Weapons of Mass Amusement

Another Google bomb has detonated. My good pal Dave H. sent me a push to google "Failure." Hilarity ensues. I think this has been around, along with "weapons of mass destruction" a couple years ago.

Remote Server for free: Gmail!

I got this tip from David Pogue's blog: the GMail Drive. It sets up your gmail account as a drive on your Wintel machine:

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

Sweet. I've been searching for cheap remote back up for important Foundation documents, this seems like a a dream come true! For those who don't know, GMail's storage limit is about 2.1 GB now and growing. It's still in beta, so you need an invitation. Anyone who hasn't tried Gmail should, and I'd be happy to toss you an invite.

Digital tapestries and Google Maps

This week's New Yorker has a fascinating article on how two mathmaticians helped the Metropolitan Museum of Art stitch some 200 cds worth of digital pictures of one of the Unicorn tapestries at the cloisters into a single composite digital image.

It begins with the common analogy that tapestry stitches are analogous to digital pixals, and therein lies the problem. The digital shoot happened while the tapestries were being restored in '98. After a bath in distilled water, and some time off the wall, the tapestry warped enough to make a composite picture difficult. (note: they were shooting at a resolution of 50 microns, or half the width of a hair). Even the process of shooting created inconsistancies, the ref. paper that slid on top as they captured each segment, the camera's sliding mechanism being off by millemetres and so on.

Without meaning to, this segways nicely into Google's news of the week: satellite imaging in maps. Again, we're talking about stitching many thousands of images together to create a compsite, a small fraction of which the searcher sees in their window. High in the blogdex is this man's annotation of Google Maps to indicate various sites from his childhood. Here are some instructions to do one yourself. I just did a brief tour from 409 Wilmers to Lincoln High School.

What a vanity search digs up

I'm perfectly aware of the vanity aspects of keeping a blog. This morning I googled "Sam Teigen" and "Teigen" to see if anything has changed. Happily <917> tops the "sam teigen" search and brought me back to this goodie, The Voice, posted online by Jose Nazario way back when Netscape was the hottest browser around. immer fragen warum!

I didn't fair so well in the "teigen" search, but turned up this gem. Plus this notice of BW, my grandfather's death came up prominently as is the Bethany College residence Hall named after him and my grandmother Elna. BW was the college's president from 1950 to 1970.