Courthouses. Back on December 3, we served as docents for the Hood County Courthouse on Granbury's annual Candlelight Tour of Homes (and other historic structures). One of the benefits of our two-hour shift was a free ticket to see other sites on the tour, which I will feature later this week. Another benefit was getting a preview of the newly-renovated interior of the courthouse a few days earlier, before many citizens had seen the results of the nearly-three-year project. The Hood County Courthouse was designed by Waco architect Wesley Clark Dodson, who designed a number of other courthouses in Texas, including the one in Lampasas.
Many of these are in the French Second Empire style. It was constructed in 1890-1891. One of its most interesting features are the paintings on the doors of vaults and safes throughout the building. Most of the benches in the second floor courtroom are originals, as is the wooden floor, pictured above. © Amanda Pape - 2011 - click here to e-mail me. Courthouse Christmas: Hamilton County, Hamilton, Texas. Like Hood County, Hamilton County's courthouse is being renovated (above), but only the exterior. It has been in pretty bad shape (see photo on the left), with paint peeling on the columns, so the work was much needed. It's quite different now with a cupola on the top that apparently was only briefly there after its last renovation in 1931. The Texas Historical Commission grant for the renovation required that the cupola be included, but there's been some controversy locally about that, since the cupola was only on the courthouse a short time. Nevertheless, the lighting for the cupola is quite dramatic (below right), and I can see this as a focal point for future holiday decorations!
The courthouses I've featured this week are in towns we pass through regularly, when we head south to see family in Austin or meet my parents for lunch in towns between ours and theirs. Historical marker text for Hamilton County Courthouse: © Amanda Pape - 2010. NYTimes Maps U.S. Census Data in Every City Block. Public Safety : Mobile Mapping for First Responders. Last week at our headquarters we hosted a meeting of nearly 100 Public Safety and GIS Professionals as a part of the NAPSG Foundation User Group meetings series.
After opening remarks from Esri President, Jack Dangermond, we conducted a Wildfire mapping exercise and used our mobile technology to map the fire. One of the mobile tools used to map the fire was an iPhone. Since August, we have had a free iPhone application on the app store ( We have recently updated this application, now allowing users to collect GIS data directly from the iPhone. This builds on current technological trends, like harnessing the power of social media in a more focused way. It also creates a vehicle to easily capture Volunteered Geographic Information. In this exercise, lead by our Wildfire Specialist Tom Patterson, participants used ruggedized devices (like those used in the Gulf Oil Spill), iPhones, and iPads to map the fire.
Google Maps & Label Readability. Finding Your Way with Static Maps. Since the introduction of the Google Maps service in 2005, online maps have taken off in a way not really possible before the invention of slippy map interaction. Although quickly followed by a plethora of similar services from both commercial and non-commercial parties, Google’s first-mover advantage, and easy-to-use developer API saw Google Maps become pretty much the de facto mapping service. It’s now so easy to add a map to a web page, there’s no reason not to.
Dropping an iframe map into your page is as simple as embedding a YouTube video. But there’s one crucial drawback to both the solution Google provides for you to drop into your page and the code developers typically implement themselves – they don’t work without JavaScript. A bit about JavaScript Back in October of this year, The Yahoo! The results surprised me. While the percentage of visitors with JavaScript disabled seems like a low number, keep in mind that small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers. Here’s the how. Making Maps: DIY Cartography.