Category: Technology

Mega Cool Super Church (and Technology)

This evening I pulled up Google maps to see what the church looked from the satellite view and the result is astounding.

Saturday I drove down to Happy Valley to pick up Graham following an overnight at his friend’s house. On the way there I saw a monstrous building and noted it was a church. On the way back home, we stopped so I could get a picture. I posted the first picture to Instagram (warning: link opens iTunes). In that picture, I included the sign as a point of reference but it somewhat eclipsed the gigantic church so I moved a few steps east and snapped another:

Abundant Life Church
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The Impact of War on Segments of the Middle East Population

…Saddam Hussein’s scorched earth policy reaked so much havoc that people continued to leave the country for the next five years…

Have you seen Google’s Public Data Explorer? It’s an interactive interface to some gigantic sets of data gathered from around the world (sorry, requires Flash). I found it when I searched for “population growth” on Google. If you click the chart at the top of the list of results, you can graph the change in population growth rates for any country from 1960 to present. The chart graphs the US population rate by default but you can turn on any combination of countries as well as the world population growth rate for comparison.

After playing with it for a few minutes, I wondered about Iran and Iraq, two countries that we all probably wish we knew less about:

Remember the Iran/Iraq war? You can see it right there in the data. Can you tell who “won” and who lost that war?

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Fun with the iTunes “search box”

Here’s a fun little exercise you can do in iTunes:

  1. In iTunes, click on your music library in the sidebar.
  2. Turn on shuffle, ensure that you have “By Songs” selected in the Shuffle menu (which is in Controls in the main menu)
  3. Type the first word that comes to mind in the search box
  4. Play one of the songs that is displayed
  5. Pick a new word or name from the currently playing song, type that word into the search box
  6. Listen
  7. When song changes, repeat 5

Note that in step 5 that you must pick a word that will include the currently playing song or iTunes will get confused and stop playing after the song is over. Obviously, having a large music library (23847 songs for me) and lots of metadata helps make the game interesting.

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“It’s Like Two People in a Room Talking”

While chatting with my old friend, Rob, I noticed he was typing a weird character combo.

While chatting with my old friend, Rob, I noticed he was typing a weird character combo. So I asked him about it:

Rob gives the thumbs up
Rob uses Apple’s default chat client, iChat. It supports AIM and Facebook.


Mick sees boobs
I use an open source chat client called Adium. It has support for almost every chat service but evidently doesn’t know how to give the thumbs up.