For those of you who know me well, you know that when I am not working to market and design maps or putting on my Superman t-shirt and “saving the internet” with our GraphicsOptimization venture (Ha!), you’ll probably find me out on a disc golf course somewhere in Southern Minnesota. A passion for a sport where I first aimed at telephone poles and tombstones at my church in 1978 was rekindled a few years ago…to the point where I am now very actively involved in promoting the sport of disc golf in my local town and throughout Southern Minnesota.
As a part of my “addiction” to disc golf, I have recently offered to organize an intramural/club team at our area high school. I don’t know if that will happen just yet, but I am hopeful that by April or May 2008, we’ll have a group of 8-10+ students out on our local course after school, learning how to play the sport that I love so dearly.
In my research on locating opportunities and information which exists to start a “club” team, I recently came across a program called Educational Disc Golf Experience (EDGE). Supported by Innova Disc Golf, EDGE is designed “to give educators and youth organization leaders the tools for teaching a fun, easy-to-learn lifetime sport to young people.”
Unoptimized 493×168 pixel .jpg photo using 6% compression – 71,049 bytes
Optimized 493×168 pixel .jpg photo using 6% compression – 29,949 bytes
Many of the graphics on the EDGE web site appear to leave a great deal of room for optimization enhancements. The above graphic can be reduced 58 percent with just a bit of zonal compression being applied using xat.com’s Image Optimizer software…a 2-3 minute process.
Unoptimized 287×84 pixel .jpg logo with 0% compression – 19,200 bytes
Optimized 287×84 pixel 4-bit .png logo – 2,893 bytes
The EDGE web site also has a number of images which could be dramatically reduced in size if the proper image file format were used. A good example of this is the EDGE logo (above), which can be reduced in size by nearly 85 percent if converted into .png format and subsequently optimized using PNGSlim.
I am always on the look-out for opportunities to blend hobbies and interests with my professional life…so if Innova ever wants to come calling to have us help make their web presence run FAST, they can pay me in discs if they want to. 
Goodness knows I could use a few more discs after wrestling with Holes 1, 2 and 10 in Springfield (MN) this past summer…
