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Knoxville is on the map!

Google has updated Streetviews to include Knoxville and 36 other new places. Pictures were taken around October. Expect to see Chattanooga added soon. Read more at KnoxBlab.

I’m a little disappointed at the zoomed in views. They seem intentionally blurred. I guess Google is trying to avoid those incidental upskirts (okay, that’s a thong showing not an upskirt), revealing marijuana plants, and preemptively avoiding privacy complaints of people claiming the car looked in their windows.

Things that will no longer be seen in Street View are:

Hi-resolution imagery
People’s faces
Previous Street Views of hi-resolution Street View.

Those things were giving Google lots of trouble, so all imagery is now lower resolution.

[Source, StreetViewFun]

That’s a shame. I hope the complainers are happy now. I really liked the high resolution zooms and Google had a process for fixing any "embarrassing" captures. I feel like the end-product is a little devalued now.

Update: John McNair says the servers are pretty loaded right now.

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Waking Exhausted

What’s tickling my arm? Oh, the cat is on the bed sniffing me to wakefulness. Look at the time! This house is hot. Why am I so tired after such deep sleep? My dreams. Tossing and turning. Programming in my head. All night I saw code and solutions to the programming challenges I have during the day. Do I really need to get up? I feel like I worked all night long.

I must work harder at calming my mind before laying down for sleep at night. I am not a practitioner of meditation. I have always wanted to be. Jason Jarrett helped me understand the Nichiren Daishonin Buddhist chant of NAM-MYO-HO-REN-GE-KYO and that’s brought me closer to a meditative calm than anything else I have tried. Chapter 9 of the book You Are Psychic!: The Free Soul Method is supposed to be excellent on teaching meditation. I have the book but have never applied its lessons. I have other books but I think learning meditation could be something that requires a mentor. Of course, I tend to overlook the one thing that puts me into a trance and brings calm faster than anything else and that is juggling. For me, juggling is nirvana. Perhaps I should just juggle every evening before bed.