I requested and got access to the new google maps. I would imagine they are rolling it out pretty quickly.

It's pretty nice. I think the search interface is much better. It's easier to look at the results as they are shown on the map. It's pretty spotty for where I live. I did a search for tire places and some showed up but lots of them around me did not. I'm not sure how they get on there - if it is something the businesses need to do themselves or there is a missing link in the chain somewhere else. I still saw more than I expected to find. I needed to search in Hungarian but that makes sense.

A search for restaurants by where I live was really lacking. This makes me wonder how useful maps will be for travel.

The cards that come up for search results are really nice. I like that interface quite a bit. I like how it fits in with the way that Google Now presents information. The only issue I've had with Google Now so far is that it tries to anticipate what you want and can give you information you don't want. To be specific, when the Penguins were playing the Islanders in the first round - I googled the Islanders following one of the games to look at the team roster. A day or two later, google now gave me a card showing the results of the previous nights game - that I hadn't watched yet. I removed the card and the alerts stopped. I'm glad I hadn't googled the Penguins or maybe I'd have kept getting updates.

This is also a reminder that everything I search or do logged in with my google account is being recorded and acted upon in one way or another. I know this wont sit well at all with some people.

Finally - I can't see all the features of the new google maps. It tells me I'm running in "Lite Mode" because I'm on Linux. You only get the full experience on Mac, Windows or Chrome.

How often does the FBI end up killing a "Person of Interest"? It runs counter to gathering information in pursuit of an investigation.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fbi-shoots-florida-man-possibly-linked-boston-bombing/story?id=19231642#.UZztCivF3pg

"There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. "
http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/rise_up_or_die_20130519/

Haven't been posting much - life has been keeping me busy. What are the latest haps in the pigeon roost?

Welllll - let's see. My wife is going to the US in June and my girls are going to a summer camp while she is gone. That means the boy and I get a week to kick it together. I'm really looking forward to that. He's 10 now and we have hit a point where we can have a lot of fun together. I help coach his baseball team, we have a little running foosball competition and we've had a blast watching ice hockey together this year - Go Pens! So I'm really looking forward to that.

In July the whole family will be spending about a week in VlorÃ, Albania. It's an old city - so old I'm really having a hard time getting my head around it. We'll be helping to staff an English camp there. After we will try to take a little holiday - maybe to Greece or Italy. Depends on the budget and time considerations.

Around all that I'll be working on building a contact management system for our campus team in Lviv, Ukraine. I'm not sure just what I am going to do - I'm a bit resource constrained. Right now I'm looking at building something using CiviCRM as a base. It's just me and no money - so I need a platform that will do most of the work for me right out of the box. We'll see. If it goes well I think I'll be able to bring some dollars to the process and get someone to build something beefier.

I've got some mobile dev work I want to start planning out as well. Which will also probably end up being contracted out. I sort of wish I could still spend day to day time writing code but it isn't in the cards. When I do have time I'm just too stinking slow and what I write probably has immense issues I don't even see. Got to leave that for the hobby stuff on my own time.

Weather is really nice right now here in the Budapest area. I need to get down town more. I was thinking about that today. Need to start taking some long lunches downtown. Bring my tablet and do some work from a cafe or something. I don't want to end up reaching the end of our time here and realizing I didn't take advantage of the location enough.

Announced at the google thing - Android Studio. It's an Android IDE built on the community version of the IntelliJ IDE by JetBrains. Here is a video of the demo. It jumps about half an hour into a much longer video and runs a couple minutes or so - then they move on to other stuff I didn't watch.

I own a couple JetBrain products - the pro version of IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. I probably posted about it when I bought them - I like the tools but the fonts are just a wreck on my 64 bit Fedora box. So much so that I just don't use it. With the Python plugin and php support on KDevelop I haven't thought about them much. (On an unrelated note - another editor I really like Komodo Edit - since it is built on Firefox tech it has the opengl issues I've mentioned here before.) Anyway I downloaded Android Studio to see - as all it cost me was a few minutes of time and some hard drive space.

I fired it up and created a little fake project. The fonts look good. This made me curious. I fired up IntelliJ, saw that there was a new version, installed that - and it looks good too. This is so sweet. And I don't know if this is because something is now better in Java, IntelliJ or Fedora - and I don't care.

The rabbit hole goes deeper. What he seaid in the earlier weeks, this year:

"The formula for a public assassination is: the character assassination before the physical assassination; so one has to be made killable before the eyes of the public in order for their eventual murder to then (be) deemed justifiable.

"And when the time arrives for these hits to be carried out, you're not going to see a CIA agent with a suit & tie, and a badge that says 'CIA'.

"What they will do is to out-source to local police departments in the region of their target, and to employ those that look like the target of interest to infiltrate the workings in order to set up the environment for the eventual assassination (character, physical/incarceration, exile) to take place."

http://sjlendman.blogspot.ca/2013/05/malcolm-shabazzs-suspicious-death.html

It isn't the fault of the New Atheists- they don't know enough history to know where they went wrong. Mainly because it happened a hundred years before they were born.

Suggest that free will exists and will never be able to be duplicated in an artificial intelligence. 69 replies to my sub-thread.

http://i.imgur.com/7DgVkf7.jpg

By HSBC. Everywhere you look. I'd love to get a few of these on the jetway gantries:
http://alternativebanking.nycga.net/files/2013/02/NewAdCampaignForHSBC2_web.jpg

And the Federalists were fascist bastards.

"By transforming democracy into a concept that encouraged uninhibited wealth accumulation rather than wealth equality, the founding elite (and subsequent generations of elites) tamed what they could not defeat. They turned democracy from a threat into an asset by making it into a concept that supported their own ideals and interests."

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2011/11/concerning-american-change-in.html

You Cannot Unsee What has Been Seen

You must keep "anti-semitism" alive.

Hollywood Conservative Leader Turns Out to Be Holocaust Revisionist

Yeah. There's no disinformation network or false narratives planted in the media. Hal was just a fluke.

"After the tsunami there was great concern that many of the children left without families due to that disaster had disappeared into Asian, Middle Eastern sex trade rings."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/09/22/151046/-Katrina-Missing-Children-The-Saudis-amp-Bush-A-Link

Why bring this up, after 8 years?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/2/saudi-compound-virginia-investigated-human-traffic/

1000 a month being killed in Mexico. Most of it as close to US border as Ciudad Juarez.

But OMG!!! Syria!!!

The Neocons never stopped operations. The "Arab spring" was another route to the PNAC "Rebuilding America's Defences".