April 2, 2007

• Greeting friends and welcome back for another excursion into blogging excellence. I honestly don’t know which is more fun: having the chance to get feedback from you people or making fun of ehowton. As always, special greetings go out to those of you joining us for the first time, and for those of you wondering, yes, this entry is coming to you live from Big Spring Park in downtown Huntsville, AL.

  Jobbing
  Honestly, I’ve got a lot of ground I want to cover, but I don’t know if it’s enough to justify a post. I was having a conversation with Heidi over the weekend and we were discussing how that it seems to be the case that every time I get a new job, I get sick and this time was certainly no exception. And it’s always the same stuff too. It’s that nasty crap that get stuck on your tonsils and then drains and drains and drains from your nose into the back of your throat, not to mention the fever and unstable stomach. I hate it and sure enough I came down with it this weekend mere days before I start my tech support position with Book Systems Inc.

  That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was the fact that it has become a very unstable situation at Steak Out for whatever reason. Apparently, they think I’m making this whole thing up and that’s fine with me. If I didn’t need the cash this week, they just might convince me to go ahead and quit. Let me tell you, I’m really having to rob Peter to pay Paul because of how the bills and checks fell this month. It’s not fun, but I always like a challenge.

  Back to my point about getting sick–and I know I’ve told this story before on my blog, my dad says I’m a siphon for strep. Strep, mono, the un-common common cold or whatever-the-hell it is I get so Goddamned frequently. Now, he’s a doctor–GI to be exact. I’ll never forget the first time I came down with this shit. It started on Sunday when they were having open house on Sawyer Mountain. Because the house was being shown I couldn’t cover up with a blanket even though I had a fever and all the meds were at the other house, thirty minutes away. That was an oppressive week. Thursday, Dad brought home a shot of something. I don’t know what it was. I just remember I could barely sit up for him to give it to me in the leg. This is what I’ll never forget and I trow he won’t either: shortly after I got better we were talking about the incident and he, “If that shot hadn’t done the trick, I’d taken you into the ER.” Now folks, I don’t know how many doctors you know, but when one of them tells you that they would have taken you to the ER, you know it’s got to be bad.

  I don’t like the schedule that Steak Out gave me this week. I was morning only today and again Wednesday. I’m split Tuesday and another day, Saturday evening and if I remember correctly just Friday evening. The point is, it’s a sucky schedule and ehowton‘s right, I need to get out of the food service industry. However, I also need to subsidize the income from Book Systems Inc., so it’s a bit of a Catch 22 although I do have the advantage of being able to tell whomever to go to hell once that job kicks in.

  In other news, this was one of the weirdest weekends I’ve had in a long time. Because I was sick and called out from work, I was constantly in the bed. I’d blog a bit on my laptop or maybe watch a movie, but then I’d roll over and go back to sleep. That’s how bad it was. I’m not complaining, I’m just passing on the news. Speaking of that…

  That which suffices for news these days

  Try this headline on for size: Google updates maps after Katrina ‘airbrushing’ incident

  Accused by a Democrat in the U.S. Congress of “airbrushing history,” Google said it has now replaced pre-Hurricane Katrina satellite images of the Gulf Coast region with more recent aerial photographs.

  The search giant came under fire late last week after the Associated Press reported the company had traded imagery documenting the August 2005 storm’s devastating effects in its mapping services for higher-resolution images depicting pre-hurricane calm.

  Google on Sunday said it had no intention of “rewriting history” but nonetheless was able to “expedite” the processing of 2006 aerial photography data for New Orleans that is of equally high quality. That update went up on Sunday evening, the company said.

  The initial news attracted concerns from Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), chairman of a House of Representatives science oversight subcommittee. On Friday, he sent a letter (PDF) demanding an explanation for the changes from CEO Eric Schmidt.

  Miller was unavailable for comment on Monday, as he is currently visiting the Darfur region as part of Congress’ spring recess. Despite a recent Google blog post that attempts to clarify the situation, the subcommittee still expects responses to Miller’s letter, said Luann Canipe, communications director for the congressman.

  “The congressman’s concern is that it was fundamentally dishonest,” Canipe said in a telephone interview. “Certainly the most basic question is, did someone ask you to change the maps and if so who was it?”

  Google said it planned to send a response to the congressman’s queries on Monday. The company confirmed it had swapped out the post-Katrina images in September, but it maintained that decision hinged on its interest in providing its users with high-quality images. The changes were part of a broader update that “substantially improved the imagery detail for dozens of cities around the world, including New Orleans,” a representative said in a statement e-mailed to CNET News.com on Monday.

  Even after it replaced the post-Katrina images, users could continue to view Katrina imagery captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–along with map overlays such as damage assessments and Red Cross shelters–at a dedicated site, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps.

  In his Sunday morning entry on the official corporate blog, Hanke said Google found the recent comments a bit surprising. “Our goal throughout has been to produce a global earth database of the best quality,” he wrote, “accounting for timeliness, resolution, cloud cover, light conditions, and color balancing.”

  Apparently in this day and age since it’s the goal of Democrats to paint the country as being in a constant state of doom and gloom, it’s now politically incorrect to show New Orleans pre-Katrina because that would mean being in cahoots with the Evil Bush who sent that hurricane to New Orleans to harm all the poor minorities. This kind of thinking is not just ludicrous or partisan, it’s retarded and borders on totalitarianism. To think that Google wanted to show of New Orleans in all its glory–why, we’ll have none of that! This is just another example of how Americans are being forced to give up their freedoms one by one and it’s all to push a liberal Democrat agenda.

  And what’s this business with “Certainly the most basic question is, did someone ask you to change the maps and if so who was it?” Who the hell cares? Google’s stockholders didn’t care and neither did the general public which Google serves (pardon the pun), but yet this Congressman can stand up and say “Whoa, whoa, whoa! We’ve got a problem here! You’re showing New Orleans as if the Evil Bush hadn’t perpetrated his evil. Are you in cahoots with him? Did he ask you to put those pre-Katrina maps up? Did he? Did he?”

  Who the hell are you Representative Miller to question what maps Google provides in a free service? And why should Google bend over backwards to pander to you and yours? Nobody’s “airbrushing history” except you and your part, Sir. It’s your party that’s saying we have no business in Iraq, that we’re doing more harm then good, that we’re pissing off the terrorists to the point that we’re provoking them to attack us again. It’s your party, Sir, that’s dictating that we set a time table for withdrawal and it’s your party that wants to defund the war and it’s your party who’s creating class-warfare in New Orleans. So I want to know, according to you, how exactly is it that Google is “airbrushing history”?

  I suspect I’ll beat Dan to the punch on this one. Speaking of Dan, he recently posted that Firefox has announced that they expect to be the most popular web browser in three months. I’m sure he’ll like this story to compliment his post, to which I ask: Since when has it become acceptable to let a security hole go un-patched for thirty days while the damage continues to spread? And I’ll go further then that: Since when has it become acceptable for a cursor to cause a security breach in an OS?

  Comments and topical discussion
  ehowton and I were discussing post content and whether or not it has an effect on comments. His point was that on his entries with 100+ comments that more likely then not the comments were off topic. Furthermore, to date, he hasn’t had a poetry entry that has garnered 100+ comments (though his current entry could indeed get there). While my point was that traditional entries garner more comments, his point was that content was irrelevant for garnering large amounts of comments per his experience. So I put it to you: do comments come because or in spite of content?

  For those of you who like to give your two cents worth, I wonder if you’d like to comment on this.

  • 9:39 pm
  • 10 Comments