Month: April 2008

Collect Them All

As I’ve previously posted, Joe is a trucker. The last time he was in town he told me of thse trading cards that are given out at different weigh stations across the country. I doubted him at first. I mean think about it, Trucker Trading Cards. How bizzare and unusual. I imagined young boys in a dusty southwestern town meeting after school to trade Bobby Brickshaw’s 445 Hemi Freightliner for Jimmy Twoton’s Antique Steam-powered Semi from 1875. While I jest, come to find out I wasn’t very far off.


I find these to be totally unique to American life. No where else are you going to find these awesome people. I enjoy the candid photos of average people performing, in their circle of peers and colleagues, feats worthy of someone taking the time to write a brief bio, snap a photo and then print and distribute them across the country. I tip my hat to you Mr. Hockaday and your adorably fluffy dog.

Greg Koerner

My uncle suffered a serious heart attack today. As of this entry he is unconscious in the hospital. The doctors do not know if he will awaken or if upon awaking if he will be normal. I can not believe this has happened and am in total shock. He means a lot to our family and is one of my heroes. Please get better Pooh Bear.

Do No Evil Google Earth

So the recent 4.3 update to Google Earth brings some neat new features. But it also brings some not so great features. Most noticably is the fact that you must be an admin in order to install the latest version of GE. Old versions installed cleanly for any user. Not only must you be an admin, but you don’t actually install Google Earth from it’s own installer. No, now you must install Google Updater* in order to install GE.

I can’t find a simple link (one hosted by Google) to download just the GE installer. In fact the only way I found to get the GE only download is to be a non-admin user. The Google Updater will fail when you try to run it, and then give you the option to ‘download and install’ GE.

This is quite annoying and I hope that Google provides a simple like to download a stand-alone version of GE soon.

*Another pain is the fact that Google Updater installs a background service that runs all the time. iTunes, Adobe Reader, Google Updater, etc all have these little daemons running that added up bog down system resources. Bleah.

**Special thanks to Tim Snyder for pointing out the Google Updater background service. I didn’t notice that on the first draft of this article.