Views of the World¶
539 words
Passing Hannover once more reminded me how strange and ugly a place it is, particularly around the railway station. And it’s strange… they had cherry trees with cherry blossom for some Japanese theme put up in front of the entrance. Pretty trees, for shure. But just not fitting into the concrete ‘aesthetic’ of its surroundings. In addition there is a passage which used to be beneath the railway station. It has been closed since they renovated the station around the Expo 2000 time and it looks like it has finally been reopened. This makes things look less broken, for sure. We’ll see whether it does any good apart from that.
Moving on to Bremen in Google Earth and their latest Mac update (which seems to run more smoothly than its predecessor), I enjoyed to see that the new set of rather old images which Google uses has high resolution images of Bremen now as well – as opposed to the high resolution images of some suburbs and low resolution images of the city centre they had before. So I was able to see my parents’ house:
and realised that its roof is black. Somehow I had always assumed it to be red. Odd. Knowing a bit about the house of course means that I can ‘see’ a lot more on the image than you can. I also spotted my mum’s car – which is cheating a bit because it’s parked in a rented space the location of which is fixed:
I wonder whether anyone can tell what kind of car it is from such a low-resolution picture. To me all cars look about the same at that level of detail. But being the honest guy that I am, I have to admit that all cars of the same colour look the same to me at higher levels of detail as well…
After spotting home, the next question is when the photos used on Google Earth were taken. It must have been a while ago. And one huge detail I spotted which should fix the year is that the nearby football stadium was renovated in some way at the time. At least there wasn’t any grass in it:
Now I just have to figure out when that happened – or just google for whatever other people may have found out. Light-wise it looks like a summer day – rather early in the morning because of the long shadows and streets
And, trying to be mildly constructive, I’ll have an imperfect shot at typography oddities on the web, which just don’t seem to work too well when posted on comment forms:
This is text with a wonderful quote,
rather than just with an ordinary quote.
And some text coming after it.
The key to this being the usage of the q HTML tag with a bit of extra CSS given by
q:after { margin-left:-0.2em;}
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to discuss how I shouldn’t do this for the q tag only in the bigger picture of the ‘semantic web’ and figuring out in which browser this, or more general implementations of the same idea, will break. And I’ll take the liberty to not care.
