The night the first snow fell, back on the 19th of December, we Lizards had our annual holiday party at McCormick and Schmick’s on First Avenue, right around the corner from our building. The food was great, and a greater percentage of us were able to make it than in the past few years.

We used to have karaoke at our holiday shindigs, but we went through a corporate phase of imagining that we were more dignified than to stand up in somebody’s restaurant and bellow like water buffalo in the ears of the dining public. We grew out of it, though, and this year we said “we’re bringing noisy back.” We rented a machine, and for a monitor, Pooya managed to wrangle a TV the size of a small hotel into his Forenza.

It’s surprising the number of Lizards who were willing to sing on a full stomach. I was going to post the little movie I took of Skiff’s startling rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”, but a horsehead showed up on my chair at work recently, which I took to mean that I should reconsider.

The world will have to wait.

As part of National Geography Week we at LizardTech have been asking ourselves what GIS and geography mean to us personally. What usually comes to mind for me (aside from work) is images from space on Google Maps. I like to scout places before I go, and perhaps show where I’ve been afterwards via GPS tracks like the ones displayed in Google Maps using this KML file.

It’s also cool to stumble on places I’ve been in the past. For instance I found the cheap hotel we stayed at in Jamaica in the mid-80s before this technology was available to the public. Here’s a link.

It was easy to spot because it is the only one up the road from the airport with a pool. It was one of the few Montego Bay hotels that would allow native Jamaican’s to stay (most were exclusively for tourists).

Lots of fun!

Halloween spirit (pun intended) was rampant here in the LizardTech office today. We celebrated All Hallows Eve by bringing in lunch and holding a contest for best costume.

It was a difficult choice; Pooya’s faceless, hooded character was quite spooky and most in the spirit of the day. Ryan actually applied paint to his body, which scores high for dedication. John – always creative – had a half dozen dolls strapped to his torso. No one was able to guess what he was (I thought he was supposed to be a “babe magnet”) until he explained that Brad Pitt has adopted six infants. Kelly came as a rocker, and note that a guitar is also called an “axe”, so extra points for conceptually including a clever reference to a spooky thing there.

But in the end, Justyna won it with her dancing queen costume, possibly because she made several trips around the office dancing and singing ABBA. Pooya came in second, and Ryan third.

We also put candy at each desk, and in the afternoon Lizards brought their kids into the office so they could go around and collect treats and we could see them in their adorable little costumes.

My family (Donna, Ian, and Maya) and I were fortunate to spend two weeks in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. We spent the first week at the Hotel Sotavento on Playa De Ropa and the second week at the Hotel Krystal on the beach at Ixtapa.

This image of our trip in ArcMap will open a new tab or window.

Our first week we swam and snorkeled at both the beach and pool, went fishing and caught a fairly large needle fish, which strongly resembles a barracuda, and snorkeled again at a nearby reef. Ian and I sailed on a Hobi Cat in very strong winds. The kids also climbed and explored on large rocks off the beach. Body surfing and boogie boarding were a big part of our beach experience here. Donna and Maya perfected their surfing techniques.

Up the beach at Ixtapa, the hotel was a more “American style” resort with lots of snowbirds escaping winter in the upper Midwest. The surf was a lot higher at this beach so boogie boarding was more dangerous. On our last day the waves approached twelve feet high and they closed the beach.

A highlight was our day trip to Isla de Ixtapa. We enjoyed fantastic snorkeling at three different beaches. Ian spotted a small moray eel in the sandy swimming beach and we followed it for some time with masks on. He and I also made a jungle trip to the top of the island, following the trails of small deer and rabbits. Our afternoon ceviche lunch - fish or shrimp cocktail “cooked” in lime juice and served in a dish with salsa and other goodies - was interrupted by a dozen sting rays jumping three to four feet out of the water in choreographed lines as if herding fish.

Stopping at a wildlife sanctuary back on the mainland we photographed huge crocodiles and turtles as well as birds and iguanas.

In town we got a good look at the street life of Zihuatanejo, where people live a lot differently than they do at home. The kids got to see how food and transportation are handled in countries that do things differently than ours. We hope to return in the future and explore some of the volcanoes that are just inland from the beach resorts.

Several of us Engineering Lizards walked up to the Convention Center on Tuesday to show support for the hardworking Sales and Marketing Lizards who were manning our booth and to have a look around. The first thing I noticed was what a blue conference it was. Every booth and banner seemed to be a cool cerulean, with the single, vibrant and very red exception of Oracle’s digs.

The theme of this year’s GITA conference was “Infrastructure Solutions”, so there were a lot of “geospatial solutions” companies offering data integration software and services. I saw the word “conflation” so many times I looked it up later.

Crowlike, I’m drawn to the shiniest objects in a given environment, so I ended up spending the most time with the very amiable representatives from an Italian company called Abaco. My eye was caught by a CAD image of the Duomo in Milan spinning in 3-D on their monitor. Abaco was showing off its DbMAP® Web 3D product, a set of tools for building three-dimensional representations using existing bidimensional GIS data.

The thing that arrested my gaze was that when the perspective dropped down into a piazza and you were looking at the sides of the buildings, the facades were correct, peeling paint and all. Not like other products I’ve seen where the elevation view is blank grey or the roof of a building dribbles over its flank like a Dali clock. I asked how this was possible, and they showed me how they manually grabbed image data from oblique aerial photos and applied it to the raised buildings in the 3-D creation, skewing and stretching via what I assume to be complex algorithms (the kind we in the imaging industry bench-press every day before breakfast).

Seeing this, my first thought was, wow, that might be fine for a hilltop village like Civita di Bagnoreggio, but adding a facade to each building by hand would be untenable for Rome, let alone some sprawling city like Phoenix. It was explained to me that in the suburbs, you would apply facades randomly from a palette—only in familiar areas like the downtown or famous landmarks would you apply the actual facade. Fair enough.

Still, invoking the adage that the coolest stuff is seldom the most useful stuff, my second thought was, who would be going to so much trouble creating virtual land- or cityscapes that they would need such a tool? Tourism boards, for one, I was told, and though the sales guy listed other customers of theirs, I didn’t catch those because the bubble above my head filled up with an image of how perfect such models would be for the website of any municipality that relied on tourism for its economy.

The other coolest thing was at our own booth, where Lizards Jim and Robert showed me the HistoricAerials.com website, which uses our Express Server software to deliver aerial image datasets spanning decades and enables viewers to toggle between years at any given location.

In my hometown of Bellevue, WA, for example, I could zoom into any spot in the city the way it was in 1964, then click to the years 1968, 1980, 1990, 1998, 2000 or 2006, seeing the city develop before my eyes. And with the haunting “dissolve” feature enabled, each year gave slowly away to the inexorable erosion of time as the next year in the set gradually supplanted it. The images above show the effects of nearly half a century on one piece of earth.

I doubt the product spec ever called out “haunting” as an intended feature, but I’ll tell you this: I stayed up late that night toggling between 2006 and 1964 and watched farmhouses in the center of town giving way to Bellevue Square Mall, and Uncle Harold’s hobby shop, where I got my first bike, dissolving beneath a mayhem of skyscrapers.

Bellevue images courtesy of HistoricAerials.com. Duomo image courtesy of Abaco Group.