Friday, March 28, 2008

Dunkin Google Street View..

So Nashville Twitterati are all abuzz with the warm glow of Google Street View showing off all the sights in our fair town... if you know where I live, you can take a happy little Sunday Drive through my neighborhood and see my wife wait patiently for you to pass at an intersection on our street before she pulls out. It's always calm on Google Street view, you never have to worry about using your blinker.. and it's always late summer/early fall there. It's beautiful.

So tonight it occured to me to check out my old home town-- Leominster Massachusetts. And while almost none of Leominster appears to have been covered by the Street View crew, there were a couple of major thoroughfares near my old house highlighted in StreetView-blue, so I decided to take a little tour around town. It's been almost 8 years since I've been back there afterall.

And I have to say, this is a weird experience. I can imagine what it would be like driving through town-- that feeling of familiarity mixed with the alien sense of things not quite the same.
That alien feeling is all the more intense when you're 'driving' around town through a series of sometimes-not-all-so-contiguous freeze frames of streets and traffice.

But it's still pretty freakin' cool!

And then, just as I was about to wrap up, I decided to take a run down Central Street.. it caught my eye because on the Map, it appears that there's a big gap in the Street-View highlighting.. as if they skipped a quarter-mile of the road when they were filming. Did they lose the hard drive that day? bad sector?

So I pressed the Google accelerator and pressed onward toward the breach.. and a funny thing happened.
We turned into a parking lot.
Passed a row of cars.. passed the Leominster House of Pizza, where I used to get the biggest and best pepperoni pizzas any kid just finished with a little league or street hockey game has ever had.
and we pulled in for a quick stop at the Dunkin' Donuts.

Hey wow, they added a Dunkin Donuts in our little Johnny Appleseed Plaza. Cool! Hey wait a minute...


View Larger Map

Yep.. seems dude at Google didn't turn the camera off when he stopped in for a piss and a cup of Joe, I guess.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

"Friends you know.. or pretend to know.."



...only you me and Michael Arrington will understand this..
Yes, we have beer cozies.

Friday, March 07, 2008

Top 5 Quarterbacks All Time

With the retirement of Brett Favre this week, there's been a lot of talk-- okay, almost all of it on ESPN Radio's Mike and Mike morning radio show..

So, for what it's worth, here's my Top 5 All-Time NFL Quarterbacks

1. Joe Montana
2. Johnny Unitas
3. John Elway
4. Terry Bradshaw
5. Dan Marino

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Who are your influences?

Bands have always talked about their early influences-- giving a little window onto those elements that factored into their early development and made them who they are today. Did you listen to the Beatles or Elvis? Zepplin or The Who? Ratt or Motley Crue?

Nick Hornby's novel, High Fidelity, which was of course later adapted (pretty well) as a film, gets into this quite a bit as Rob, the main character, is constantly sorting and resorting his record collection.. reorganizing and reprioritizing those little sentimental pieces of himself contained in those records-- the times and places and people they represent to him.

I think about this from time to time-- in terms of music, literature, television, even philosophy... all things that put a little structure in your brain, that affects how you think about things from that point on.. These are the things you find yourself going back to over and over again, referencing in conversation, using to define some abstraction in your head.. or maybe these are just the experiences of things you reminisce about when you have a little time to think about the old days.

So who would I list as my influences?
Pink Floyd
Rush
Led Zepplin
Star Wars
The Tom Baker Doctor Who
J.D. Salinger
Plato, Republic
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Bill Buckley
Michael Ondaatje
The ClueTrain Manifesto
Hornby, High Fidelity (I can't leave it out after I mention it in explaining my point, can I?)

So who are your influences?

Brett Hangs 'Em Up...

This is one of those sublime moments when you see the real heart of a competitor surrendering finally to age, fatigue.. finding himself in a place where he's forced to say "It's over."

Twitter in Plain English

Once again, the good people at CommonCraft-- Lee and Sachi LeFever-- bring order to the chaos and give us the words and images we need to explain something so simple and yet so incomprehensible to our friends and relatives..
On second thought.. I'm not sure I want my relatives a) reading my Tweets; or b) Tweeting themselves.

All the same-- this is awesome.