Three for Thursday

Well, I didn’t get a chance to post my 2 for Tuesday – so I’m making up with it by doing a 3 for Thursday. ;)

1 – I am sure you are all familiar with GoogleEarth. This is one of the coolest programs ever and a lot of fun to play with. If you’re not familiar with GoogleEarth, which has been out a long time, then you must be from the moon or Mars. In either case, there is also now GoogleMoon and GoogleMars. You can do the same thing with them as with GoogleEarth, only right now they are web versions. My favorite is GoogleMoon – if you zoom in close enough, you see the actual texture of the moon. People have been right about it for centuries.

2 – I couldn’t blog Tuesday because I was at Microsoft HQ in Redmond. This was the first time I had ever been to the campus headquarters and I can’t even describe how big it is except to say that in Redmond, there are 30,000 workers on over 8 Million square feet - and this link shows only part of it. I know some of you reading this are familiar with Eastman Chemical’s HQ, or Boeing’s HQ or other large companies similar. Well, to me Microsoft was vastly different. First it is not separated out from the city like most other large HQ’s. It is the city, intermingled with other businesses (like Intel and Nintendo) and shops and shopping malls, restaurants, etc. When we got off the interstate we turned right and pulled into the first Microsoft complex which had buildings 1-4 I think it was. Well, our meeting was in building 121. Yes, and these are not small buildings. It took us all of 30 minutes just to find our building. We drove all over Redmond trying to find it – and thank goodness we did. We wound up being 5 minutes early. Close. Oh yeah, MSN has it's own buildings and so does XBOX. Everyone was driving around in these white Toyota Prius Hybrid cars...something is in the works for that...I just know it... ;)

3 – I know I’ve said it before, but I love Switchfoot. A long plane ride means listening to a lot of stuff or reading a lot (which I’m finishing a biography on George Washington that is pretty good, too.). Well, for whatever reason, I had my nano on shuffle play and since I have all of their albums on there, they come up a lot. Finally I just started listening to them exclusively. If you haven’t heard their new album, it’s really good. Their lyrics are very insightful. I’m going to think about it a little more today, but I am strongly considering starting the process to bring them here in concert. I think people would come. Although, San Diego is a long way away. Hah.

No pics, nothing funny – just the facts. ;)