Life 2.0: European vacation without the jet lag
After my mini- meltdown last column, I was super pleased to pop open my inbox in the interim and pick up a story from reader Dave Graham, who wins the prize this week for a great tip on his digital life.
Seems Graham became a big fan of a KSPS-TV series on the railways of Switzerland, but only after technology added a new twist. Previously, Graham wouldn’t have been caught dead ogling Swiss hamlets.
“It is truly for a niche audience, but when I coupled it along with Google Earth I found myself squarely in the middle of that niche,” he wrote. “I direct Google Earth to the starting place of the Swiss travelogue. Then, as my trip wanders through some rather breathtaking scenery, I follow along on my computer.”
Later experiments proved that adding a TiVo digital recorder to the mix sweetened the experience even more. Graham could now take breaks in each town and explore before continuing on his digital European vacation.
“When they show a map of the journey, I jot down names of some of the towns, just to use as guideposts for my Google train. It is easy to get lost with all those French, German and Italian names,” Graham said.
I’m a big fan of Google’s amazing map program — it’s a virtual globe with seemingly limitless detail. You start by orbiting terra firma and zoom in to street level with a click.
The program just keeps getting better. The company recently added weather maps to its virtual globe and the community of users using SketchUp to build models of real buildings and landmarks continues to populate the world, building by building, with near-perfect digital reproductions of the real world.
Haven’t gotten a chance to try out SketchUp? See a recent .TXT story (March 3) by Parker Howell that includes a video demo. The free SketchUp program is easy to learn and lets beginners build 3-D models of any major structure or even one’s backyard project.
I found myself constructing a digital model of the Monroe Street Bridge on SketchUp earlier this year, and anyone who’s ever built a scale model in the garage knows how the painstaking attention to detail is somehow totally freeing. Hours could pass and I was still perfecting concrete arched ribs on the underside of the Spokane landmark.
Why this kind of digital verisimilitude is so fascinating is beyond me, but Google Earth and its model-making sibling are still totally engrossing.
Graham might have captured it best.
“Chances are I will never travel to Switzerland, but this has to be the next best thing,” he wrote.
Heard a great podcast, found a great tool or read a smart blog? Got a tip for the next column? E-mail me at stevenrneuman@gmail.com