Day of Days

Today is the 63rd anniversary of D-Day, which commemorates the Battle of Normandy during World War II. This was the largest seaborne invasion in history, and it resulted in the Allies forming a beachhead in Northern Europe through which they could further assault the German forces on land.

I remember picking up the video game Medal of Honor: Frontline for my Nintendo GameCube a couple of years ago. It’s a WWII first-person shooter game where the first level had you storming the beaches of Normandy. The presentation of the battle — deafening explosions, people dying around you, bullets flying everywhere, your commander shouting sometimes inaudible orders — was so overwhelming that I was moved to tears.

I can’t imagine what it must have really felt like to be on one of those landing boats when the ramp dropped and the machine gun fire started pouring in.

My Favorite Poem

OZYMANDIAS

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Google Maps: Street View

Google recently added a fantastic new feature to their Google Maps service called “Street View”. Google has sent vehicles fitted with a 360° camera driving down hundreds of roads, taking thousands upon thousands of photos. At each point where one of these photos was taken, you can zoom in and have a zoom-able, full 360° view of the surrounding area from that point. It’s incredible!

Here is an example, chosen for its shameless humor value: 588 44th Ave, San Francisco, California, USA

You can click and drag the image to rotate your view, and you can use the slider on the top-left to zoom in and out. I hope they’ll eventually get to doing this with my home town, but I’m not holding my breath.