Google Earth Tour of M6 Return +

OK, I know its been a while, but I have been working on this post in between my other activities in Del Mar, CA (Eating, Sleeping and a little Jacuzzi time). Also, the more I worked on it, the more I thought about adding, so it just grew and grew. (no surprise from me)

I spent the last week or so working on putting together a Google Earth Tour; although it takes a little practice its pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I'm sure I will use it in my class this year and will probably have students make some tours as well.

Here is a picture overview from Google Earth of the trip home I made from Duluth earlier this month after the COPA M6 convention. This was the basis for setting up my tour.

How to experience this tour:
After putting the tour together, I had to think of a way to show it off in my blog. As it turns out, that was a bit more difficult to accomplish than actually making the tour. After some serious thinking (in the jacuzzi of course) I finally came up with 3 approaches

1. Download the Google Tour and run it on Google Earth yourself
2. Post a screencapture video using programs like Jing or iShow and post
   
3. Take pictures of the tour using screenshots and use iPhoto to make a sideshow and post.

The rest of this entry gives you opportunities to experience all three methods and a little bit on how I did them. Feel free to leave me some feedback on which you like best or contact me if you want more details on how to do any of these.

Watch the Google Earth Tour directly
Certainly, one great way to experience the tour is to view my trip directly in Google Earth. Download this KMZ (Google Earth tour file) and then play it directly in Google Earth. Click on Google Earth to go and get the program if you don't have it. Its free and lots of fun to play with. There is so much you can do , its amazing. The new Google Sky is even cooler. Its like having your own planetarium. (sorry for the digression)

A few hints to get the most out of the tour:

Be sure and set the tour preferences (go to Preferences) to include the pop-up balloons- they have some nice pictures and links to explore.

When you get to a stop you want to know more about, click the pause button, then just click the icon on the map, the balloon pop-up will appear and you can read my comments or click on any active links to learn more.

Here is a link to a Google Earth help section on tours and preferences if you need it. You can adjust the speed and pause time in the tour preferences as well.

Enjoy the trip, it takes only ~ 2 minutes this way, instead of the 2 days I spent flying. Of course I had the fun of flying, but that might not be for all of you.

Watch a video screen capture of the tour as it plays:
Another approach was for me to run the tour and use a screen capture program such as Jing or iShowU to make a movie of it as it plays, although you will not be able to pause and check out the links I put at each stop. In addition, the terrain does not show up as well due to needing to compress the details in order to post the file. The good part is when you click on the movie below, it will play quickly and smooth, even with a slower connection.

Some of the downsides caused by need to "shrink" the video so I can insert it in the blog and have you see it can be avoided by using a direct link to the file. If you have a very fast connection or are patient, and want to see it in more detail then shown above, you can use the link at the end of the paragraph to play the full version . This file is ~ 80 MB so even with a very fast connection, you may have to wait up to 3 minutes to get a smooth play. A slower connection might take as much as 20 minutes to retrieve the file.
Google Earth trip home with iShowU

How I captured the video:

I first tried to do the capture with Jing (my new favorite screen capture tool), however after playing with it for 2 days, I was generating files that were 150MB to 450MB with only 1 minute and 30 seconds of video. Much too large to post and view from my blog. I contacted Jing. and they told me that their program doesn't work well with real time video content like a Google Earth Tour. Wish I knew that before I started.

I finally found a tool called iShowU that allows more options for saving and using the files, but it was $20 to get rid of the watermark on the video. I guess I was feeling cheap, so that's why there is a big green iShowU label in the middle of the video. (If you send me a donation, I'll buy iShowU and get rid of it- JK).

Use iPhoto to make a slideshow of the tour.
After discussing this project with my Auntie Lynn (of Saint George fame), it seemed like another approach would be to just take some screen captures of the tour using the Grab utility in OS X, keyboard shortcuts (command-shift-4) or the image capture in Jing. (I used Jing, but all will work). This approach still does not have the full effect of Google Earth, and the downsides of the video capture above still exist, such as lower resolution, and inability to read the balloon pop-ups, but like the one above, the video below plays fairly well. If you started the one above, you may have to wait for it to finish to see this one unless you have a fast connection. You will know its queuing up as it will display a buffering pop-up notice.

Once again, the downsides are due to the need to "shrink" the video so it will play with minimal delay in the blog. If you have a very fast connection or are patient, you can use the following link to play the full version (sorry this one has narration, but not music). This file is even larger than the previous one at ~ 100 MB so even with a very fast connection, you might have to wait over 3 minutes or more to get a smooth play. Google Earth Tour Slideshow of M6 return

How I created the slideshow:
I played the Google Earth Tour on my computer, paused it whenever I felt it was good for a picture (of course I captured all the pop-up balloons), snapped a screenshot and then imported them into iPhoto and made a slideshow. I used the Ken Burns effect (manual mode) to adjust the pan and zoom of the image to simulate real motion. This actually worked even better than I thought it would. It was easy enough to do that I am confident I could teach my students this process. I think having the students create a Google Earth Tour based on something we are doing in class, creating a slideshow of it and posting it to a class website or wiki will be a great project during the year. Take a look and see what you think. I added the titles and narration in iMovie, because it was quick and easy. I am pretty pleased with this version, give me some feedback.

M6 Was AWESOME- Thanks COPA/Cirrus

The last 10 days have been super hectic with all the fun in Duluth, my dash back across the country with Tony, packing for Del Mar and then driving here. I am finally in Del Mar, CA. (here is the view from my window)

With some peace and quiet I plan to catch up on my summer blog. My first update is on my experiences in Duluth, more to follow in the next week as I get my "relax" on good and tight.






M6 was the best yet.
After dodging a few storm cells on the way up (no big deal with NEXRAD on board), I arrived in Duluth for the COPA event (M6). This was my 5th Migration and probably the best yet for me. I met up with lots of COPA friends including Sanjay, Rick, Mike, Curt, and Jim, and made a lot of new ones. I also ran into someone I worked with 30 years ago at Intel (Steve Dominick). Isn't it a small world. Not sure how many planes came this year, but you can see for yourself, its a lot.

Rather than relay all the details, here, for anyone interested, I will provide a couple of links. Fellow COPA member Gil Williamson put up some pictures and captions on his website. Just click here if you want to take a look. (since I wrote this Gil has attended the Dayton Airshow, so you need to scroll down and move to the second page to find the pictures.

Just added today- Aero News Video about the COPA Migration. Its about 8 minutes but check out my 5 seconds of fame at the 3:43 mark




One of the other great improvements this year was the publication of the Migration Daily News. I put up the files on this website for anyone to read. I tried using a new on-line program called Scribd to allow easier viewing. [note: sometimes it takes a few seconds to download, be patient] Let me know what you think. If you want to download the files, click the Scribd logo and then download. Use the + sign to make it larger. I think this will be great for putting things on my class website for parents to read.

For those that don't want to delve into the details, here is my "15 minutes of fame" picture in Saturday's Daily Update. No surprise, the picture is of me standing in line for some food. Eating fish and shrimp while walking around at the Duluth Aquarium was sure a bit weird, although tasty. It was a nice change from the trains at all the previous events.

My best memories from this year's Migration were Rod Machado's great speeches and just having the chance to "shmooz" with a bunch of great people. Of course being across the street from Dairy Queen didn't hurt either. I also had a chance to see "the -jet" in its hanger as they were doing some maintenance, as they prepared it for Oshkosh. Thoughts of purchase are still dancing through my head, if someone can get the stock market to go up instead of down, I might be tempted. For now, its just drool and watch.

Duluth put on a great weather show with nice days mixed in with a wonderful lightening storm on Friday night- what a show. As always, everyone in Duluth was nice, and the people at Currus, IOLS and Monarch Aviation were all wonderful. Thanks to all the hard working volunteers of COPA that put this event together. I'll certainly be back next year.

Traveling to Chicago

As previously reported, I had a long trip ahead of me to the Midwest. Tony and I had a long day enroute from Saint George to Ann Arbor (outside of Detroit), but we made it.

Our first stop was in Denver after a beautiful crossing of the great divide. We had an awesome breakfast at the Perfect Landing- I need to find more excuses to go to Denver, it was fantastic. (Of course I had a Denver Omelet)

After spending the night at Tony's son's house outside of Detroit. I decided to proceed to Chicago along the lakefront. I have never done this before, what a beautiful view of the city. Take a look for yourself:


For those that know me, the second most important reason I come to Chicago is to get my taste of Luke's Italian Beef Sandwich. (First is seeing everyone). If you ever see this sign, you MUST STOP and try one. Tell them Stuart sent you:


Tomorrow I'm off to Duluth for the Cirrus get together. I can't wait to go and I'm sure I will have lots of new cool aviation toys to discuss next week.

Preparing for Duluth

Only 2 more days until my big flying trip of the year. I attend the annual migration of Cirrus Aircraft in Duluth each summer. I love the comradary as well as the opportunity to fly a long ways. I am sure this year they will show us their new jet flying. Here is the first flight from a few days ago.




This year, I will be stopping in Saint George to pick up my Uncle Tony and drop him off at his son's place outside Detroit. A quick stop in Chicago to visit (time and weather permitting) and then to Duluth. Below is a map of my routing. Over 13 hours of flying (yeah) and 2394 nautical miles (2700 for you ground based people).





Have done a lot of planning (even though I have done it before), to be sure I know the route and planned stops. Plan A (there is always a Plan B and Plan C as backups) will have me overnighting in Saint George, breakfast in Pueblo,CO the next day, lunch in St. Joseph MO and then drop off Tony in New Hudson, MI. If its not too late, I'll jump over to Chicago to spend Wednesday with family and then hop up to Duluth on Thursday for the weekend. My main requirements for stops are fuel, food and clean restrooms.

Checking weather is one of my main pre-flight activities as well as ensuring all my maps are up-to-date. Weather is showing a forecasted front moving through Chicago and Detroit on Tuesday afternoon, with some isolated T-Storms along with it. Depending on how the forecast looks in a few days, I will either delay my departure from Saint George by a day or be prepared to spend an overnight in Southern Illinois. Time wil tell.



Most of my maps are updated, I'll get the rest done Monday morning before I leave. Working out the details of the route, preparing Plan B and Plan C and just the anticipation of a big flight always gets me excited.

Cool tool- Animoto

Stumbled across a site (don't even ask me how I found it), that some of you might already know. Its called Animoto and it will take pictures and music and make it into a cool video. The free ones are 30 seconds (just fine) and if you want to make a longer one, its not much. I made one this morning from a recent trip, it was easy and fun. I think maybe I'll take some pictures of the teachers getting ready in their classrooms just before school opens and have Cheryl post the video on the school web site. I'll probably make some more from my own pictures as I suspect practicing with the techniques will improve the quality.

Bonnie's New Computer and iPhoto 08

I had planned to work on my flight-plan to Duluth for next week, but was sidetracked when one of the teachers from our school called. Her name is Bonnie, coincidentally the same as my wife. She does pre-K early intervention work and is a wonderful persson. The district gave her a new computer on the last day of school, but did not set it up. I know she wanted to practice with it this summer, so I went over to see if I could help.

Turns out Office 2004 (including mail) was not loaded. I learned a new trick last week; you can boot up a Mac in "target mode" and it acts like an external hard drive. I took her old laptop, booted it in target mode and then copied all her programs and files to her new computer. We checked everything out without any issues. We then spent some time looking around her new Leopard system. She loved "spaces" as well as the document preview and widgets. I know she is going to enjoy playing with it this summer.

On her personal Mac she has a lot of pictures but didn't really know how to do anything with them, so we talked about what she wanted to do and decided iPhoto combined with Google's Picasa web albums would work the best. When we upgraded her setup to iPhoto 08 (since that is also what's on her new notebook), it was amazing. It reorganized her photos and set up the new interface. Its very cool. One cool feature is when you search a subject for help (like combining events), it actually tells you and shows you what to do, not just describes it. Very slick. Signing up for her Google account was quick and we downloaded the iPhoto plug-in for Picasa (why we chose this approach).

She can now put her photo's in iPhoto, select the ones she wants for an album, upload them to Google to store, email her friends the location and send them to Snapfish with just a few clicks. All inside iPhoto 08 and all free (except for the cost of printing her pictures) She is going to the Tetons this summer and is excited to try out her new photo capability. She might even bring her notebook and upload her pictures as she goes.

My good deed for the week (setting up her computer and teaching her pictures) was made easy because of the capabilities and simple interface of Apple products. Yes, I am a real fan now.

I promise not to do all my posts on Apple and technology (although I will do some on the new cool tools I am practicing with for next year's class). Upcoming entries will focus on my upcoming trip to Duluth and having a great time flying myself in my Cirrus.

Tiger and Leopard on my Mac

OK, I'm now going to take this blogging thing a bit more seriously and see what might come of it. I spent the last couple of days playing around with my school computer. I was offered a chance to put Apple's new OS on it (Leopard with lots of cool things), but I was concerned since I provide support for teachers at my school with Tiger, that it might be a problem. I read online (in a blog) that you might be able to run both.

Off I went to Fry's, purchased a 160GB portable drive to back up before I started and then dug in. I had a few problems, but the online resources were great and in a few hours, I was able to boot either Tiger or Leopard onto my laptop. Both seem to work ok and with a little optimiztion today, I was able to free up ~ 16GB of space for data files on my puny little 60GB hard drive. Not bad, all my applications including iLife, iWork, Office, all the apps the kids use, a school photo library, some background music for school projects and all my presentations and documents PLUS 2 operating systems all on one 60 GB drive.

If anyone wants to see a video of what my desktop looks like now, here it is - just click the play button when it opens. The desktop is amazingly clean for me; fyi, the reference in the video to Stacy is one of the teachers at school who always gives me a bad time with how cluttered my desktop is.

Tomorrow, I think I will blog a bit about some of the cool new computer tools I learned in the last couple of weeks. Next week, I'm off to fly myself to Duluth, so there will be lots to talk about.