My Microsoft "Ship-it" award
This one requires some explanation. Strings were strung between this platform
and the space needle to make the world's largest musical instrument.
On Saturday, Gennie and I went to Maximilien in the Market for dinner.
It's a rather nice restaurant, with lovely food and lovely views of the sound. For starters I had frogs legs. I have been meaning to try these for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity. They are rather like chicken in consistency, but they tasted more like fish - somewhere in between meat and fish in fact. They were a lot less strongly flavoured that I thought they would be.
My main course was a lovely piece of duck (I thought I'd stick with the amphibious animals for the evening) in sweet sauce, and for dessert some little slices of chocolate cakes. It's not the sort of restaurant you go to to get the big "American style" portions, but what we had was delicious and filled us up just right. The combination of good service, great food and nice atmosphere and surroundings made for a wonderful dining experience.
Afterwards we went to see Lost in Translation, which is quite possibly my new all time favourite movie ever. It perfectly captured the dreamlike state of being jetlagged and alone in a foreign country where you don't know anyone and don't speak the language. In some ways it reminded me very much of my first days in this country. By the end I was absolutely captivated, and when it finished I had almost forgotten I was even watching a movie at all - I felt like I had just been in Japan for a week.
I finally got the 30m resolution Landsat data working with BlueMarbleViewer! It looks fantastic, although the colour saturation is still a bit low. So far I have processed the data for the South-West of England, Seattle and New York City (although I haven't seen the NYC data in action yet since it hadn't finished processing when I left for work). I wonder which area I should do next...
The antibiotics are making me a bit nauseous but fortunately it's a fairly slow week at work so I can take it easy.
When I become a criminal mastermind, I'll become supreme ruler of the entire world because when James Bond (or whatever other hero comes around trying to save the day) I won't waste time telling him what my master plan is - I'll shoot him in the head!
Then, Gennie can have ALL OF THE SHOES!!!
I found a fiddly bug in BlueMarbleViewer and gained admiration from the other guys who are hacking the thing. Meanwhile, work on the utility to import the Landsat data is coming along slowly but surely.
Gennie had an unexpected day off today so we went to check out the new Fry's in Renton and also had a wander around Ikea.
Ever wondered how Ikea comes up with the names for their products?
The University of Maryland's Global Land Cover Facility Earth Science Data Interface provides the means to download Landsat 7 data (30m resolution) from almost any land location on the planet. The data is in a rather fiddly form (separate 60Mb non-normalized GeoTIFF files for each channel) so I really need to write a little program to put them into a format I can use with BlueMarbleViewer.
My blog has been somewhat geeky lately, so here are some pictures of cute kittens.
Wow, I got the high resolution (~30m) Hawaii data to work with BlueMarbleViewer! It looks incredible - you can see the runways at the airport and everything.
Now to go and do my real job.
I've been playing around with this neat little piece of software, Blue Marble Viewer. Basically this displays a picture of Planet Earth from any angle you care to choose - like a sort of virtual globe. You can zoom in and see all sorts of details of the surface, from ripples of sand in the desert to pollution in lakes to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest to impact craters to the Great Wall of China and everything in-between. It uses an obscene amount of disk space (about 2Gb uncompressed) and the resolution of the most detailed picture works out at 40960x20480 pixels, which means that each pixel is a little over 1km square at the equator (less at the poles). The overall effect is quite incredible.
The data comes from the Blue Marble section of NASA's Earth Observatory website (which is one of the most awesome sites on the web in my opinion). Another image on that site is a composite of global cloud patterns, which I liked so much I printed it out, framed it and hung it on my kitchen wall. Yet another is the famous "Earth at night" picture which is the desktop wallpaper of one of my computers at work.
I've got BMV compiling and (more or less) running under Windows now, but there are still a number of bugs.
Very geeky fun.
Rats, my email is down. My hosting company (Ghoulnet) knows about it but doesn't have an ETA for fixing it. In the meantime, all my email is bouncing.
I feel like I'm a ship adrift at sea...
I've been attempting to do Net Riddle. I have got to stage 1.48 but nobody seems to have completed that one yet, so my chances of passing it are slim at best.