Every time I ran into a new cool feature my jaw would drop a little farther. The fluid zoom, rotate, and angle can be played with for hours. Adding in the other features such as 3D buildings, earthquakes, etc. are even more fun. It’s got a whole section of local businesses that you can turn on to see where they are in whatever city, that hooks into the Google Local database (food, banks, schools, pharmacies, movie rentals, etc). It even has other funky things like Crime Stats, Census data, Postal Code boundries and more… although I didn’t run into any of those that worked in my local area (Utah) so that may be only available in certain places.

It is so much fun I am seriously considering upgrading to the Google Earth Plus to be able to get the cool extra features.

I know that hundreds of people will be writing about this today, but I was so impressed I just had to add my .02. Go download it and have some fun… it’s awesome!

ActionScript is fairly similar to JavaScript, and if you know any programming language you will be able to appreciate the majority of what is going on, just maybe not the fine details. But If you know the poem well enough you may be able to get a good enough kick out of it if you are even slightly techy/geeky.

Found via /.

Jabberwocky text to compare to

The statues we received were Helm’s Deep and The Golden Hall part of their “Environments” series. Unfortunately I missed out on the first one, Orthanc which is now selling on eBay for around $1,000. We can only hope the same happens to our new statues.

They are beautifully detailed, especially the Golden Hall. Unfortunately the Hem’s Deep statue is covered by semi-hard to see reddish/marroonish dots. They definately don’t seem like they fit in… unless they are squished orcses or something. I sent an email to Sideshow asking if this was a bug or a features, and that I could provide pictures. I was quickly responded to with a request for the pics, so I will have to take some tonight to send along. So far so good on the customer service. Their FAQ’s state that sometimes replacements can’t be had due to limited number editions (which this is) so I’ll then have to decide if I want my money back or a botched statue.

Anyway… will post the results of the dot findings when they happen, but am excited to add these to the collection. Now I just have to find a place to display them proudly.

**update**
After sending some pics they approved my return, and sent someone to pick it up. According to the UPS tracking number, they just got it. So hopefull a new unspotted Helm’s Deep will be on it’s way shortly.

Requirements: Have seen LOTR:FOTR, and be a gamer

sif = As if
ffs = For F*** sakes (their words not mine)

F3ll0wsh1p of teh R1ng

Dislikes so far are:

• Filters don’t work very well. They don’t explain how they work, so there isn’t much “help” to go with it. I tried just experimenting with it to figure out the syntax that is allowable, and found a few things out. But when I do a test search it comes up with X number of messages that match the filter. But when I apply it, only Y messages are listed.
• Labels are nice, but folders have perks too I love being able to assign a given message to 5 labels. But I hate that unless I want to archive a given message, everything shows up in my inbox. So the daily status emails I get from my server that I don’t want to really read right off the bat… are just sitting there staring at me, taking up prime realestate. It would be nice to have both folders AND labels, so I can physically move a message to it’s “main” category, but still be able to find it as associated to other labels

Gotta get back to work, so I’ll make this short. Just wanted to link to a few cool places:
Gmail4Troops.com – Donate your invites to those defending our country. A small but valueable way to say thanks.
Pop goes the GMail – A hack to download your gmail to a pop account.
Gtray (sporatically working link) – A desktop application that sits in your tray and checks for new GMail every X minutes. It uses Internet Explorer as a conduit to do the checking, and can only open IE directly… so as a FireFox user, I just see the bubble popup saying I have a new one and know to go look, instead of going through that bubble to see what’s new. This is a very early program, so hopefully things will get better.