June 2006 Archives

"I know what you're thinking."

That sentence, spoken by Tom Selleck as Magnum P.I., is what I hear when I look at this picture.

"I know what you're thinking."

Maybe you do, Tom. In the picture I am nearly done with the quarter-mile swim in the 2006 Warsaw Optimist Triathlon this past weekend. And I'm ready to be done by this point. Having never participated in this type of event before I knew nothing of what to expect as I walked out into the water Saturday morning and began my strokes. I expected the water to be cold; at 73° it felt fine to me. I expected to get bumped and kicked a couple of times; I had no such trouble. I expected to be able to set a pace and stick to it; yeah, right.

"I know what you're thinking."

I remember exactly what I was thinking at the time of this photo: "At this point I can walk in to shore faster than I can swim it." I was exhausted. While I do feel a little bad about saying this, in all of my years in organized sports I have never given as much energy during an event as I did last Saturday. I have never had recovery after an event consisting of 30 minutes of "am I going to puke or am I going to pass out?" before starting to feel better. In my defense, I have never tried to do so much with so little training either, but that is a lousy excuse.

"I know what you're thinking."

What I am thinking now is how appreciative I am of Jill and the kids coming to root me on, and for my tri-mates Dave and Joel for making up for my horrible start. I can't say if I'll do the triathlon again next year, but you know I'll be thinking about it.

Upon reading about the update of Google Earth today (on CNET and others) I was excited to fire up my current version (Google Earth Pro 3.0.0762) and take a peek at the updated images even if I won't download the beta just yet. And... resolution appeared to decrease! Luckily, I think it is a bit of bug and is quite fixable, but in my region of interest does not represent an increase in resolution. I'll take the long route to explain.

A month ago at the IGIC board meeting a terrabyte of data was being passed around -- actually it was a LaCie external 1GB disk that contained the 2005 Indiana Orthoimagery. The data was in the process of being sent to Microsoft, Google, etc. for use in their mapping programs. In terms of resolution, the whole state was there in 1'- or 6"-per-pixel images. As an example of what that looks like, here is an image of a baseball park near my house at 1'-per-pixel resolution.

The image is sharp enough that you can see the lines on the pavement in the parking lot as well as the shadows of the light poles across the outfield. This is coming from the (compressed) MrSID file of the image, not the uncompressed TIFF which would be sharper still. And this is what I though I would see as part of Google's update.

Instead, the same area looks like this:

That is neither the new data we sent, nor the old data they were using before! Wondering if this was across all platforms, I fired up Google Earth on my Mac and had a look at the same area (below, right).

This is the same image that used to show on Google Earth Pro and may be coming from my local cache, but I don't think so. Comparing those two images, it looks like the "new and improved" is actually "back to the basics."

Digging a little deeper, the Google Earth Pro image is being provided by i3 with a copyright of 2004. Google Earth on the Mac claims Europa Technologies with a copyright of 2006. It would seem that the data for the pictures are being served from two different places. Google Earth Pro claims to be pulling this data from the "Legacy Database" server, which is news to me. It has been set to auto-login into what was the Primary Database server since I first installed the program, but which now apparently is the legacy database. Logging out and then logging in again (with Primary Database selected) brings up the image I saw from Google Earth on the Mac.

The good news is: I'm back to good resolution imagery of my neck of the woods. I am still wondering... where did the terrabyte gigabyte of data go?