The Mad Bull’s Blog, Version 3

There is a summer worker who is working right beside me. He will be going off to university soon, and as such, he is doing tons of research on the university he is supposed to be attending. He went on the net and got a map of the area where his university is. He was able to see the individual buildings on the compound. He was able to identify all the clubs and restaurants in the vicinity, and go to their websites, look at their menus and prices. He was able to look at and select some housing, using price, distance from the university, etc as qualifying factors. There is so much info out there on the net, it boggles the mind when you really think about it!

He gave me the idea to look to see what info they had on the university I attended, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus!

Click the link below to see the rest nuh?

Yow, look at what they have on the net! I found it at maps.google.com. Check it out!

Look, see Ring Road! Click on the picture to see more… Look at the detail of the picture nuh?

See all the Faculty buildings around the ring! of course, its not labeled but if you attended the university, you can identify everything yourself. Of course, itseems to be an old picture too, because I don’t think I see a new building that I know about, but its still pretty damned impressive. You can zoom in fairly well in many places in Kingston and in a couple of the more populated areas, but not everywhere in the island. I guess maybe sometime in the future they will improve their maps even more, but we’ll see…

With some of the maps in the U.S., everything is labelled, streets, some of the buildings, you name it. Bwoy, I find this so fascinating, even though its not the first time I have seen it… I used Yahoo Maps to get hotel info and maps of a section of New Orleans. Based on info in Yahoo Maps, we called the hotel and booked the rooms, and then we printed off the map and used that to go back and forth between the hotel and the training centre in our rental. I thought that was pretty cool back then too… lets see, that was Peoplesoft training, so that was way back in 1998-9. Awesome, some of the things you can use the web to do, innit?

Eventually, maybe they will be showing us those pictures in real time, beamed to us from a satellite… you’ll be able to see the cars whizzing along on the street, or people walking along. Then, when the authorities start implanting microchips in humans at birth, maybe they’ll be able to start tracking anybody they want on those maps! They just put in the person’s serial number and bada boom, the quadrant of the map in which you are will appear and they will be able to watch you walking down the road, or sitting at your desk in your office, or maybe even humping your lover before you go home and lie about where you were to your significant other…

Uh oh! Maybe eventually even your significant other will have access to that information! But then maybe y’alls would be in some deep doo doo! Maybe this is not such a good idea for some of y’all after all, huh?
Its so Orwellian though, isn’t it?

Still, right now, looking at that picture, I still think its pretty cool! But then, I am a bit of a nerd!

Tags: I think its interesting! //