Saturday, July 16, 2005
Installed Google Earth. Google continues to amaze me over and over again with simply superior technologies that are both cool and practical. Google Earth enables people with newer computers to observe satellite map data as though they were flying above the earth. I installed it and started the Play Tour feature from the View menu. My graphics card, a Geforce 5200FX, couldn't keep up with the redraws, so some tour stops were still blurry when I left them, but nonetheless it's an impressive piece of software and networking (streamed data). My first interface problem occurred when I realized the blue underlined text in Places could be double-clicked. In fact, single-clicking gives a different behavior than double-clicking, but since it's blue underlined text, I realized only by accident that I could double-click it. Napped. I had a daymare: I dreamt my mom was outside my window with a garden hose. She thought she was helping out by washing the walls of the house but she didn't seem to realize that the windows were open, so water was splashing in the room. There was already a small pool of water at the foot of the bed.—Added more text to yesterday's entry; I forgot to mention the beautiful cakes Joel had made and brought to the office. Patrick and I picked up Tony A and Stephen F and we all went to Remi's birthday party at his home in Menlo Park. We drank Absente, the legal American variety of the old famed French hallucinogenic liquor, Absynthe. It tastes like black licorce. Remi had a quiz for everyone to determine who knew him the best, and the winner turned out to be Stephen, who had met Remi for the first time today. Remi had karaoke set up in his living room, so after drinks, bbq, and dessert, they put on their own show to kick off the singing. Patrick sang 4 songs: True Colors (Cyndi Lauper), Vogue (Madonna), The Greatest Love of All (Whitney Houston), and Summer Lovin' (Olivia Newton-John, John Travolta). On Vogue, Galen, Stephen, Nicki, and ? were backup dancers. On Summer Lovin' Patrick sang Travolta's part and Stephen sang ONJ's part. For dessert, Patrick made and brought Creole Bread Pudding with Creole Hard Sauce. We had a wonderful time.