Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Stressed. (And why Groningen?)

You might have guessed it by the lack of new posts in the past days: I'm very busy. I'm trying to graduate in August and that means a lot of work in very little time. As a result I’m pretty stressed out. At the moment I’m reading boring scientific papers all day, so my mind tends to be a bit soggy in the evening... until the end of this week I won’t have lot of inspiration for writing here I think.

In my lunch break today, I stumbled upon the new MSN Virtual Earth. Looking at the map of Europe, something caught my eye: The choice of cities displayed on the low-resolution map of Europe is somewhat strange. London doesn't exist and Amsterdam is not denoted either... but my home town Groningen (with 180,000 inhabitants the 7th city of the Netherlands) is:

Makes me wonder: What did our city council and mayor do to put Groningen on the map (literally)? It turns out this isn't the only oddity in Virtual Earth. Apparently they're having fun at Microsoft recreating the planet as they'd like it to be: Apple's corporate headquarters in Cupertino, CA has been wiped off the map and satellite photos. ;)

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