Maps Made Friendly

Am I the only person who thinks the maps provided by Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps aren't all that? The directions aren't half bad, but those maps never have the details I want. Google has put their own map service into public beta. I know I sound like a Google fanboy, but this thing is so damn cool. When you search for directions, you can click on each step and a little box will pop over the map where the part is and zoom in. The map is intuitively easy to navigate with your cursor with basically unlimited dragging to any part of the US (let alone that local area) and a zoom bar on the left that will actually zoom in a lot. Plus, it's very fast. But that's not all boys and girls: you can put in a business and enter in a city and it will bring up all the locations on a map. Finally, a truly digital business white pages phone book! It's not necessarily better than A9 for business searching, but it has its advantages in how it maps it out whereas A9 has more pictures. I reccomend that everyone check it out.



I might as well move into some movie news now. The Fantastic Four movie has been moved from the July 4th weekend to the following weekend, which is a bad sign because the former is a historic weekend for good, big movies. The reason is so that it doesn't have to compete with Speilberg's War of the Worlds, and it is a smart choice but it kind of screws up their previous marketing campaign. It will instead compete with Bewitched (with Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman), and probably lose. I actually have even more comic book movie news: there's another review praising Constantine as staying true to its roots. My doubt is slowly deteriorating, and FilmForce is offering an opportunity to chat with Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishbourne for those who are interested.

Back to just normal movies though. There is now speculation that Dominic West may be a more likely candidate for the next Bond movie, Casino Royale, than Dougray Scott, who may not have enough street credit stateside. I think that both could pull off the stealthy, suave image, but I personally think West may do better. Fans of asian films may be interested in a new Thai movie with a name that can't actually be expressed in English. Apparently it's a P with a squigly line over it, but it sounds intriguing regardless so I hope it makes distribution in the U.S.

Not a whole lot of techie news today unfortunately. Supposedly, Firefox could soon become a target for spyware makers. I think the market share would have to grow quite a bit for that to happen, but I suppose that it could happen this year with enough irritation for Internet Explorer. Though it may share security holes, it shows its responsibility at least a little with a built in pop-up blocker. The word today from Microsoft was that Longhorn will go into Beta 1 in June. I wonder if they got that codename because there was a Longhorn on their development team? The major changes they've made to the most attractive parts of the program cast doubt in my mind, and the only release information we actually know for sure is that it'll be out by November 2007. Before I close out this paragraph I might as well mention Ask Jeeves's acquisition of Bloglines, which was quite a tempting blog site for me to switch to soon after coming to Blogspot.

Just a couple of random things before I close out my post. A Boston area priest has been convicted of rape and child mollestation. The jury truly believed that the accuser has no motive other than justice to press the trial and the deliberation ran rather long. Hopefully I'll post the sentencing on February 16. It goes without saying that there are no words to describe the pure horror of these actions. It's one thing for a guy to rape a girl, and it's totally another to be a respected member of the community who parades around as a man of the cloth to take advantage of impressionable boys. In no way am I belittling the rape of women, but I'm trying to emphasize that this goes beyond even an act that horrendous. I wish the Church would stop being so damn uptight and let priests marry. If there was concrete evidence that Jesus was married and it spread into the mainstream they'd be forced to change their policy or face a mass exodus. Enough about that though, the other big thing today was Bush's plan to cut his budget. And what do you know, he's increasing money for the war and anti-terrorism and his beloved No Child Left Behind crap while cutting money from veterans and college kids and even cops. The things I would do for a Democrat in the White House...

Because today's Tuesday Twosome would be boring given my loser-status I thought I'd try the Ten on Tuesday meme instead:

Ten Reasons Why Valentines Day is a Stupid Holiday
10. It's hard to find a place to eat outside.
9. Public displays of affection are likely to be more common.
8. You can't do anything with your friends because they have to do Valentine's Day stuff.
7. It doesn't actually commemorate anything.
6. I'm pretty sure it's not what St. Valentine intended for.
5. There are no flying babies with magical arrows.
4. It makes people's wallets way too light.
3. It creates another excuse to give gifts other than just for the sake of love.
2. It causes complications in what women expect of men.
1. It makes people like me feel like crap.

Out of all the other responses, I like this one the best. Oh, and all you Catholics who don't go to mass tomorrow are dirty sinners since it's Ash Wednesday and I consider it one of the more important days to go to Church. A pagan holiday that we celebrate on December 25 isn't a big deal people, Lent is.