Merry Christmas, Digit!

This one is on a more serious note, but it's my favorite Christmas video and I always play it for myself a few times each year. Coincidentally I had run across the link earlier today when I was looking for something in my bookmarks and had played it just today!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all our friendly RMG folks!

Skybird

Here is a link that might be useful: A Silent Night Movie

Thank you, Skybird! And, Merry Christmas to You and Everyone.

I really enjoyed your Christmas video. Thought about the human-made displays of lights that are often searched out for their nighttime beauty at Christmas time.

The refrains were also enjoyed while I watched a new-to-me pbs show called Wild Nevada. It occurred to me how pleasant they were with the natural beauty.

Steve

Thank you both. I enjoyed them very much. The first, digit, made me smile and the second, skybird, was beautiful and thought provoking.

Thank you, Skybird - that is a beautiful video! I shared it on my facebook page :)

And digit, that White Christmas video has been my favorite for several years! Thanks for sharing it.

Hope all RMGers have a lovely Christmas, and find beauty and heavenly peace ... we all most certainly need more of that, especially as of late.

Marj

You are welcome!

Nobody said anything about what they thought from clicking the little guy with the blowing scarf . . ?

I know, it was kinda mean, leaving him there like that . . but, I thought it was hilarious what the little idiot put himself thru . . ha!

Steve

Digit,

Loved him, too. Maybe it hit a little too close to home. Yes, I am that little idiot sometimes!

Thanks to you and Skybird for posting these. I watched a Silent Night movie on Thursday and I swear it helped me get through the news of the horror in Connecticut on Friday. We do indeed need peace. And more posters on RMG. It's been awfully quiet lately!

Barb

Me too, Barb!

I mean, I'm the little idiot. One thing that I do, and I haven't hurt myself yet or been stranded in transit, is to go on the internet and often, google streetview.

First there may be a stop at familysearch.org. That's where I can get my bearings. I have visited places like the town in eastern Quebec where my grandfather was born and the town in southern Ontario where he grew up - for example.

The community in Quebec is very near the border with Maine and seems to be entirely French Canadian these days. His grandfather was from the south of England (a town I've also visited via streetview). It could well be that since that ancestor was involved in shipbuilding, the family was there to steal trees out of Maine! Yeah, that has actually been suggested . . as if I needed any more skeletons in the closet!

My grandmother's birthplace in Missouri leaves just a little something to be desired. I don't suppose that it has changed a whole lot since the time before her birth - that is, assuming there wasn't anything there in the 1870's!! I can almost see some evidence of structures there in the distance as my streetview car approaches an intersection of a couple farm-to-market roads. Seems to be about it . . nothing there but a crossroads.

Of course, I've gone back to the neighborhoods where I grew up. Believe it or not, it is now a little difficult to find the first home that I, myself, purchased in the early 1970's! But, if I just relax . . there it is. Gee, I don't remember ever having so much trouble turning into the driveway back then!

I don't want to turn this thread into anything too outrageous and it is a little risky to ask with so many Colorado folks here but . . do you have ways of taking a trip without leaving the farm?

. . digits doing the walking . .

I love google earth. We use it for planning my kids back packing trips. They now sell something that uses a satellite-thingie so that the kids can press a button on a hand-held GPS transmitter and you get an email giving the coordinates so you can look up exactly where the kids are - "Ok, they're sleeping right at the tree line just below such and such peak

Check out the Grand Canyon.

It is snowing again so that means shoveling in the morning. I think I might live after all even though the cough is still hanging on but hubby is coughing up a storm and pulled someting in his back so he is down for awhile. In the meantime I am trying to get somethings caught up. Merry Christmas to all of you. Have to get working on my FedCo seed order as the deadlline for the group order in January 10th.

I love Earth too, David! When I was going to the wedding out in Tabernash/Winter Park this summer I put in placemarks for the cabins I was thinking of staying at and that way I could easily see where they were located relative to the wedding venue and it helped me make a decision about where to stay. But sometimes I have a problem with it! When I zoom in close to things and then "drag" it to another place it starts to "stretch" it rather than just dragging it! Have never figured out what happened or what I did or what went wrong---or how to fix it without just x-ing out and starting it all over again! Whatever happens, when it gets itself into Stretch Mode it becomes impossible to just go "from place to place" to look at things and it totally distorts anything I'm trying to look at.

For the most part these days I just use the regular google maps which have much of the same content as Earth, and with "street view" you can see what buildings look like before you go somewhere and stuff like that, and since you get most/all of the roads on "maps," it's easier to see exactly where you are--on Earth they only have a few of the main roads, and, in my experience, you need to zoom in really close to get the roads at all--so if you're trying to follow roads to get to a different place it takes a LOT of dragging, and if you zoom out further the roads disappear and you have to just guess.

Have you ever had any of these problems with Earth with the kinds of things you do on it, and, if so, do you know any way to fix them--like the stretching (maybe you've never had that happen!), or is there a way to get more roads to show up without zooming all the way in?

Funny thing! When I was making plans for that wedding I was planning to drive over Corona/Rollins pass coming home from Winter Park and BOTH Earth and Maps absolutely refused to give me a route over the pass, they both kept leading me a couple hundred miles around to get from one end of the pass to the other! I kept trying, and kept putting in more and more of my own markers starting "up the pass" (from both ends) and it would go as far as I marked and then turn around and take "the long way!" I was going, what the......... So I googled the pass and eventually discovered that the Needle's Eye tunnel on the very top had collapsed mucho years ago (I hadn't been over it since circa 1980) and you couldn't drive over it from end to end anymore. I though both Earth and Maps were "faulty" like GPS's sometimes are when they lead people on wild goose chases, but it turned out they were right in this case and it really isn't possible to drive the whole way over the pass anymore! Disappointment in that!

Generally speaking I find Maps to load things much faster than Earth and use the maps most of the time, but would probably use Earth as much if I could figure out how to solve my "problems!"

But using Earth to "track" your kids sounds like a GOOD thing to me!!!

Skybird

I just noticed that they'd updated the satellite photos for my area to 2012 - Previous were from 2002 during the exceptional drought.

And they're far more high-resolution. I'm seeing my lawn mower tracks, prairie dog holes.

Street view is still about 6 years old, during the winter.

I'm just posting back to digit's original Christmas theme - this is one of my favorite Ojolie ecards :)

Thank you, Marj.

Peace on Earth and Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Steve