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This seems very apropos with all the inclement weather we’ve been having.

GMaps + Storm Data.

While I was driving to pick up my lunch today, I heard an interview on MPR that Gary Eichten was doing w/ a few Minnesota state reps regarding the impending government shutdown. I haven’t been following the whole process well enough to determine if anyone’s (or any group) is to blame. I don’t really care. All I have to say is shame on the lawmakers for not doing their job. They get paid by our tax dollars to effectively run the state. They’ve had months to get this budget deal nailed down. Seriously – they need to do what it takes to get the job done. What a miserable failure.

So now – as a consequence, it looks like all the state parks, rest areas, and other “non-essential services” will be shut down…just in time for the July 4th weekend.

For shame…

This is great. A contest was recently held between a 13 year old girl w/ a T9-enabled cell phone and a 93 year old telegraph operator to see who could send a prescribed line of text the fastest. Well despite the 13 year old’s speedy thumb and predictive text entry, she still got her butt whooped by the morse code-wielding telegraph operator.

Back in grade school, I bought some morse training tapes, and started working through them for a few days, but as usually happens, I got distracted by some other endeavor and forgot about the morse tapes. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll actually get my Amateur Radio license (not that I need another hobby).

Edit…Thanks for Mr. Miller for the vid. Here’s a video of a similar contest that was aired on Leno a while back.

Evenin’ all…many of you already know, but if you haven’t heard yet, we’re expecting a new baby (which happens to be a boy) in November. Meghan and I are already bonding in an amazing way with the baby, and are looking forward with great anticipation to parenting our little boy.

So far we’ve gone in for ultrasounds three times, and our doctor says that everything’s looking great. It’s amazing to see all of the parts in there – growing steadily day by day. You can check out the ultrasounds here.

Several months back, Google purchased a company called Keyhole. Keyhole made a desktop application program which allowed you to zoom around satellite images. Pretty cool stuff. The catch is that Keyhole was charing $40/year for this software, if I recall. Well today, in case you missed it, Google released this product, rebranded as “Google Earth”….for free. It has all the functionality of Keyhole’s application with the addition of Google’s Local search and direction finder.

Download away!