Parked under a full moon about 20 miles east of Quartzsite, AZ. About 1 mile off I10 on a dirt road.
Comfy so far – I’m working e-mail, blogging, about to read books on the iPad. Brian enjoying the family comedy channel on Sirius radio.
Tomorrow, Tuscon and a hotel. But first a stop at Dillon Precision (for reloading supplies).
Just click on the Earth tab in Google Maps and many of the cool features found in Google Earth will appear, without you having to download the Google Earth app.
For instance, here is the Pima Pistol Range, near Tuscon, where I will be shooting this weekend.
Dear Santa,
I would like to have an HP DesignJet 3D printer for Christmas this year. It would be really handy to prototype all the good ideas my son and I have. Santa, I know it is $17,000, but surely there are politicians not deserving presents this year that you can skip and spend on me instead…
Thanks,
Ken in St. George.
Local Motors holds contests for car designs, winners get money, and if they can secure orders for 500 of them they build a micro-factory where you can spend 6 days building your own car.
This concepts interests me. The current car, The Rally Fighter, is cool, but not my type of ride.
I’d be interested in building a custom designed small, affordable Carerra or TT type sports car – only with a useable storage space/trunk.
kitcars.com has a zillion kit cars that are basically new frames dropped onto existing car’s chassis. But that isn’t quite the same… I’d like to design my own, just for me, and make it.
I just got back from Texas. None of my customers knew I was traveling. As we flew along the Interstate, I readily answered e-mail, or took phone calls. I didn’t blog, but that was mainly cause when I wasn’t working I wanted to look at scenery or chat with my fellow travelers.
What really made this possible was my father-in-law came along and did most of the driving. Oh… and amazing 3G wireless technology helped too. (-:
Out west public transportation just won’t work. But I can envision comfortable, information highway enabled jitneys moving people about so they can remain in the knowledge game. And for some higher value knowledge workers, I could easily justify a driver just so they can keep working.
I just bought a 2009 E350 Ford Van with 12 captains seats in the back. It was a commercial shuttle. I’m turning it into a Nelson “info highway” travel van where we can comfortably make some regional trips we have planned, while still being “information” enabled. We will be making trips to Washington State, Texas, Arizona, California, Idaho and New Mexico – that is just through August.
I’ll leave 6 seats in back, adjusting their location for legroom. Each will have a power port off a 600 watt inverter hooked directly to the battery. A laptop rack bolted to the seat bottom will hold a laptop for computing and media. A small fridge will keep us refreshed (and my medicine properly chilled). And, naturally there will be WiFi in the van and a Wilson electronic cell phone antennae giving us 20 mile cell range. The back will be storage on a sliding rack and a pop up bunk bed for when my son and I travel to shooting matches. Should be a good rig. It isn’t an RV, but we learned last year that RV travel is cool, but not that comfortable for the passengers. This will be an RV for two heartier travelers, and a comfortable way to get from hotel to hotel for a larger group.
I’ll post pictures of the final project in a month or so after we’ve finished kitting it out.
This would have saved me some time in years past…
http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html
A very cool 26 gigapixel panorama stitched together from a bazillion different pictures.
The prebuilt tours in the lower right are very cool.
I’d love to see this for more cities.
In someways, Google Earth is like this, but without the particular perspective.
Two reasons mainly… they try very hard and they adapt constantly.
That’s where the contextual signals come in. All search engines incorporate them, but none has added as many or made use of them as skillfully as Google has. PageRank itself is a signal, an attribute of a Web page (in this case, its importance relative to the rest of the Web) that can be used to help determine relevance. Some of the signals now seem obvious. Early on, Google’s algorithm gave special consideration to the title on a Web page — clearly an important signal for determining relevance. Another key technique exploited anchor text, the words that make up the actual hyperlink connecting one page to another. As a result, “when you did a search, the right page would come up, even if the page didn’t include the actual words you were searching for,” says Scott Hassan, an early Google architect who worked with Page and Brin at Stanford. “That was pretty cool.” Later signals included attributes like freshness (for certain queries, pages created more recently may be more valuable than older ones) and location (Google knows the rough geographic coordinates of searchers and favors local results). The search engine currently uses more than 200 signals to help rank its results
The article was fascinating to this Computer Scientist and I bet you non-technical Google users will find how they do what they do pretty interesting too.
The student becomes the master…
I knew it had to happen sometime. I just didn’t quite expect it so soon. My son smacked me down. Sat on me. Owned me. In pistol shooting… that is.
In the past, he had beat me once ,by a very small percentage and only when I’d had severe jamming of my pistol.
But yesterday, he started with an early 1st stage smack down, and then turned on the heat. He finished 4th overall (of 36 shooters) , with 116 seconds, I in the middle of the pack with 157 seconds. His score was within 1.5 seconds of 2nd place. I would have had top ten if I had not had a lot of jams on the 5th and 6th stages, but even if the gun had run, I wasn’t in his league on that day.
Which pleases me (-;
This match didn’t have a lot of movement. I can still move better than him, but in stages stressing shooting and gun handling – he has an edge…. for now.
Oh… and he’s just 12.
My home schooled son has posted an essay from his home schooling on his site:
http://briankevinnelson.com/report-richard-henry-lee-60
He’d love feedback.
We have him write most days. Not every day yields a full essay, sometimes we focus on just strong parts – like active sentences, or a strong paragraph from a particular essay.
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