Google is taking over the world. They have the best search engine in existence, they own Blogger, AdWords, and I’m sure many other things that I can’t think of right now. And despite the fact that I know for certain that their stock will plummet on May 12, 2006, they now have made another purchase. Keyhole is basically a database of huge collections of satellite images, all put on a digital earth and there for you searching pleasure (It’s Google, of course you can search). By this I mean you can type in an address, city, country, or any combination, and it will zoom in to a satellite image of it. Given, some areas of the world are less detailed than others (big cities will be fairly clear, but Charlottesville on the other hand isn’t). I would also venture a guess that any military installations are mysteriously absent from the photos.

A little over a year ago I saw Keyhole used on some science program, and when they would move from talking about one part of the world to another, they would literally have the picture go from a zoom in on one part of the world, zoom out to see the Earth, then zoom in to the next part. But back then they didn’t have a free trial, and I was very disappointed. Now, my dreams have come true - and the best part is, although the images of Charlottesville are horrible, Chaska (where I lived in Minnesota) has really high detail images, and I could even see my old house! So anyway, download Keyhole, it has a 7 day free trial, and it’s only $30 if you want to buy it. I’ll post some coordinates so everyone can see my old neighborhood soon.

Something I forgot to mention about my trip was how my mom got invited to go teach somewhere for a few days. This isn’t an unusual thing - it’s what she does for work -but every one in a while she gets invited somewhere crazy. While in Paris, she got an email asking for her presence in Kuwait. Yes, I’m talking about the country that had the nasty little incident with Iraq during the Gulf War. She’s not going to go of course, but she had heard from some other people earlier that had visited Kuwait that they pay considerable amounts of money to people during what she does there. In cash. In large paper bags. I’ll let you think on that,

#m

Are you counting down the days until May 12, 2006, when we will have a huge mourning ceremony during lunch and… sacrifice someone? Becuase if we do I have a suggestion for a sacrifice. In the immortal words of Mrs. Strub, it start’s with a C, and ends with a hris.

God his jokes were terrible, weren’t they?

Oh wow, I remember he did that to me on the first day we ever had class with him. I really did hate him for the first year or so, but when Mr. A came, I really started to miss him (by the end of the year Mr. A was cool with me, but it takes me a while to get used to people). Come to think of it, the last I heard of Mr. Strub was on that job site for American teachers in Thailand, but it wouldn’t let me look at his resume, which saddened me.