A geospatial career journey
Early in my career, I dealt with a requirement to post-process a corpus of existing documents to "geocode" them. This meant identifying the locations referenced in each document, calculating a minimum bounding rectangle (MBR), and writing the MBR, the file path, and some associated ID into a database, so that documents could be surfaced via … Continue reading Simple Geocoding with ChatGPT
Directions Magazine has announced that it is shutting down, with May 31, 2024 as the deadline to access/republish any content from the site. My first reaction when reading this was that I didn't know it was still around. Unfortunately, I was not being facetious, but it's also not funny and I should have been more … Continue reading So Long, Directions
A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a live discussion of the Geospatial Innovations group on LinkedIn, along with Linda, Bonny, Tim, and Will. The topic was “Reimagining Maps” and was spurred by a couple of recent posts by Linda and Will - "Modern Mapping" and "Modern Geospatial", respectively. The discussion ostensibly examined … Continue reading Decoupling Maps
NOTE: This post was an April Fool's joke. It’s happened to us all - tucked away in the dusty corners of our attics or closets is that box with a serial port Zip drive and a dozen disks. Curiosity usually gets the better of us and, after a few downloads and a couple of kernel … Continue reading Announcing Legacy Data Abstraction Library (LDAL)
As I was building a Python notebook in Databricks, I started thinking about how much Python work I've been doing since I went out on my own. That got me thinking about all of the SQL I had been doing the last couple of years at my previous role, then the Javascript before that and … Continue reading Rings In a Tree
I've been working a project recently to investigate training an LLM (LocalGPT, in this case) to help analyze a document library. (More on that in the future.) For ingest, it handles PDF files really well. I needed some well-known (by me) content to kick the tires for initial prototyping so I decided to dump all … Continue reading Export WordPress Posts to PDF
I spent the past couple of days at the Esri Federal GIS Conference, still referred to by many as the “FedUC,” in Washington, DC. The primary reason I went was to attend some customer meetings. The FedUC draws many people (6,000 in this year’s case) from around the country and it’s a convenient place to … Continue reading In HIFLD, a Lesson
Approximately one year ago, I started independent consulting in earnest. I had spent six years at my previous role and had a number of systems and routines in place to manage my day and help productivity. Those all had to be re-examined. This post will be the first in an occasional series where I break … Continue reading This Consulting Life, Part 1 – Calendar Management
On March 1, 2024, ArcMap will transition into "mature support." This means it will stop getting patches and updates. While ArcMap is not scheduled to be retired until 2026, the lack of patches and updates is the death knell for any modern software. At a minimum, many IT shops will begin to uninstall it simply … Continue reading Pour One Out for ArcMap
I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. They are usually motivated by well-intentioned, but often misguided, factors and are typically designed to fail. That said, the annual passage of January 1 is a good milestone for assessing goals for the coming year. A lot of the work winds down between mid-December and January … Continue reading Simpler Goals