A geospatial career journey
Work in the new all-remote world has actually been quite busy, and I realize I am very fortunate to be able to say that. But we know what they say about all work and no play. For me, play often involves cracking open an IDE, especially since work for me isn't centered on that anymore. … Continue reading Recent Diversions
I spent the better part of a decade and a half building geospatial applications in support of infrastructure analysis. Not infrastructure in the modern tech sense of containers and cloud providers and orchestration, but infrastructure in the classic sense of roads and rail and telecommunications. If we consider infrastructure through the lens of the ISO/OSI … Continue reading Rural Broadband – An Anecdotal Look
Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography that deals with the study of people and their communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment by studying their relations with and across space and place. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_geography) I was catching up with my friend and former boss, Tony Quartararo, a couple of days ago when our discussion got around … Continue reading Personal Geography
Or Skype, or Google Meet, or GoToMeeting, or whatever. As I bounce around social media, I keep running across a lot of spurious advice on how to project a "professional" impression as you, like everyone else, participates in video calls from home. This seems to be particularly true on LinkedIn. Most of that advice is … Continue reading Tips For Your Best Zoom Experience
The cursor flashes, waiting for a command.Any command.An editor window is open,Empty.The fan does not hum, with nothing to cool.The keyboard simply restsAs dust,Illuminated by the stripes of sunlightmoving across the desk,Settles between its idle keys. It all taunts meWith the truth: There is no map I can make,No chart,No graph,No query,No post nor comment;There … Continue reading Nonessential
Data conflation is a meat-and-potatoes task in most GIS workflows. There are numerous reasons one might need to get data from one data set into another. Perhaps you want to attach a new geometry type to existing attributes or a table. Or maybe you need to pull attributes from one or more data sets into … Continue reading Attribute Transfer in PostGIS Using Spatial SQL
I have addressed the topic of triggered notifications a couple of times on this blog previously. I've taken the opportunity to apply the technique to a current use case - the ability to get notifications whenever the confirmed count of COVID-19 cases changes in my county or surrounding ones. I am basing this workflow on … Continue reading Watching COVID-19 Data for Your County with PostgreSQL and Node
I don't write code as much as I used to, but I have to return to it every so often to keep my sanity. With the current world situation, there are a lot of dashboards going up, many of which are based on the Esri Operations Dashboard or ArcGIS Hub. I got thinking about a … Continue reading Fulcrum Query API and Koop
Even though I work from home full time, I have a little extra time available since most things have been closed by a gubernatorial executive order. During downtime, I'm doing a little tidying, and it's amazing the things you find and realize you've held onto. At this time twenty years ago, I was probably be … Continue reading Y2K and Today
I have worked from home full-time for the past three years. I know a few people who have done so for a lot longer (decades), but, regardless of how long anyone I know has worked from home, we seem to have many of the same observations. Thanks to the coronavirus, we are becoming a lot … Continue reading Lessons on Working from Home