| « Murderous beanbag chairs afoot | Home | Doing a deal in Centralia (and other Saturday odds 'n ends) » |
Latest Entries
On the Set at the Toyota Commercial Filming
Dick Stein Reading The Tacomiad (and other fab audio!)
Photos ~ Frost Park Chalk Off #30
Thu. April 7, 2005
Visualizing the world with World Wind
I did have a rather busy day today. It was kind of a nexus wherein I felt like I did when I was a student going from eight in the morning until ten at night. I got to work a at 7:30am this morning so I could prep for a workshop I was teaching to a class needing to know how to edit webpages. Most of the rest of the day was moderately productive but I cut whatever was occurring off so I could make a 4pm meeting with a potential freelance web development client. The meet we well and, although I don't know if I officially have the job, we're moving forward with an estimate for my services. From there, I headed downtown to meet with Sarah for some dinner at the local Taco Del Mar. Things there were tasty but the reason I was downtown tonight, aside from spending time with my beautiful wife, was because I am sitting in on Sarah's marketing cert class at UW Tacoma so they can analyze how I can grow my revenue in my freelance work.
Somewhere in there I found time to download a piece of software from NASA called World Wind. This is a global visualization program that lets you zoom in on nearly any corner of the world and even rotate into a 3D view of landscapes. You can superimpose layers of all sorts of interesting info like borders and labels but also animations of global climate data as well as recent satellite imagery taken after certain weather or other natural events. It's beautiful stuff and I've found myself just cruising around all corners of this planet just to see what might be out there. I went back to where we spent our honeymoon in Costa Rica, a visit to my sister in Scotland, some random islands off the island of Madagascar, and much more. If you have a decent 3D card in your computer I recommend this just for fun, as well as for school projects if you have young ones who want to put together a dazzling shot or two for their next class report.
Comments (1) | To Top
4/13/2005 @ 12:42am
I have *got* to check this out. Those look like really sweet images (and accurate too)!
by Dave