When our crime and courts reporter told me last week that an infamous murder trial was set to begin on March 6, I immediately thought it would be a great opportunity for us to try a live Tweet. She agreed so we set her up on a laptop and had her Twittering from inside the courtroom. The murder trial began with opening statements from prosecutors and followed with testimonies from several witnesses. The trial is for a Cayucos man accused of killing his grandmother, stuffing her body into a suitcase and dumping it off a cliff somewhere near Ragged Point. I’ll spare you with the gruesome details, however, you can read them on our Twitter page
to see how our reporter handled the case. Our experiment was a success and I hope to do more live Tweets in the future. And to all you Tweeters out there, be sure to follow @slotribune for breaking news updates throughout the day.
I finished another mini project at work today. It turned out OK but I would have like to spend a little more time cleaning up the text and fleshing out my interactive map a little more. But hey, I did what I could. I’m happy I finally had a chance to play with UMapper. It’s a great program (included in my list of Top 5 fave sites for embeddable Flash components). It’s very simple to use and doesn’t require an API key to embed straight onto an HTML page.
I like doing these kinds of projects, especially when I have good content to work with. Thanks to Dave Middlecamp for the photos and for creating the SoundSlides project.
I was going to include a few more tips on mountain biking around SLO County (there are a lot of great trails here) but I ran out of time. Instead, here are a few good resources including a book on the topic by my buddy Brian Milne (that’s him on the cover).
The book covers some of the more popular trails including Cerro Alto (starts at the campground between Morro Bay and Atascadero), Blinn Ranch Trail (backside of Santa Margarita Lake accessible via the Pozo area), both sides of Cuesta Ridge and Cerro San Luis. Montaña de Oro also has some pretty good trails.
Mapping these trails on UMapper wasn’t that easy since the only way you can really map a hiking trail is on a GPS unit, according to Brian. I figured my way around this by using UMapper’s Polygon and Line tools. Instead of points and dialogue boxes, UMapper allows you to highlight a section of the map, or draw lines and circles to highlight an area.
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