All hail the mighty water cooler – the oft-praised bastion of corporate culture, where the strategies of organizations great and small are made or destroyed in the hushed tones of whispered conversations among those who gather for daily hydration. By now, everyone who can has been working remotely for several weeks. Companies are starting to…
Category: soapbox
Tips For Your Best Zoom Experience
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…
Have a Good Weekend and Remember Atanas
I’m about to head out for the weekend. As we get ready to go about our weekend activities, let’s not forget that Atanas Entchev and his family are still being detained. If you have not yet donated to the Entchev legal fund, please take time to do so before you head out. Please keep them…
Support Atanas Entchev
UPDATE: Atanas’ daughter, Christina, is now using his Twitter account to get information out. In addition, she posted a message from Atanas on his blog. He and his son are currently being detained. Also, please see the comment stream to John’s post (link below) for additional information about sending letters of support. Letters that are…
Prying Data Open
In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, I was trying to get information from my local electric cooperative about outages. There were many (including my neighborhood) and I wanted to see the scale of the problem. It turns out, they have a page with a map that shows current outages by zip code. It’s pretty old-school…
Critical Infrastructure?
A couple of weeks ago, I took some gentle razzing from some quarters for admitting I still have a land line: As actual voice communication devices, mobile phones still suck. This why I still have a land line. #oldtechthatworks — Bill Dollins (@billdollins) August 13, 2011 This tweet was the result of yet another dropped…
Open Government, Open Data and Some Lessons from Arkansas
I was reading Brian Timoney’s excellent post “Open Government is a Slammed Door at the BLM,” when I encountered this line: Top-down, large scale spatial-data-integration-by-directive simply doesn’t have the track record of success to justify the costs… This resonates well with observations that I have made during the course of my recent work with the…
Try Some Local Fare
A few days ago, Randal Hale posted an announcement about the upcoming Southern Appalachian Conference on GIS to be held at East Tennessee State University. I have never attended that conference and probably won’t this year but, if you live and work in that area, you may want to check it out.
AGIO Puts the Data First
I read Learon Dalby’s latest GISuser.com expert column (disclosure: I am a contributor there also) with great interest since it addresses an issue with which I have worked closely over the years: availability of GIS data in a time of crisis. Over the years, the proliferation of “operating pictures” (you’re not in style unless you…
Does Vendor Lock-In Increase Health-Care Costs?
Today is World Diabetes Day. I am a parent of a child with Type 1 diabetes (also known as juvenile diabetes). As such, my child is dependent upon insulin and will be until a cure is found. I am using my blog today to discuss the issue of interoperability (or lack thereof) of medical devices.