Archives For google earth

A timeline of Louis Zamperini’s journey

January 8, 2011 — 55 Comments

I just finished reading “Unbroken“, at the urging of my wife, and it was a great book!  It inspired me to create a Google Earth file that shows all of his adventures, but I was unable to find a simple timeline of his events.

By working back through the book, and using various other online resources, I came up with the following.  If you see anything that is missing or inaccurate, please leave a comment and let me know.

Update: April 26, 2011 — Thanks to David Hale, the list is now much more accurate, including dates for most of the major events.  For a full timeline, you can check out this Google Spreadsheet (or download the Excel file, if you prefer).  Thanks David!

Early Years

  • Jan 26, 1917 – Born in Olean, NY — 327 Coleman Street (thanks Alec!)
  • 1920 – Moved to Torrance, CA — 2028 Gramercy Avenue
  • Aug 26, 1929 – Louie saw the Graf Zeppelin over Torrance, CA
  • Jan, 1933 – Louie began tenth grade at Torrance High School
  • Feb, 1933 – Louis began competitive running
  • Dec, 1935 – Louie graduated from High School
  • May 22, 1936 – Track meet in USC Coliseum.  Louie finished second in the 5000.
  • July 3, 1936 – Louie left Torrance for the Olympic trials in New York.
  • Aug 7, 1936 – Ran in the Berlin Olympics
  • 1938 – Attended USC
  • Sept 29, 1941 – Louie joined the Army.

Bombardier school

  • Nov, 1941 – Houston, TX – Ellington Field
  • Aug, 1942 – Midland, TX – Midland Army Flying School

Training

  • Aug 19, 1942 – Ephrata, WA
  • Oct, 1942 – Sioux City, IA
  • Oct, 1942 – Hamilton Field, CA (stopover to Hawaii)
  • Nov 2, 1942 – Hawaii — Hickam Field

Missions

  • Dec 23, 1942 – Wake Atoll (via Midway Island)
  • Feb, 1943 – Canton (to prep for Makin and Tarawa)
  • Feb, 1943 – Makin (in the Gilbert Islands)
  • Feb, 1943 – Tarawa (in the Gilbert Islands)
  • April 17, 1943 – Nauru, then landed in Funafuti
  • April 18, 1943 – From Funafuti, via Canton, to Palmyra Atoll
  • May 24, 1943 – Stationed at Kualoa Field, Oahu

The Crash

  • May 27, 1943 – The plane that they were searching for crashed on the way to Canton from Kualoa
  • May 27, 1943 – Heading from Kualoa to Palmyra and crashed, roughly 225 miles north of Palmyra

POW

  • July 13, 1943 – Landed at Wotje in the Marshall Islands
  • July 16, 1943 – Kwajalein
  • Truk Atoll (stopover on the way to Yokohama)
  • Sept 15, 1943 – Yokohama, Japan (on the eastern coast of Honshu) to Ofuna
  • Sept 31, 1944 – Omori (on an artificial island in Toyko Bay)
  • March 2, 1945 – Naoetsu

Going home

  • Sept 5, 1945 – From Naoetsu to Yokohama
  • Sept 17, 1945 – Okinawa
  • Sept 18, 1945 – Laoag, Philippines
  • Sept, 1945 – Manila
  • Sept, 1945 – Stopover at Kwajalein
  • Sept, 1945 – Hawaii
  • Oct, 1945 – Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco (Pete came to visit)
  • Oct, 1945 – Long Beach airport (reunited with family)

Post-war

  • May 25, 1946 – Cynthia and Louie were married.
  • Sept, 1949 – Billy Graham came to Los Angeles
  • June, 1954 – San Gabriel Mountains, CA – Louie opened the Victory Boys Camp
  • 1984 – Louie carried the Olympic torch in Los Angeles
  • Jan 22, 1998 – Louie carried the Olympic torch past the Naoetsu POW camp.
  • April, 2003 – Wantanabe died
In Other, Personal , , ,
permalink

You’ve gotta give before you can get

September 16, 2010 — 1 Comment

It’s a idea we’ve all heard before: You’ve gotta give before you can get.  Churches often apply it to tithing, many apply to social networking sites like Twitter, but it also applies in a few other areas.

Think back to the move “Miracle on 34th Street”.  Kris Kringle was directing shoppers to competing stores when Macy’s didn’t have their desired toy in stock.  Management was initially furious, but the result was that customers greatly appreciated that Macy’s was really looking out for them, and become even more devoted to the store.

Here’s a clip from the movie that shows that.  The audio isn’t synced correctly, but you should be able to follow along:

Ministers

The same is true of ministers.  I’ve attended a handful of churches in the past decade and found a variety of styles from the ministers.  Some were great friends with neighboring churches, some were like mortal enemies.  Here are two quotes from senior ministers at two different churches, upon finding out that a high school student was attending a program at a different church in the area:

A: “That’s great! I hadn’t seem him in church lately and was getting worried. I’m glad to see he’s plugged in somewhere!”

B: “Why are they going over there?  We need to duplicate that program and try to lure them back!”

In the case of the second church, they spent thousands of dollars on a new program to directly compete with another church just a half mile away.  The program died shortly after.

At our church, the Lead Pastor makes it clear that his primary concern is for the well-being of church members; whether or not they attend our church is completely up to them.

Recently, when discussing the upcoming “Baptism Sunday” that was approaching, he showed a clip of a recent baptism at another church in the area.  It was a powerful clip, and it made that other church look very good.  More importantly, it made the church (as a whole) look good.  The clip was a powerful reminder of the importance of baptism, and the fact that it was promoting another church was meaningless.  Even so, many pastors avoid showing this kind of content during their service, for fear that it’ll make people want to attend the other church instead.

Here’s the clip, if you’re curious:

Websites

The same holds true to websites.  Some sites are afraid to link out to anyone, for fear of losing that visitor.  In fact, the opposite is true; by withholding valuable resources, visitors will be less likely to return to your site at all!

For example, on Google Earth Blog, virtually every post is a story with a link to another site.  I try to find the best information for the readers of the site, and direct them to it.  By always providing useful information, it’s become a very reputable resource for Google Earth news.  The same is try for sites of every genre; the biggest sites are the ones that freely link to the best resources.

Church Websites

So how does this apply to your church website?  That’s up to you.  The main thing is to simply give your users the best possible information, even if it’s not yours. You can do little things, like linking to the website of an upcoming musical or preaching guest.

You could take it even further and link to other churches in your area.  Oak Haven UMC actually has a page on their site that lists other churches in their community, so you can make an informed decision and choose the church that is best for you.

What are some other ways you could use your church website to give more to your users?

In Church, Site Content, Videos , , ,
permalink

Disney’s technology was surprisingly lacking

December 1, 2009 — 4 Comments

Our recent trip to Disney World was great — we had a blast!  However, a few things struck me as very technologically inferior and I thought I’d share them here.

disney-cardFirst, though, I’ll touch on what they did right. The card they give you when you check-in is amazing.  This single card allows you to:

  • Open the gates to get into your resort.
  • Open your room door.
  • Access the parks.
  • Charge food to your meal plan.
  • Charge food/gifts to your room.

If you’ve ever worked in a large organization, you probably have some idea how difficult it can be to combine systems.  They’ve managed to combine hundreds of different systems to all talk together and work with a single card.  It works very well and is quite impressive.

Now for the bad…

It’s really not that bad, but these things bugged me:

  • No Wifi: Our resort (“Port Orleans: Riverside”) was very nice, but didn’t have wifi. Really?  No wifi in 2009? They had “high speed internet” available, but it was via ethernet.  The port was “conveniently located” on the opposite side of the room from the table, and they wanted $9.95/day for it.  Awful.  Fortunately, AT&T had excellent 3G coverage there and I did well with my wireless card and Cradlepoint.
  • No GPS buses: With all of the Google Earth work I do (site, blog), I’m constantly seeing new apps and mashups that show live bus locations for various cities.  Given the complex network of bus routes around Disney, I was sure they’d have something.  Nada.  The buses themselves worked well enough, but we often waited 15-30 minutes for a bus that was going to the correct destination.  Having a way to check on that bus ahead of time would have been very useful.
  • photopassIE6 recommended: Disney’s “PhotoPass” card is the one thing that’s not tied to your main Disney card.  I’d expect they’ll fix that before too long.  In the meantime, it’s a separate card you need to carry around and hand to Disney photographers.  They take your picture, then you can log into the PhotoPass site to view them later in the day.  It’s really a pretty nice system.  However, if you try to access the site using Google Chrome, they kindly suggest you use Internet Explorer 6 (among others).  It also recommends “Windows 98, 2000 or XP”.  I guess Vista and 7 are out of the question, huh?  The site works fine in most browsers, aside from being a bit slow.  I just thought the warning message was pretty funny.

All in all, it was a fun trip.  I don’t expect the GPS-enabled buses to roll out anytime soon, but I sure hope they have wifi next time…

In Companies, Technology , , , , , , , , ,
permalink

Software to load on a new computer

November 1, 2009 — 1 Comment

I purchased a new desktop yesterday.  My old computer was better than three years old and starting to show it.  The new one is quite a powerful little beast — Intel Quad Core i7, 8 GB ECC3 RAM, terabyte hard drive — and I got a great deal on it.  Tossed in a second video card and it’s running all three monitors quite nicely.

As it was going through it’s initial start-up, I made a list of the software I’d need to load.  So much of my life is in the cloud (Gmail, Google Calendar, Nozbe, etc) that it was fairly easy, but it was still a pretty sizable list.  Here’s what I loaded:

  • Firefox — Much better browser than Internet Explorer
  • Google Chrome — This is actually my primary browser, though I use Firefox a good bit too.
  • Ultramon — If you have more than one monitor on your system, this tool stretches your taskbar across all three, then only show icons for the programs open on that particular screen.  It’s superb.
  • Open Office — I use Google Docs for most things, but sometimes it’s nice to have native software to run.
  • Dreamweaver / Fireworks — I still run old versions of these (ver. 8), but they’re essential.  I’ll upgrade to the latest CS versions eventually.
  • Google Earth and SpaceNavigator driver — I use Google Earth a ton, and the Space Navigator is a great tool to have with it.
  • Notepad++ — For quick text/code editing.
  • DropBox — I’ve got thousands of files stored in here, all automatically synced to all of my computers.
  • iTunes — Of course.
  • Evernote — Syncs notes and ideas across all of my computers and my phone.
  • Jing — Slick software to quickly grab screenshots or do short screencast videos
  • AceFTP — Simple free FTP software.

Beyond that, I made sure to install the video chat plugin for Gmail, a patch for Dreamweaver, my printer driver and some files from an external hard drive.

I must say, it was the easiest and smoothest new PC transition I’ve ever made.  Using the right tools can make all the difference.

Anything I’m missing?

In Technology , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink

10 things that non-Diggers are wrong about

January 15, 2009 — 1 Comment

While the title says “non-Diggers”, this really applies to anyone who would visit this blog and say “what’s SEO stand for?”

I find that very smart people are very confused about a wide array of technology-related items.  Here are the 10 I hear most often:

—

Wii Remote10 — The Wii Remote needs to see the screen!

In some cases, yes.  In most cases, no.  I’ve had friends try to point the remote at the screen so it’ll accept a button press, and you’ve had friends do it too.

When you’re moving the cursor around on the screen, it needs to be able to see the bar above (or below) your TV.  If you’re in the middle of a game of Mario Kart, it doesn’t care where that little bar is or who is standing in the way.

—

Apple iPhone9 — The iPhone is the most advanced phone ever!

The iPhone is great.  I have it, I love it.  It’s slick and it works well, but it’s missing a ton of very basic features.  I traded an N95 to get my iPhone.  The iPhone has a much worse camera, no built-in video capture, a worse battery life and no MMS.  Throw in things that it should have (like copy-and-paste) and it looks even worse.

That being said, it’s still the best phone I know for e-mail and browsing, and that’s my main concern, but it’s got serious weaknesses that other phones don’t have.

—

Google Earth8 — The government has a live version of Google Earth.

I spend a lot of time on various Google Earth sites, and I’ve found that many people that wonder if Google Earth imagery is in real-time.  When they find out it isn’t, they’re sure that the govenment has access to it.  No.  Trust me.

While I think that real-time imagery in a product like Google Earth will be here someday, I’m pretty confident that we’ll be in the 2020′s before that happens.

—

Google Logo7 — Sites at the top of Google paid to get there.

They’re not talking about the paid listings; they mean the organic ones.  “You know you can pay Google and they’ll give you a boost, right?”

While there are ways you can pay to possibly move up (paid links), slipping Google some cash under the table won’t do it.  If they were found to be manipulating the organic results for some kick-backs, that could be the end of Google as we know it.

—

Macbook Pro6 — Macs can’t get viruses

Macs are so much better than PCs because they can’t get viruses, right?  Wrong.  In fact, some studies have shown Macs to be more vulnerable to attacks than Windows machines.  The main issue seems to be a lack of market share, and thus a lack of incentive for evildoers to attack the Macs.

On the other hand, every year we hear that “this year Macs will start to get attacked” because of their growing market share, and yet it never pans out.  Still, people that think Macs are somehow “virus-proof” are idiots.

—

Website Stats5 — “Hits” are the best measure of a website

As soon as a I hear someone tell me how many “hits” they’re getting on their website, I know I can tune them out.  While hits are a technically accurate measure, they don’t mean what most people think they mean.

For example, our church website got over 12 million hits last year.  Amazing!  Not really.  that was only 115,000 visitors and about3 million pageviews.  Certainly nice numbers, but nothing like the 12 million hits.  When you load a page, every element on the page (images, JS calls, external stylesheets, etc) create a “hit” on the server.  Thus, one visitor looking at one page could easily generate a dozen hits on a site.

—

Sitting at PC4 — I’m “on” the website right now

While this is somewhat beginning to change, it’s still not accurate.  When you pull up CNN, your computer downloads the HTML, images, etc, shows them on your screen and disconnects from the site.  When you click to another page, your computer reconnects, grabs the HTML/images from that page, and then disconnects again.

You’re never “on” a site — you’re just pulling each page to you.

—

Identity Theft3 — My identity isn’t safe online

Many people think that just by pulling up a website, your identity can get stolen.  I suppose with the right spyware on your machine it could happen, but it’s unlikely.  The majority of identity thefts occur when people simply give away their info in a phishing scheme.

You can say your identity got “stolen”, but the truth is you gave away to them.

—

Computer Virus2 — My computer might catch a virus

Viruses are big news, but really are fairly rare.  Many people think of comptuer viruses like human viruses, in that you can just “catch” one.  You can’t.  You need to download an infected file, open an infected e-mail, or visit an infected site with your unpatched browser.

If you keep your PC up to date and you’re not stupid, the odds of being infected with a virus are close to zero, even with out A/V software installed.

—

Google Logo1 — Google searches the internet

This is the one I hear the most often.  The truth is, Google doesn’t search the internet.  It can’t.  It is impossible for you to search the internet.

Google simply searches a copy of the internet that they store on their servers and update as often as possible.  This creates the illusion of them searching the internet, and it’s a system that works very well.

—

What other crazy things do you hear from your semi-technical friends?

In Other , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink

More fun ways to use the Google Earth plugin

June 28, 2008 — Leave a comment

I just showed you how you could add a simple location via the Google Earth plugin to your site, but how about a series of locations?

Using EarthSwoop, I thought it’d be neat to show all of the places that we’re sending mission teams this summer.  You could do the same thing for local missions, youth group trips, or anything else outside of your church.

So, I put in all of our mission trip locations, then embedded it into the blog on our site.  Here it is:


Powered by EarthSwoop | More info about this collection

In Site Content , ,
permalink

Another way to show a neat map on your website

June 22, 2008 — 4 Comments

A while back I showed you YourMap, an easy way to embed a Google Map on your site.  Google now makes it very easy to do that using their normal Maps site, but here’s a new tool — ShareIt.

Google has recently released the “Google Earth Plugin”.  It’s a free plug-in that runs Google Earth (3D buildings and everything) right in your browser!  It’s quite slick.

The problem is that it’s kind of a pain to use it on your site.  The Digital Earth Blog just did a round-up of the best ways to use it to embed a map in your site, but I think the clear winner for churches is ShareIt.  It makes it very simple to add a map to your site — probably less than 30 seconds to get the code you need.  Here is what it looks like on your site:


Powered by Google Earth Hacks | Map Details | Create your own!

Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

In Site Content , ,
permalink

Firefox 3 finally gets the Google Toolbar

June 16, 2008 — 3 Comments

For those of you that love the Google Toolbar, but have been missing it with Firefox 3, your wait is over!

http://www.google.com/toolbar

I figured we’d see it updated this week, since the public release of Firefox 3 is scheduled for tomorrow.  I also expect we’ll see an update to the Google Earth plug-in very soon, since it still doesn’t work on Firefox 3 yet.  For that matter, there are a lot of plug-ins that still don’t work on FF3.  How many will get updates this week?

In Browsers , , , , ,
permalink