A Little Fact Checking

Posted on by Jordan

A few days ago I received an e-mail with the subject:

” WHAT PILOTS SEE WHEN LANDING AT OFFIT AIRFORCE BASE SAC”


The e-mail had the following images attached:

I am very skeptical of anything I get in an e-mail forward. Skeptical to the point that I assume it is 100% faked unless I can go find a few independent sources to verify whatever the forward is telling me. The fact that they misspelled “Offutt” didn’t lend any credibility to the e-mail.

So… I looked around. The hard part about this e-mail is that there wasn’t much text to work with. Typically you can just plug the first sentence of the e-mail into a Google search and get a lot of information about the origins of the urban legend. (I am skeptical for a reason… maybe 1 in the last 100 forwards turned out to be true)

After not finding anything that looked particularly reputable, I realized: “Hey, I know where Offutt AFB is, and I know a great source for aerial photography!”

Google Maps

I checked a few other sources and the field appears to be blank, and as you can see from the Google image, the message isn’t the same, but I think we at least see that it is apparently true that somebody carves some really neat messages into the fall stubble at the end of the runway.

-Jordan

Me:1 Google Maps API: 0

Posted on by Jordan

This might be more honestly considered the rematch, after things did not go so well for me Saturday, but I have a fully-functional map on the directions page now! I am not too impressed with the documentation in the google maps API, they give you some helpful example code, but don’t explain what anything dose. When I took the time to go through it line-by-line I realized what was going on, but good grief I write more descriptive comments into code that nobody will ever see at work than they did into their public *EXAMPLE* code </grumble>

I am really excited to have that in, it means one more thing off the list, and a somewhat more involved task than the ones before it. I will ask you to kindly ignore the allignment mess at the bottom of the directions page, and refrain from pointing out that all I did was copy-paste some code into a CSS template while I bask in this accomplishment.

next up: the RSVP page, aka “lets point out how little Jordan knows about PHP”

-Jordan