How can I view the Blockchain locally on my machine? I'd like to view the blockchain on my Windows 7 machine. Right now I'm looking under roaming/Bitcoin/blocks, and trying to open blk00000.dat . I can't read any of it though, it seems the text is garbled. How can I change the format/open it in a program that makes it look more like the raw block data from blockexplorer or something similar?

Thanks.
You can check the log files , but bitcoind clears it when it starts to get bigger.

although you can read the Bitcoin block file using software/application called Bitcoin Abe
you can parse the data from bitcoin block file to mysql server too.

https://github.com/bitcoin-abe/bitcoin-abe

This software reads the Bitcoin block file, transforms and loads the data into a database, and presents a web interface similar to Bitcoin Block Explorer, http://blockexplorer.com/.

Abe draws inspiration from Bitcoin Block Explorer (BBE) and seeks some level of compatibility with it but uses a completely new implementation.