Google Earth to obtain some data (no more on that later here). Anyways, I've used GE before to pinpoint my house and that sort of thing but never realised you could tilt Earth (mock me if you must).

To me that is absolutely magic. I can somewhat grasp that you can do that, computerwise, but the feeling of actually being somewhere else even though you're just staring at your computer is (to me again) totally amazing. Nineteen years ago I played "1942" and "Winter Games" on a computer with a 64 kb memory, because that was as much as anyone needed anyway. Now this. I am able to go anywhere and do anything (well) in the world.

Here's some of my best tips:

- Climb Mount Everest and enjoy the view. No frozen feet. No dead buddies. None of that media hazzle when I get back. Just me, a beer, and a view.

- Crash into buildings on Manhattan. This one is probably not polically correct, but how would it feel?

- Take a helicopter ride over Sahara. See how long you can go without noticing any buildings, roads etc. Then go to Paris. See how long it takes before you're out of town.

- Take a helicopter ride through Grand Canyon. Rich folks do it. Why shouldn't you?

- Zoom out as far as you can. Set our planet to north. Tilt it 9 degrees. Spin it carefully. Contemplate life universe and everything.

/J.

6 comments:

secret wombat said...

From one ground-dweller to another, congrats on the new job, LG. Just hope it doesn't curtail your authoring activities...

Lone Gopher said...

Thanks SW! I'm sure it will cur the tail a bit, just as long as it gets to keep most of it's body I'm fine.

/J.

Anonymous said...

Hi Bro,

Congrats on the newfound GE experience, I'll skip the Pepsi commecial comments. Even more congratulations on finding a job. Hope it works out for you ("works" - get it ....). No idea why I'm writing this in english.

Lone Gopher said...

Maybe as courtesy to my other reader. His Swedish is a bit rusty. Been there, done that? I know, i don't even have Firefox, it's embarrassing...
/J.

Anonymous said...

Congrats with the job.

Winter games and summer games? Dude, you bring back cool memories. We killed quite a few joysticks with these games...

Lone Gopher said...

Thanks Jeffrey.

I remember we used the Tac2-joystick for biathlon. tic-toc tic-toc tic-toc tic-toc tic-toc tic-toc - bloing, bloing, bloing. None of the games these days go "bloing". And the freestyle was called "Hot Dog". I used to think that was the proper name for the event for a long time.

/J.