Desultory Thoughts

What do the United States, Israel, and Google have in common? They’re all on Iran’s ‘Must Be Destroyed’ list. Yes, Google, the China-owned, commie led virtual world superpower has done pissed off Iran.

From The Guardian (UK)

Google has provoked the wrath of Iran’s notoriously suspicious authorities by appearing to question the country’s sovereignty over the province of Azerbaijan in an entry on its Google Video website.In a move tailor-made to wound Iranian patriotic pride and arouse a blizzard of protest, the Azeri provincial capital, Tabriz, is located “in southern Azerbaijan, currently in the territory of Iran”. To add insult to injury, the ancient city is listed as being in Azerbaijan, rather than Iran. Tabriz and southern Azerbaijan have belonged to Iran for more than 4,000 years.

The text of a tourist film on the site has drawn accusations that the US-owned search engine is deliberately trying to undermine Iran’s territorial integrity by fomenting separatist sentiment in the mainly Turkish-speaking province.

Jihad time, baby- cyber style!

The information technology ministry has branded the entry an attempt to intervene in Iran’s internal affairs and has urged Iranians to flood Google with emails.”This act is a typical example of interference in the affairs of another country,” said Samad Mohmen Bela, the IT ministry’s representative in parliament. “The simplest, most effective response is for all Iranian users to reflect their objection to Google’s management.”

Wow. Color me amazed. What a novel idea- expressing objection through peaceful means. It’s doubtful, however, that even repeated emails from all 18 of Iran’s Internet users will be that effective. But before you abandon Yahoo or Gigablast to return to Google, anybody care to bet how long it takes Google to remove the offending video in order to placate our peace-minded Iranian brothers?

They did it! Or I should say, Sassy did it. As reported earlier, Jeff and Cristie Walk won $10,000 in the season premier of America’s Funniest Videos. Tonight they went on to win the $100,000 contest! Congratulations…again!!!

This time Sassy is the most calm of the three, but that makes sense considering the circumstances.

Here are the highlights of tonight’s appearance:

This is a long video, but it’s made up of many short videos that remind me of that old game called Mouse Trap; only these versions are the Mouse Trap on Steroids.

My kids loved watching it and now they’re singing the little jingle that you hear at the end of each clip. It’s in Japanese. I wonder what this is a commercial for?

Very clever and very entertaining.

Ever since I read about Microsoft’s Photosynth in July, I’ve been chompin’ at the bit to get a look at it myself and try it out. The time has come and it’s now available to touch and feel and SEE for yourself. If you like to cruise the world in Google Earth then you’re going to love Photosynth which takes pictures, analyzes them for similarities and then puts them in a virtual 3D viewing place in relation to the rest of the pictures. It doesn’t matter what angle the pictures are taken from, Photosynth puts them together to make viewing areas (currently there are four collections) seamless as if you were actually there.

At the moment you’ll need to fire up IE6 or IE7 in order for the software to work properly (doesn’t work in Firefox, although they’re working on it) and you’ll also need XP with Service Pack 2 or Vista.

Some tips as you move around in the pictures; don’t forget to make use of the zooming features. You can zoom by clicking the plus and the minus symbols, or use the scroll wheel on you mouse. It’s fun to see some of the detail in the high resolution pictures (especially in the art gallery collection) and it helps to get your bearings by zooming out and seeing all the tiny dots that make up the points of reference. Another fun thing to do is to see where the camera was when the photo was taken. This can be toggled on and off by clicking the camera icon. Little red triangles appear and when you mouse over one it projects the angle and crops the area of the virtual scene that makes up the photo from that angle.  Lastly, don’t forget that you can close the informational column on the left by clicking on the divider line in the middle.  This will maxmize your 3D model world and make cruising around experience even better.
Give it a try. Can you imagine when they give us the ability to upload are own collections? It’s coming soon, but for now we’ll have to pacify ourselves with the collections they’ve given us.

Click image for full-size view.

Good friends Jeff and Cristie Walk (he was my best man on my wedding day) already won $10,000 with their video of their dog, Sassy, screaming at the TV and now they’ll compete for $100,000 on November 12! I remembered that I still needed to post a video of their 15 minutes of fame when I ran into them last night at the Pet Shop Boys concert.

You may have seen clips of this video making the rounds in the viral video circut, but what you didn’t see is Jeff and Cristie winning the money! So if you missed it, here it is for your viewing pleasure!

Congratulations Jeff and Cristie!