No really, I mean literally, in the alley behind our building. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) was scanning buildings in Post Alley between Madison and Spring this morning, creating LiDAR point clouds.

I ran into these guys a few months ago on my way to work, where the alley between First and Second meets University Street. As the technical writer here at LizardTech I’ve seen plenty of LiDAR data, but I’d never seen a LiDAR scanner before. I had once worked on a survey crew and used a theodolite, and thinking this was just a topographic setup I almost walked by these brightly vested crewmen and their tripod without a second thought. But then I noticed that the machine atop the legs was bigger than a theodolite and it was moving, very slowly, by itself. On the wall of the alley opposite the machine, a small green light pattern was flickering.

Since we make products for losslessly compressing and viewing LiDAR files, I was fascinated and engaged the men in conversation. On a laptop lying there on the cobbles and plugged into the scanner, they showed me how they programmed the machine using Leica software to scan from here to there, and at a desired density. A viewer enabled them to see the LiDAR data that was being captured right then, or an image of the alley from the perspective of the scanner, or both together.

They said they were scanning all the buildings within a certain radius of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which, if you’re from around here, you know is due to come down soon and be replaced with something better, or at least something newer, safer and more expensive. WSDOT doesn’t want anyone coming back after the viaduct project saying that their activity caused their building’s walls to shift or its foundation to sink.

WSDOT has to take all these measurements in the warm weather of summer, then repeat them in winter, because buildings heat up and expand enough that their outer walls actually move. Also, down by the bay, the earth expands and contracts with the ebb and flow of the tides, so they’ll have to take measurements at high and low tides. It had not occurred to me that our buildings and even the ground they sit on were breathing in and out, as it were, with tide and temperature.

You could have knocked me over with a LiDAR point. 

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!

Last Tuesday evening, LizardTech hosted a party at GameWorks in conjunction with our participation in the GITA conference. I couldn’t attend the party, but several of my fellow Lizards did and the report is that a good time was had by all. Thanks to all who stopped by.

Here is one of our favorite photos from the evening. As editor of Geospatial Solutions Online, Cyrena Respini-Irwin is an old friend of LizardTech. She has reviewed a number or our product releases in recent years. Here she is blasting away at indiscriminate evil alongside our own marketing coordinator, David Calabro.

We’ve always known her aim is true.

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.