Class of ’83 25th Reunion

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Miscellaneous

The Paladin

It’s hard to believe the years have passed so quickly.  This weekend was Homecoming at Furman, and my 25th Reunion. There seems to be a core group of my classmates that attend these reunions.  This wasn’t really the group I hung out with while at Furman, and my friends have been spread out over several years, so we have tended to do our own thing at various Homecoming reunions.

Since this was a biggie, though, Laura and I decided to do the entire thing, and had tickets for a cookout Friday night, breakfast Saturday morning, a luncheon, then a reunion dinner in the evening.  My friend Dwight was coming up Friday to spend the night with us and join in the activities.  In addition to our 25th reunion, this year marks 50 years that Furman has been located on its present campus.  There was much to celebrate, and lots of events planned.

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Ghosts of the South Carolina Midlands

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Entertainment, Local

I added yet another book to my growing collection of South Carolina ghost lore. Tally Johnson has a book out entitled “Ghosts of the South Carolina Midlands.” While the subject itself was of interest to me, what sealed the deal as far as my purchasing the book was the dedication in the Acknowledgments section: To … Read More “Ghosts of the South Carolina Midlands” »

Secrets Revealed in ArcGIS Explorer

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Geocaching and Maps

ArcGIS-Explore-Screen-Captu

LongArcGIS-Explore-Screen-Captu

Long before Google Earth came on the scene there was ArcGIS from ESRI. There are two (actually, multiple) flavors of this. There were the professional GIS versions consisting of ArcMAP and ArcServer, and a free viewer, ArcExplorer. I attended a couple of workshops on ArcExplorer, was impressed by its potential for the classroom, but never really got into it. Along came Terraserver making free satellite imagery available, then Google Earth took the world by storm, somewhat obscuring these previous free mapping services.

While working on another project I needed to check out ArcGIS Explorer once again, and was surprised to find that it now looks very much like Google Earth with a similar user interface. Navigation is essentially the same – you can zoom in, tilt, and pan just like in GE. There are search functions and you and create placemarks. While Explorer will open KML files, it’s designed to be more compatible with ArcGIS data.

Google Earth has a much larger user-contributed base. However, there is much more accurate GIS data available for Explorer from various GIS organizations around the world. When comparing the free versions of these programs, you could think of Google Earth as being more populist, and ArcGIS Explorer as more professional.

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Four “B”‘s for Successful Blogging

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EdTech

Yesterday afternoon I had the privilege of addressing the Lambda Chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma Society International on the topic of blogging for educators. I modified one of my previous presentations, bringing it up to date a bit. Usually I start out by asking the teachers what they think of when they hear the word … Read More “Four “B”‘s for Successful Blogging” »

Embeddable Google Books

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General Technology, Internet

From Lifehacker.com I stumbled across this post on the Google Operating System Blog about a method of embedding Google Books into blogs and web pages… Google made it easy to embed in a site any book available at Google Book Search. You can add a fully-functional widget using this code: <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://books.google.com/books/previewlib.js”></script> <script type=”text/javascript”> … Read More “Embeddable Google Books” »

The Elements

Posted on By Tom 2 Comments on The Elements
Photography

The Elements

Over the weekend Laura told me that they were looking for artwork for the new Chemistry Department offices. Furman has completed a renovation of Plyler Hall, which is now part of the Townes Science Center on campus. The Chemistry Department has large blank walls that are just begging for some artwork. Laura suggested something semi-abstract dealing with the classical elements, so I thought I would see what I could create. The image above is the result.

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