In 2005, Google launched its downloadable GoogleEarth program allowing people to get a bird’s eye view of Earth.

 Folks immediately latched onto it as a way to explore the planet, flying over the Great Pyramids of Egypt or the Grand Canyon.

Today, real estate agents routinely use GoogleEarth and its spinoffs to show houses. Or at least their rooftops and the neighborhoods around them. Tourists can get visual cues for their vacation routes. City planners can sight subdivisions, streets and houses.

And what would your television news programs do without it? They are always showing crime scenes using the tool.

People also use it to look at their homes and their neighborhoods. It allows you to peek over fences that otherwise are obscured. The program allows viewers to pinpoint altitude, longitute and laditude and other neat info. You change the elevation and spin the image around.

Well Google has a new toy available that will radically change all those applications. It’s called Street View and it’s attached to Google Maps.

Some worry their privacy is being violated because images show cars, boats, campers in driveways and garages. Google offers viewers the option of complaining via the “Report a concern” link on the bottom, left corner of every image. Faces routinely are blurred along with vehicle license plates and other images.

But most people simply use the tool for fun. You can check out a park for picnic tables. See if a bicycle rack is within blocks of your destination. Is there a deli near the hotel where you’ll be staying. You get the idea. Click “Learn more” to find tutorials.

It’s easy to use. Go to Google.com and plug in an address with ZIP code.

Then it’s as simple as clicking on the “Street View” thumbnail photo in the balloon. And you will get something like what you see below.

The site allows you to expand the photo and the map in the bottom right-hand corner to fill the page.

Then you can click the white arrows on the photo to navigate around the city. 

Use your cursor to drag the little humanoid icon along the map to where you want to go.

The map will change color to show which streets are photo-mapped. Not all of Colorado Springs is available on Street View. The blue area on the map below shows where Street View images exist.

Maybe you are wondering how they do it. They have a fleet of cars equipped with 360-degree cameras. The cars look like this:

You can have some fun with the site. For example, you can get glimpses of the car in action, such as in this shot taken outside The Gazette. The shadow shows the car and camera and makes it obvious the photos were taken not long after dawn.

Or you can determine when photos were taken by clues such as large tents set up on the quad at Colorado College or by using movie theater marquees for tips.

t’s easy to figure that Google’s car was in downtown in February/March 2008 because Kimball’s Twin Peak theater was showing “Brideshead Revisited” and “Mama Mia.”

How do I know when they were showing?

 I “Googled” it, of course!

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GOOGLE’S COMING, CLOSE YOUR BLINDS! is a post from: Side Streets

Longtime Side Streets readers no doubt recall the stories of Jan Jackson, who lives with her husband in the mountainside subdivision known as the B Lazy M Ranch.

It’s a beautiful community on the western flank of Pikes Peak.

Here’s a GoogleEarth map to the B Lazy M:

And this is another view of the remote, wooded ranch.

Here is a view of Jan Jackson’s house, one of two she owns in the community of 35-acre ranchettes.

Jackson and her husband bought their first house with a barn and corral in 1999. They bought the house next-door, above, a few years later and moved. But they still own both properties.

 Jackson’s anger at the B Lazy M homeowners association was ignited when they questioned the size of a corral on the property at her first home. Then she accused the HOA of illegally storing water in this pond on Hay Creek.

The pond dam is 19 feet high and 200 feet long. It holds about 30 acre feet of water. It was built in 1963 to water cattle on the 1,600-acre ranch. After the ranch was developed into a subdivision in 1977, the HOA maintained it to water a few remaining cattle, to stock for fishing and as insurance against wildfires.

When the dam needed repair, the HOA issued a special assessment, which Jackson protested, to fix it and to buy water rights to fill the pond.

The dispute led to years of complaints, counter-complaints, allegations, tense meetings and deteriorated into name-calling and lawsuits.

Jackson launched a crusade not just against B Lazy M Ranch but against all HOAs, declaring war and vowing to abolish them. She has her own Web page and posts on many blogs on the subject.

Finally, in October 2007, 4th Judicial District Court Judge Thomas Kennedy ruled Jackson had repeatedly libeled members of the ranch owners association board of directors with venomous attacks that often started like this. . .

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An Article The B Lazy M Ranch Owners Association in Colorado Goes Completely Dictatorial?California developer and his “cabal” appear to violate Colorado laws with impunity January 12, 2006By Jan Jackson (View author info) Florissant, Colorado -The B Lazy M Ranch Owners Association (BLM ROA) board of directors (BoD) has outdone themselves this time.===

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Here is a link to a vintage Jackson rant in which she called board members psychopaths. The board of directors had 2,000 pages of evidence.

In addition, the judge issued an injunction that gagged Jackson from future screeds to her B Lazy M Ranch board, or about the board to newspapers, blogs like the AHRC, which stands for the American Homeowners Resource Center and is a major anti-HOA voice on the web.

Want to really dig into this case? Check out this link, which includes transcripts from the 2007 trial before Kennedy and his decision.

Now, the Colorado Court of Appeals has struck down Kennedy’s injunction against Jackson, freeing her to unleash new attacks. But not with impunity. She no longer faces contempt of court for speaking her mind, but she may be open to new libel lawsuits, bigger fines and court costs.

She is appealing to the Colorado Supreme Court claiming the one-year statute of limitations on defamation claims had expired on many of the statements. It’s unknown if the high court will consider the appeal.

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B LAZY M is branded a nightmare is a post from: Side Streets

Want to see the latest tool in fighting crime? Look in the mirror.

And hold up your cell phone.

Police across the country are turning to Web-based systems to reach out to citizens via text messages, e-mails and podcasts to alert them to crime and get them watching for, and more importantly, reporting crime.

Visit CitizenObserver to see how the company is turning cell phones into police scanners and recruiting thousands of cyber-deputies.

Police departments from tiny Pelham, N.H. to Boston swear by the system.

Consider these observation by Pelham Police Chief Joseph Roark:

“It’s awesome,” Roark said.

If the village on the border of Massachusetts has an armed robbery, instant messages go out to cell phones and computers of anyone registered to received the alerts.

Maybe it’s a snow day and schools are closed. Another instant message.

Perhaps it’s someone going door-to-door trying to scam residents. You get the idea.

Roark said the system is far superior to Reverse 9-1-1 phone messages usually directed at land phone lines instead of cell phones.

When an ice storm knocked out power and phone lines for eight weeks recently, Roark was able to communicate with his cyber deputies via text messages.

“It has worked really well for us,” Roark said. His small department could never have afforded the time and manpower of creating a mass e-mail system. It takes expertise to set up and maintain. Plus, it exposes your computer servers to spam and viruses, plus the maintenance of updating lists when e-mail addresses go dormant.

The Wichita, Kan., Police Department is sold on CitizenObserver, too.

Here’s what their Web site looks like:

Wichita intends to create Watch Groups according to each neighborhood association in the city. And it is depending on those neighborhood groups to spread the word about the program and encourage members to become cyber-deputies.

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CALLING ALL CARS – whr r u? is a post from: Side Streets

The canopy of trees lining East Platte Avenue will be spared as Colorado Springs traffic engineers seek ways to reduce the number of wrecks on a stretch west of Union Boulevard.

Motorists too busy talking on the phone, fixing their makeup or wheeling and dealing don’t notice cars ahead of them trying to turn left into Walgreens or Burger King or onto one of the side streets. The result is an extraordinary number of rear-end and chain-reaction wrecks.

In earlier blogs, I detailed the problem with wrecks and the residents’ insistence the city not widen the road to create turn lanes because adding pavement would mean subtracting trees which line the curb.

Concern led residents to organize the Historic Platte Avenue Neighborhood Association to lobby City Hall. The gorup plunged into fray and began working with a city-sponsored safety group studying the issue.

Presto, a compromise has been announced by Dave Krauth, city traffic engineer. It will result in a small concrete median built from Union west past Meade Avenue. See the FlashEarth.com image below.

The median will prevent left turns off Platte. In addition, the city will install signs on the side streets of Farragut, Logan Foote and Sheridan avenues where they intersect with Platte. The signs will ban most left turns onto the major arterial.

 It will be right-in, right-out. (Kind of like Colorado Springs politics!)

Krauth said the city also has agreed to install flashing speed monitoring signs. But the neighbors are thinking about whether they want the flashing lights all night. The idea already provoke arguments among neighbors.

The city also will use pavement paint to create an optical illusion of narrow lanes. The idea is to naturally prompt lower speeds by suggesting a tight driving area.

Read about the city’s East Platte Avenue Safety Project at this link. There are some meeting minutes and cool crash photos taken by neighbors at this site. And here is a link to my previous blog on the subject.

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EAST PLATTE COMPROMISE is a post from: Side Streets

What’s your vision of Colorado Springs? What direction should it take over the next decade or so? When people think of Colorado Springs, what images do you want them to conjour?

The Dream City Vision 2020 initiative is designed to answer those questions by probing the imaginations of people across the Pikes Peak region.

For the past few months, Dream City promoters _ its four primary parters include The Gazette, Leadership Pikes Peak, the Pikes Peak Library District and the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region (COPPeR) _ have been sponsoring conversations to generate ideas.

Those conversations now are coming to the neighborhood level and organizers want you to get involved. The first is 7 p.m., Tuesday, March 17, with the Old North End Neighborhood. It’s scheduled at the First Lutheran Church in its Fellowship Hall, 1515 N. Cascade Ave.

It is for Old North End residents only.

A ”Come One, Come All” meeting is being planned by the Council of Neighborhoods & Organizations for its April 7 meeting.

If you prefer, the organizers will help you plan one for your own neighborhood. Simply contact Becci Ruder at  becci@leadershippikespeak.org and she’ll find trained facilitators to lead the discussion and gather ideas that will be plugged into a database to guide more in-depth discussions in the next phase of the Dream City project.

Or you could attend one of the upcoming “Come One _ Come All” sessions. The first is at 6 p.m., Wednesday, March 11 at the Rockrimmon Branch Library near the Safeway at 832 Village Center Drive, near the intersection of Vindicator Drive and Rockrimmon Boulevard.

Another session with an open invitation is for 6 p.m., Thursday, March 12, at the Penrose Public Library downtown, 20 N. Cascade Ave. 

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DREAM A LITTLE DREAM, Colorado Springs is a post from: Side Streets

It seems El Paso County no longer is a fit place for cowboys. In fact, it officially ranks as an “urban county” as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It means there are more than 200,000 people living in the county, outside of the Colorado Springs metropolitan area. Whoa, pardner!

Don’t get too excited. A lot of wide open space remains in the county, hwich encompasses more than 2, 158 square miles or more than twice the area of Rhode Island!

There’s no denying, however, it is growing. By 2010, the Colorado Department of Local Affairs projects El Paso County’s population at 649,217, which would make it the most populous county in the state.

But it’s not as bad as it sounds. The designation as “urban” qualifies the county as an “entitlement community” and makes it eligible to become a direct receipient of lucrative Community Development Block Grants, a program started in 1974 for “neighborhood stabilization” projects designed to provide decent housing, economic opportunities and repair infrastructure for low-income Americans.

In Colorado, HUD distributes CDBG grants both 14 cities and 4 counties and to the state for distribution to small communities. In Colorado, HUD has given millions in response to mortgage foreclosures that have devastated many neighborhoods. Follow this link to its budget.

Here are some of the headlines from HUD’s work in Colorado in recent months:

Colorado Springs has been a CDBG entitlement community for years and used the money to refurbish low-income residents’ homes and pave miles of sidewalks, curbs and gutters among other projects in selected “Neighborhood Improvement Areas.”

In the past, El Paso County stood in line with dozens of smaller Colorado towns and counties and only received about $2.5 million over 15 years. Already, it is approved to receive $1 million for 2009, thanks to its new urban designation. Here is a look at the El Paso County Community Development Block Grant program.

The county has hired Tiffany Colvert to oversee the program. Here is her contact information:

Tiffany Colvert
Community Development Specialist

27 E. Vermijo, 5th Floor
Colorado Springs, CO 80909
719-520-6476, fax 719-520-6486

tiffanycolvert@elpasoco.com

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URBAN COWBOYS is a post from: Side Streets