christopher’s lives (v5.3)

Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 9.08 pm

Bird’s Eye Tourist

if you have been too busy playing with google earth to explore windows live local’s “bird’s eye” views, here’s a very cool way to get acquainted with it…

Bird’s Eye Tourist

From the site:

First Google brought us Google Local and Google Earth. Then Microsoft followed suit with Windows Live Local, featuring stunning new imagery. Bird’s Eye images provide a high-resolution, low-angle aerial view of a small area.

This website is the definitive guide and repository for the coolest Windows Live Local locations.

with a blog format and links divided into locations (where i found the sandia peak tramway) and categories (DO NOT miss “our favorites“), this is a very cool site…

at the moment the front page includes “the bat cave from the old TV show Batman“, “the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park in Buena Park, CA”, “numerous hovercraft at the Little Creek Amphibious Base in Virginia, “The Simpsons mural at Fox Studios”, and “the fake McDonalds”…

oh, and they also have a list of all the cities covered by windows live local…  very cool - even microsoft doesn’t offer that anywhere, as far as i know…

this is one to keep an eye on…  (btw, they DO have an rss feed!)

Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 6.13 pm

Duke City Fix » Hiking to the TWA Wreck

Duke City Fix » Hiking to the TWA Wreck

Anyone who has taken the tram up to Sandia Crest has probably overheard a passenger or two asking about the ‘crash site.’ They are referring to the wreck of TWA flight 206; a twin engine Martin 404 that slammed in to the west face of Sandia Peak on February 19, 1955. Sixteen passengers and crew were killed. While all of the bodies were removed, the remote location and rugged terrain necessitated leaving the bulk of the aircraft on the mountain in the upper portion of Domingo Baca Canyon in area that has since become known as TWA Canyon. A hike to the site makes for a memorable, if tiring, day trip.

Saturday, October 29th, 2005 at 10.03 pm

random email to the future

F u t u r e M e . o r g » Public » Random

in my links on the sidebar, i have a special section just for random links… click on them to visit a random weblog, a random homepage, a random webcam, even a random page on wikipedia… i love random links and don’t come across them too often, but, now i have a new addition to the list…

do you know FutureMe?
it is a site that lets you send an email to the future… the link at the top of this post and soon to be on my randoms list allows you to see emails people have sent (they have been anonymized), with the date they wrote it and the date it will be sent…
i hit it a few times and there is some fascinating stuff… a parent’s email to their daughter for her 18th birthday, a guy entering medical school sending himself a message to be received after he graduates, someone on their first day quitting smoking, a wife on her 5-year wedding anniversary sending a message to her hubby for their 10-year anniversary, and of course, mundane things like reminders for a doctor’s appointment, and many many many that are not easily described…

they are small pieces of stories of dreams and wishes, hope after regret, breaking of cycles, escapes from the past, beginnings and endings and new beginnings… and you can’t help but imagine these people and their situations, and the more vague the message, the more interesting it is…

so, go check it out, and btw, this is the best kind of random link, the url itself has the command to randomize, so, you can go there and just keep hitting reload…

Sunday, September 26th, 2004 at 10.31 am

links - couple of star wars dvd bits, a few various

The true cost of free iPods - Engadget

Boing Boing: Lucas put malicious Xbox trojan on Star Wars DVD
Star Wars DVD Grosses $115M

Google Search: star wars holiday special
[not only do i remember the fam rushing home so my brother and i could watch this over 25 years ago, i have always rather vividly remembered a couple moments from it (like the stormtroopers searching the wookie kid's room), and the images at these sites were so familiar i found myself saying "oh yeah, i forgot about that part"... yet i have trouble remembering my own phone number...]

ICQ Chat Request

A visual history of spam (and virus) email
The Spam Weblog

Boing Boing: Fave music site: Oddio Overplay

Play the PlayStation Portable — in Japan - Engadget
[um, yeah, i'd probably like to play with that... btw, best pics of the PSP i've seen yet...]

Guardian Unlimited Film | Features | Ruined by R ratings
[something of a history of not-safe-for-network-tv language in movies being dubbed for broadcast...]

NetRatings: Broadband users a majority in U.S.
[i somehow missed this news until now...]

The Making of a THX LaserDisc

Cities Collection [via RefDesk's SotD]
This NASA site offers outstanding astronaut photography of cities taken during space-flight.

craigslist - Gorgeous 2br Penthouse on Las Vegas Strip [sigh]

Friday, September 17th, 2004 at 3.44 pm

links - various, from karl, from SOTD, for family

first, the various…

Ender’s Game
“Intruder Signal” on 40 Meters Remains a Mystery for Now
Creepy crawly blanket
apod: Above the Eye of Hurricane Ivan
me with my LaserDisc evangelist hat on

karl sent me these months ago… yes, i am just now getting to them…

MetaSpy
OpenDiary.com
Web FTP Client Version3.5.0
Phone Phreaking Trips [RealAudio]

these links with descriptions are copied from three RefDesk’s Site-of-the-Day email newsletters i have had sitting in my inbox, meaning to check them out…

MIT OpenCourseWare
   ”Welcome to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare: a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership. With the publication of 700 courses, MIT OCW offers educational materials from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT’s schools.”

Time Capsuler
   ”To begin your trip in this Time Capsule enter a date. You will be presented with your own customized page that includes all the information you’ve chosen, plus typical consumer prices from that year, Academy Award winners that year, etc. Site has data online for the years 1800 through 2002, although data for the years 1800 - 1875 is probably spotty.”

The Yahoo! Buzz Index Weekly
   ”Check out the top 20 search subjects on Yahoo!, complete with a sardonic round-up of all the newsmakers that are moving and shaking web traffic this week.”

and i am posting these specifically for members of my family…

one for mary, one for mom, and one for jeff (i have been meaning to point this one out to him for something like three years)…

Saturday, September 11th, 2004 at 11.00 pm

links - The Holy Trilogy on dvd, two more 9/11 links, and a few various

these links came from an AGSF (?) thread titled “Star Wars DVD LG did not do a good job on remaster thing sound”

ours have been pre-ordered for quite some time, just waiting for launch day, with a gift certificate given to us for just this set, so, george technically got none of our money…
besides, we still treasure our near-mint Star Wars Trilogy Definitive Collection LaserDisc Box Set of the original theatrical cuts of the films, and even have the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition LaserDisc Box Set, the now intermediary 1997 versions, also not available on dvd (even though, with all the dumb stuff added in ANH and the dumb stuff already there in ROJ, only ESB is worth watching, but, VERY worth it)…

anyway, on to the links…

Digital Bits DVD Review - The Star Wars Trilogy
May The Force Be With You - Star Wars Trilogy DVD Media Day [plus a forum thread]
IGN - DVD: Star Wars Trilogy
dvdforum.nu - dvd, film & hemmabio [Region 2]

and just some other things i came across today…

American RadioWorks - Witnesses to Terror [RealAudio format]
Poynter.org - Covering the Attack

Engadget - The Search Engine Belt Buckle

Terra Nova: Ye Olde Disciplinary Punch-and-Judy Show [reported on boingboing.net as "Narrologists versus Ludologists: battle of the games-academics"]

Movieoke.Net: The Official Site of Movieoke

Saturday, September 11th, 2004 at 12.55 pm

links - ABQ cams & blogs, and 9/11 on fark.com

just getting started looking for abq cams…

AWS PalmNet
KOBTV.com - Eyewitness News 4
Albuquerque Cam
Dartmouth Street Gallery
WXnation: Weather Radar, Live Cams - Albuquerque, New Mexico
webcamworld.com : WebCam Directory : North America : USA : New Mexico

after i sort the wheat from the chaff, i will add some abq blogs to the sidebar…

ABQ Blogger.com’ers
ABQ LiveJournal’ers
Quirky Burque
Metaquerque
Burque News
Albloggerque
bohnsack.com
Musings from America’s Outback
NewMexiKen

9/11 anniversary thread on fark and the original news thread…

FARK.com: Comments (Avantgo version) (1119031)
9/11 remembrance discussion thread. Link goes to the original

FARK.com: Comments (Avantgo version) (45086)
NEWS FLASH: PLANES CRASH INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER, PENTAGON. Our link to CNN works (thanks Metafilter). We have news and pics in comments section, if you have any post it there

Friday, September 10th, 2004 at 2.50 pm

links - web-based tools and the world’s biggest cyndrical aquarium

these tools/resources will mostly be of interest to Dreamcast/WebTV browser users, though, a few might be worth a look for anyone who works with with web pages…

AnyBrowser.com - Your Source for Browser Compatibility Verification
WDG Copy/Paste HTML Validator
Cynthia Says - Accessibility Validator
Doctor HTML Quality Assessment Validator

Web Pages That Suck — Daily Sucker
HTMlite tutorials
extended ASCII - Webopedia.com

TL/2 - “a FileManager specially designed for thin-client browsers and a sturdy [webspace tool kit]“.
Draac.com - Web Page Tools
MAiP Developer Tools
Domania Directory Mover
net2ftp

Email Address Encoder
Adobe Acrobat - Adobe PDF Conversion by Simple Form

JSMFeed is a Perl script that converts RSS XML feeds into standard browser side Javascript in JSMsg convention.” - “Display RSS Feeds on your site- Convert your RSS feeds to JSMsg feeds for easy web-page display”
phpMyChat is an easy-to-install, easy-to-use multi-room chat based on PHP and a database, supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and ODBC.”

and, behold The World’s Largest Cylidrical Aquarium…

AquaDom Aquarium [via BoingBoing.net]

Wednesday, September 8th, 2004 at 2.10 am

links - blog stuff, Psion/Epoc, and a great craigslist post

been meaning to check these out…

Kinja, the weblog guide
Bloogz: The Blog Search Engine
bloglines

The Online Journal of David Berkowitz

The Memory Hole
“stores and makes available information that disappears from the net; this blog posts news about disappearing data.”

a few Psion/Epoc things…

RealMaps is a mature mapping utility with enough guidance and forethought to help even beginners become competent cartographers and navigators”
Solun - The Pocket Planetarium “Perhaps the world’s first astronomical program designed for a pocket computer”

epoc zone
nice tucows site
many downloadable books
World of Software - Psion - Contents

Pscience5 - Compact Flash
deep info and also a handy database file “containing reported makes/sizes of CF cards working/not working in Psions”…
Pscience5 - Digital Cameras
a few thoughts about the CF card variety for use with Psions…

PDABuyersGuide.com

and a great craigslist post…

hmmm…… :| <—– me. (not to scale)

Wednesday, June 16th, 2004 at 5.12 pm

search terms that bring people here

see, we have now added several thousand words to our site with these blogs, so, we show up more in search results, so, we are getting many many more hits…
and, following the tradition of posting interesting keywords, here are some that i thought were odd or cool or whatever…

let me get our regular keyword stuff out of the way first…

for as long as we have had our collection online, we get lots of hits from people looking for dreamcast stuff, since our dreamcast page has a lot of stuff, a few rare items people would be looking for, full titles, and even catalog numbers… dreamcast-related searches are our biggest bringers of traffic…

next, or maybe tied, would be all the searches for porn using google image search… you see, the directory of pics from when we saw a band called “Bozo Porno Circus”, every pic has “porno” in the filename…

we also get a surpring number of hits for people looking for the “sounds from hell” wav file that is in our wav directory

recently, we have also been getting some hits from people searcing for movie titles, and a few for bands we have mentioned here and there on the site…

and, with my recent posts on the subject, we are pulling in some mp3 blog-related searches…

ok, now for the singularities…

whisper dish
mentioned in the post from when we went to alamogordo…

jesse diaz pastor las vegas
mentioned in my recent post about our wedding…

virtual drugs
yeah, made a post about that…

clive barker signing pics forbidden planet
whoa… huh?
i assume those terms match to the “horror night” post, but, i have no clue what this guy was looking for…

what is the k-pax alternate ending plot spoiler
so, lemme’ think… probably the “list of movies we have seen” post and the “horror night” post appear on the same archive page and have all those terms between them…

talking cat video
whoa, now that is a weird one… i would have to poke around a bit to figure out where they landed…

intitleindex.of mp3 chab
this may be the oddest one… who would be looking for mp3’s and chabs simultaneously?
though, both are in our media directory, i don’t know anyone else besides us who keeps voice chabs online…
or is there a band called chab?
(btw, for non-dc’ers, “Ch@b”, sometimes spelled “Chab” in casual use, is a japanese instant messager service, and is built in to japanese Dreamcast browsers… it is the only real IM choice for dreamcast browser users…)

limpbizkit.mid
i thought the midi craze was over… we have not added any to our collection in a long time, and only have this one for something like historical value, in that it is the first midi we ever in heard…

amarillo yard signs
argh! does this mean someone knows the story behind these??? or are they also searching for the answer?

archived yahoo webcam feeds
i don’t get this one, either… feeds are live, not archived, and what is a ‘yahoo webcam’?
nor can i think off the top of my head where they might have landed on our site using these terms… though, now that i think about it, i bet most or all of those terms appear in the sidebar of every page of my blog here…

dreameye homebrew
well, THAT would be nice… but, i don’t think anyone is working on it…

angelfire briefcase links page
don’t get this one… what is an angelfire briefcase? i know yahoo briefcases, but, not angelfire… and are they searching for a page of links TO angelfire briefcases? i just don’t get it…
anyway, the terms all probably appear on our sitemap

penn jillette pc computing
good to know someone else reads them… (you can read tem, too, if you follow the “Penniphile” link on my sidebar…)

so, nothing TOO terribly exciting, but, we are just gettin started here and many more words will be added as months roll by, which means man more interesting search terms…
so, i will post about this again in the future…