Where in the World is Spokane, Washington

December 1995

I have always liked maps. My momma was a subscriber to the National Geographic magazine since 1936, and I am still getting it. I have a globe of the world that Honeywell Corp once produced shaped like a Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Dome. From time to time, I have to travel for work reasons, so I always pick up local maps wherever I go, starting with the car rental agency city maps. One of the best pieces of advice I have been given for travel of any sort, is always pack a swimsuit, and always have a map of the area you ar going to be in.

Spokane is very lucky to have a store devoted to nothing but maps, in the form of Northwest Maps, in the impossible to park downtown area. I get a lot of fun in doing that store a couple of times a year. There are maps there of places you would not believe anybody would want to map. I have an interest in the local lakes around here, and they have topographical (hydrographical (?)) maps of most of the small lakes, and very detailed maps of all the big ones. (Some of the very best such maps are drawn as a hobby by the owner of Don's ElectronicLand in Franklin Park Mall).

But I digress. The theme of this issue, is what to give your local nerd for Christmas. I suppose that this means computer games, (which I have written in the dark distant past, but rarely if ever play), additional hardware (you can never have too much [disk, memory, monitor size, ...]), or a gift certificate for the point 1 release of Windows 95.

I will tell you what two of the best (vaguely computer related) things I have bought for myself are, and they are the DeLorme cdrom maps of the USA, and of the world. These products are called Street Atlas USA (ISBN 0-89933-953-0) and Global Explorer (ISBN 0-89933-942-2). The former can be found from time to time at Costco for about $60, and the latter also runs about $60. DeLorme also produces a trip planner, called Map'n'Go ($30), which I have not yet used, because I rarely drive anywhere on trips. DeLorme Mapping is at PO Box 298, Freeport Me, 04032 (207 865 1234). Just this week, as I write this, Street Atlas Version 3 has been released. I have not yet got a copy of this update, but I intend to.

Strangely enough, the place where you would think most likely to find these items, the wonderful Northwest Maps store, does not stock them. I saw an interview in some bizarre outdoorsy newsletter recently with a spokesman from Northwest Maps, and in essence he does not see his customer base wanting to pop these big bucks for, well, just a map, and in his opinion, a crummy one at that.

The DeLorme company has for years been publishing humongous and exquisitely detailed maps of all the states, in huge 11x14 books. The one for Washington runs about 110 pages. The detail is rather sparse when you get to the area around Ellensburg, Wa. maybe, but for my interest, which are lakes and boating places, they show launch sites and campgrounds for even itty bitty lakes. And they even show how you can get there. Or at least maybe could get there once, before the road washed out.

And, maybe the cdrom versions don't show quite as much information. But have you ever tried to give a description to somebody from out of town about how to find where you live or where you work? A picture is worth a thousand words, and if you can include a graphical image of an annotated map into your fax or letter, showing just what the person needs to know, how much more useful is that than some paper cutup?

The Street Atlas program contains maps of every street in existence for all the 50 States. It contains 25 Million (!) Street segments, and over a million other landmarks (like lakes, rivers, etc). You can bring up a map in all kinds of ways. If you know a zip code, telephone area code, or street address, it will take you right there. Otherwise, you start off showing half the USA, and you zoom down through sixteen levels of magnification. You have full freedom to zoom in or out (by quantized magnifications), or to pan up, down, back or forth. As you zoom down through more and more magnifications, more details show up, that if shown at the smaller magnifications, would have cluttered the image.

Thus, to find the ComputorLink offices at 305 W. 9th, 99204, first I had the map show me the 99204 area code (this took about 10 seconds to get from the view of the Western US to that part of Spokane), then I entered the street address, and the cursor jumped to that part of the map, then I zoomed in some more, and Figure 1 shows about what you would see.

I say about what you would see, because my version of the program (V2) does not let you annotate. (Annotation is part of the V3 package.) You can print the image, or if you want to play with the image, you can copy it to the Windows clipboard. From there, you can copy the image into a bitmap paint program. I use Corel PhotoPaint. I have tried Paintbrush, but have had some problems using it because of the very high dot resolution that the DeLorm bitmaps are created in. Once in a paint program you can add your annotations, as I have done in Figure 1.

The Global Explorer program covers the whole world, but not at quite the resolution that Street Atlas does. Our group does business in Russia, and is going to do business in China soon. The cities that we do business in are all well identified, but you don't get anything but the major streets. Major, like in hiways and intercity streets. The 100 largest cities of the world do have street map data available. It is our sad problem that we do not seem to do any business in those cosmopolitan kinds of places.

There are some other significant differences between Global Explorer and Street Atlas. Global Explorer does not print anything -- the only way to get a hard copy is to copy your image to the clipboard and use a bitmap paint program to do the printing for you. In my case, I get some funny streaks on the image that I have not figured out how to get rid of, when I go through the clipboard. I am surprised that these guys did not use the same engine and user interface as they did for the Street Atlas, but there you are. They give you a lot of annotation on even small cities and towns. Unfortunately, you cannot get rid of the funny symbols that indicate that specialized information is available, and this clutters up the map.

However, if you do want to find out just where the heck is Lanzhou, China, or Kraznoyarsk, Siberia, this program will tell you that, and will tell you about its principle sights and show you roads to the surrounding areas. For somebody that is interested in the world, or might even have to travel in funny parts of the world, it is an acceptable product. Figure 2 shows the closest view I could get to Kraznoyarsk, should you decide to take the Trans Siberian Railroad trip there some day.

I know that there are programs as good as Street Atlas for most of Europe, and Japan, but I have not seen them available here. I suppose you could find them in those countries, but that is a pretty expensive price to pay just to get a crummy map.

Note that there are Really crummy atlases on cdrom available from other sources. I got something called World Atlas and US Atlas free when I bought my cdrom drive, and they weren't worth even that price. They have zilch resolution, no zooming capability, and spent a whole lot of time and effort to give you a multimedia effect by playing the state or national songs, and showing their flags running up a flagpole. I do not salute them.