Now with satellite imagery!

Google Maps now has satellite imagery. In some areas - including the island I live on - it's not high-resolution enough to zoom all the way in, but the pictures are very impressive. In others, it's quite good.

For example, here's an overview of the Air Force base a short distance from where I grew up - and you can zoom in another 3 levels from that. (Don't worry, folks, it's got cargo planes and Air National Guard tankers - nothing exciting!)

Donnie Darko

Over at the Internet Movie Database, there are few surprises among movies IMDB users have voted as the best science fiction movies of all time. "Star Wars" is joined by "The Matrix," "2001," and "Alien" among others.

One surprise is a movie which is ranked in the top 15 of all time, despite having been written by someone fresh out of film school who had the audacity to insist that he be allowed to direct it, having cost only $4.5 million to make, and having flopped in its original limited box-office release, bringing in only $500,000, only to become a "cult movie" upon its release on video.

That movie is, of course, Donnie Darko, a sort of bizarre fusion of 1980s teen movies like The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off and sci-fi thrillers. If you've seen The Butterfly Effect, this is the movie it was trying to emulate.

The plot? Simply put, a psychologically disturbed teenager has visions of a giant evil bunny-rabbit that tells him to commit acts of destruction because the world's going to end. Sound bizarre enough yet? If not, throw in wormholes, time travel, Patrick Swayze as a character you'll love to hate, Drew Barrymore, and some great one-liners.

If this movie's so great, why do I only think it deserves 4 stars out of five? Because ultimately, all the things that look like they're being taken care of in the movie aren't taken care of at all. Exactly how that comes to be, and why, I can't say without spoiling it. You'll have to watch it yourself.

Donnie Darko is rated R, probably because there's some violence, destruction, implied drug use and typical 1980s teen humor. In my opinion, it's just barely an R as opposed to PG-13.

Among our weapons are surprise, fear, and redundancy!

I'm not sure what a "Headquarters Headquarters Company" does. Maybe they handle all the forms that have to be submitted in duplicate? 

I saw these folks from the Headquarters Headquarters Company of the 2d Battalion, 299th Infantry, marching in the Royal Parade of the Merrie Monarch Festival today here in Hilo.

April Fool's Day

Not bad overall. Went up the mountain. Drove an Expedition (fullsize SUV) instead of the Explorer (midsize SUV) I usually drive. The Explorer is a lot nicer on the road; the Expedition just wallows along. But on the steep dirt road near the summit, the Expedition is a bigger, heavier, more powerful vehicle, so it doesn't bounce around as much.

Got up there, spotted some tourists, gave them a quick tour of the observatory. They were from the Los Angeles area. Got my work done. Gave some more tourists a quick tour. They were from New York, but had grown up in India. This was funny since I was in New York early last month, and in India last fall. Drove back down. Recorded my trip as Hilo-Mars-Hilo in the vehicle's mileage log, since it's April Fool's Day.

Watched part of the Merrie Monarch Festival, except when my daughter demanded that we channel-surf over to "Trauma: Life in the ER" on Discovery Health.

Eventually, got some sleep. 

Recipe: Saint George and the Graham Cracker Dragon

Special Consideration:		Kids
Servings:		300

Description:
Cryogenic crackers turn science fair attendees into "smoke"-breathing monsters.
Ingredients:
Liquid Nitrogen (in a styrofoam bowl)
Graham Crackers (not iced)
Tongs

Directions:
Make sure you have an audience.
Break graham crackers into bite-sized pieces.
Use tongs to dip each piece into liquid nitrogen for 5 seconds
Use tongs to wave cracker piece in air for 10 seconds (cracker will appear to "smoke" or "steam")
Juggle cracker piece between hands until it is safe to touch (spots of frost on your hands mean juggle faster!)
Hand the cracker piece to someone who will eat it quickly
OR eat it yourself.

The continued gasification of the liquid nitrogen in which the cracker was dipped creates cold nitrogen. As the person eating the cracker exhales, the cold nitrogen causes the temperature of the air it mixes with to drop below the dew point, resulting in condensation of water vapor in the air, and clouds of "steam."

(Our outreach officer was quite worried when he saw me doing this, and told me to stop before our associate director noticed.  That's when I told him the associate director already ate one...)

A Farewell to Access

Today, I used Microsoft Access for what I sincerely hope will be my last time.

I had been using it on a quarterly basis, as part of perfoming a reporting process for a company in my area. The process - which was created far before I got involved - went something like this:

• Get the backup tape from the SCO OpenSewer/Advanced PICK machine
• Restore the tape on the Linux/PICK D3 machine
• Do a bunch of mucking about on that machine to create ODBC-accessible SQL views
• Use Excel to pull data off via ODBC
• Muck around with the data in Excel
• Feed parts of the data through Access, with a bunch of macros
• Muck around with the data in Excel some more
• Print out lots of results.

Anyway, the company recently got sold, so the SCO box, and everything associated with it, no longer matters.

On the down side, I'll have a little less work and pay as a result of this. On the up side, the work I'm losing involved technologies I'm really not a fan of, like SCO and PICK and Access.

Of course, I've been running Access (2000) on Windows XP SP 2, under Virtual PC 6, on a Mac. With this process gone, I really won't have any reason to boot into Windows - other than to run Windows Update, which I already do far more often than I actually do anything productive with Windows. That says something!

Bookworm 2: The Return

A couple weeks ago, my daughter got her very own library card. This was an extremely big deal, and still is. It did get lost in her room (as things tend to do) but was found quickly today, for her return trip to the library.

The return trip involved, of course, returning books - something she'd never had to do before, but now knows about.

Then she decided she wanted some science books, so I showed her where the kids' non-fiction shelves were, and she picked books about germs, centipedes, mosquitoes and grasshoppers. Then she picked up "Franklin is Messy" from the fiction shelves. 

The librarian pointed out the shelves for circulating magazines and new books, and we finished up with 2 issues of "Spider" magazine (it's not about spiders; it's the follow-on to "Cricket" for slightly older kids) and a huge thick book containing ALL the "Thomas the Tank Engine" stories that had just arrived.

We got to checkout, and after watching the circulations lady stamp the other books, she noticed that there were no stamps in the front of the Thomas book. I was just about to point out that she was the first one to check it out, but she blurted out, "Am I the first one to ever get that book?" and was tremendously excited about it.

We wound up with a bit more than she could easily carry on her own, but that's mostly due to the Thomas tome. And she's down to a "mere" dozen books out at once, which is an improvement over her first-week binge of 20 books.