To celebrate the release of GeoExpress 7 - the strongest and best received version ever of our flagship product - the Engineering team took a snow day.

A few weeks ago, we had been all set to execute our original plan - an overnight at Scottish Lakes in the North Cascades - but the passes had closed the morning of the Big Day.

Disappointed (and better educated about avalanches) but not deterred, we decided to reschedule. It was difficult to find two days and a night that would work for all eleven of us the first time, and for our second “assault”, we had to settle for a day trip and even then, only nine of us made it into the caravan.

So last Friday we set out with two GPS units, three cars and enough walkie-talkies that each of us got at LEAST one.

At Snoqualmie Summit we split up for skiing, snowboarding and snowshoeing. Look at us (see photo above), all full of energy and confidence, unsuspecting of the horrors that lay ahead.

Actually, it was sunny and warm the whole day. The torrential downpour that soaked Seattle for most of the day only arrived after we had loaded up and were heading down the hill for a sumptuous repast at Thai Ginger in Factoria.

A good time was had by all and there were no injuries - which was good, because “return with no broken limbs” was called out in the spec for this project.

Top photo courtesy of Jeffrey Salazar.

I recently got back from a short vacation with friends and family in Hawaii. Although I’ve been part of the LizardTech Engineering team for many years, I’m relatively new to the geospatial industry, so you’ll forgive me if wax a little misty here.

One of the things that made this trip particularly memorable for me was geocaching all over the Big Island.

My wife and I found one cache that brought us through an ancient petroglyph site. Others of us found a cache placed by a 6th grade class near a 100-foot seawall. There were others… all of them at sites conveniently close to us but uncrowded and beautiful. I’m grateful to the locals who posted these, becoming private tour guides and sharing their intimate knowledge of beautiful places close to their homes and their hearts.

I’m continually struck by how small a place the world has become. From our living room at home, we get online and look at the road from the airport to the rental home we’ll be staying in. The aerial image shows the roadway, the round-abouts, the beach, the pool and the rooftop over our suite. When we arrive in Hawaii - 2000 miles from home - we walk, for the first time, through a brush trail looking for a 10-inch package and find it as easily as (well, with no more frustration than) if it were a box of Christmas lights in the garage.

This is just the fun side of it, but “better living through geospatial technology” is a worthy goal and we at LizardTech are proud to pursue it.

Last November, together with two co-workers, laptops, projectors, tons of inflatable globes, CD holders, pencils and of course plastic lizards, I went to the Brighton School in Lynwood, WA, to share my enthusiasm for GIS Day with a class of 5th graders. To prepare for the hour-long presentation the teacher had been in contact with us about where the class was at in their current history lesson, the 13 colonies and Revolutionary War, and could we somehow incorporate that into our GIS lesson?

We began with a birdseye view of their school and how far away it was from Seattle’s Safeco Field. They loved it! I was amazed at how many of them quickly made the connection between ESRI technology and Google earth.

To incorporate their current Revolutionary War curriculum I gathered maps of the 13 colonies, Revolutionary War battle sites and other key geographic locations such as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and current aerial photos of Philadelphia. I digitized, or overlayed, the current aerial imagery with some of the old maps like the one shown above.

In class I used this to point out the extreme difficulties that individuals such as General George Washington experienced while creating maps during that era.

“The want of accurate maps of the Country which has hitherto been the Scene of War, has been a great disadvantage to me. I have in vain endeavored to procure them and have been obliged to make shift with such sketches as I could trace from my own Observations.”
- General George Washington

After our presentation the kids were really excited to show us some of the tools they had been using to learn about the Revolutionary War and the 13 colonies. One way was by playing Twister with a giant map of the 13 colonies that their teacher had made. They insisted that we play a few rounds. I never realized just how far New York is from Georgia.

I won…twice.

This was a great day with the kids. Many of them asked us to return next year and I have to say I’m looking forward to it. Check out the article about our trip to Brighton (PDF) in the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping’s online publication, ACSM Bulletin.