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Author Archives: Barb

Glogster

If you haven’t seen Glogster, it’s worth checking out. It is an interactive on-line poster maker, sort of like scrapbooking or collage making on line. If you look under the education section it looks like teachers are using it for school projects, especially the ever important Poster about a country, animal,book, historic event, or other school topic. What’s tickles me is that the map side of the posters are static which makes the map sections look like the type of poster you would make in grade school – - except with video capabilities. It’s still fun to play around with and might be useful for school projects, or as the sight suggests, expressing yourself by making a collage.

Decorating with Globes

Apartment Therapy has a short but sweet post on using globes for decorating in the home. Looking into globes and decorating further I found the George Glazer Gallery, sellers of antiquarian globes, maps, and prints NYC, which has several videoas and articles. I think the coolest ones are the tellurians and orreries. An interesting site about map collecting s the blog Map the Universe about the author’s quest to begin antique map collecting. A recent blog highlights the line between collecting and obsession. It states that, ” Scalpel happy and wealthy British book collector Farhad Hakimzadeh has been sentenced to two years in prison for slicing out pages and maps from rare books in the British Library. “

NASA Life and Work on the Moon Contest

So Nasa is having a Life and Work on the moon contest for highschool and college students to depict the future moon environment. I think that geospatial technologies won’t be one of the images unless one of you can draw. I was thinking people are going to draw habitats, mining, and other professions people can see but geospatial technologies will be the invisible tool that pulls everything together. I also imagine that geospatial professionals are going to have to do dangerous field work similar to other early explorers in dangerous new terrritory. Probably even more invisible will be the geospatial planners who have to determine political boundaries. In my mind I am picturing all of the scenes from the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson that is now being made into a sci fi series. What do you imaging life and work on the moon will be like for geospatial professionals?

Virtual Gingerbread House

This might be stretching the term virtual bit far, but at Apartment Therapy they posted about a virtual gingerbread house created by Jenny B. harris at Allsorts studio on Etsy. She also has a Christmas Dress Up Doll and some other activities. It’s really fun to decorate your gingerbread house but when I first clicked the link I was thinking 3D virtual environment.

Geography Themed Weddings

I love Crafster. It’s a great place to get ideas and see how creative people can be. It’s amazing how much geography can inexpensively personalize a wedding. I liked this 100% DIY Punk Rock Wedding everything in it is cool but especially how they used local street names to label the tables. Several people used travel maps to make cards or save the date invitations incorporating the directions into the design. There is even a naughty bachelor party in a globe. Of course these ideas could be used for anything (except perhaps the bachelor party in a globe) but it just shows how much incorporating geography into gifts and planning could help cut down on the costs for things. I even saw on a another site someone had used social networking and maps as ice-breakers on tables to connect people at a table to each other which helps with the… why did they sit me here hierarchy.

A Loo with a View

Plenty of places are talking about the new picture book A Loo with a View by Luke Barclay which features the world’s tops toilet views. What I find most interesting is that 1) He was able to do it in under two years, 2) He’s looking for submissions from other people, 3)he has a history background. I think I was expecting him to be a geography major!

Note: sorry, Barb posted this about a month ago, but it got stuck in the drafts somehow…

“vampire tourism” and geography

Accodinng to this article in MSNBC news, the book Twilight has created booming tourism in the town where the novel is set… where the author never visited when she wrote the first book, which has now gained Harry Potter status. The town set out to match places in the book with places in the town. What’s really interesting is this quote, “It’s not quite how I thought it would be,” says Yena Hu, a University of Washington sophomore who made the four-hour trek from Seattle to visit. “They’re always talking about all the windows — and in the book, the house is on the water.” What expectation does the public put on geograhic realism between fiction and real places. I guess they had an easier job than someone trying to locate Aquaman’s New San Diego which is one of the real places in the DC universe. It is set in San Diego around the convention center where Comicon and the ESRI user’s conference take place, except that it is underwater!

Webkinz and Maps

I played Webkinz all weekend with my nephew. It’s a cute stuffed toy with a code to enter a virtual environment with tons of interactive games. Many schools use Webkinz as an educational tool or as a reward for good behavior. Gantz, the makers of Webkinz list the reasons why virtual world is educational but they left out one component – you have to use a map tool to add rooms to your virtual house. If. like my nephew, you have almost every room configuration possible, you definitely need the map to find your way from your beach room to your space room without getting lost. You can see all the different types of Webkinz animals at Amazon.

GIS and the art of LEGO

According to this CNN, a former lawyer is making a living out of creating Lego structure art. If a lawyer can do it, can you imagine what a person with a GIS background could do. What if there was an ARC or other spatial Lego software? Anyone already doing something using GIS and Legos? You can become one of the few Lego certified professionals in the world! Imagine Greenwich Village, NY Lego to scale. Incidentally, there is a Lego Land near San Diego, if you want to stop by during the ESRI Users Conference. Someone posted in the reply section about L Cad which allows users to create CAD models using Legos. Too cool

GIS, CAD, and Cruiseships

When looking for more information on the world’s biggest cruise ship, I found a great blog on GIS CAD Interoperability aptly called “GIS CAD Interoperability” GIS and CAD are some of the tools used to design cruise ships which are essentially floating cities. When you watch a video of the world’s biggest cruise ship, Oasis of the Seas, being built for Royal Caribbean you can practically see GIS at work. Some sections of the ship even have their own microclimate. You can book your trip at the Royal Carribbean site. Another cool, albeit less luxurious, cruise ship site is POGO-Ocean Cruises which is the International Research Cruise Information tool and website to locate the next ship for your big or small research expidition. It is a little disconcerting to go from the image of the Oasis of the Seas to POGO’s charateristics of research vessels but both of them look like fun.